fiddler crab review: home of the poetry chapbook review

The Mechanics of Rescue by Amy Miller

2012-01-23T18:47:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T18:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-11T18:15:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T17:43:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

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.

___________________________________

Mandala by Diana Woodcock

2011-03-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

mandala by Diana Woodcock.

Foothills Publishing ,2009.

39 p. $10.

Reviewed by P.Nelson

There’s nothing arbitrary about Diana Woodcock’s title, “Mandala”, a circle to be traveled, the bulls eye of attention, a cosmoplan and web of forces. This is a courageous book of witnessing, a challenge to the complacency of the comfortable reader to sustain the compassionate attention this work deserves.

An author who has opened herself to harshest realities and constructed a work from them may have to face the baldest criticisms. Surprisingly common in such cases and always a shock when you are subjected to it (as a friend of mine has been) is the assertion that the author, by exposing violence, subliminally endorses it. You are “in to” suffering. “Don’t deal with this stuff.” You risk the indictment of moral self-congratulation. Woodcock’s poems are partial, in a decided, constructive sense, to narrative. Nearly all the poems are focused on “others”, victims, prisoners, refugees, those that endure, presented in a language that is even, sober, clear eyed and thus, intense in ways we might wish to glance away from….

The confessions:/ Pregnant women tied to trees,/ machetes cutting out fetuses;/ children killing their own parents/ for stealing food, rats eaten raw/ How could I stomach them? […]/ The old man squats in the shade of/ Ankhor Wat, ruins rising from the jungle./ Cassia and basho trees sway in the breeze./ Children women cut open here-- so/ much that cannot hide under the shadow/ of the banana leaf the child carries,/ riding his water buffalo, which--/ at the end of its life--is sacrificed/ for buffalo stew. (from Buffalo Stew)

Most of the poems have that vital turning, from death to life, In “Aphrodisiac”, Woodcock tells us of the death of two rhinos, shifts to a pharmacy shop in Kowloon that sells rhino horn power and there ...

At the bar next door, beery- eyed Chinese/ men in the smoky din watching thin/ prostitutes- some home grown, some/ from the Philippines- in their tight/ jeans, painting their pale lips red.

The added ethical valence of feminism is properly in play here.

Much of Woodcock’s poetry could be considered reportage (how, at extremes of suffering could it be otherwise?) but marked by intelligent observation and selection, a mediation by composition and juxtaposition, as above, or in “Survivor”, a Tibetan nun reflects on her eleven years of imprisonment, finds some consolation in nature and then recalls “the Chinese guards who went home at the end of their shifts to wives and daughters.”

The specific ethics informing Woodcock’s work and world view are Buddhist and feminist but presented with a non doctrinaire refinement, exposing the “in this life” dilemma that our attunement to even the noblest (and seemingly self-evident) beliefs can be problematic, indeed ambiguous;

Are these the primary poisons: ignorance, hatred, greed?/ Could a conch shell or a simple bell awaken me?/ A lotus rooted in mud enlighten me with blossoming/ energy? Blind me to all that is not sublime? […]

Find God in music yak and sun. But how?/ Could I ever learn to play the dranyen and move/ through life as if around a mandala,/ balancing always balancing/ ready to be erased? (from Mandala)

As one who believes poetry is in its highest evolution a baroque art, characterized by over elaboration, most communicative when least direct, most authentic when trying too hard, I was at times lulled by Woodcock’s careful but plain diction, her casual enjambments. Yet these aspects too came to seem to me a refinement, an honest retort to the contortions of brutality, a refusal to over aestheticise violence. These poems are meditations on mercy.

This is a pretty chapbook. If some of the line printing is not precisely as inked as a print perfectionist would prefer, the cover, of mandala within mandala is gorgeous.

Slide Shows

2011-02-24T14:26:00.000-08:00

Slide Shows

by Ann Fisher-Wirth

Finishing Line Press, 2009

21 pages. US$14

Review/interview by Moira Richards

I love that chapbooks so often present themselves as piece of artwork, special, more-than-a-book-to-read. Slide Shows displays as its cover, a colourful childhood photograph of the author, dressed in a butterfly-bedecked kimono, chatting with with her sister and a friend. The smooth shimmery end papers catch the deep crimson of their garments, and fine red ribbon, that might also have been used in the girls’ hair, ties the pages. Beautiful to look at, beautiful to touch, beautiful to read :-)

The collection comprises nineteen ten-line, unrhymed poems that snapshot bits of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s experiences and perceptions when, as a child and daughter of a US army serviceman, she left the USA with her family to go and live with her father in Camp Zama, Japan. The year is 1955, World War II still in its aftermath and the Korean War barely over. The narrator is a little girl who could not, then, have understood the wider implications of what she noticed.

Hong Kong

But at the last minute

we could not

take the airplane

at Christmas to Hong Kong

Our father said people

who pushed and shouted

Yankee Go Home

had turned cars over in Tokyo

and the Army guards

would not let anyone leave Zama

Since I happen to ‘know’ Ann in the internet sense of the word that has people from opposite sides of the planet connecting more strongly than they do with most of their neighbours, I thought to include here, a chat with her about Slide Shows.

Moira: Ann, I'm intrigued by the decastich form you've used and how it sort-of resonates with hints of the ancient Japanese 5-line tanka or ‘short song’ form, and also with the Japanese renga/renku genre in which verses jump from one to the next without any explicit connection or overall 'story' but instead, narrate a journey of sorts – as this collection seems to do. Would you comment on the form you used?

Ann: I wanted all the poems to be—or seem—quite simple. Being set in Japan, it seemed appropriate to make them echo the brevity and sensory specificity of haiku, yet I needed some additional length in order to incorporate elements of narrative. I wrote one poem—I don't remember which—and it had ten short lines. I liked the idea of a series, and I knew that formal uniformity would help the series attain a feeling of completeness. Slide Shows is quite different from most of my poetry. It was a lot of fun to see how much I could compress, how much I could pack into small spaces.

Moira: I love the device of narrating in the voice of the child you were and also with the naïveté of someone too young to fully realise/understand what she was experiencing. That's some feat to not bring your older self explicitly into the poetry but to trust that the reader will pick up on what you've not said.

I guess I'm also asking why this book now, some 50 years later..? And after authoring a number of other collections of poems?

Ann: My parents—who adored each other—were apart all during World War II; I was born a year after my father's return from the South Pacific. He stayed in the Army and was gone again for extended periods, first in Germany, and then during the Korean War. When we joined him in Japan in 1955, they thought that would be the beginning of many happy years together. But shortly after our return to the States, he developed cancer and died. I was fifteen, and his death ushered in a very troubled time for me. My mother died in 2003, after a long illness; her death made my memories of childhood—which was very happy and secure—especially vivid. I realized, at that time, that though I'd written three books of poems, I never had written about my childhood. Also, as I've grown older, I've become aware that I lived through a remarkable period in history—and that I had a wealth of material in those vivid images and memories of our 18 months in Occupied Japan.

I wanted to honor those moments, and those people, by presenting experience as it occurred to me at the time, rather than as overtly reflected upon by the adult I have become. But of course the reflection takes place in the acts of choosing one thing rather than another, and of shaping poems. I think children would like these poems, but I am delighted when adult readers can experience them on many levels, with an awareness of all that is not said.

Reprise: Slide Shows

He controlled the magic,

and we sailed across the Pacific

to find him. After we

all came home, our mother

sometimes called us, Girls, Daddy’s

going to show slides.

Korea, Japan— lakes, farms,

mountains. Every time

his pictures ended,

his hands made doves across the screen.

Raising Petra

2011-02-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

Raising Petra
by Michele Battiste
Pudding House Press, 2007
22 pages, $10

Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell

Who is Petra? I enter this book through the first poem, titled, simply, “Petra,” and I’m introduced to this girl who is supposed to be asleep but isn’t. OK, I think, this is about the author raising her daughter. Am I really going to be able to sustain interest in her child-rearing ups and downs through 16 poems? Petra—an ordinary girl, it seems, who “loves/her new, short haircut and pinafore/with lemon ruffles.” Oh, a girly girl, I think. Even less interesting. But soon something different happens—the poem careens around some corner:

If only it were morning, the cats dozing
in their baskets, the house warm with running
bath water and butter melting
into toast. She would jump up
and into that pinafore, shake
her head like a puppy killing, . . .

Killing? That line, ending with such an undecorous word, and the hints start to grow that this is no ordinary collection about childhood. Rather, we are going to peer into the unpredictable, the sad, maybe even the dangerous. It is not just that a child is not yet an adult, but that Petra—and all children—are apart from adults, essentially unknowable.

