Vincent J. Tomeo’s collection THE USEFULNESS OF HIPPOPOTAMUS weighs in at just under fifty poems. The work’s subtitle, “A Humorous Chapbook For Trying Times,” might suggest a political undertone, but in fact refers to the author’s recovery from cancer and his experiences during the COVID pandemic.
Tomeo writes in a personal, rather informal blank verse. The humor is droll, and very occasionally louche in the best possible way. Here and there, for example, sex hovers at the edges of a poem—as when he imagines the dead going at it in the cemetery in “Plot 15 Division C Section 2”: “Do not be frightened by mummies moaning.” Elsewhere, a self-portrait by Picasso slides off the wall and mingles with Vermeer and Frederic Remington in “Breaking Out of The Frame,” a poem inspired by an experience while on marijuana (taken for pain relief).
Nor is Tomeo above a little wordplay: “lightening” for “lightning” brings “Flight AA4114” to a clever, satisfying conclusion, and “Nuclear Medicine” ends in a play on words about radioactivity: “Had an emergency / wondered if the seat would glow? / Who would sit here next?”
The chapbook has been largely made up of a number of works published previously in a variety of magazines and periodicals, and, as with any poetry collection of this sort, it becomes difficult to discern a throughline. As one might expect, though, death looms large: “Cemetery Samba Roll” makes a ballroom of the boneyard, while “Charging A Cellphone” sees Tomeo on life support in the hospital.
There are times when the ephemeral merely comes across as trivial. “I Saw a Mouse on a Wing,” for instance, describes just such an incident and raises little interest before ending on an underwhelming pun. That said, Tomeo is capable of exhibiting great pathos in other poems: “Things My Mother Would Say or Ask As I Got Older” is a profoundly affecting read for anyone who has lost a parent. The closeness of death as perceived when one contracts a life-threatening illness can be terrifying, but THE USEFULNESS OF HIPPOPOTAMUS proves overall that it can also be a singularly fertile source of poetic inspiration.
Though its poems are occasionally lightweight, Vincent J. Tomeo’s THE USEFULNESS OF HIPPOPOTAMUS: A Humorous Chapbook For Trying Times is by turns droll and affecting in its exploration of life and death.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader