StarCat/CatStar

Review of
Jupiter Works on Commission
by Jack Phillips Lowe
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There is a cumulative strength to the poetry in Jupiter Works on
Commission, the latest pamphlet/ small poetry collection by Jack Phillips
Lowe (published by Middle Island Press, 2015). The twenty-four poems
explore American blue-collar life from the down in the mouth perspective
of the blue-collar, urban male. Frequently jobless, working on painfully
reduced salaries or in dead-end jobs, it is not an uplifting existence. Despite
moments of black-humour, occasional lightness and some bizarre
surrealism, the sequential narrative of the poems collectively builds to
create a sense of routine despair and desperation, or perhaps it is just tipof-the-fingers
survival of mundane life. Whichever, there is no way out, not
even via death, as Harry discovers in the poem “Easy Layup”, when he
meets his dead drinking buddy Lou “sitting upright and breathing”. Lou
admits that, following a quick peek at his Netflix queue,
“ “I snowed the Reaper into refunding me the time
I spent watching Twin Peaks in the 1990s
All of it,” said Lou, chewing ice from his drink. “
Television figures significantly in the drab lives of the men exposed in
these poems and in the poems themselves.
There is Buchman, a character who appears in a number of poems
exploring progressive episodes in his life, who imagines his father putting
his love of the Western TV series Bonanza before his wife’s desire to see
Elvis perform, live at Vegas. The fact that his parents had made it to Vegas,
but then had been stopped from achieving his mother’s desire by the