Two poems later, Petra’s apartness challenges the reader in the first line of “Visiting Petra”:

Petra doesn’t like you. I can tell
by the shrug, one shoulder raised . . .
. . . Petra
has developed moods that tug her
facial muscles into portraits a hand itches
to slap loose, and for now, Petra doesn’t
like you. . . .

And now we are in more complicated territory—the underlying conflict, the barely concealed hostility. Who has power here, the child or the adult?

The narrator/mother reveals herself caught between doubt and love, between, perhaps, admiration and something darker—envy and anger. Who is this girl, this daughter, this being in the world? “I swear you are here,” she convinces herself, “as real as wood or berries,” but challenges the reader and herself, “What do you really know about Petra?”

As the book goes on, Petra becomes more than a child. Is she the narrator’s alter ego, a self she could have been, some spirit posing as a child? In the later poems, the narrator’s envy of this “relentless” girl, who seems to have such control of her world, seeps through:

It’s hard not to be jealous, to want
to refuse her, to crush Petra just
a tiny bit. It would be discipline,
wouldn’t it?

The book is full of questions, drawing the reader into the conspiracy, to admit, yes, yes, it isn’t fair: “Who should be that/ lucky, that loved by the elements, that tranquil/and sure?” Petra is independent and unpredictable. She might do anything she wants. What she does could be interpreted as what any child might do—couldn’t it?

This book is haunting and haunted. The poems are written with a sure hand, the images right, the word choice sharp, the line breaks masterful, as in this passage: “In another world, Petra’s a fat,/unlikable kid, nervous and snotty,/every syllable a whine.”

It is hard to stop quoting from this book. On every page there is a passage I want to share. “Petra’s Song” is truly a tour-de-force, but to quote only part of Petra’s terrifying nursery rhyme here would be to ruin it. So I’ll give you only one more taste to tantalize you to buy this disturbingly honest book and read it from cover to cover for yourself:

It’s best to leave her now, like this,
too far away to be certain, her giggle

like hysterical sparrows we swear
are trapped in an air-duct, the beating
wings haunting our walls, and nothing we do

will reach them. Nothing can let them out.

Everyday Chica

2011-01-18T20:50:00.000-08:00

Everyday Chica
poems by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
Longleaf Press at Methodist University, 2010
28 pages, $8

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

Everyday Chica is confident. Everyday Chica is bold. The cover design energizes, and the poems inside deliver the anticipated charge. Everyday Chica is the perfect storm - poetry, person, and culture all colliding in free verse - and Cuban-American poet Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés is in complete control. She establishes her presence in the opening series of 5 autobiographical poems (below) that make up the entirety of chapbook’s first of three sections, titled Back When:

Back when I was Cuban
Back when I was a Jersey Girl
Back when I was an Exile
Back when I was a Quinceañera
Back when I was a Disco Queen

There is never a question of who is leading whom in this chapbook. A disco queen’s lands are immense/She must dance with all her subjects – Milanés’ last lines of poem "Back when I was a Disco Queen" stopped me in my tracks. Is it possible that the reader is one of her subjects as well? Milanés moves us from Cuba to New Jersey to Miami. She navigates us through her quinceañera, crosses cultures, weaves in Spanish with English, and grieves in full view, as in a stanza from her poem "Dónde está tu abuela?"

Dónde estás? Did you leave me anything but the
wild seed of your imagination? The desire
to recover you? The ability to recreate you?

Rhythm is always underfoot, beating in poem titles, such as "Hombre, Hambre, Hembra," or in lines like Ni los tipos on the corner/Ni las church ladies/Not sweet tías nor doting tios. Ricky Ricardo and babalú mean music, while limón, mangoes, guanábana, and plátanos are a cultivated list of sounds. You first hear the “singing” in the opening poem, "Back when I was Cuban":

Back when I was Cuban
   With no language but my mother’s and father’s tongue
A Cuban baby
   without words
   only a language that murmured and sighed
   a singing, a festive system of signs

There is never a lull, no valley of dullness, or poem that leaves you wondering What exactly does she mean? Milanés mixes it up, varies her line length, indents with ease, and make interesting use of the visual poem on the page. She writes the way she wants, about what she wants, and it works. Everyday Chica is about an Everyday Girl, an Every Girl, a Cuban American Girl, and it is no surprise to read her dedication - “For all las Chicas and in memory of Lucille Clifton”

So how does it end? With a Cuban American Manifesto!

Cuban American Manifesto
(para Guillermo Portabales)

I want to write a Cubanische poem
full of rhumba, conga y chachacha
con azucar sazon café tabaco y salsa
a Cuban poem for those over there
a Cuban American poem for those over here
I want to celebrate our richness and complexity
and I figure you saw Mambo Kings
and Buena Vista Social Club
so you know a little somethin’ – somethin’ about Cuban culture
even though Armand’s American, Antonio’s a Spaniard
and why is Celia singing in English?
and Desi Junior can’t even speak Spanish
but maybe I’m splitting hairs
and why should you care?
…

I admit, I am partial to a well-written poetic rant. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés sharpens her tongue in this 7 page poem, teaches us (non Cuban/Cuban Americans ) a thing or two, and does it with tremendous heart. Her final lines….and my soul, mi corazón is/not for sale could have been her first.

Stepping Through Moons by Toni L. Wilkes

2011-01-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

Stepping Through Moons

by Toni Wilkes
Finishing Line Press, 2009

27 pages, $14

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

Stepping Through Moons starts with a bang and a bucket of nails.

Bucket of Nails

He comes back, a bucket of nails
in one hand, a pear weeping
brown bruises in the other.

Stems of quince tear his face
when he squeezes the redwood gate
from its latch. The tin bucket

slaps his thigh, nails jangle. His
parents’ house, a waste of bottles
and shame glares back at him.

Near the porch, black bees dart
from the riven trunk of
a maple. Remnants of a tree swing

sag from its branches. Laying the
fruit on the porch railing, he prods
slats of steps in place as the pear

rocks to the blows of his hammer.

Here’s the book in a nutshell, or, rather, a tin pail. Strong visuals, suffering and stoicism offered in a language of charged restraint, and always something that can be heard—nails jangling, the hammer blows—in the clusterings of words and consonants.

Toni Wilkes has organized her chapbook into sections that echo the title phrase Stepping Through Moons: Walking Through Myths, Threading Shadows, Scattering Clouds, plus a little transitional Diptych of two poems that respond to paintings. The ekphrastic poems in the book underscore the landscape poems, in which she artfully reveals nature’s beauty.

But most compelling to me is the first section, Walking Through Myths, where we follow that boy with the bucket of nails through his life with challenging parents—a sometimes distant, sometimes shouting father, and an artist mother whose sketchbooks (and “independence”) he finds “stashed away in cupboards and drawers.”

Part of my attraction to this section is that the female poet takes us deeply into the life of a male character, presumably one she knows well. She knows his personal history, or perhaps his personal mythology. We see him old enough to repair a porch. We see him young, a “triangle-faced boy” in one of his mother’s colored chalk portraits. We see him playing with a sister. We see him losing this sister: “They took his sister away at dawn, / her face the pearl-gray of shadowed water.” We see him grown past his griefs, disposing of the contents of his parents’ house. This is a grown-up boy who commands my attention and compassion as a reader, and here Wilkes is both poet and masterful portrait artist.

Stepping Through Moons is one of the signature saddle-stapled chapbooks of Finishing Line Press, with colored endpapers and ribbons tied around the spine. I know the poet has some choice in colors and book design but that the press also uses available scrap paper stock from its printer, so I count myself lucky to have a copy of the book with shimmery moon-colored endpapers and a blue ribbon that matches some of the blue lettering on the rear cover and the blue illustration on the front cover. It’s a lovely book with a bound-in erratum slip crediting the cover art—a color etching called Moon Rising—to Kathan Brown, a gift of the artist to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Wilkes is a California poet, and I was pleased to learn two words from her poems! “Nandinas” and “neoprened.” Nandina is an evergreen plant known as the heavenly bamboo, but not really a bamboo at all. Considered a pest in Florida, it is tolerated in California, and is a good place for towhees to hide and find seeds in winter, as in “A Study in Gray,” one of those artful landscape poems.

And neoprene is a DuPont plastic and the stuff of wetsuits, which makes perfect sense in “Ghost Surfer,” the last poem in Stepping Through Moons, where a surfer whose “shadow, like an indigo / stain” is there and not there, and then “evaporates / in the wing-beats / of swifter currents.”

