The Mechanics of Rescue by Amy Miller

The Mechanics of the Rescue
Poems by Amy Miller
Nine Bean-Rows Press, 2007

Review by Laurie Rosenblatt


"Why play at all?" is the question Amy Miller asks in the first line of her poem, "Short Game Rules". Most poems in this chapbook start with a tantalizing hook. Here are some other opening lines:

I love the way men die/on Big Valley
 "(Big Valley")

She calls it Timmy, for alliteration
("Mom Names the Tumor")

I can't stop reading any poem beginning with a line like that. But this chapbook is not all technically skilled entertainment and quirky humor. The poems in The Mechanics of Rescue may take off from interesting directions but lead the reader along darker paths. For instance, the first stanza from "Cheerios,"

She wants a heart attack:
swift, sure goodbye
on the living room floor,
or maybe in the car
alone. She thought about it
those nights in the still,
clean halls of Vista gardens,
spooning soup into the woman's
hungry-fish mouth.  The woman:
That's what she came
to call her, like faeries
took her mother, left a skin,
a stranger in her clothes.

A close look at "Cheerios," will show how many of Miller's poems work. As we've seen "Cheerios" opens with the wish for a quick death, an end before any radical stripping away of one's place in the world imposed by, say, dementia. The poem's title layers the innocence of childhood, the cheery British goodbye, and the sunny tone of a 1950's movie heroine facing disaster—devastating mix. The second stanza gives us the speaker's thoughts on how to court the quick death by turning away from healthy living while her husband cheerfully, optimistically, trustingly looks forward to a benign future and makes her a breakfast to guarantee long life. As with all good poems, this trot doesn't do justice.

The Mechanics of Rescue gives us many poems like "Cheerios." I've read the chapbook again and again. But sometimes Miller doesn't trust herself as much as the reader trusts her. For instance in "Picking Blackberries" she divides the poem into eight sections complete with titles. This structure deflects the power of the whole.  Without division, a single poem unfolds and the small discontinuities add to the reader's connection and identification with the intimate voice speaking about the tragedies, errors, missteps, and beauty of life in quiet, arresting images. Ignore the distracting breaks. It's a gorgeous, moving poem. That's the worst I say about this collection. A trivial complaint.

Since publication of The Mechanics of the Rescue in 2007, Amy Miller has written Tea Before Questions (2010) and Beautiful/Brutal (2009) as well as five other chapbooks. I look forward to chasing them down.

Hunger All Inside

Hunger All Inside
by Marie Gauthier
Finishing Line Press, 24 pages, 2009, $14

Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell


Sometimes I long for plain first lines, the ones that tell me exactly where I am and exactly what is happening.  Sometimes I tire of making my way through metaphor, fragment, or obscure juxtaposition and long for something like this:

He squats, his boy haunches
leaning against wrought
iron with one hand
through the gap as he flings
pinecones into the river.

Are you not pulled in?  What lovely end words: haunches, wrought, flings.  The scene is drawn so sharply—we see it—the boy, the railing, the river.  It’s a lovely scene out of childhood—what could be more innocent?  Yet wrought and flings, hanging at the ends of lines, already signal something deeper.

Many of the poems in Marie Gauthier’s deftly crafted chapbook, like “Gravity” from which the lines above are taken, focus on the complicated course of motherhood—the wonder and the fear.  In “The Second Miracle,” returning to her son in the bathtub after “a second away” to get a fresh towel, she imagines:

his small head dashed against the porcelain,
his body a broken toy floating in pink-tinged froth.

Everywhere there are depths and precipices—yet the mother knows her boy must charge into the world:

. . . we grab tufts of hair, sticky hands,
cotton shirts by the score—we yank him back,
over and over, as irresistibly he goes,
over and over, to that verge.

Ms. Gauthier’s language is precise, but layered, like those first lines with which I started this review.  She is grounded in the outdoors and the seasons, the leaves, the trees, but the different perceptions of adult and child of the commonplace bring a depth to the entangled emotions:

Out, out, he cries each morning,
          so we bundle up, and he barrels
through phalanxes of leaves—

dun-colored, breath-thin,
          they crumple beneath his feet
like letters from the dead,

unearthed too late, or too soon
          for his reading . . .

Ms. Gauthier’s biography reveals that she worked at the Jeffrey Amherst Bookstore in Amherst, MA for many years before it, like so many independent bookstores, went out of business.  I was in that bookstore often during those years and do remember her from her picture on the back of the chapbook, but never knew she is a poet.  Through some internet sleuthing, I found that Ms. Gauthier is now the Director of Sales and Marketing at Tupelo Press; a blog by her and some of her poetry can be found at: http://mariegauthier.wordpress.com/.

Fading into Bolivia by Richard Taylor

Fading into Bolivia
by Richard Taylor
Accents Publishing, Lexington , KY
28 p., 2011.

Reviewed by P. Nelson

As writers, we are all pushing product and that’s good even if at times it has horse before the cart aspects. We need first and frequently to have taken standard delivery, ( Pegasus pulling his load of aesthetic affects), to have consumed the artistic goods and to have been consumed. Many poets are diverted by the various wrappings: technical strictures, narratising authentications, sparkles of language when the purest poetic object is in its being “ a still point of the turning world.”, a composed composure.  The greatest power of poetry is this of concentrating our concentration-and if the counter is made “Sure-- and so does prayer and zen” (not bad bedfellows, by the way), poetry does this in a special way, powering-up our attention at the same time it provides objects, profounder than jig saw pieces for that empowerment in a timeless circuit of feed and feedback.  Which is to say. and maybe this got boring five minutes ago, lyric poems at their best are deep and deepening. They are quiet. (They do not draw attention to themselves by tripping over themselves.) This is the sterling quality of Richard Taylor’s Falling Into Bolivia. His work is carefully shaped and paced.  

“The skim of algae into which /she waded to escape the heat / accepted her, pond ooze
hugging like a lethal stew.”
(For a Newfoundland Drowned in a Farm Pond)

Skim and stew are re-enforcing but the real fixer, after the lulling ordinary language of “escape the heat”, is that terrible-inevitable verb “accepting.’

