The Universe and All That by John Oughton (Ekstasis Editions, 2023)

The title of John Oughton’s latest collection of poems The Universe and All That was likely designed to echo the title of Robert Graves’ 1928 autobiography, written when he was 34 years old, Goodbye to All That. At any rate, that’s what it recalled for this reader as she stared at the massive leaf that composes the cover and pondered the author’s inscription upon the frontispiece for her: “Catherine, fresh meat for your scalpel.” Hmmmm. At least this critic is seen as a surgeon and not a butcher! And the writer must know that I no longer review books that appeal to me not a whit so if I’m reviewing your offering, you can take solace in the fact that I find it mostly readable and not a cliché-rife cringe.

In The Universe and All That, Oughton offers an array of poems drawn from later-mid life concerns: queries on what parents once taught us, the plight of the bees (which should terrify us at any age of course!), lost lovers, shifts in existence, the shrinking universe. Some of my favorites include Jack, where he recalls his dad’s lectures on maple leaves (“The colours are always there”), the lyrics on buzzing and singing beings, the funny (and Oughton is often a tad tongue-in-cheek or deigning to be playful with potentially serious subject matter) Uncouplets or Fifty Ways to Love your Leaver (“She dumped him because he couldn’t see her grief, or angels….He dumped her because she narrowed his creativity,/which he proved by never writing another poem”), Epiphany, about the smiling girl who leads him to “change [his] locked mind,” Arise, whose auralities enchant (“Waking, I trail a skin of dreams/like a caul, contrail….Rainbow-scaled…become small waves in a cup of coffee”), and several of the ekphrastic pieces at the end (was it necessary to define the now-common term in the title?) such as Iceage, based on an acrylic by Wenda Watt that starts, “Blue of the long vowel/immoveable/black of rock scraped/by glacier’s implacable blade” or Flight, leaping off a mixed media piece by Mary Lou Payzant: “If birds invented music,/men answered with muting./I would speak of the dodo’s silence, passenger pigeon, but feathers plume my mouth.”

Ooooo yes, I like it when Oughton has an ear (and suddenly Horton Hears a Who rings in my head) and also when he resists a tendency he shows too often, the need to tidily wrap up his poems with a statement, a directive or a platitude, say “love is out there/just look” or “let it rain on me/let it rain.” Personally, I would have placed the ekphrastic pieces throughout the book and perhaps given more thought to ordering the lyrics into sections (an editorial decision not approved of by the author I hear!). In the preface, Oughton states that one of “the values of poetry is that [it] allows us to navigate at least emotionally and through images, these long expanses [of time].” And he does just this, paying homage to what is both now and before and beyond.