The Schwenkfelders by Rebecca Lauren

2010-12-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

The Schwenkfelders
By Rebecca Lauren
Co-winner, 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize
Seven Kitchens Press

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

Rebecca Lauren's The Schwenkfelders collects stories from her German ancestors' migration, a journey that ends in Pennsylvania. The Schwenkfelders' tale attracts and keeps a reader's attention. The narrative line is strong. But Rebecca Lauren keeps the narrative's structure fluid using metaphoric and allusive language. I couldn't put this chapbook down.

The collection weaves a fine fabric out of letters sent back and forth between separated sisters, stories about life lived in an insulated community, and family history spun into myth. In the first poem "Soaring over Spitzberg" the Devil stuffs,

   Schwenkfelders' followers into a sack
   spindly Santa Claus in red with no sleigh.

They're on their way to hell along the epic trajectory. But Lauren turns in a different direction signaling a fairy tale instead,

   While soaring over Spitzberg,
   snow caps gleaming beneath him,
   the Devil snagged a corner
   on the mountain's peak.

   Burlap seams split, spilling
   Schwenkfeldersers into the valley.
   Men's bodies bounced like jacks;
   women's spun and splayed like unfurling yarn.

In some poems, the speaker stops to reflect on the inevitable blank spaces faced when recreating a family's history:

   My grandfather's boots still hammer in the attic. Agitated,
   he turns over boxes and bins and trunks to find
   the blue ribbon or that old newspaper clipping
   of his father pulling two boys from the river.

   But he'll never unearth the genealogy, safely
   tucked away by my grandmother years before—

And a little further on:

   I cannot breathe in this upper room, but outside
   a car idles at the end of the block with its windows
   rolled down. I watch as the driver rummages
   for an address she used to know by heart.

All the Schwenkfelder women weave—some with yarn and some with words.

In "The Spinsters, 1770," we have an epigram from Mary Daly that defines "spinster" as a woman who spins. Spinster also refers to a woman who chooses to define herself as a distinct person, someone who escapes the narrow social definition that depends on men and children. In Lauren's words, "a whirling dervish." The poem begins with the men of Skippack finding Eva Heidrich "cheerful in her widowhood. " She spins through her days "trying not to burn/the food/ or her paper-thin skin." We see her rolling egg noodles, baking bread, and finally entering her spinning room, the stüblein, where, "She is far too old to prick/ her finger on a spindle." Even the poem's lines shuttle back and forth,

   I greet Eva Heidrich
   as one who understands
   the pull of the loom
   the blur of color in fading light.
   I too spin straw
   for an iron man
   who pulls back
   at my hands, sparks
   flaring in the open air.

   Some nights, he goes slack as yarn
   and I forget
   how to spin—
   night blackening to
   cinders in my hands.

The poems in The Schwenkfelders use slant rhyme, repeated lines, even variations on the villanelle and other song forms as sonic devices. In the poem "Stüblein," printed in justified lines like a newspaper clipping, capital letters beat in rhythm.

   Logs squared on two sides only,
   double-boarded floor, a strong shingle
   roof above my head Small stove room
   Roving room of looms Daughter at
   the oven, son in the barn out back
   Stocking yarn spread long like flower
   Garlands Mother's spun coverlet Just a
   wall between—this wall and memory

Arrgh. Technical issues have again had their way with me, the lines imperfectly justified. But, if we look past the reviewer's technical idiocy, we see at first glance no punctuation. Instead the capital letters cut-in to end sentences and phrases. It's well done. We don't lose the thread. But wait. What about those commas?

We're nearly mid-way through the chapbook, so we know by now it's not an oversight during revision. Instead we hear the shuttle's continuity followed by the beaters firm thump in this loom-song.

The German language has a history of alliterative poetics, or so I've heard. So, again, it's no accident that poems here use assonance and alliteration as substitutes for rhyme. Let me try the reader's patience for one pedantic moment to remember that in contrast to alliteration (which occurs primarily at the front of the word), assonance is generally medial and so not aided by the eye. Whew! In short, assonance is more purely an ear thing echoing through the poems in the way predecessors' lives echo through the speaker's identity.

These subtle touches are typical of the deft use of formal elements in Lauren's chapbook. Yet another reason I couldn't stop reading The Schwenkfelders.

Investigating Nancy Drew

2010-11-28T20:25:00.000-08:00

Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth
by Kathleen Aguero
Červená Barva Press, 2008

33 pages, $7.00

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

Nancy Drew has had a long career in popular fiction, and even though many things about the novels seem very dated now, she is still a character that many readers remember with admiration and affection. Especially readers, like me, who grew up in the 1950s. It was the decade of postwar complacency, and the role models for teenage girls were limited in that pre-Feminine Mystique era when we couldn’t even imagine the changes the 1960s would bring. Our mothers mostly stayed at home, and many of us had little independence before we went to college. Nancy Drew offered a picture of a different kind of life. Not only was she smart, attractive, independent, and resourceful, but she had no mother telling her what to do! Her father, the prominent attorney Carson Drew, supported her sleuthing activities, admired her intellect, and financed her lifestyle--including her sporty blue roadster, her impressive array of outfits for every occasion, and her constant road trips with her friends--without ever a complaint. Even though there was no mother to run the household, Nancy had no duties in that area because Hannah Gruen, the Drews’ efficient housekeeper, took care of everything. In short, an enviable situation!

But it wasn’t just Nancy’s comfortable life and freedom that we envied, it was her job--even though she was still in high school, she spent much of her time as a very competent detective. She could recognize clues when she saw them, and she knew how to interpret them. She got to the heart of things. She tracked down evildoers and miscreants, and brought justice to the innocent. This, I think, was her real attraction: she could solve mysteries.

For all these reasons, I was delighted to come across Kathleen Aguero’s chapbook, which consists of nineteen poems that are all inspired in one way or another by Nancy Drew. But there’s more to these poems than nostalgia--many of them move quickly into other territory, and Aguero writes with humor and insight about a variety of situations. In the poem “Ambition” she shows the kind of independence that Nancy represented for her readers:

            Nancy, like Athena,
   must have been born
   straight from her father’s head.
   . . . . .
   Climbing
   out of windows, hiding
   in dark cellars, hardly
   a woman at all, at least
   not like our mothers,
   hair in rollers, lipstick
   smears on coffee cups.
   Go into law or business,
   my mother told me,
   meaning I might have a chance
   to call the shots,
   meaning, she’d also
   wanted to be Nancy.

In other poems Aguero acknowledges the privileged life that Nancy led, as when the faithful housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, speaks to Nancy’s readers in one poem: “How could Nancy get to be Nancy/ without me, a flowered apron/ doing magic tricks--food appears,/ dishes disappear--but not quite a mother/ reigning her in? How many of you/ were born in a house with a live-in housekeeper?” And in “No Parking” she refers to one of the most dated aspects of the novels, the fact that the criminals Nancy pursued were always from the lower social classes: Nancy walks confidently on the beach in a shorefront town where she belongs to the country club, while the “swarthy criminals/ . . . circle in their pick-ups,/ searching for legal parking./ . . . Let them park in Revere and hitchhike here.”

Whereas in the novels Nancy never fails to solve a mystery, in many of these poems she is unsuccessful, as in “Stumped,” “Unsolved Mysteries,” and “Mystery of the Tolling Bell.” And in the poem “Mammogram,” Nancy is confronted by a situation unlike anything she’s had to deal with in her investigations:

            The clue, a small lump
   she finds sleuthing
   in her own breast.
   . . . . .
   She’s felt baffled before,
   but what is this drop in her gut
   like an elevator going down?
   Her own pale breast
   withholds its secrets.

We are in very different territory now. And in the poems toward the end of the book, Aguero leaves Nancy Drew behind to explore more general situations, all of them mysteries where we have no certain answers. In “Suppose” the poet asks how it is that teenagers, even one’s own children, can do things that hurt others, or can be victims. In “The Case of the Suicidal Friend,” she writes about the helplessness of those left behind after a suicide, and the way the living search for clues to the reason for the death. Three of the book’s most moving poems are about the speaker’s mother, who is suffering from dementia and eventually has to live in a nursing home. Dementia is certainly one of life’s biggest mysteries, as Aguero says at the beginning of “The Case of the Impersonator”:

The first clue is she doesn’t know me.
The mystery is that she looks just like my mother.

In these three strong poems the language of mysteries and clues takes on a whole new resonance.

In the book’s final poem, “Zen Nancy,” Aguero returns to Nancy Drew, but this is a very different Nancy who has gone beyond the solving of mysteries and has reached a new level of consciousness: “What curiosity/ she feels is inner, quiet./ The mysteries she solved, so innocent/ they hardly seem crimes at all.” These days, Nancy is solving “more difficult cases”:

            the code of the aurora borealis,
   the trail of the horseshoe crab, the sound
   of stone, the color of air,
   the vast and clueless sky.

