Approximately Paradise
by Floyd Skloot

Ways of Looking at the World
Sanford Pinsker
The Sewanee Review, Summer 2005

(Approximately Paradise, Floyd Skloot, Tupelo Press, PB, $16.95, ISBN 1932195-25-4)

Floyd Skloot is probably best known for his personal essays about the way a virus attacked his brain and vastly changed his life, but it is worth remembering that Skloot began his writing life as a poet and that Approximately Paradise is his fourth collection of verse. It is also his most confident, whether he is negotiating the rhyme schemes of a highly formal structure or describing, with great specificity, the firs and pine trees just outside his home in western Oregon.

This world is all treasure, Esther Houston ("The Travels of Esther Houston") insists: then she quickly adds: "if you know how to look at it." The forty-four poems of Approximately Paradise show us various ways of looking at the world. Sometimes Skloot's inspiration comes from composers (Brahms), painters (Gauguin), writers (Hardy), or even the Brooklyn Dodgers (Pee Wee Reese); but, no matter how different the settings or circumstances, the ruminations that result merge precision with clarity and join acceptance with a quality that comes very close to grace.

In lesser hands Skloot's struggle to maintain his equilibrium would become the stuff of melodrama: sentimental, ham-fisted, and ultimately, utterly false. Skloot's poems are made of sterner stuff, for their maker is not only able to introduce bits of humor but also can tease us into thinking about the multiple possibilities folded into the "approximately" of the collection's title.

Consider, for example, the quirky poem about Pee Wee Reese set on the first anniversary of the great shortstop's death. Skloot sits in his Adirondack chair, wearing a battered Dodgers cap. Deer and mosquitoes make their way through the warm Oregon evening. Enter the ghost of Pee Wee Reese, who suddenly appears in ways that will remind some of Shoeless Joe Jackson walking out of a Midwestern cornfield in the film Field of Dreams. "Illness is but a high/pop fly," Reese observes, one that "pulls us into shadow." Juxtaposing the "good news" about illness as a merely high pop fly (presumably easy to catch) with the bad, more ominous note about the "shadow," it pulls us into an example of how Skloot's brand of negative capability works.

The sequence about his mother, now in her nineties and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, shows how much sheer power a personal poem can embody:

She is fading away. Her eyes grow
    dark
As she looks at the old man sitting
    there
Claiming to be her son.
    —"Lunch in the Alzheimer's Suite"

Still thinking I am her late boyfriend,
She leans closer, says "you're always
    so kind
to me" and sighs as she pats my hand.
    —"Relocation"

It is easy to be impressed by Skloot's considerable skills as a wordsmith, but what makes Approximately Paradise at once memorable and important is the way he writes about the painful with painful honesty, at the same time he remains open enough to feel the wings of paradise gently beating somewhere up ahead.

Tupelo Press produces first-rate books that are a delight to hold and an even greater delight to read.