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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 54 > Reviews >James Tipton's All the Horses of Heaven

All the Horses of Heaven/Todos los Caballos del Paraiso
James Tipton
Modern English Tanka Press
ISBN Number: 978-193539805-9s

Reviewer: James Owens


          There is something remarkably cosmopolitan and contemporary about James Tipton’s book of tanka, All the Horses of Heaven/Todos los Caballos del Paraiso. After all, these are the poems of an American expatriate writing in a Japanese form about life in central Mexico, about the ways of an ancient culture that exists alongside supermarkets and tourists in gold bikinis. And all the poems are presented in both English and Spanish, as if to repudiate the relevance of political borders to the work of poetry, perhaps even to question the authority of concepts like “definitive version” or “translation.” At the same time, these poems touch and renew the most traditional of themes. Tipton’s tanka are always in contact with the life of the warm earth, always yearning after that life as it takes seductive shape in the dark eyes and strong brown hands of the women who inhabit this book and lend their erotic force to the poet’s words.

          At heart, All the Horses of Heaven is a book of erotic love poems. Tipton seamlessly combines a firm grounding in the body, especially those times when the body becomes near luminous in sexual attraction, with an awareness of the spiritual that sometimes suggests a melting away of self into the universal, into dream. In the space of a few lines, he can go from the sexy, imagistic lightness of

Lifting her crossed arms
she struggles
out of her tight black t-shirt
leaving for a moment
only her bare breasts.

to the wry, worldly tenderness of another poem:

You apologize because
you forgot my name
while we were making love.
It’s easy to forgive you
because I forgot it myself.

          Love, Tipton has said, is a major theme in his work. Interviewed in February of this year by Anne Greenwalt for WOW-WomenOnWriting.com, he said, “My own poems, as Isabel Allende points out in her Foreword to my book of poetry, Letters from a Stranger, are often about ‘ordinary experiences—wings, canyons, rocks, flesh—but mainly about that other extraordinary experience…love.’ Love (and its various facets) for me, is always immediate, experienced in the moment, and somehow this is related to why I write short love poems.”

          The quickness of the tanka, usually focusing on one image that lingers in the mind and accumulates ripples of meaning like a stone dropped into the pond of the reader’s sensibilities, serves Tipton well. Some poems seem to echo their roots in the Japanese tradition of haiku and other short forms, such as this one (below) recalling all the poems of the classic masters looking at the bells of Shinto temples:

La Iglesia de Guadalupe—
I listen for her
familiar voice
in the rain
on the ancient bell.

          Other poems take a humorous, commonsense approach to the ironies of adapting their form to a very different language and very different cultural context:

They say you like to pick apart
these five-line poems
because “they are not pure tanka.”
Is the form important or the poem?
They also say you are a lousy lover.

          Tipton’s erotic poems in All the Horses of Heaven often alternate between those that celebrate the unexpected, serendipitous flash of attraction for a stranger observed in the street and those that luxuriate in the pleasures of a long-term relationship. The poems of attraction are always closely observed, often with a touch of ironic humor. Two instances:

At the health food store
I watch her brown legs
ripple when she reaches
for a high jar of honey.
Time to become a vegetarian!

*

I drink too much coffee
because that young waitress
in her low-cut camisa
comes when my cup is half empty
and tips her full body toward me.

          The poems of achieved love tend more to the abstract, but they are no less precise in their delineations of emotional life. A couple of examples:

One hundred years
is a long time to make love
to the same woman,
but for tonight, at least,
I like the commitment.

*

You want to know why I like
her rather unremarkable body?
Because inside that body
is another body
that only comes out at night.

          All the Horses of Heaven is also a book acutely informed by place, and Tipton convinces a reader that the tanka form is well adapted to the rhythms of life in central Mexico—though this is a Mexico of sun and ripe fruit and the autumn moon, a landscape where the pressures of politics and international economics seldom intrude. Even the Church, whose pervasive influence another poet might see as unfriendly toward such ready and democratic eroticism, co-exists easily with Tipton’s dark, warm senoritas.

Here in San Antonio
that Virgin of Guadalupe
looks quite content
beside the big tits
on the tire shop calendar.

          All the Horses of Heaven offers many pleasures to a reader, the poems themselves often being as seductive and inviting as their subjects. Readers who are lucky enough to enter the world of James Tipton’s poetry will want to seek out his other books and spend as much time as possible in this version of paradise.

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