I love this picture of a new, enlightened Nancy. It’s a satisfying ending to a very enjoyable book.

Things of the Weather by Wendy Barker

2010-11-14T19:49:00.000-08:00

Things of the Weather by Wendy Barker Pudding House Publications, 2008 30 p. $10

Reviewed by P. Nelson

In a mood*, it can seem Poetry is under assault-and “the Perps”?-- its best friends, poets. The old bromide that more people write poetry than read it (stale news by at least 1600) has reached a more toxic distillation -- more poets write than read it. Here, Cher Reader, you’d be right to ask “how can you possibly know such a thing, Pew Poll perhaps?” But proofs can proceed by theorem; thus: IF poets were reading work worse than they write, THEN they’d write better by repulsion, if the same quality, they’d write better by competitiveness and if reading better quality, by aspiration. And so by a series of reactive reformations, the curve of poetry would be rising, which isn’t the case.

Many contemporary poems are really short-short stories, yearning for the bulked up lineaments of prose. The leading cause of poetic pallor is “trope-ic anemia” (sometimes called Levine’s Disease or Updike’s Disorder) but which critical clinicians properly call “metaphorosis”.So it is good to be able to present a healthy specimen, Wendy Barker’s “Things of the Weather”.

Condensation Nuclei

Sea salt, pollen and smoke./Particles the air / needs to form a cloud./A pebble in the palm./Phrase dropped on a plate./Your words I’ve collected/ and lined up like bowls/of ash, or sand, /stared at, and wept /or like our lidded glass/containers: oats, wheat,/ and opalescent grains/ we use to knead/our bread, yeasty /loaves with raisins./Rain, relief, the irritants/washed back to loam./Saliva, the body’s/juices that digest /grit between our teeth.

There’s a coolness here, a detachment and distance, the “personal” almost off stage, oblique, toned down. The attraction is in the elusiveness, the allusiveness. Baker, a “makeur” gets it: a poet (ever, optimally, a title conferred, not claimed) is not a maker of poems (almost anyone can do that) but a shaper of language; a distinction that is (and should be) critical.

High Sky

The sky has slipped its stitches,/the feathered cirrus, wool of cumulus,/ gauze shreds of layered stratus /gone with the unexpected guests/who left this morning/after a night of pelted rain./Now the sun flashes and shears/the few seams left/ till bare skin bursts through/and we’re down to ourselves,/ Two loose threads, the knot undone.

Now this is perhaps not as coolly removed as some might prefer, composure here softening into comfort. But the important thing is this : a poetic organization that is essentially vertical and harmonic rather than prosaic, horizontal and narratising. Harmony over melody, i.e., anybody’s “Late Quartets”.

Because, really, nobody cares about the raw testimony of your personal experience except your mother and the courts. The relationship of “experience” to poetry is like that of clay to pots, substantive but not defining.(Experiences, rhetorically rendered and imagistically enhanced are another thing entirely.)[See Susan -Jo Russell’s review of Soot.]

If I’ve inadvertently taken poets to task, I don’t mean to privilege critics and reviewers.

Reading reviews is like watching French people talk on Euro TV, never mind the jabber, it’s the gestures! Turn down the sound and watch the hands. As to major critics, its time that lowers the volume. The great critics- Burke, Richards, Empson and Auerbach are less recalled than rusting hulks of battleships. Perused by, at best, a lifeboat’s worth of professors,what’s enduring is not what they said but what, in urgent words, they were pointing to. What Fiddler Crab does with its own little claw.What we, the memorious remnant of readers, can turn to and briefly look.(Put another way, the long term value of criticism, provided it makes the proper signs, is indicative rather than constitutive.)

A bone, too, to pick with some responsible party. The cover engraving, as apposite as the properly cited titular epigram, isn’t credited. While its style is so individual as to be widely recognized, not one reader in a hundred will connect the cover with its only begetter, that typically short lived and unhappy 19^th century genius, J. J. Grandville ( aka Jean Ignace-Isidore Gerard) whose plate 70 from Un Autre Monde of lightning rods grounding thunderbolts should perpetuate his fame.

Finally, lest Barker’s chapbook seem shorted in these critical circuits, one of its pleasures is its organizing and titular mechanics, chiefly cloud names that befit these definite but shape shifting poems. Turning pages, I was reminded more than once of days passing and more than once needed to consult,with delight, Day’s classic reference work, “ Clouds and Weather.” ______________________________________________________________________

*See Richard III, (I.2, 248)

Kilimanjaro On My Lap

2010-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Kilimanjaro on my Lap
by Epiphanie Mukasano
Dakini, 2010
45 pages. ZAR90
http://www.anneschuster.co.za

Reviewed by Moira Richards

Kilimanjaro on my Lap – Africa’s highest mountain in someone’s lap? What an intriguing title… is this metaphor of unbearable burden? I turn immediately to the contents page in search of a title poem with clue to the mystery. But no, decide rather to begin at the beginning.

I examine the cover, look close at the detail. There, amid masks and musical instruments superimposed on the African continent, are books, some snippets of text, and a name – ‘Black Moses’. Black Moses? Harriet Tubman, the courageous and determined woman who not only escaped oppression but returned again and again to help hundreds of other US slaves, including her own parents, to their freedom…? More puzzles. Impatiently I skip the introductory matter to find the poetry.

The book opens with a poem celebrating Mother Earth, followed by another, chant-like piece, that celebrates Mother Africa and then, starkly, the narrator introduces herself as daughter of these two mothers but also,

I am a rootless tree
standing as if by magic
swinging back and forth
yet battling not to crumble
(I am from)

A couple of pages on, a poem of grief makes mention of the Rutare mountains. Rutare is one of the regions in Rwanda that bore the brunt of the 1994 genocide which saw the massacre of (some estimates say) 800 000 people in the space of 100 days. 8 000 men, women, children killed every day for a quarter of a year. With a slow chill, the context of this collection begins to emerge. And then makes itself clear, in a series of stanzas narrated with unflinching directness…

We scattered like bees
from a troubled hive
...
my mother died a pig's death
a beetroot crushed
...
no looking back
amid the frenzied shootings
...
a decade and more later
I'm still on the run
...
night and day I dream of her
her last minute stirs my mind
night and day I pray to God
to save the mothers of Africa
(Answers from the unknown child)

Poems, songs of heartbreak follow. What else is there to say?

But Mount Kilimanjaro, symbol of strength and liberty, appears as the title of a poem of promise – the poem in which,

I will come back full-handed
my blue backpack a blessing
Black Moses returned
a dream come real
...
I will sit on a woven mat
I will gobble a yellow plate
of banana plantain
mixed with mountain beans
tender onions in palm oil
a mound of my mother's food
Mount Kilimanjaro on my lap

(Mount Kilimanjaro)

The narration becomes one of resilience, the narrator begins a re-discovery of joy, the rediscovery of herself although a new life in a new country is not easy. The poetry takes the reader by the hand to show the hardships, the blessings, the new friendships until in the end, the sense of peace regained…

then in the silent dark
somewhere from within
a song finds its way
light comes in the night
the moon relents
and you sing of beauty of life
(Light in the night)

I read Epiphanie Mukasano’s book on the day that the last of thirty-three Chilean miners emerged from that underground prison; the day when the world celebrated the ability of the human spirit to rise in triumph above circumstance. The poetry of Kilimanjaro on my Lap demonstrates too, that triumph of spirit.

Soot by Jeff Walt

2010-10-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

Soot

by Jeff Walt

Seven Kitchens Press, 2010

$7.00

Review by Susan Jo Russell

From a batch of chapbooks in which many poems struck me as either too expected or too obscure, Mr. Walt’s collection rose to the top, grabbing my attention with the first poem, “All Day I Have Been Afraid.” Afraid of what? Afraid, like we are now, not knowing of what we are afraid:

I heard Mrs. Lee scream Kill me! Kill me!
from inside her house and I did not move.

At noon, all the dogs in the neighborhood
began barking wildly. Was an unbearable truth

told in a pitch only they could hear?

Opening a book with a title like Soot, the reader expects a certain amount of grit. And there is grit, for sure, in Walt’s rural, working class landscape. The people in these poems work at (and lose) dirty jobs in dirty places—strip mine, paper mill, greasy diner. They smoke, they drink, they take a joyride, hang out at the local bar or the porno shop, looking for camaraderie, eking out pleasure from the familiar and undemanding. In “The Wayside,” the cooks end their shift: “Before mopping up/the last soiled hour, someone always//pulled out a joint or two. Sitting on cases of Bud/out back, we smoked and bitched,//plotted to steal Delmonico steaks.”

