February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Paul O’Neill
THE McSORLEY POEMS, by Geoffrey Bartholomew. Charlton Street Press. 112 pp. $14.99.
Imagine that you could capture the essence of your favorite particular portion of space, frame it, book it, or even carry that atmosphere around in a bottle so that whenever the mood struck, you could whip out the cork and inhale that wonderfully familiar aroma and time. Not an easy task to accomplish, this storing of pervading moods and emotions.
Now attempt in your mind’s eye to perform the bottling of "New York City’s Oldest Pub." Include presidents, psychologists, journeymen, convicts, and bums. Formulate your phrase in Haiku and poignant prose steeped in world history. You have just managed to write "The McSorley Poems."
The creation of this remarkably endearing publication fell to an authority on McSorley’s, Geoffrey Bartholomew, who has been writing poems and working at the sawdust sprinkled bar for 28 years. Indeed, who else could conceive and execute such an in-depth script?
In his 112-page odyssey through the artifacts behind and above the hallowed doors of the ancient establishment, Bartholomew speaks with a mature and real voice rarely found outside the lauded circle of living bards.
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The poem "Lunch Respite" begins "Onions, sawdust & ale/carved tables clotted/with burgers & fries/cheddar & mustard/humans lunched at the eat." Here we are introduced to diurnal feeding time at the inn, pleasant enough you might think until "Frank the Slob" shuffles us into a story of haste, and joyous satisfaction. Check Page 26 of "The McSorley Poems" for Frank’s respite.
And indeed each of the writer’s songs is an imaginative description of a universe thriving around the wooden tables, the century and a half of famous and infamous patrons who have worn holes in doorknobs, the landmark, yellow newspapers and photographed personages respectfully framed, forever it seems, on walls holding dark and dear secrets.
Bartholomew’s "DOC ZORY" leads us on a musical escapade through the real or imagined life of a violin-playing traveler who ends up scrubbing the restrooms of the 7th Street pub. Whether this sailor-turned-boozer ever existed is left to us to decide. What matters is how the words unfold the passage of a life extraordinarily human. With lines such as "Ma died young on us/so he taught me the axe/honing an edge to call shadows/until beauty was airborne" the poet barman conjures up an unromantic rough honesty reminiscent of a McCourt novel, or Dylan’s whine.
"The McSorley Poems" is a worthy collection for any bohemian bookshelf or cultured library, a cutting reminder that supping and people have changed little since John McSorley opened his doors to all one inspired day in 1854.