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As an arts publicist, Julie Bruck spends much of her time promoting the works of other writers, so it's ironic that she disagrees with a portion of the press release about her own first book, The Woman Downstairs.
"This elegant, finely crafted book of poetry draws its inspiration from the anonymity of contemporary urban life," reads the second paragraph of the release from London, Ontario- based Brick Books.
"I don't think that's really accurate," says Bruck, a graduate of North Carolina's Warren Wilson Program for Writers. "I think there's a real attempt [in my poetry] to look at people from a distance, but I don't like to think of them as being alienated or anonymous."
"My poems are not discursive poems," she continues, "they're not argumentative poems, but underlying them there's an argument between what is and what could be."
Bruck's poems --originally published in such publications as The New Yorker, The Malahat Review and Denver Quarterly-- are, in fact, sharply delineated extracts of life written in a style that's deceptively clear and lucid. Though her poetry is richly layered, she bucks the late 20th century trend, seeming to prefer construction over deconstruction, accessibility over pure style.
"I think of my poems as dramatic narratives," she says. "They're very accessible. I think of clarity as a virtue."
Unlike many poets --contemporary and otherwise-- Bruck doesn't seem intimidated by the mass-culture. She revels in it, fearlessly using urban imagery like trademarks and technology, cars and highways. And she uses it in a fundamentally new way, escaping T.S. Eliot and the bleak, anti-modern influence of The Wasteland once and for all.
"I don't know how to be any other way," Bruck claims. "I feel very much a part of the [mass] culture. And for some reason I can't really fathom at all --because I'm not a maniacal car person-- there are automobiles in almost every poem in the book."
The most poignant of these is Car Alarm, a bittersweet poem about an older woman who hears a long-lost lover in the voice of a Mercedes-Benz with a high-tech alarm system.
The tone in Car Alarm continues throughout the book. All of the poems in the collection positively ache with that vague, untraceable sense of longing and loss that we've all experienced in this culture.
"There is a [sense of loss] in the poems," Bruck agrees, "but I think the book is redeemed by the fact that the narrators --and there are different speakers, in the first section there's even a goldfish-- become less and less detached from what is being seen as you move through the book. By the end of the book the speaker is an integral part of the narrative."
And is the speaker Bruck herself? Not always, clearly, but more and more often as the book progresses. By the time the you reach Connection, a raw, angry poem about a ski trip the narrator takes with her parents, the author has obviously put herself on the line.
"That poem is autobiographical, or at least it started that way," she admits. "It got changed, as many poems do, but it's still pretty naked."
Ironically, Bruck has less trouble revealing herself in her poetry than she does integrating her two complementary professions. She even seems surprised that I'm more interested in discussing her poetry than her publicity work.
"Everybody else seems to be asking about how I make time to do my own creative work while I'm being a midwife to everyone else's. It's a relief to talk about the poems.
"I wouldn't promote my own book," she continues. "There's enough of a conflict of interest already simply being a publicist and being recognizable from that.
"My job is to promote writers, not to promote myself."