The Clock Made of Confetti

by Michael Salcman

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193253511X
• ISBN13: 9781932535112
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Orchises Press
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A poet that has changed my life

I'm not a very good with waiting. So having a desire to read this collection, The Clock Made of Confetti by Michael Salcman, ( who I will confess to writing even BEFORE I read his work) I was seriously irked when it took several weeks to arrive. Coming home after a 1st grade "Open House" last evening, wheezing and still struggling with such virulent on-going infection from my lingering worsening two month nightmare chest stuff, of course it was there sitting on the wing chair inviting me to be my other self. Invitation to sit to be the woman self that isn't holding tiny hands and singing silly songs about Polka Dots, signing "A You're Adorable" while giving the "eye" to someone about to snatch their 5th raisin oatmeal cookie after a serious discussion of "fair shares" in the earlier day. So I became Sarah again, not a Mrs. Whomever that quotes rules and praises our little gentleman for manners, wondering how I ever will survive another year of talking duck rhymes in front of parents newly immigrant who look at me as if I have grown another head. Stepping away from one world into another into another finds its way into this book by Michael Salcman. I found after curling up last night in my fuzzy green blanket, with cold medicines from one end of the chair to the other, wheezing, it seemed better that things happen when they happen. You cannot rush art into form, or expectation into bringing you a volume of poems so very interior. I felt my thoughts emerging from the brain matter this poet knows so well, despite the day's chaos and demands. I had not expected that journey at all. I truthfully appreciated this beyond words. I did stay up last night alone reading, thinking of how it must be to carry his realities, medical, surgical, knowledge of all that he can and cannot do in managing life, along with the beauty and appreciation of art which is a kind of place where I am keeping, combined with the desires, dreams, feelings of a man. I thought about how much his poetry pulsates and lifts. And considered pieces of the works just for their searing beat. Sometimes when I read I can work to wholeness; sometimes rather like meeting a new person, I'm captured by nuances and bits, pieces that will slowly in time build into an understanding. I'll hang up in text on a finger inserted into a heart chamber or the "suicidal forsythia" as I come to know of the ranges and connections. At any rate this was how it was last evening. So this "review" which is just a few thoughts... is written after my initial read...long before I am finished, but when I'm enjoying the lovely taste in my mouth of a new poem. I like this...no, I almost can't tell you, it is so personal. This writer can cradle the masculine and feminine and almost cause me to blush reading. "Afterwards, I smell you like hot butter rising from my thighs, my hand pollinated with your musk.." That affects you late in the night silences; in my days I can push those connections away...but... These kind

The Clock Made of Confetti

In THE CLOCK MADE OF CONFETTI,poet and brain surgeon Michael Salcman indulges himself, and us, to his loves and passions: poetry, art, sailing, the healing of the body, and most of all, his family. Of his paintings about art, "Stubbs Not Seen" is my favorite. With a surgeon's eye and experience, Salcman dissects the anatonomical accuracy--to the point of almost crazed obsession--of an imagined painting by the great animal artist George Stubbs. In the poem, a horse is being attacked by a lion: "each joint moves as it once did..." Salcman sees the wonderfully strange in everyday life and the mundane in the bizarre. Take "Be Not Afraid," for instance, a poem inspired by an official government communique on how to react if one is attacked by an anaconda. It's a marvelously quirky poem, laid out in almost Kafkaesque appreciation for stating the strange in a matter-of-fact way: "Oh yes/you did remember to carry a knife/didn't you?" gives us entry into the bizarre world depicted here, fraught with dangers and perils. But for me, the ultimate stars of this celestial collection are the poems about Salcman's wife, parents, and children. "Our Son Discovers Pantyhose" combines high wit at his five-year-old son getting literally caught up in a pair of pantyhouse, with the sweet memory of his wife taking off a pair of that "nest/of woven fibers...the night we reclined to make him." What gorgeous tenderness. This is a marvelous collection of intelligent, yet accessible poems told in a highly evocative and concrete language.