I’m not a guy. I don’t (and haven’t) worked at these jobs or hung out swilling Bud Light. But Walt’s poems speak—to me, to anyone. While many of the poems are personal—about particular people in a sooty world of hard work, chronic exhaustion, few pleasures—they also capture the malaise of a society only rarely redeemed by love. Listen to how “The Wayside” ends: “each toke/like inhaling an ineffable love that we kept/passing around and around.” Yeah, we get that; whether a joint, a bottle of cheap wine, or even a pint of Häagen-Dazs, we’ve been there—the fleeting joy of the taste, the smell, the way we focus on that swallow of pleasure and let it blot out whatever we choose not to face.

There is a host of unseen and non-human presences in Walt’s world—angels, the dead—who lurk at the edge of vision; even the sidewalk and the fire hydrant have some kind of consciousness. They act as a sort of chorus. The dogs in these poems see more than most of the people do, like those dogs in “All Day I Have Been Afraid,” with their sense of something pervasive and wrong. In a later poem, a dog watches the soul of a suicide rise; in another, the dog can see the drunk angels who lounge in the shadows, avoiding their work as escorts for the dead. With their inability to imagine or desire a different life, they look at what the world is, while the humans blunt their senses against reality.

What do I read these poems for? Is it to confirm an inevitably grim view of a world in which even the angels have been pulled into its squalor? It can’t be only to commiserate about hopelessness. So then, what? It is to know these characters—and therefore myself—better. It is to walk with the author’s brother searching for an escaped dog he doesn’t even like because he must. It is to be reminded of the ways in which we create the easy camaraderies that substitute for deeper connections or don’t recognize the deeper connections that might be found in those comfortable niches where we’ve “become a regular.” It is to examine the varieties of dailiness in which we confront or avoid our deep fears. One of the poems in the book that haunts me is “Next,” in which the narrator searches in vain for something under the bed, finding mementoes of his past, but not able to remember what it is he is trying to find and why the need is so urgent: “A cockroach blinking back,//but I don’t have time to kill,/not today, not with this need to find/winding me like a toy.”

What Walt’s poetry illuminates is the insidiousness of despair—not only how it works in the lives of this man or that woman, but how the accumulation of despairing lives affects our perceptions of the world or, perhaps, not only perceptions, but the fabric of the world itself. Is the best we can do to remove ourselves from that world, if only temporarily? “I want to put the brakes on /my longing, fill my tub. Soak in my final stop. The world’s noise/and people who need me wrung from my body/like water squeezed out of a sponge.” [from “Bus Ride”]

Only the final poem gives a glimpse of love with a partner that—we shouldn’t be surprised—is not glamorized, not idyllic, not ecstatic, but, after all, what one can hope for: “My pulse against your back//reminds me how alive I am. Our exquisite/middle-aged bodies spooned, flawed, and used.”

I hope Walt is already working on his next collection.

Rappelling Blue Light

2010-10-03T20:53:00.000-07:00

Rappelling Blue Light
by Laura Rodley
Finishing Line Press, 2008

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

Lately I have been reading poet Laura Rodley’s chapbook Rappelling Blue Light. I carry it in my bag, stick blue post-it notes on poems. There is something I really like about this chapbook, and for a while I’ve been trying to fix a term to this feeling. And it is a feeling. Then I recalled, and not by chance, a poem in Of Separateness & Merging by poet Ellen Bass. The poem is titled “This poem is dedicated” and here are some lines:

…Remember this when they tell you your days aren’t lofty enough, are too personal, not universal

…there are millions of women, just like me, writing from the

everyday truth of their lives, telling the stories of half the human race…

...We are inevitable.

Rappelling Blue Light is inevitable. Rodley has a woman’s range and absolutely no agenda – there is nothing exclusive here. To quote Annie Dillard - "How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives." Rodley has this figured out. A friend in chemo, a dog long gone, a daughter’s coming of age, caregiving a dying parent, a walk to mailbox, the color of the road – it’s life, isn’t it? Not all of it is everyone’s, but enough is. And then she inserts a logger. Where did he come from? Rodley is good at this twist. She mixes it up, steps into boots besides her own, as in the poem “Crashing” - one of her best:

The logger does not ponder his need to be needed
While he chainsaws open the heart of the red oak,
Cuts out a v-sized chunk, then braces his feet
Into the ground on the oak’s opposite side and
Guides the chainsaw, slicing all the way through,
the tree crashing exactly where he had planned.
He does not miss his children needing him;
He was always gone, sawing, working alone
In the woods, driving his truck over frozen ground…

When she wastes no words, bears down on what’s in her view, Rodley’s poems are spot on, as in her description of the road in the poem “New Morning” –

The road is a piebald horse’s skin,
the pressed mud, liver colored, the
discs of pressed salt: lichens.

Not all the poems in Rappelling Blue Light are as finely tuned however. Some loosen up and lose me, get too prose-like, but I don’t dwell on them and it is easy not to. Why? Laura Rodley gathers up not just a collection of poems in this chapbook, but maybe even more so, a kind of mood: caring, observant, connected. I'm hooked, not to specific poems or lines, but to the endeavor. From the poem “Caregiver”

I do not know if right now
you will choke
and I will have to watch
your life leave in blueness
if you cannot catch your breath;
you are on DNR orders,
I could not breathe my life
into your lips to save you.

After the blue post-its have been removed from my favorites of Rodley’s poems, I might just shelve Rappelling Blue Light next to Ellen Bass’ On Separateness and Merging, as a reminder of where we have been, and how far we’ve come.

Foustian: Two Chapbooks by Rebecca Foust

2010-09-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

Dark Card
Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Mom's Canoe
Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
Winner, Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize 2008

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

It’s fun to look at more than one chapbook by the same poet. Mom’s Canoe is the second chapbook I’ve read by Rebecca Foust and I’m happy to say it fulfills the promise that only flickered in Dark Card.

Dark Card, has as its focus a child’s autism. The issues compel empathy and respect. Unfortunately moments of clarity lie buried in lots of other stuff. And though there is the occasional moving, satisfying final snap— “…you remember to set your/ alarm. Charge your phone/ in case your friends call./ Your friends. Your friends call”—overall, the language doesn’t pop and the texture is largely confined to predictable line breaks or breaks that don’t seem to serve the poem’s meaning. Some readers might view the flat tone of these poems as mirroring the subject matter if it were not accompanied by a lack of sharply focused image and telling detail. As readers we end up watching when we’d like to be thrown-in.

In Mom’s Canoe, Foust drills down into the specifics. These poems sift memory for the particular items that will serve the larger issues afoot in each poem. The collection hangs together and paints a vivid picture in controlled and taut lines.

“Fossil Record,” takes technical language and makes it sing as Foust defines and observes: Brachiopod, Trilobite,/ Ammonite, Crinoid stem,/ fern in stone with spores/each bract; snakeskin/tree bark, imprint wing/pressed and fanned; one/metatarsal wears a ring. The poem winds this long view of time into issues of personal identity, contingency, and the threatened loss of loved ones. Foust does it in twenty-nine short lines.

Other poems are less lyrical and more narrative for instance, “Things Burn Down:”

   ...What Dad loved was bells
   and sirens, to watch things burn down. Damask

   is not what would bring my folks back. I'd guess
   garage sales, four-alarm fire bells, red squalls
   of new babies, Maybe a Bratwurst and beer

   served on an unfolded Altoona Mirror. Not damask,
   not fingerbowls for Christ's sake. If you don't
   get it by now, don't ask.

This poem, like others in the chapbook, stitches a family history out of things that trigger memory. Here, the recurrence of damask unmasks the ambivalence the next generation feels confronting the lower social (socio-economic) status of their parents and grandparents. Damask becomes an evolving image encompassing shame and prickly pride, “you won’t have to ask/how Gramma knew linen—soiled, in the wash/she took in each week, or why she had to sell/baked goods in the street off “white trash damask,”//yesterday’s newspaper…”

Questions for the “you” pepper “Things Burn Down.” By asking “understand?,” “Do you understand that?” they weave the poem together toward the final, “If you don’t get by now, don’t ask,”—a combative immediacy. What at first seems to be a regional phrase, a tic, a placeholder for thought is finally revealed as a stiff-necked challenge to those who would assume and judge.