And the poet must accept “that among all the sounds of late summer—
the “hum of semis along the bypass and lunch-break siren when the wind was right,” he had actually
heard “ a hoarse barking, plaintive, faint, its agony never surfacing.” and done nothing.

His Peaks Mill Road is perfectly observed

“In the near dark where the doe lies /(a musical, fairy tale set up)
half on, half off the road, / my headlights cone unto the survivors: /
two bucks, a spotted fawn,/ and two or three vague others.

Ears tenses, sleek heads swiveling / in the glare, hooves as lustrous,/
edged and deadly as a shot glass, they find no refuge in shadow,/
the brightness welding them together.

They do not break they do not scatter.

And to our surprise and gratification, the poem from that natural ending continues for two excellent stanzas.

If some poems are trope-ically overloaded (kayaks as relationships?), or topically conventional (prof grades papers), they are consistently sound in the units of their construction, especially the bond of noun and modifier – “heft of light” the griever’s rain of “gentle tamping, small erosions”- that ineptly fabricated, undermines so much contemporary verse. (If you can’t get noun and modifier right- all the metaphors in the world won’t save you.).

The chapbook itself, as object, is admirably low key and refined; a matte dual-tone cover, a chaste title page, good printing, a back cover of sober, uninflated blurbiage. No ribbons, no fandangles, no (ever-disappointing) author portrait.

One of Taylor’s poems end ... “I brace to face the weather—bundled, blank, at last reduced to words.” As is the reader, in fulfillment, at end of this good book.

Thirteen Designer Vaginas

Thirteen Designer Vaginas
by Juliet Cook
Hyacinth Girl Press, $5, 15 pages

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

Hyacinth Girl Press is “a feminist micro press” that aims “to bring feminism, mysticism, and scientific inquiry together with awesome poetry,” according to editor Margaret Bashaar, and has certainly done so here with Juliet Cook’s 13 poems, all titled “Designer Vagina,” and “partially inspired,” the poet says, “by looking up Vaginal Rejuvenation Surgery online.”  Remind me never to do that. 

I much prefer reading these lively poems, rich in humor and wordplay, but also rather frightening in what they suggest about what can be done surgically to alter or repair women’s nether parts.  Unless that is done in the woman’s mind and/or of her own free will.  “I was just looking for a new female doctor, / but I got sucked into this Exclusive / Embossed Edge.”

These poems are consistently provocative in a variety of ways.  “A bonbon and a boner walked into a bar” is now one of my favorite first lines ever, but it does invite us to question the value system that makes women into bonbons and celebrates vaginas for their “boner” potential, and then treats it all as a joke.  “In between a pair of masochistic doll legs, // a designer vagina might be just another punch line poem.”  Not to mention the implied violence in all this.

I appreciate the questions raised in these poems, and the speaker’s dogged, half-repulsed pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge.

Why do I write mutant love letters
to men who don’t even read?

It’s like a botched cosmetic surgery
when all they want is push-up bra love.

Together the poems evoke an experience similar to relentless page-turning in a medical textbook, or, since the poet’s own research was online, repeated clicking on websites offered in a search, but the poems render the anatomy in unexpected ways, often with images of food:

The heaviness of this body, raw biscuit dough
swelling out of its tube.  Am I wrong
to want to be more like a patisserie,
instead of a discount grocery store.
An exotic candy-making machine
instead of a homey spoon rest.

There is plenty of design here in Thirteen Designer Vaginas.  A pink ribbon in poem #1 carries over into poem #2; the bonbon in poem #2 carries over into poem #3.  The endpapers are pink.  The covers are “jeweled,” evidently each one uniquely, with tiny shiny glued-ons that remind me of the jewelry-like surgical scars in one of the short films in Aria, “Nessun Dorma” directed by Ken Russell. I’m glad to have encountered all 13 of these vaginas.

Full disclosure coincidences:

I am eager to see the other books available individually or by subscription from Hyacinth Girl Press, one of which will be mine in winter 2011-12 (!).  I am also included in the anthology Make It So…, an anthology inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation, published by Prime Directive Press, an imprint of Hyacinth Girl Press.  It’s nice to see a chapbook anthology (and fun to be a Kirk writing about a Picard).

The Cows by Lydia Davis

The Cows
by Lydia Davis
Sarabande Books, 2011
37 pages, $9.95

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

He says to us: they don’t really do anything.
Then he says: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.

It is hard to resist a chapbook with a cow on the cover. It’s even harder when the cow is good-looking, standing in a green field, and staring straight at you.  I like cows. Who doesn’t? Having worked on a dairy farm I have a sense of the cow - the one you milk, feed, let out, bring in.  The Cows by Lydia Davis is not, however, about our active relationship with cows at all, or in other words humans are not in the picture. Good move. What Davis does is watch 3 cows from her kitchen window through the seasons and record her observations in spare precise lines of poetic prose. Or is it prose poetry? No matter.

Sarabande Books and Davis include 26 black and white photographs of the 3 cows in this chapbook, with the title page photo appropriately being a panoramic of 2 of the protagonists and (SPOILER ALERT!) the calf born on page 35.  I wish more chapbooks did this.

The Cows is a meditation on bovine nothingness. And it’s relaxing.

Against the snow, in the distance, coming head-on this
way, separately, spaced far apart, they are like wide black strokes of a pen.

Cows become isosceles triangles, cars of a train, a compass, teardrops, and then there is the choreography of the day – how they move, and how they don’t at all.  

After staying with the others in a tight clump for some
time, one walks away by herself to the far corner of the
field: at this moment, she does seem to have a mind of her own.

Lydia Davis makes this all look effortless. There is no Lydia in her lines. It’s about the cows. It’s that simple. Moo.

For Crying Out Loud by Cid Corman

For Crying Out Loud
by Cid Corman
Mountains and Rivers Press in Eugene, Oregon 2002

Second printing 2011 www.mountainsandriverspress.org
31 pages, US$8


Review by Moira Richards

It’s not often, I guess, that a poetry chapbook goes into second printing. It’s not often either, that someone produces more than 80 chapbooks of poetry in a lifetime – even if he does live to be octogenarian. For Crying Out Loud is, by my count, the 81^st and last collection of poems by Cid Corman published before his death in 2004.

Cid Corman did a lot of translation work too, and I love the energy he gives to Bashō’s oku-no-hosomichi translated as Back Roads to Far Towns (The Ecco Press, 1968 and again in 1996 with introduction by Robert Hass). Corman translates the hokku in the haibun in a way that evokes the sense of a rich variety of writing technique at the command of the old master. His translations suggest too, that Bashō reveals diverse facets of mood and personality through his poems.

I’ve also noticed interesting similarities between the way in which Cid Corman and Bashō led their lives. Corman, like Bashō, devoted his life to poetry; to teaching and to sharing the poetry of others, with others. Both earned very little money from their literary work, and both men were indebted to the generosity of friends and patrons to be able to pursue their passion. I thought it’d be fun to place a few of Corman’s poems from his last chapbook alongside his translations of Bashō’s last journey. And to watch how the two old men converse.

Both poets are master of drawing great beauty with few words – is it too fanciful to imagine Corman also standing, in 1689, at that most sacred of shrines atop Mount Nikkō albeit a few months later in the year?

O glorious
green leaves young leaves’
sun light                                                          (Back Roads to Far Towns, 29)

Within the
fallen leaf

to trace the
standing tree.                                                  (For Crying Out Loud, 17)

Perhaps Cid Corman was there, alongside Bashō that long-ago autumn night to echo, as drily, Bashō’s resignation at the non-appearance of the year’s much-anticipated full moon…

harvest moon
Hokkoku weather
don’t depend on it                                          (Back Roads to Far Towns, 143)

The only
thing you can

be sure of
is nothing.                                                       (For Crying Out Loud, 22)

Do you not enjoy picturing Corman, sharing three days of enforced stay in an inhospitable border-guard hut at the Shitomae Barrier, bouncing repartee off Bashō’s droll, dour, and powerfully succinct comment on the experience?

fleas lice
horse pishing
by the pillow                                                   (Back Roads to Far Towns, 91)

Get the life
outta here

That seems to
be the word.                                                    (For Crying Out Loud, 26)

I like to think of Cid Corman as travel companion who understands and empathises with the old master’s weariness and ambivalence at the aloneness of a nomadic life; the upside of which is privileged of witnessings of  the grandeur of the natural world.

wild seas (ya
to Sado shoring up
the great star dream                                        (Back Roads to Far Towns, 117)

Like finding yourself
lost and knowing there was no
where else you could be.                                 (For Crying Out Loud, 15)

Bashō, at the end of his months-long oku-no-hosomichi, does get to celebrate the joy of good friendships renewed but he acknowledges, simultaneously, the inevitability of future partings. Corman, with considered choice, placement and replacements of the few words selected for his own poem as well as for the translated poem, demonstrates mastery in both poets.

Clam
shell and innards parting
departing fall.                                                  (Back Roads to Far Towns, 151)

Every
moment

Any
moment now.                                                  (For Crying Out Loud, 14)

In a long conversation, a couple of years before his death, Cid Corman talks about his life’s work and explains his reasons for not wanting to be published or anthologised by a big publishing house. That entire interview with Philip Rowlands is online (http://www.flashpointmag.com/corman1.htm) and is as well worth the reading as is For Crying Out Loud. Both pieces gives great sense of the voice of the man and the can’t-stop-or-sit-down busy-ness that must surely be trademark of anyone with so large a body of work which includes, some dozen and a half translations.

Nine Hours from Oswego: poetry mostly

Nine Hours from Oswego

poetrymostly

by Elaine Schear

Big TablePublishing Company Chapbook Series, 2011

36 pages (32 poems), $12

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

This chapbook covers a lot of ground, as we accompany the narrator through various stages of life: growing up in cultural exile in upstate New York, coming of age, and then life as an adult—relating to aging parents, family life with a partner and children as they grow up. These experiences are common to many of us. Why should we read this book? Because of Elaine Schear’s distinctive voice—her vivid language and images, her wit, her moments of tenderness in the midst of the difficulties of family life. I especially like the way this chapbook is structured—I think the poet put a lot of thought into the sequence of the poems as the book unfolds. It feels like a journey through life, with a long prose poem at the center in which the narrator describes the final cleaning out of her parents’ house after both have died. The book has surprises as well-- unexpected changes in subject, variation in tone and imagery, alternation between poems and prose poems, all of which keep the pace of the book lively and interesting.

The biggest surprise for me was a strong prose poem that occurs just after the poems about the old age and death of the narrator’s parents and precedes the poems about her family life with her own children. This poem, titled  “In War, the Dog,” is told from the point of view of a dog in four different wars spanning World War II and Iraq—a stark reminder that along with growing up and dealing with aging parents and bringing up children, war is a part of life as well. There are some powerful lines in this poem: “Once I rode in a box car. There was no room and no light” (Poland, 1942); “I was left behind when the Ba’th master went away . . . These new soldiers  . . . hold me on a leash when the hooded ones stagger off the trucks. Fear is my job.” (Abu Ghraib Prison, 2005). Although at first this poem seems to stand alone in the book, after a few readings I saw many connections with the rest of the poems (there is another poem about dogs; there is a poem about 9/11).

The first poem in the book, in fact, is also about war—a vivid imagining of the narrator’s father’s experience in World War II. As Schear portrays it, he “slept in his helmet, stupefied, grit-mouthed, cold / half-dry mud advancing into his boots and pants,” and he hated everything he had to carry—his gun, knife, and shovel. But in the end, “The shovel saved him, pitched that moment at an odd angle / just behind his head. He fell into shrapnel and stone, / got dragged by the guy behind him, who he could never repay / except to dig a soldier’s tomb into sickened ground.” In the following poem, “Before she was my mother,” Schear imagines her mother’s early married  life just as vividly, but with very different language:

She glowed before the clean foaming smash of Niagara

that first married summer in upstate New York,

her rounded figure dressed for the camera in mother-to-be,

glad to be pregnant but more than the baby

the belly of success, her bright open face as if to say

Look! I’ve got a man and he got me this way!

The liveliness and humor of Schear’s voice are evident in poems like this, and I like the way the narrator evokes her parents so strongly in a time before she was born. The subsequent poems in the first part of the book take us through her younger years, with her tufted poodle socks and candy cigarettes, to her awkward early teenage years (in the wonderful poem “Thirteen” she says “I’d like to not be thirteen and just / be a nice older age / like twenty-one /  or a single digit / like nine”). And on to the later teenage years of summer jobs (scooping ice cream at Ho Jo’s in a summer resort), and then suddenly in the next poem she’s an adult, working as a barmaid at the The Jazz Workshop in Boston.

The poems that follow, about the narrator’s parents in their old age, have poignant details: while waiting in the hospital to see a specialist, the mother gamely puts on lipstick because her daughter has heard that elderly women get better medical care when they are wearing lipstick, “even while in their beds after surgery”; the father steals band aids from a jar while waiting for his medical appointment. After both parents have died, the narrator goes to Florida to clean out their house; this exhausting and disorienting experience is described in a prose poem, “Her Last Week in Their Paradise,” told in the third person and divided into the seven days of a week. It’s an effective poem: the prose form conveys the endless, numbing list of tasks the narrator has to deal with, one thing after another, and the third person makes it feel like a universal experience: “She is not sure where to begin: the bank, the realtors, the leaks in the sink and the roof. She needs to decide what to pack and ship. She needs to call her 92-year-old aunt. . . . The large bathroom mirror shows too much. Dark circles, lines. . . . She takes down the zippered satchel wedged into the corner of her parents’ bedroom closet. She has waited a long time for this . . . canvas bag of love letters written by her mother and father to each other when Dad was still in the army . . . their unrestrained desire.  . . . She brings eighteen bags of clothes to the Goodwill, but they’re too busy to accept them. A Haitian woman approaches her on the way into the parking lot and offers to take them all. She is grateful to give them to a real person . . . She imagines skinny Haitian men wearing her father’s oversized shirts and heavy E-width shoes.  . . . She finds one remaining jar of Dad’s homemade sauce in the freezer, buys the kind of spaghetti he liked, cooks it al dente the way he taught her many years ago, and sits down to eat  in the stillness of her parents’ kitchen.”

The remaining poems in the book are about the narrator’s family life with her partner and children, and they are beautiful and moving (and sometimes have biting humor, as in the pantoum about same-sex marriage in Massachusetts).  She describes the way her daughters change as they grow up, as in the poem “Generosity” when one of her daughters invites her mother to share her bath and have a foot massage:

Last year toy boats and farm animals

bobbed under the bathtub mirror

. . . . .

These days she reads in quiet water,

washes her hair by candlelight.

. . . . .

She invites me for a foot massage

insisting, Don’t Look! as she raises

her young body, unguarded, from

her warm water cover, even though

I’ve been there all along admiring

her steamy shrine, the shine of her.

. . . . .

She takes up the washcloth in silent concentration,

applies her favorite cinnamon soap.

She gently bathes each toe and wrinkled sole.

In the poem “Standing By” Schear portrays vividly the painful emotions that a child often has in “the middle / days of her child life,” emotions that many of us still remember all too clearly:

She is ten and

longs for the single digit

time before taunting

ruled the classroom

where she’s learning to lower

her head and risk nothing

Raw from her day

she stomps upstairs

jaw clenched against

the sour taste of seven hours

worth of unspoken words

The next poem, “Chill,” is about an older daughter:

I am lost in the unfamiliar bigness

of her ideas at fourteen,

her passion for the knife edge,

mountain climbing with backpack, bed and utensils,

outerwear and underwear strapped to her back.

She is happiest now above tree line.

The book ends with the beautiful poem “Harvest,” in which the speaker and her partner have moved beyond the bringing up of children, in a time that is compared to autumn:

. . . . .

Yes, that’s the gift of it: the giving up

into flowers, fruit, and song,

gold flotsam, chocolate branches, unchosen edibles

bolting into something tall and tough with petals.

This could be the way with us,

moving on, relieved of our birthing,

regally flapping our rusty foliage in the wind,

sending out blooms in the off hours.

That last line could be a description of this chapbook—it sends out blooms in the off hours. I’ve found that many of these poems have stayed with me.

Cinders of My Better Angels by Michael Magee

Cinders of My Better Angels by Michael Magee. MoonPath Press, 2011. 51 pages.

Review by P. Nelson.

While not all the poems in Michael Magee’s ‘Cinders on My Better Angels” chronicle his explorations of medicine (or medicine’s of him), the many that do are notable. Americans of this era, we may not fully appreciate the clinical oddity of top forty radio infused treatment rooms or the off hand discourtesy of painful diagnostics that Magee has experienced up close and very personal; in Shakespearean terms—he has drunk the spider-or at least the banana flavored barium. That’s almost a Magee type jest but he has risen the stakes of his play and his jokes are better. But it’s what happens with poetry of distinctive utterance; the reader begins to mimic the poem’s performative gestures. Of course poetry can be distinctively good or bad (only the banal is oblivious), so let’s be clear – Magee’s is good.

My Sigmoidoscopy wasn’t that flexible./ I tensed up as the snake went in… / what were they looking for anyway?/ Hidden canals in Venice? / As they discussed me like gondoliers taking tourists for a ride-decked out / in another language of jargon. (from My Flexible Sigmund Freudoscopy)

“Language of jargon” is suggestive and artful. And the whiff of Venice, as even a tourist as delicate as Henry James might agree in a closeted moment, wholly appropriate ; La Serenissima, golden flecked, serpentine, glisteningly intestine, with its hints of the fetid and fecal. And something apt too about those gimlet-eyed, almost cynical medical gondolierists who have Charoned too many over the familiar crossing.

Magee’s manner at its best is “American” at its best : informal, funny, fundamentally modest, conversational, riffing; ragtimeingly intelligent, alert, capacious. It knows how to envelope his sharp edge subject-objects, needles, endoscopes, tumors, rasorial nurses. She says something about a home visit/which sounds like a death sentence/but maybe I’m reading into someone /else’s life, besides for right now / I get my twenty dollar co-pay back. (from Lab Results)

It would be easy to glide over the not calling attention to themselves subtleties, a death sentence read, a reimbursement that is actuarially temporary.

People here today look lost. “I don’t /care as long as they don’t operate on me,”/ someone says. The lobby is under construction / and no one can get through. The deli is under / the jackhammer’s rule as people spin off / in different directions. It’s Friday and we’ll / soon be keeping each other company …/ The unemployed, SSI, charity cases and elderly / we are all here on life support, waiting / for hip replacements, or cataract surgery / and no one is admitting to anything.” (from Admitting)

Our minds are parliaments (or medical grand rounds) and sure there is some party that will earnestly assert that the chief value of this poetry is as courageous and often humorous (which is, in this context, a re-iteration of “courageous”) testimony.

But the opposition would be as right to counter we don’t care about another such testimonial ; talk to your local oncologist or veterinarian; uncommon courage is a common virtue. And for all we know or really care , Michael Magee is actually a tri athletetic pre-med student with a serious case of writer’s itch. Our concern and Time’s is the vitality of the body of words, a corpus sufficient unto itself, its health a matter of images, rhetorical and verbal musculatures. Our project has nothing to do with “the ghost in the machine”, an author somewhere charting his course along the Seven Ages. Are some of Maggee’s enjambments detached? A few of his adjectival phrases loose or thematics too rue-mantic? Should they be looked to? Yet every poem in Cinders of My Better Angels gives pleasure as art, communicates qualities of courage, wit, observancy. So we do care. Stay well Magee, for your next book.

Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía by Penelope Scambly Schott

Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía
by Penelope Scambly Schott
Rain Mountain Press, 2009
www.rainmountainpress.com
41 pages. US$10

Review by Moira Richards

“During a stormy February and March, I was provided with a mountain, house, and magpies, for which I am most grateful.”

So reads the preface to Under Taos Mountain and, I wonder, what would I do with such a gift?

Penelope Scambly Schott creates a bright reflected/reflective picture of a mountain, a woman, and combative magpie. And she gets herself sucked into a verbal duel with that magpie; a duel in which Magpie always maintains the upper wing – right from the first meeting in which, kindly, ‘Magpie Invites Me’…

            Tía, my Auntie, we live;

            let us fly together
            above this mountain.

                        But the wings of my soul
                        are daubed with mud.

            Then stand in the round oven
            and bake;

            your pin feathers will toughen,
            your wings will strengthen.

… until, at the end of the acquaintance, ‘Magpie Dispatches Me’ and then carelessly invokes the narrator’s ‘Expulsion’ from that house under Taos Mountain:

Magpie flaps at my window:

Tía, it’s time to go home.
You’ve bothered me plenty

and I’m bored with you.

            Magpie, I thought you cared.

Don’t you get sick of caring, Auntie?

            I do, I do.
           That’s why I came here:

            my heart was so crowded
            that my brain was squeezed.

That’s very peculiar anatomy;
no wonder your feathers don’t work.

Magpie’s affect is clear from the quickest of scans down the titles in the chapbook’s content listing… ‘Magpie as my Patron Saint’, ‘Magpie Assaults me on Ash Wednesday’, ‘Magpie on the Afterlife’. Through the poems Magpie emerges not as muse, not as conscience, not as alter-ego but, irresistably, as amalgam of all three…

            Tell me your sins, Tía.
            (I, of course, have none.)

Or perhaps Magpie is just a teasing magpie; the poet leaves the possibilities wide open – and uses her Magpie to invite as much uncomfortable introspection as the cover image suggests.

Magpie variously taunts the poet narrator and here, likens her nest to the writer’s work:

            See how it all connects.  Pull one twig and the nest unravels.

                        My whole life is like that, Magpie.

            Someday you will go back to being a pile of twigs.
            In our dry climate, you will decay slowly.

            Every word you have written on the rough bark
            will remain legible

            for awhile.

            That will be enough.

And other times, when least expected and never for very long, the narrator elicits comfort, soothing words, magical imagery, from the mercurial Magpie;

                        Magpie, why can’t I sleep?

            You write too much, Auntie.
            Let your dreams lie in peace.

            …

Drop your pencil           

            I will rock you back to sleep in a basket
            woven from the tails

            of shooting stars.

So the poems for this chapbook… lots of soul-searching (only by Tía), lots of quarrelling – maybe more intense than terrible – the magpie a formidable verbal opponent and, tantalisingly, there’s no real resolution by the end of the tale – except of, course, Magpie gets to say the last, sly, words.

            That’s why I like you so much, Tía,
            whenever I like you at all.

Alchemies of Loss

Alchemies of Loss

by Kimberly Davis

Bare Cove Press, 2011

33 pages, $29.18 (hardcover), $12.18 (softcover)

ISBN: 978-0-9834810-0-3

Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell

On the cover of Kimberly Davis’s chapbook—her first poetry collection—is a photograph of “Weeping Angel,” a statue in a cemetery in Hingham, Massachusetts.  The stone angel is flung over the monument, her head buried on one arm.  There is something arresting and unsentimental about her; the form conveys true grief, palpable grief, as does this collection at its best.

Angels haunt this collection, as do cemeteries, hospital beds—the usual scenes of death and dying.  But it is the spare, almost conversational, language holding the surprise of the commonplace undergoing transformation that engages both my eye and intellect, as in these lines from the beginning of “Alchemy”:


I would like to have a catalog of what
each day is worth, weighed in

I don't know, the most

interesting stones you
could find on a beach, or colored glass

tortured luminous by a million
grains of sand--...

“Tortured luminous”— the hard-won beauty of the beach glass and of our lives— I doubt I have ever seen these two words used together.  The scene is so familiar—walking the beach, picking up stones, bringing them home perhaps to sit in a dish—reminders of one day’s worth—of what?  As the alchemy of life and loss wears on us, are we refined or diminished?  While the poet conveys her personal encounters with the death of her mother in this poem, her images open out into the profound.

The transformation of the commonplace—this phrase came to me repeatedly as I read this collection.  Davis examines our relationship to the objects around us, investigating their solidity and strength and our own. “Tree,” which concerns a collision with one, begins: “It seems now/that I have never believed/in the unyielding nature/of physical objects. How strange/that you could stretch out/on the floor, for example,/and not fall through . . . .”  Yet, might permeability be possible?  Is there a connection with what might be found within what appears solid?  She imagines the center of trees as “hollow luminous chambers/within which dust motes swirl” and, speculating about the car’s occupant, “perhaps he did break through/to unite with/the sparkling dust . . . .”

In one of the most striking images in the book, from “Prayerstone,” the speaker’s attempt to move a boulder seen in a field as a child—an “erratic” left by glacial ice—is a metaphor for her child’s belief that if she just prays hard enough, she can prevent her father’s death:

After he died
not that she had been too weak
but that her resolve had faltered,
betrayed by thoughts
which could already imagine him gone.
How they tugged at her hands
like little children
peeling back her fingers
one by one....

 

In many of these poems, the speaker is trying to hold on to time and space, yet time and space are essentially unreliable and uncontrollable.  The speaker is often sleepless, in the dark, looking for light.  In the opening poem, “Four AM,” she brews coffee in the middle of the night; standing in her kitchen, in the light of a single lamp, she has “carved//this small/room of light” out of the “sentient, permeable” dark.  In “Stone Angels,” she sits at home alone, imagining the forms of those she has lost, as “it is growing darker or/the lamp stronger—hard to say//almost as if the room/were pulling to the glow.”   Within the vastness of time and space, we are fighting diminishment.

In Paul Simon’s recent, gorgeous collection—at 69, as stellar a writer as he was when he wrote “Sounds of Silence” 46 (!) years ago—he writes the lines “Questions for the angels/Who believes in angels?/Fools do.” Later in Simon’s song, the speaker aligns himself with the fools: “Who believes in angels? I do.”  And perhaps it’s best if we, too, align ourselves with the fools, the ones who see under the shiny surfaces and speak truly of the alchemy that is, not the alchemy we wish for.  These 20 carefully crafted poems cohere into a meditation about our relationship to death and dying that speaks truly about how we learn about grief and its inevitable transformation of our lives. As we read these poems of loss, we learn along with the author that there is no alternative to facing into grief’s alchemy, that loss changes you in ways you cannot predict:

I see now
what comes of loss

                              and I
am beginning to hold to it

the way the alchemist clings
to a clot of iron

summoning gold.

Miller's New England Haiku Dictionary

Miller's New England Haiku Dictionary

by Mike Miller

Drafty Attic Press, 44 pages, $5.

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

Maybe it is because my daughter is studying European Imperialism, or maybe it’s because Donald Trump was annoying me, or maybe it’s because Mark Doty is on another poetry magazine cover, or Jane Hirschfield was in the New Yorker, or perhaps it was these lines from the Women’s Review of Books online submission page:

Please note that we generally do not review the following: genre fiction; self-help books; inspirational autobiographies; self-published fiction, poetry or memoir; poetry chapbooks; … Save your review copies of these kinds of books for more appropriate publications.

but I find myself looking at these poetry chapbooks in piles around my apartment and liking their powerlessness, the authenticity, the staples and cardstock, the folks who assemble them in their living room on tray tables like the editor of Seven Kitchens Press, the lack of budget, not much publicity, their blogs, their sense of humor and humility, all of it. When the top 5% in every category or company or country dominates and controls most everything in the world these days, I find the honesty and persistence of a simple and sometimes beautifully handcrafted chapbook that arrives in the Fiddler Crab mailbox to be a small revolution.   

Or maybe it’s the chapbook that I’ve been reading lately that is inciting my grassroots mood – Miller’s New England Haiku Dictionary - both written and edited by Mike Miller and published by Drafty Attic Press, which is Mike Miller’s press.  Mike Miller is a one man poetry band, so to speak, and he proves that he can do many things well, including entertain, in just 17 syllables. Here are just a few of his Dictionary haiku:

Alphabetize (v.)
you know that you sing the song
every single time

And for the writer who sometimes equates the process of revision to the satisfaction of solving an equation - here is a haiku for you.

Mathematics (n.):
finite symbols set into
poems you can prove

And then there are the ones that just make you grin

Blurry (adj.):
“Try again. The third row,” says
the license lady.

Antecedent (n.):
children with their mother’s nose
and their father’s eyes.

There is something about this chapbook that has me calling out to friends and family – You’ve got to hear this one. Then they usually want to hear another.  Haiku are so short that performance reading can be a problem. Haiku are over and done with almost as soon as you've begun, but the dictionary aspect of this collection is brilliant and motivates the reader to continually browse around. Are you in a letter T. mood, or is it more of an X. or Q. kind of afternoon?  For the first time in my life I began to understand why people like reading the dictionary.  

So just when I was depressed about Donald Trump and the fact that the New Yorker isn’t brave enough often enough to publish excellent poems by completely unknown poets ….

Democracy (n.):
not a comfort if all your
country men are dumb.

Mike Miller’s Miller’s New England Haiku Dictionary arrives in the mail. Thank you Mike.

Now, there is just one thing I’d like you all to do and I promise you won’t regret it. Click on Drafty Attic Press.  Priceless!

The Girl Who Goes Alone by Elizabeth Austen

The Girl Who Goes Alone

by Elizabeth Austen

Floating Bridge Press, 2010

27 pages, $12

ISBN 978-1-930446-22-9

Where Currents Meet

by Elizabeth Austen

as part of Sightline, in The Quartet Series

Toadlily Press, 2010

75 pages, $15

ISBN 978-0-9766405-5-4

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

I was immediately attracted to The Girl Who Goes Alone, by Elizabeth Austen, both by its bold title and by her brief bio on the back cover.  We connect!  We both worked in the theatre; we both do poetry on the radio, at local NPR affiliates. But she “wears a size 6 ½ hiking boot,” and my hiking boots are disintegrating.  It’s been a long time since I walked a portion of the Appalachian Trail.  Elizabeth Austen walked alone for six months in the Andes!  Wow!

That fierce independence is barely held in by these 27 pages of lively, inquisitive, heartfelt, boundary-breaking, punctuation-busting poems.  Connections continued as I read the poems closely.  We’ve both written Eve poems that insist “It Didn’t Happen That Way,” though Austen grabbed that wonderful title.  We both have a fascination with Virginia Woolf and the rocks that weighed her down.  We both grapple with our spirituality. 

“Don’t assume I believe in you / just because I’m talking to you,” she says in “Vestigial God,” a poem that is bold and self-deprecating at once.  “Actually, I’m between gods at the moment—” she continues in this smart and hilarious poem, interspersed with asterisks like mini-snores—“saving my breath for someone who’s not too rude to do his own PR.”  (I wonder if Elizabeth ever performed in Jesus Christ Superstar, or Godspell!)  She can’t believe in God’s tacky, loudmouthed spokespeople these days, but she lets him off the hook with, “I’ve been known to fall asleep at the wheel myself.”  And then clinches it with marvelous self-knowledge: “I ask God to speak.  I keep talking.  What do I expect?”

Now let me pause to mention Where Currents Meet, a shorter set of poems by Austen contained with three other chapbooks by other poets in Sightline, a book in The Quartet Series of Toadlily Press. That’s an interesting project, a way to get the work of multiple poets into the hands of readers, but, for now, I’ll only discuss Austen.  I find it fascinating that two of her poems appear in both books, one rather dramatically revised.

Her Eve poem, “It Didn’t Happen That Way,” opens The Girl Who Goes Alone.  I love how it starts mid-sentence (unless the title is considered the beginning of the sentence), blaming the apple instead of Eve:

                   Unless the apple itself, longing
                   to be known, can be blamed
                   for the light bent
                   across its skin
                   for the midday heat
                   transforming sugar to scent. 

Now I would have put a comma after “skin,” but not Elizabeth Austen!  She lets the line break do the work, and she rails against “the dogma of the period” in “On Punctuation” just as much as she rails against religious dogma in other poems in this book!  I much prefer this version of the Eve poem.  She doesn’t need the two introductory stanzas in the version that appears in the Sightline book.  In The Girl Who Goes Alone, we start in medias res, in the middle of the action, and keep going with that kind of energy all the way to the end, when she promises in “More, One More,” the last poem, “to praise this  world / by hauling what I can / into the next.”  And she warns,

                  Darling, sweet pants
                  don't stand
                  too close
                  at the end.    

This makes me laugh even as I anticipate her lover’s wrenching grief.  Who could bear to lose such a woman?  Or is she speaking to a young daughter, a toddler at the water’s edge?  Then who could bear to lose such a mother?

And now back to Where Currents Meet, which is full of water poems, and the poet’s “need…to travel naked into an evening ocean,” and then back to “More, One More”:

                        I’m sure to try
                        to pull along
                        some cone or frond
                        grain of sand
                        in my swimsuit
                        pistachio stuck in my teeth—

Got to love that pistachio! Got to love those rolling tides and waves, swimsuit or no swimsuit!  Where Currents Meet begins with an earnest, achingly lovely, questing poem, called “The Permanent Fragility of Meaning,” that asks, “Why persist…?” It seems to equate poetry and prayer, something else to which I connect, and ends with conviction: “I rise up and begin again.”

It’s amazing that both these books were published in 2010, but one has a vigorous and rollicking tone, as if the poet has solved something in choosing to go alone.  Good for her.  I’m eager to see where she goes next.

I imagine she’s resurrected something of the fierce toddler in herself, the girl in the other poem that appears in both books, “Her, at Two,” a little girl not afraid to take and eat!

                                     Is this how we all
                          began, thrilled to hold the meat
                          in our tiny fists, sure
                          the feast was laid for us
                          alone?

Even if it wasn’t, it was.  I hope The Girl Who Goes Alone is

                                               That girl -
                       who reaches and takes, erupts
                       in glee as she shakes her fistful
                       of bone and meat.

Heart Song & Other Legacies

Heart Song & Other Legacies

by Linda Buckmaster

The Illuminated Sea Press, 2006

33 pages, $11

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

I came across this chapbook in a bookstore in Maine (more on this later), and the first thing that attracted me was the cover art, a montage entitled “Angel” by Jean Proudman--a beautiful and mysterious depiction of a figure that is part woman, part angel, and also perhaps a sea creature like a mermaid (the sea-green pattern that overlies the figure contributes to this effect). The 26 poems in this collection--a journey through landscapes of the heart and of the natural world--live up to the promise of that cover. Linda Buckmaster’s language and images are evocative, exploring the mysteries of birth, family, growing up, illness, death, love. 

Not surprisingly for a writer who grew up in Florida and now lives on the coast of Maine, images of the sea and of water occur repeatedly in these poems, as in the beautiful poem that opens the book, “Sea Time”:

            This is the place you were spawned--
            the warm sea surface and the dark
            below.  Sleek tangle of kelp
            fathoms deep and deeper still,
            one-eyed creatures with antennae that blink.

            You could have drifted
            forever, in a gentle chaos, governed
            only by currents and moon. But you
            took that turn toward the hard shore. 

Life on the “hard shore” has moments of both great pain and great beauty. Several of the poems are about the death of a beloved, prefigured in the poem “Memory, a snake” in which “the double-helix serpent lies ready/ to pounce, to strike, to sink/ its venom into soft tissue.” The death itself is portrayed vividly in “Sudden Death,” the moment when “you shorted out, caught fire, and/ bursting into white flames,/ consumed yourself/ in light and heat, leaving us/ the still warm ashes of an afterlife.” In the following poem, “January,” gentler but no less poignant,  the poet mourns for the lost lover:

            The other night, I saw you
            as moonlight coming in
            the west window of the kitchen.
            Fourteen years in this house and I never
            before saw the moon coming in that
            particular window.  Perhaps it's that we
            never stayed up late. . .
            . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now
            I'm often up very late, alone
            so that night I saw you softly spreading
            across the dark countertop and burnished surface
            of the stove--a triangle of light--and
            I lowered my face and kissed you. 

Other poems describe the poet’s experience with cancer, including “Initiation” and the moving catalogue poem “Nine Ways to Get to Bangor” in which the poet lists and numbers the waterways and plants and seasons of the Penobscot Bay area in counterpoint with lists of surgeries, hospitals, treatments, clinics, names of roads. The poem begins and concludes with the phrase “One watershed,” followed at the end by two lines: “Carry on./ Carry on.” 

There is so much else in this short book, including two strong poems about the poet’s father and a poem about her son’s birth. Two lively poems describe the poet’s teenage and early adult years, although the tone of these is different from the rest of the book. What I like best about Buckmaster’s poetry is her continual identification with the natural world, her images of mystery and beauty in that world, as in the poem “Flowering” near the end of the book:

             Pick a crevice
             a homey gap
             between stones
             and make it
             your own
             . . . . . . . . . .
             the bees will use you
             for their sweet honey.
             The rock will soften
             under your touch. You
             will draw moisture from
             fog and hold it.  Your
             presence will
             build soil.                 

             This is all
             we have in this
             life, all we own:
             a flowering
             an opening
             a gap between
             stones for tiny
             tender roots.    

I found this chapbook in the poetry section one of my favorite independent bookstores, Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine. As they describe themselves on their website, they are “a fiercely independent community bookstore” that offers “parking, gift wrapping, advice, dog biscuits, and a wealth of knowledge about books.” It’s a unique pleasure to spend an hour or two browsing (and buying books) in this or any other independent bookstore. Sadly, these are hard times for bookstores. So I urge you to support your nearest independent bookstore--buy your books there and not online! Go to the readings and author events that they offer! Talk to the friendly and knowledgeable staff members! Without dedicated customers, these bookstores won’t survive. And the serendipity of coming across a good book that you weren’t expecting to find, like the one I’ve reviewed here, is something that can only happen while browsing in a bookstore, where the physical books are still sitting on the shelves, waiting for you to open them.

Fiddler Crab Feature - Interview with Seven Kitchens Press' Editor, Ron Mohring

What brought you to poetry publishing? How did you get your name? In other words, a brief history of your press? 

I've been attracted to poetry chapbooks for a very long time (and had three of my own published before my first book came out), so the decision to launch a chapbook press was pretty easy. When I left a university job in 2007, I also left a job on the editorial staff of a literary magazine, and suddenly there was time to go ahead and take the micropress leap. I haven't looked back. 

Our name owes a debt to my partner and to my friend Deirdre O'Connor, in whose kitchen we were drinking wine & telling crazy housesitting stories when Randy suddenly exclaimed: "You guys should publish a collection!" Even though that housesitting anthology is still in limbo, I still believe it will happen, and I wanted to acknowledge a debt to all the nurturing conversation and brilliant ideas that hatch in our kitchens.

Books from Seven Kitchen have a very distinctive and, we think, attractive design/look. Do you have any comments about the design work or publishing aesthetics at your press or in general? Do you do all the work in house or outsource parts? 

Thank you! We've been fortunate to gain permission from some very talented artists and photographers for some of our cover images. I learned a bit about design at my old job, but some of the process was very trial-and-error, especially in our first year. Last year, I had the help of a madly talented intern, Kari Larsen, who designed some awesome covers (R J Gibson's Scavenge, Naomi Lazard's Ordinances, Erin Bertram's Inland Sea). I print the pages at home on my laser printer and have the covers printed locally. I trim, assemble, and tie each chapbook at home. 

Is there a kind of poetry manuscript or poet you are looking for or are passionate about? 

Ron Mohring, Editor of Seven Kitchens Press

My goal is to represent a wide range of voices and aesthetics. I think we're doing all right so far, though I really want to represent more poets of color (and I'm working on that). I read a lot--a lot--of poetry, and if a manuscript stays with me, even if a guest judge didn't land it in the top for whatever series, I will probably try to find a way to publish that manuscript. So many titles in our Editor's Series, and almost everything in our Summer Kitchen Series, happened because I couldn't let those poems go unpublished!

How are manuscripts selected for publication at Seven Kitchens? (Do you, for instance, ever use outside vetters or “ manuscripts made anonymous” for reading?). 

For our open series (Robin Becker, Keystone, Editor's Prize), we remove identifying information as soon as the manuscripts come in and assign randomly-generated log numbers. I don't know who wrote what until the finalists are selected. I like soliciting guest judges for the Keystone and Becker Prizes; it brings a fresh reader every year to those series, and I've been completely happy with the judges' selections. I do read every manuscript that comes in, though a time may come that I'll need help with that, but I'd rather hire a co-editor than ever hand the manuscripts over to outside readers who may not be as passionate about the press as I. 

  

What’s the hardest thing about running Seven Kitchens? And the best? 

The biggest challenge for me is time: my intentions are constantly undermined by the realities of my daily schedule. The second biggest challenge is money: we have a tiny budget--you wouldn't believe--yet here we are, thirty titles strong, pushing ahead and feeling very grateful for the support we've received so far. 

Editorial Assistant, Sadie

The best part about running 7KP is the absolute delight of bringing each writer's work into print in thoughtfully designed, carefully edited, lovingly constructed chapbooks. I love every stage of the process.

What are your thoughts about the current status of the chapbook in the poetry world, and how do you see the chapbook developing in the coming decade? 

I'm blown away by the ways that some folks--Didi Menendez and Nic Sebastian, for example--are creating gorgeous digital chapbooks. But there's so much creativity in the physical chapbook as well: Betsy Wheeler makes incredible chapbooks at Pilot Books, as does David McNamara at sunnyoutside. It's almost unfair to name names because so many folks out there are creating beautiful, original, stunning work. Chapbooks are thriving!

What do we need to know what about you do that we don’t know? 

When I'm not writing poems or working on the press, I quilt. I'm a hand quilter. Some antique Pennsylvania quilting fabrics inspired the cover designs for the Summer Kitchen Series; just wait till you see this year's batch. Finally, I want to thank you again for this interview, but especially for your commitment to the chapbook and the fine work you're doing with Fiddler Crab Review.

___________________________________

interview by P. Nelson and Emily Scudder.  photographs by Ron Mohring. All Rights Reserved.