Comments for The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press, June 2009)

 

 

 

"The Caveat Onus, for those of us lucky enough to have watched its development, is a poetry event of consequence - a cycle of poems, geared to a life & expressed through a system of words & numbers, that could make it (I would dare to predict) one of the significant long poems of our time. Pivoting on the number 13 & never abandoning its symmetries & variations, it charts the works & days of Dave Brinks, citizen of New Orleans before & after the floods, world traveler in the ways that really count." - Jerome Rothenberg

"Interweaving I Ching hexagrammatic measures, Mayan calendar arithmetic & totem animals, and an unwobbling axis mundi as line of flight, the complex architectonics of this superb cyclical poem create a counter-word, an act of sympathetic magic, a harnessing of the destructively chaotic energies of hurricane Katrina. Begun nine months before the storm, then moving through the days & weeks that followed, and now paralleling the rebuilding of the city of New Orleans, Dave Brinks' Caveat Onus series is a major poetic and shamanic enactment, as powerful, poetically innovative, and vital in its way as were Charles Olson's admonitions to Gloucester in the Maximus Poems." - Pierre Joris

"Sometimes a force of nature meets a poet of equilibrium. The Caveat Onus meditations are composed of cycles incorporating the sacred lunar number 13, a meditative lyric of survival that becomes a chilling testimony: "...the only significant light that New Orleans would experience after sundown came from the moon...." Dave Brinks is a New Orleans poet that commands our full attention." - Maureen Owen

"Dave Brinks' The Caveat Onus is a serial work in verse which beautifully demonstrates the poet's mind, heart, poetic skill and grace-a remarkable opus with its roots in Brinks' well developed sense of humor and creative play. The Flood struck New Orleans while Brinks was composing his cycle of poems. This is a thrilling work of the imagination, lucid and rhythmically compelling." - John Sinclair

"The reservation is on us, and Brinks means it several ways: we have reservations in heaven and they are entirely the product of our industry and ingenuity; we have certain reservations about this place where we live, but the burden of proof is on us, and we mean to prove it, hoping that we will be proven wrong; we have a reservation here in New Orleans where America drove us poets (the new Native Americans) in order to keep us from upsetting the holographic government; we reserved rooms at the School for the Imagination for the imminent birth of our Brain Children under the baton of Maestro Brinks; we have a reservation for the secret library above the Gold Mine, but it's up to us to find it; and I have no reservations about the reserves of marvel and wonder contained in Caveat Onus, a book of songs which prove that everything is on us who reading them know where the cave is at. The rez is in the cave in the song of us." - Andrei Codrescu

"Deeply conceived, methodically executed, these poems erect a luminous bridge between the personal and the social, the mystical and the mundane. We hear labor pains and witness the joys of birth, even as the moonlight falls upon the waters of a Katrina-submerged New Orleans. Here is Dave Brinks as poet and priest, myth-maker and raconteur. The Caveat Onus is, truly, a "golden book of words." - Niyi Osundare

"Today the paper writes the tree," as Dave Brinks notes in The Caveat Onus, an interconnected sequence of some 169 13-line meditations. It's true about the paper in these meditations which present themselves as totemic explorations of what Robert Duncan might term the "noumenal" notifications of verse. Some of the most powerful of Brinks' meditations trace the spiritual topology of New Orleans and the unearned suffering during and after the Great Storm of 2005." - Ed Sanders

"Throughout this luminous and remarkable work, The Caveat Onus, the poet Dave Brinks writes of the devastation of his beloved city New Orleans, and of what remains; the people he loves, the ruins of the city, and of the future whose story is yet to be told." - Brenda Coultas

"Dave Brinks' book of poetic meditations, The Caveat Onus, bravely shoulders the dual burdens of its occult / surrealist compositional matrix and the actual circumstances of recent life experience in his home town, the great city of New Orleans. It succeeds in making the reader engage with the musical pleasures of the text while also aware of the quiet background drumbeat of tragedy and joy." - Anselm Hollo

"What is so amazing amidst all this dazzling and poignant poetry is the elegant precision of its underpinnings, its formal and iconographic shapes, guides and references. It is totally original, brilliantly written and so, so moving and interesting. What a truly amazing lopus, conceptually rich, meticulously shaped, an epic..." - Moira Roth

"David Brinks is evidently one of the saints of poetry, like a young Francis Steloff in her shop, or Louise Solano at the Grolier. The sufferings are now accurately transcribed in The Caveat Onus as elegies to a city that he hopes will revive. None of us know anything but the truth of his rage. His poems are illustrations of a coffin lost beside the river. His work is as big as a city and as intimate as the improvisations of an action muralist. After the floodwaters, comes the response of a poet: total commitment, Cagean devotion to poetry and the city of trouble and music." - David Shapiro

"The Caveat Onus poems are depositions of particulates. I found myself ultra sounded by totem animals, and sifted through macro/micro matrices. Dave Brinks' cosmic fluid/flow poetry, flash flooded by the tragic atmospheric condition of hurricane Katrina, is a metamorphic experience in which the poems archive themselves in the body." - Nicole Peyrafitte

"Hallucination, dream, nightmare, meditation - Dave Brinks' The Caveat Onus arrives with a post-Katrina post-apocalyptic New Orleans tragedy. From this ancient tune, Brinks makes use, as poetry must, of all available wisdom to engage us. The Caveat Onus comes forward to help show us a way onward for a city and a nation in peril." - Hank Lazer

"The Caveat Onus: Book One is an act of love, a testament to Dave Brinks' respect for craft, invention, and humanity. Spun from lunar cycles, the poems here constitute the first stage of a reader's enlightenment about the 'Cave at Onus' or the obligatory habitation of post-Katrina languages. By clever placement and displacement of language, Brinks offers us meditations that focus and transform our engagement with poetry. The poems heighten our sense of Brinks' aesthetic of necessity, his determination to give us twenty-first century moments of recognition. Under the influence of The Caveat Onus we move from anger and anxiety into proximities of acceptance, and the mindscape of intimate estrangement. As moments both of recognition and recovery, this work offers essentials for healing. Brinks knows that water must enter a reader before the reader enters the water. Let The Caveat Onus enter you." - Jerry W. Ward Jr.

"In The Caveat Onus, Dave Brinks discovers a wild and unhinged environment. The heart and head of these poems are totally on the ground. His is a vision of loving anarchy and goodness born of the stuff of everyday giddy-up. He is a true original." - Peter Gizzi

"I think it was one of the Daltons, before taking the Northfield bank, who, seeing a motor car on the main thoroughfare, said 'it's a wonderment.' You, Dave, are a wonderment." - Bill Berkson

"Dave, you're a Gold Mine!" - Lawrence Ferlighetti

"First, look up in perfect silence at the stars, then read this book." - Bernadette Mayer