Outrageous Fortune, a review of Bittersweet, by John Grey

By Peter Mladinic

Outrageous Fortune: a review of Bittersweet, by John Grey. cyberwit.net. 2025. $15.00 paper.

John Grey, one of the most talented and prolific poets of our time, writes from the unique perspective of growing up in Australia and living in New England in the United States. At times he is as satirical as the Brit, Gavin Ewart, and as outrageously irreverent as the American, Alan Dugan, two poets who thrived in latter part of the twentieth century. An appreciation of Grey’s new book, Bittersweet can be gotten by considering nature, the suburbs, and the city. He says things about all three his way, but to get an idea of what that way is, think of John Updike’s suburban satires, John Ashbery’s ironic observations of city life, and the peaceful but haunting woods of Mary Oliver and Robert Frost. Like the six aforementioned poets, Grey sounds like no one but himself.

John Grey is at home in the woods, with nature. At home enough to write about nature in a very particular way. Nature is not an escape, but rather a going into a world of comfort and solace, where he can relax and “be himself.” In "An Intuit Boy” he combines nature with artifice.

In the boy’s small bedroom,
a polar bear repeats itself
across the wallpaper.

The many splashing seals
have no fear

of the giant white predator.
Nor does the slinking
Arctic fox.

But in another poem “the forest floor / is a graveyard / though the fallen leaves cackle underfoot, 'I am not dead.’” And in "The Sonnet Of The Forest,” the first half, the forest, by day, is “vibrant,” but in the second half, at night, it is “haunting.” The speaker is alone in the pitch-dark, with the “dreaded doom / Of nothing to see and yet surely there.” In "A Connecticut Mill Town,” he sees “the mills off in the distance: / rotting benches, rusting machinery,” and concludes "The ones who still / earn a living there / are pigeons cooing from the rooftops.” Among the human-made ruins, he finds beauty. Observing a nest’s "Sticks, weeds, a strand of hair, even some string— / I’m face to face with where birds live.”

Where the poet lives seems to be the suburbs. They bring out his satirical side. "Suburbia, On Any Given Day,” an anthology-worthy tour de force take on suburban life, instructs in that it brings out truths, and entertains in that its every line is a punch line.

Keri’s best friend, Hannah can’t swim but can often be found posing,
at the town pool, at the very end of the diving board.
Steve considers his parents to be small-minded.
Kurt so much wanted a drum kit for his birthday

but his divorced mom bought him a rifle instead.
Frank has an abnormal fear of being sued for slander.
Hannah’s dad, Roy is always saying how there’s more than one way
to skin a cat.
He can only name one.

The poet is at home and not at home. He simultaneously accepts and resists life in the suburbs. He sees through the materialistic entrapments of the suburbs, and astutely comments on the excesses, luxuries, conveniences, pains, and pleasures of people who live where he too lives. In his suburban home he collects …beer cans. "I’m in a mood these days to preserve / rather than just let things go.” In a place where "Kami’s friends want to slap her face when she talks about her / growth as a person.” And “Roy has never found a use for staring up at the sky.”

The city is where the poet is least comfortable, closed in, surrounded by the noise of traffic and machines. In “The Car Alarm,” his merely walking past the car sets off an alarm. He wonders "Maybe it was my after-shave.” Farther along,

Surely there’s someone,
even now,
up in their third-floor apartment,
staring down at me

as if I’m the most disreputable
man on the planet.

Could be they’re already calling the cops.

This is all in fun, but with a serious undertone. The conflict is human versus machine, the personal at odds with the impersonal, and finally the pedestrian at odds with the apartment dweller. The city puts the poet, and others on edge. The city makes people vulnerable to road rage; the dog-eat-dog competition for the corporate job; the “grab it before the other guy grabs it” item on sale in the store where everything has a price tag. It is a place where “From club to sidewalk, / brightness blinks / equal measure of good life and insanity.”

Ultimately, Grey’s subjects “know no boundaries. He writes about whatever sparks his curiosity, as a thinking, feeling human being in a world with others. In poems about childhood, he learns something new from an old situation. In all his poems, his lack of pretense is as refreshing as his ability to go straight to the heart of what matters, and, in elegant poems, make it matter to the reader. At the end of the title poem, "Bittersweet” he says, “The view from here / is cold and tired … / Yet I don’t complain. / Not now. /Not when I have a poem to please.”