Iron Man Family Outing

Review of Rick Belden's Poetry

From Menletter July 2008

By Tim Baehr

How many of us have had boyhood fantasies of either being a superhero or being rescued from an impossible life by a superhero? For Rick Belden, author of this searingly honest collection of poems, the hero was Iron Man, a Marvel Comics character that played a role in Belden's personal mythology, even as an adult.

The poems, created in part after attending poetry workshops at the Austin Men's Center, chronicle life with an abusive, dysfunctional family - an angry, unavailable father and a mother who could not make up for her husband's faults.

Why Iron Man? In the Marvel mythology, Iron Man had an indestructible suit that enclosed an ordinary man. The suit had its own weaponry. It could fly. And it protected the man's wounded heart from further damage.

The fallout from the family in Rick Belden's life is laid bare, and Belden pulls no punches about how his family life affected his relationships, his jobs, his sex life, his spiritual life. To read the poems is to enter into an ongoing nightmare (actually, several of the poems are dream sequences). The images are so sharp, the language so powerful, that, even as we wish to avert our inner gaze, we do not want to wake up. Not yet.

This book is not about victimhood but about survival and transformation. In his work as writer and poet, in his work in men's groups, Belden was seeking what eludes many of us: a "more conscious manhood." The book ends with poems of hope, as in the last stanza of the last poem:

there's a brand-new day inside me

a fresh breeze blowing

a warm sun rising

and a sleeping bird about to awake.

The poems are free-form, almost stream-of-consciousness, but at the same time disciplined. Belden can stop a thought - and make us think along with him - with the use of white space or an indentation, and then pull us pell-mell through a series of lines, repeated words, or internal rhymes, building a tapestry of images and feelings.

Title: Iron Man Family Outing: Poems about transition into a more conscious manhood

Author: Rick Belden

Web: www.rickbelden.com

Excerpt: http://rickbelden.com/excerpt

Available: From Belden's website or from Amazon