Title: Tea in the Pacific Northwest

Author:  Jim Landwehr

Genre: Poetry

Publisher: Kelsay Books

Length:  84 pages

Reviewed by: Ed Werstein,  https://edwerstein.com/

There is a plethora of bleak poetry being written these days. And there is a plethora of dire topics for poets to choose from, with democracy under threat, regular mass shootings, a lingering pandemic, and endless wars. But fortunately, the poems in Jim Landwehr’s new collection, Tea in the Pacific Northwest (Kelsay Books, 2024) are anything but bleak. There is a great deal to like in this collection.

Landwehr’s poems are riddled with humor, and even many of the more serious poems, taking a lesson we learned as children from Mary Poppins, are laced with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. A little humor goes a long way in making a poem memorable, and we all want to write memorable poems, don’t we?

Landwehr’s use of metaphor and simile are endlessly creative and surprising, as we learn early in the book. In the poem “Return Flight” he compares a romantic breakup, to an airplane trip back to reality:
“The deconstruction of his heart/ happened on the tarmac.” And later, “...where her words/ once touched his own/ on the lips/ were like parchment in/ the valley of his despondency./ So his anguish rode with him on/ a flight to a destination / devoid of meaning.” And in a more humorous example, in the poem “Trout Fishing in the Driftless” he describes fish “as numerous as Subarus/ at a farmers market”.

Landwehr’s humorous poetic take on every day situations and topics etch many of these poems in our memory. If you’ve ever suffered your way through a work meeting to nowhere, you’ll appreciate “The Meeting”. “...(t)he meeting was a formulaic soul killer/ serving no measurable purpose/ except to do what meetings do best/ which is generate more meetings.” And I laughed out loud at “I actually saw his spirit leave his body/ as it yawned itself toward the ceiling.”

In the title poem Landwehr imagines having tea with Sasquatch. It turns out Sasquatch speaks English better than most of the author’s friends. And he’s reading Slaughterhouse Five. The creature tears up when he learns that the fire-storming of Dresden really happened. When invited to the city, he declines preferring his simple existence to the stress of city life.

Landwehr pays good attention to titling his poems also. Titles like “The Four Walls of Me”, “The Collision of Philosophy and Poetry”, “Notes from a Part-Time Buddhist Hack”, “Please Hold for a Limerick”, and “Art Attack” invite the reader in to see what’s going on.

In “2050 Anticipated Trends” (taken from the 2050 Old Pharmers Almanac) we learn that “The new iPhone23 will replace most of your friends”, and “Due to steadily decreasing attention spans, all new books will be less than thirty pages long. Poetry will be limited to haiku.” Funny, but serious at the same time.

All that said about Landwehr’s humor, is not to say that there aren’t timely serious poems in this collection, poems with a message that addresses important issues. Some topics are too serious to be sweetened, and that is the case with the poem “Named”. In “Named” Landwehr makes a statement about assault weapons and the school shootings that haunt the US. His tying the number of the bullets to the names of the victims is one of the strongest devices I’ve come across in poems on this topic. And he closes the poem like this:

These children
were taken
from us
by an assaulting
weapon of war
good for
one thing.

Killing dreams.

In “Three Haiku Not Yet Banned” Landwehr takes on those who would ban books. The closing haiku is:

Light in the attic
Fahrenheit Four Fifty-One
and I turned out okay.

Okay is a gross understatement. Landwehr and his poetry are way more than okay. This is timely important poetry, written in plain English, but poetic for sure. Buy this book.