Near the end of the book, “Perennial,” takes a direct look at the implacable disinterest with which nature confronts the loves and happenings that seem to us so important and compelling, the narcissisms that pass for meaning in our little lives. The poem begins, “When you’ve gone, it won’t matter to the musk rose.” And goes on risking the occasional rhyming couplet yet managing to avoid the comic tone that generally dogs the hard and fast rhyme. Introduced with a list of flowers in the garden, (“hyssop’s rising pale flower foam” etc.), we come upon:

   and none of it matters. Not how you loved it, not
   how you knelt in each dark December plot
   to part the rich plait, reached

   through the wither of winter to find something born
   of decay of all that was young once...

In the end, Dark Card may appeal to parents facing similar challenges caring for an autistic child. I can’t help feeling that Foust might write a compelling memoir from this material. On the other hand, Mom’s Canoe, is full of lovely lines in a natural voice. The interplay between lyric and narrative poems lends a pleasing variation to the chapbook. Enjoy it.

Luck by Liz Ahl

2010-08-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Luck

by Liz Ahl

Pecan Grove Press, 2010

48 pages, $8.00

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

Some chapbooks consist of a series of closely related poems, with a common subject or theme or form, or a narrative arc that connects all the poems--and in many ways the chapbook is ideally suited to such an arrangement, with its relatively short length of 25 poems or so. But I also like chapbooks with a wide variety of settings and subjects, where each poem comes as a surprise, where the reader finds herself in unexpected places and new situations. Liz Ahl’s Luck belongs in this second category. Although there are several themes that recur in the poems like leitmotifs--luck in games and the allure of winning, listening to music in bars, looking at the stars and planets, living in the cold north--this collection often surprises by taking us into new territory. The settings in these 24 poems include a craps table in a casino. a road trip at night in the midwest, a lawn with a statue of the Virgin Mary, a carnival midway, a skateboarder in a sculpture garden, a college campus, ice shacks on Lake Menomon, a typesetting workroom, pubs and bars where music is being played. One of Ahl’s strengths as a poet is the ability to draw the reader into these scenes, to let you not just see them but feel and hear them. By the end of her poem called “Setting Type,” for example, you can feel the weight of those blocks of lead type: “My fingertips and thumbs are smudged with meaning. / I’m not looking for the story, but feeling instead / the sheer heft of sentences . . . the literal weight of them / in the galley tray, the thing they say to my fingers / and to my forearms and the pits of my elbows.”

Many of the poems are written in couplets and tercets, which work well with the poems’ subjects, and there are two nicely done villanelles (never an easy form to pull off), again well suited to their subjects--the yearning for food, and luck in gambling. Later in the book there are several poems where Ahl breaks away from the regular stanzas and has poems with long lines and varying stanza lengths, and these are among the liveliest and most interesting poems in the book. One that I especially like is “Who Do You Drive For?”, a poem in which the speaker, driving on a long trip through the midwest at night, stops at a service area and is asked this question by a trucker, who thinks that anyone driving alone this late at night must be a trucker, like him. The speaker spends the rest of the trip “inventing answers” to this question: she is driving for her friend in Chicago; she is driving for herself; she is driving for the speed; and she is driving

            . . . for Walt Whitman, who, even now,
   hangs his head out my passenger side window,
   mouth open, nose into the wind, eager
   for experience like a dog, my friend
   on this long journey to a place we’ve never been.
   We’re hauling secret, unspeakable freight
   and we name as we go like Adam and Eve did
   . . . . .
   and we command new syllables to leap off
   our tongues in soulful, barbaric yawps.

How can you not like a poem in which Walt, with his “barbaric yawps” from “Leaves of Grass,” appears with such vividness in the passenger seat?

Another strong poem is the one that ends the book, “Rain Dances,” set in a bar in Nebraska where a band is playing loud, thumping music as a storm hits outside:

            The storm that’s been waiting all day to hatch
   from the lowdown sky comes tumbling out as we sway
   to the take-no-prisoners blues. Lightning
   does its neon sign routine outside the front windows--
   but the only thunder we feel is thumping from the stacks
   and the sax pours out brass tornado siren wails.

By the end of the poem you feel you’re in that bar, dancing along with them:

            Hot as hell, we shake it on out, bumping
   into strangers, inventing dances
   like the hey-baby-what’s-your-sign,
   the exploding-thunderhead-lambada,
   the talk-to-the-hand-cause-the girl-ain’t-listenin’.
   . . . . .
   Sometime during the second break,
   a tornado blows through Beatrice,
   and later, after midnight, after the birth of a third set
   of scorching guitar licks and girl-don’t-do-me-wrong-no-more
   blues, we trickle our snare drum shuffleout into the rain-
   soaked streets, heads pounding . . .

It was interesting to read in Ahl’s bio that she has collaborated with musicians and dancers, and her work has been set to original music, combined with dance choreography, and riffed to improvisational jazz.

Another poem about performing music, “Girls with Guitars,” is more introspective--we’re again in a pub where music is being played, again there’s a lightning storm outside, but this time the music is quieter, a singer-songwriter with a guitar, and the speaker conveys vividly how in a setting like this you can feel lonely and not lonely at the same time:

            I let myself feel lonely, but warm
   with coffee and bourbon and the murmur
   of the crowd, all the people I don’t know
   surrounding me like a family.

There’s a lot to like in this chapbook, and by the end I feel that I’ve been a witness to, and sometimes a participant in, many different scenes and places, accompanied by the vivid language and images of this poet.

Flashes by Carol Leff

2010-08-16T04:53:00.000-07:00

Flashes
by Carol Leff
Aerial Publishing, 2009
37 pages. ZAR45

Reviewed by Moira Richards

Flashes begins with poetry in which the narrator navigates a journey over hazardous roads in attempt to find her way to an old home ‘before lamp-lighting time’. The collection ends with poems in which she does indeed arrive just as the last of the sun’s rays disappear – perhaps, comically, because

a dassie on a rock
stretches its nose upwards
as if breathing in
the light

Do dassies go by some other name outside of Southern Africa? Or are they indigenous to the region? I’m not sure so, below, a link to images of the endearing little sun-loving creature as it inhales the last of its day.

http://tinyurl.com/2frpjd5

Carol Leff writes that she crafted the poems for this, her first collection, ‘by the light of the night’ over a period of ten years and these ‘Flashes’ are impressions and bits of memories of roads travelled, places passed through, and the people met en route. Five diary-entry-like poems towards the end of the book give a sense of the range of geography and experience the narrator touches on her way:

Groot Marico ~ 1960

a moth-eaten letter
dated the week I was born
reads:

So you have come, baby?
And your name is “Meercat”
so they say
Well, this is from an old, old man
you still have to meet…

You just have to have seen a baby meercat, with its enormous eyes and air of impossible fragility, to appreciate how a newborn baby might have attracted this nickname, so enjoyed by her grandfather. YouTube anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMIRwCNvI94

The Groot (big) Marico is a region of quintessential South African bushveld or wild countryside where big skies and big game animals are still to be found in abundance, and the poet segues seamlessly from there to

Brazil ~ 1970 where…

I was nine years old
when I saw shrunken skulls for sale
in a curio shop in Brazil

Then the poetry returns to South Africa, to a suburb in the heart of Johannesburg at the dying of the apartheid era:

Yeoville ~ 1980

things were very different in those days –
Hillbrow and Yeoville were still safe havens
for young brazen ravens

… and on, to one of our country’s finest moments:

Cape Town ~ 1990 when like so many others, the narrator finds herself,

jubilant among the crowd
that snaked a dance with abundant joy
to welcome Mandela in Cape Town
claustrophobia was changing into euphoria

At the end of this short sequence, the narrator is home in yet another far part of South African countryland, and in reflective pensive mood…

Hogsback ~ 2000

mesmerised by the sparks
I watch the bonfire flame burn bright

… my memories are burning
and I am learning
to just
let them all go

Happily, those sparks and flashes of memory found their way into these poems before they are let go – perhaps it is poetry that enable our lettings go? I’m not sure but nonetheless, it is with the same sense of closure that the narrator and her readers, who set out on page one on an uncertain homeward journey, reach at the book’s end…

this large old house
with its warm yellowed windows
glows with the promise of supper cooking
someone keeping home fires burning

… and, maybe too, the promise of another collection of poems proving like bread dough in the warmth of that hearth?

Kindle by Paulann Petersen

2010-08-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Kindle
by Paulann Petersen
Mountains & Rivers Press, 2008

Review by P. Nelson

One of the great dimensions of poetry is its power of temporality, its marking and making of mental movement (as in music’s allegro, scherzo, adagio), the variant durances of its empowering focus and attention.

This has little or nothing to with lineation or length. Similarly sized passages of Shakespeare and Milton, for example, seem to occur in different time zones of rapid and slow. Marlowe, Jonson. Pope and Shelly are “fast’. Wordsworth, Hardy and Keats are “slow”. And this is more than a graduate student lounge game. The most significant moments in our lives have been known to occur, at the time and ever after, in a kind of slow motion or breathe-catching brevity.

Many of Petersen’s poems are short, 15 to 20 lines, taking no more than 15 seconds to eye scan. Yet they are decidedly “largo”, slow reads, meditations . I found myself reading slower and slower, re-reading, a de-tempoing sensation with the curious confirmatory effect that the closer one gets to absolute zero, the more one is aware of movement on a parallel track, the transferred motion of our freighted being.

Finish

I rub my shoulder

against a doorframe’s wood,

getting the feel of this creature

felled and transformed.

My fingers curve to knead blood

toward a muscle’s hurt, lotion

into an elbow roughened by neglect.

Snubbing shoes, I let bare soles

reacquaint themselves

with the wear of pavement’s grit.

Clothes serve the modest task

of long soft friction.

Bit by bit, night by day,

I grow smoother-grained,

ready for light. Let me be

a mirror in which something else

might catch a glimpse of itself-

the burnished stone beneath

a lifetime of water, flowing.

No particular fireworks here, no pyrotechnic metaphors, propelled by a reaching high conceit. But a perceptive deliberateness, a detective ear down to the ground swell of language. Lotion as motion, “Grit, fric, bit”, a poem that begins with “finish” and ends with flow. (Readers might be reminded of Rilkes’ Tombs of the Hetaerae, which like“Finish” is liquid and about more than its "about").

Or another example, chosen at random and the more telling for its brevity.

“ Between us -- the righted car gone./The road now a part of itself/ that lay ahead/ out of sight./ I walked it alone, awake." (from Time-Travel)

Note the rebar of near and exact rhyme, assonance, the bracing of those long a’s. This is deliberate, carefully shaped free verse, what I call “reinforced free verse” employing common language that yet has force, a koanic type property of making you stop as it points beyond itself and over the horizon of its overt argument.

“ …The only sound, a current

rubs against what waits/

Now geese, above. Their bleat

like air pushed through a reed—

hollow stalk begun in a meeting

of water and earth so it can

reach toward the sky. Then rowing,

close by- a boat borne along

by voiceless labor. An oar

plunged under, splashed up.

My wet feet taking root."

(from Slake )

A distinctive strength of this collection is its obliquity to the personal, its almost Jungian vectoring of imagery along lay lines of earth-air-fire-water, a grounding in the always more than four temperaments.

So what’s not to like? The poems have aphoristic feel in their economy and depth but even the great aphorists, Lichtenburg, Nietzsche, Wilde can’t always aim dead center and in the aphorism,(as in the short poem) there is only bullseye- or a clean miss. Some of Petersen’s work feels a bit too confined and under oxygenated. It never seems glib, pretentious, or trite but after a while you may hunger for a few free radicals or panting over extensions.

To conclude with two points of received wisdom that informed my reading. First- the only thing I recall from “Poetry Seminar 101” – “A poem should not leave you where you started.” In other words, the poem may or not be “transport” but it should always be “encounter.” Each of Petersen’s poems is a real encounter. Second, from further back, from a very humid night in the 1950’s Norfolk Virginia tenements. The fan is failing, June bugs are banging against the window screen and it is simply too hot for my mother to continue with the bed time story. So she stops, saying ”the strongest genies come out of the smallest bottles.’’
---------------------------------------------------------

We admit to having drifted across a bibliographic line; Kindle is a small “full collection”, not a chapbook proper, an undemarcated Grenzenland we hope to survey in a subsequent review. The book comes tastefully, chastely bedecked with only one blurb (a lesson in Basic Blurbology, “less is more”) and this a quote from a properly appreciating introduction by the poet Vern Rusala.

Edge by Edge

2010-07-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

Edge by Edge

by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, Vivian Teter

Quartet Series

Toadlily Press, 2007

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

“Edge by Edge,” a chapbook in Toadlily Press’ Quartet Series gathers work from four poets in a single volume—poetry tapas! Each poet in this collection addresses non-trivial issues (faith, female identity, suffering, human cruelty, the failure of love). These are competent writers, and there’s no mistaking one poet’s work for another’s. Let’s take them one at a time.

Carr’s “Augustine’s Brain—The Remix,” promises more transgression than it delivers. A sampling from the title poem gives us the general idea: “say we tumble from grace/ while birds blow by/ & the emperor of ice cream sings.” We get it. The reference to Wallace Stevens tells us death is the punch line. It’s preceded by two images—the first capturing the lovely but indifferent continuity of nature while the second implies that doubt insinuates itself into a life upended by grief. This poem is constructed from short, smart and ambitious little nuggets. Augustine was busy with these human concerns and so are we. But now that Carr has so skillfully flushed the game where are the horses, the hunters, and the hounds?

Take another tercet from the same poem—“say there is knowledge/ in a mystic’s palm/ invention in the membrane,”—it’s interesting, mysterious. Or is it? What does it mean? Take it negative and it reads, “there is no knowledge in the mystic’s palm/ no invention in the membrane” – now we see it—the leap to faith, the hand of God present in every thing. And it’s worth the trouble.

The poem builds tercet on tercet until it’s packed with complex ideas and conflicting values. But Carr doesn’t pursue her advantage, doesn’t examine and put into settings these tight gems of struggle, hope, faith, and pain.

Carr’s remaining poems also contain promising kernels and bear re-reading though they sometimes don’t germinate. It’s not easy to capture each Augustinian insight as succinctly as Carr does in her title poem but she leaves each pearl unstrung, the complexities abutted rather than in conversation. Her seeds stay inside their coats.

Hart’s, “In Ordinary Time,” goes down easy. Here we meet the vignette poem spreading its arms to embrace larger issues. Hart uses sound to pull these poems along and ably presents situations encompassing general concerns. When a neighbor, “belts her daughter’s name until the thunder/ takes her voice” (Ordinary Time), or the speaker asks, “what will you do with your secret poverty?”( On Kenosis)—we are jolted awake.

More often, however we find it a little too palatable. “Angel of History/Book

with Wings,” a poem that gets its title from two sculptures by Anselm Kiefer, addresses America’s history of wars and destruction. It ends with,“ and the siren-call over the Capital/ sings to us to remember/ everything.” We should feel something. Has Hart said it too plainly perhaps? Or with too little detail thereby letting us off the hook leaving us with our conventional, two-dimensional, comfortable sense of outrage and injury without the goad to responsibility and action?

Under these quiet rhythms and unruffled surfaces run interesting cross-currents, but Hart sometimes short-circuits their impact: “each windfall fruit/ a gift or waste, who knows.” Who knows seems glib here. Especially after setting up the question, “gift or waste”. The answer is, of course, up to us. And do we even admit we choose? More of that please.

What makes a poem interesting? W.D. Snodgrass[i] suggested three paths:

1. The poet might have a new idea.

2. The poem could address old ideas with new facts and details.

3. The poet may talk in a new way giving voice to a fresh and engaging style or type.

It’s wicked hard to write an interesting poem.

Bolden’s “How to Recognize a Lady,” takes Snodgrass’ third path. Each poem is an, “obedient fist of petals,” creating interest out of attitude, revealing character through image, pacing, unexpected turns of phrase, and voice:

“I come from a long line of pistols.”

(Will and Testament).

“She is the book of slander, a match dropped in dry glass./ She is a head sprouting snakes, milk for gall, low rolled smokes/and poor taste….”

(How to Recognize a Lady).

“Marry a man with a hammer, marry a man with a gold money clip,/ a medal from a rusted War. Marry a man with green spectacles.”

(Courtships and Engagements)

“I woke to the taste of Lysol./ I swear it was an accident./ I wish Goldilocks had been eaten.”

(The Confessional)

The poems can become a little fragmented but they’re still fresh and ambivalent, funny and oppositional. These poems read like dramatic monologues working over internal and external versions of what it means to be female. Fireworks, love ‘em.

And Bolden’s poems don’t rest. Here’s a taste from, “God is in the Ceiling”

Inside my bed I am

a good girl. I lie

still and careful,

keep limb from limb.

Outside I hear living.

