Synopsis "Scherzo Furiant (in English)"
A mind well stocked with poetic lore, historical detail, and metaphysical perplexities, where ideas suddenly pop up like champagne bubbles that pleasantly inebriate the reader, plus a sense of humor that’s identifiable, once you taste it, among all others in the market. What else could you wish for in a poetry collection? Ah, yes, music. You will find it all in Louis Gallo’s Scherzo Furiant.—Ricardo Nirenberg, Editor, Offcourse Literary Journal; author of Cry Uncle and Wave MechanicsIn Scherzo Furiant, Louis Gallo adeptly choreographs an impressive range of contemplative moods, from the meditatively domestic pavane reminiscent of William Carlos Williams as presented in a poem like “As I Stood There” in which the narrator expresses a tender awareness of how our fragile human consciousness contrasts to the mass and velocity of “the stars and moons/And asteroids, all headed for/The edges of the universe” to a bemused but genuine appreciation for the verbal gavotte of Southern dialect found in “Sugie, When You Coming to Get That Turkey?”Even when Gallo shifts his focus to more abstract considerations (and he explores a variety of them), he maintains an absorbing and winsomely elegiac tone particularly in a poem like “Asia” in which the speaker raises the question “Is the neo-cortex/our enemy or friend?” At some level in most of his poems, Gallo speculates about the price we pay moment by moment for higher consciousness. To validate this distrust of abstraction and to explore his fascination with cosmic ironies, Gallo provides compelling details that establish the value and fullness of our daily lives but then methodically modulates that richness to a minor chord by questioning just how much of that fullness we’re allowed to hold onto. Whether Gallo is working out a surprising counterpoint between a shrimp sandwich and “about any summum bonum” as he does in “The Best Po-Boy,” or reevaluating the memory of the first time he heard the music of Bob Dylan in “Once With Jen and Sue and Bob Dylan” and was initiated into a new dance of erotic speculation when “kink smoldered in the air like voltage,” his poetry moves to compelling rhythms that are wise and intricately pleasurable. —Donald Secreast, Author of The Rat Becomes Light and Red Velvet: StoriesFrancis Bacon famously said that he took all knowledge to be his province. So does Louis Gallo. Behind his poems lies a voracious intellect, one that draws upon a dazzling array of major thinkers —Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Descartes, Einstein, Camus—to name only a few. But reliant as he is on such colossi of often abstract, complex ideas, his poems first and foremost are always anchored with keen wit in the grit and gristle of a living world, one Gallo clearly finds both intoxicating and erotic.—Randall Freisinger, Author of Plato’s Breath and Windthrow & Salvage
