Poem Review: "Laryngitis" by Philip Dacey

Dacey's poem "Laryngitis" or "losing your voice" in layman's terms, failed to surprise. The opening line, in addition to stretching long enough to visually stick out, begins the poem with a flop. On first read, the lines seem disjointed from sentence to sentence: there are police, a square, a union, and then an afterlife and a dead brother: each metaphor repeats the loss of voice in what might fairly be called "redundancy."

Perhaps most engaging, the line "For a change, listen!" hardly does the work of a therapist working with men who can't shut up. That Dacey admits in a previous line to being "guilty" of "littering" (ie guilty of saying nothing of value, or even "talking trash") is hardly a serious enough metaphorical offense for the audio "space" men tend to take up. For a poem about the transformative value of losing his voice, there is little to convince the change was wondrous enough to warrant deep spiritual interest.

The ending tries to get at the core of the poem, but develops little more than we already knew. It's as if to say, "I used to talk too much, but then I lost my voice for a hot minute and now I'm totally cool. Let me tell you about how cool my experience was."

If this poem has a strong point, perhaps it's in the immediate accessiblity. Truly, there must be good arguments for this poem's merits. It *was* published not once but twice.

Above all, what is least of this poem is that Dacey, co-editor of the fantastic anthology Strong Measures (Harper & Row 1986) and author of eleven books of poetry failed to deliver this reader to the happy threshold of a good poem. Surely he's produced many fine works. This one didn't work for me.