Good Morning, Romantics

Good Morning, Romantics Shanna Compton 20 pp.

Shanna Compton’s Good Morning, Romantics is a fantastic chapbook cut out of her larger volume, The Seam Rovers. Compton’s poems are lively, popping with fresh and unexpected twists of imagery in every poem. It would be tempting to spend this review simply quoting lines from the poems, “Hey Mike, we need you to wean the Elizabethans off the tern eggs and lipstick,” or, “There are scattered concessions. Overheard confessions.” Even if Compton had not succeeded so admirably with these poems as a collection, the sheer refined brilliance of her language on a line-by-line basis alone would be more than enough to make me love this book.

On the large scale, Good Morning, Romantics is a book about seeking unity with society outside of oneself. The chapbook is divided into two sections, each delving into a separate approach to this theme. In the first half of the book, Compton lingers on how differently people can try to integrate themselves into a society. This becomes clearest in “Hospital for the Ear & Neck,” where we witness the active work of matching step with a group. Throughout its lines, the poem presents us with images of unifying our perceptions of reality and the way we produce our own understanding of the world.

“Setting and receiving tones,

we tune our beating machines

which cluster flocklike

and crow alone.

Fiddling our knobs together,

distilling notes, patterning after”

This opening couplet immediately brings to mind notions of radios and transmitters; the machinery used to project and receive thoughts and communication from other human beings around the world. But this machinery is not to be tuned in the solitary, according to one’s own individual plan. Rather, it is tuned with a group, bringing the whole population into unity through the use of their receptive and transmittive faculties, each patterned after the notes of others in the group.

Formally, Compton’s poems suggest this groupthink as well. The text is dominated by couplets, triplets, and quatrains, with only the rare line standing alone. In these few cases, the language and imagery heightens the effect, drawing the reader’s attention to the solitary nature of the subject matter and the lines themselves. Compton’s sometimes playful couplets draw the reader into a state of comfort with their rhythm and completeness-the effect of reading the solitary lines at the end jars us. We read them and feel almost strung out, waiting for their completion, but knowing it will not come.

In the second half of Good Morning, Romantics, Compton turns integration into society at large around, giving us a confession in five poems, each of which presses on a different angle of a close-knit group of outcasts and criminals. This lengthy confession dwells on the various crimes of the group, ranging from the destruction of cars to the reckless amputation and burial of limbs.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this series is the final poem of the set. Compton ends with a haunting note, the longing of her narrator to rejoin the community she has confessed her way out of through this cycle of poems. She cries for the loss of her friends, for the loneliness she feels in a society which is not hers. She still hums, 

“the songs we whisper-sang

pepperstung under the stars.”

Would I recommend Good Morning, Romantics? Yes.

Score: 4.7/5

Would I keep it on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar