Book Review - Jason Schindler's The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them

Paul Guilfoyle not only reads poetry, but writes about it with compassion and imagination. His commentary on the Irish-drenched Seamus Heaney's Casualty is near poetry itself: "This poem reminds me of when I was a little boy in the 1950s. It was different. Starting as a child I remember there was WORK [sic] and Mass and work and Camel untipped cigarettes and work and parades and soda bread and work and scully caps and beer and whisky and work and callused hands and music and boxing and a coughing kind of laughter and yelling and blood and work and no loose change, all money either saved or spent." It's got a good poem's cadence, to be sure.

Fine, but who the hell is Paul Guilfoyle? Well, you've likely seen him, but know nothing about him. He's the head cop — Capt. Jim Brass — on the original CSI. Yeah, that guy. Knowing this, that Guilfoyle admires Heaney and has more than a bit of the poet in him, too — knowing this changes both Guilfoyle the actor and Heaney the poet. For the moment, at least, I'm paying attention to Heaney, because he's the inspiration here, but next time I surf and land on CSI I'll see Guilfoyle in a slightly different light. He'll have a dimension I would never have imagined. My nonchalance or inattention will be altered. I'll know him, kind of. 

This is the doing of Jason Schindler in The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them. And for his efforts, along with co-editors Michael O'Keefe (Caddyshack, The Great Santini) and Lili Taylor (Dogfight, High Fidelity), we should all be grateful. This is a book (including a CD of selected actors reading their favorite poets) whose time is way past due. Don't we have enough books on books that inspired writers; or on musicians who praise a note, a sound, a singer of great power?

Article Author: Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster (no relation to the composer) works in the investment business to pay the bills, but writes about the arts and popular culture because that's what he loves. He is the publisher and managing editor of www.culturecrank.com.

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