Trees wave skeleton hands,

            the moon’s fingernail scratches
            the far-cornered sky. I pray

       O Lord let me, keep cool
       as a clam’s flesh. I am sick

         with purity, with waiting

That’s not the end of the poem, but it’s enough to see how the enjambed lines set meaning a-teeter—obedience or desire, body or soul, wait or act—and jostles a wasps’ nest of emotion. Bolden manages to avoid presenting us with a series of climaxes that lack continuity or depth. And her speaker’s voice never becomes overheated, bombastic, or forced.

Which brings us to Teter. I love the heart in “Translating the Bridge.” Several of these poems strive to call us out of our easy assumptions and self-serving helplessness when faced with atrocity. In others she asks us to face everyday truths we’re more comfortable denying. For instance in, “After the Fire Experiments,” the speaker states, “We wanted to know; what secret remains/ when layer after layer/ the fleshy apparitions/ fall away?” And, “Hunger of No Tongue,” a poem using the fig as metaphor ends: “that pain dead between your eyes:/such flesh, ripened, easily falls away.// The lesson sears/ your brain. You bear down hard,/ tooth toward tooth:/Lost, you eat them green.” Death. Desire. And the places and times they come together leaving us ravenous.

Teter is refreshingly ambitious. Poetry ought to be about important issues. It should be valuable and compelling enough to interrupt our channel surfing, texting, or whatever else distracts us. But when Teter takes on the role of witness for the lost boys (now men) of the Sudan, the poems don’t knock us flat and gasping. Take these lines from, “Meditation on ‘Tok,’ the Dinka Word for ‘One,’” a poem that begins with a helpless wish to erase person-on-person brutality:

If I could delete the memory

if I could wash it from your mind, if I could sweep it

over the edge of the planet far out into space

and let the stars blow out in horror

Here we feel neither horror nor helplessness. We become observers not witnesses. The stars just don’t “blow out in horror,” and the overstatement reduces us to innocent bystanders with no moral responsibility. A little voice inside us says something like, “Geez if the stars blow out, what could we possibly do?.” And we’re off the hook. Eighteen lines further into the poem, about halfway to the end, we read:

You have walked through centuries of pain

through a world where adults slaughter children

and human life weighs nothing on the scale

of riches for a few.

I cannot tell you what it is that broke inside

when I heard the heaviness and ache

the unspeakable unheard behind your words.

Nothing rends us here. Our simple, shallow assumptions stand un-rumpled. Nothing implicates us.

So why don’t we feel it? For one thing, we lack the facts and feelings; the details on the ground. We’ve been told something we think we already know. Still it’s not really literal truth that we’re missing, it’s imaginative truth. We want these young men to speak to us of the children they were—what happened, how it felt, what it was like—simply and directly. If we had that, the Sudan would be too real for comfort. This nearly comes through in, “An Explanation of the Rain”:

We walked many, many miles

many, many months—bush, desert

--best was rain. You see,

between us and those dead, just

one leaf to eat, just one hand of mud.

And now you see us here—a new land—

now we are not having to drink this rain!

But identification with the victim on a visceral level isn’t the final destination. When we identify we become outraged. And that rage sets in motion a very different identification. We feel sadistic, murderous, like the perpetrators—now that gets us involved in fruitful ways.

Realistically this is Auden and Jarrell territory. It’s improbable that any poet will ring all the bells that must be struck to make a great (or even very good) poem about atrocity. For Teter to attempt to infect us with horror at our shared human capacity for committing outrage is devilishly difficult—so if she hasn’t completely succeeded, the intent and her attempt are certainly worthwhile undertakings.

The take home? These poets as they appear in “Edge by Edge” are not, “The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse,” as the blurb on the back claims. The poems in this chapbook competently take on interesting and important human issues, but, with the possible exception of Bolden’s, too often approach us from predictable angles without the force that the content deserves.

[i] Snodgrass, WD. “Tact and the Poet’s Force” in In Radical Pursuit, London: Harper & Row,1975.

Zugzwang by John W. Evans

2010-06-21T17:55:00.001-07:00

Zugzwang
By John W. Evans
RockSaw Press, 2009

Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell

As I flip through the pages of a new chapbook, if I find an intelligent poem about baseball, you’ve got me. As a Red Sox fan who has just lived through a particularly dreary April (although things are looking up in May and June), I am even happier when said intelligent poem knows my pain, as only another Red Sox fan or a Cubs fan can. At least I have the comfort of, as our partisan Boston announcers remind us, rooting for a team with two World Series wins in the 21st century. But, ah, the unrequited longings of fans of the Cubbies . . .

John W. Evans’ “Poem Written outside Wrigley Field,” with its tongue-in-cheek nod to Bishop’s “One Art,” is not only a baseball poem—it is about going on in “an autumn,/inconsequential as the previous hundred/or so.” It is about loving what we must love and staying where we must stay, maintaining hope when we have no choice.

Evans’ Zugzwang take its title (and a wonderful word it is on the tongue) from the situation in chess in which any move is a bad one—the player is forced to make a move that will worsen the player’s position in the game. Sounds like a Cubs fan—every move, every year, every game, and hopes dashed again. In the title poem, a relationship is mired in its habits, but it can be easier to remain with those than to look beyond them:

. . . It felt good to keep playing,
to do one thing well over and over again.
Maybe that’s why I liked
the pizza place around the block that burnt our crusts . . . .

Evans is well-traveled—he spent time in Bangladesh in the Peace Corps and in India—and although the more personal poems are rooted in the Midwest, he also has a wider view as in the four-part poem, “The Five-Dollar Shirt,” that pieces together the lives and experience of factory workers in India and asks us to reflect on the consumption of cheap goods made possible by the low pay and unsafe conditions of the workers.

The poems move from Chicago to Dhaka, from personal accounts of his uncles and friends and nieces to a meditation on black pepper and cardamom to a dramatic monologue of Hobbes to Calvin. There are one or two slighter poems in the collection, but the core is strong. Each poem provides something to ponder. The collection deals with failure, yes, with the inability to move forward, but it is layered with a stance towards life that says, “it is what it is” and stretches toward “restoration and withstanding.” You have to take life as it comes, the poems tell us. Sometimes we go through the motions only because some action is required, however fruitless, but sometimes “the sweetness of mango overwhelms our afternoon.”

[Unfortunately, this collection is already out of print. Maybe a deluge of requests will encourage Rock Saw to reprint it.]

Peace & War by Rick Black

2010-06-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Peace & War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel

by Rick Black

Turtle Light Press, 2007

32 pages. $15

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

Israel is in the news again just as I am sitting down to review Rick Black’s chapbook Peace & War. Rick Black was a news reporter in the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times for 3 years, and he lived in Israel for 6. Israel is complicated. He knows that. Haiku is not. He knows that too. In his own words Rick Black assembled this chapbook for the following reason: I never felt like I was able to capture the essence of the country, its paradoxes and contradictions, in my reportage… These haiku are both a protest against war and an attempt to live with the paradoxes of life in Israel.

Peace & War is a well-crafted chapbook. Not all chapbooks are. The binding is in dos-a-dos (back-to-back) style, with the "Peace" poems on one side and the "War" poems on the other. So where do you begin reading? Rick Black makes us choose. Am I in a Peace mood right now or a War mood? The design is deliberate. Black, a book artist and founder of Turtle Light Press, along with being a journalist and poet, puts his talents to good use in the making of this miniature chapbook. Just 3 1/2" x 4 1/2" with 32 haiku, hand-held, you can’t help but flip it. Form meets function. Back to front, peace to war, front to back, war to peace. This tiny chap becomes the physical representation of the paradoxes of life in Israel. You can feel it. I like that.

From War:

just buried soldier-

too soon for his mother to

notice the crocus

empty sandbox –

a mortar shell explodes

nearby harmlessly

Not all Black’s haiku follow the strict haiku form, 5-7-5, but most do. He anchors his imagery in traditional themes of geography and nature, and handles the cut or kireji (the place where the haiku is divided into two parts, images or events) with ease. This is not an experimental collection of American haiku. Black’s haiku are not about Black. Each haiku ushers us past the finger pointing to the precise object of his attention - an army bulldozer, teens playing soccer in the moslem quarter, an Air Force cadet absorbed by Love’s Labor Lost.

From Peace:

great blue herons

heading south like f-16s

autumn maneuvers

two old veterans

revisit the battleground

arm in arm

At times there is a sense of disorientation in this collection that I found appealing. Am I in the War section or the Peace section? It is easy to get turned around, lose one’s bearings for a page or two in Peace & War, and this, perhaps, is intentional. If not, it is the natural outcome of the subject at hand. Either way I found myself handling this chapbook, retracing my steps through its pages, and in doing so becoming a witness to Israel’s particular landscape. I noticed the chapbook’s edges had become worn, the soft cover curled almost - a sure sign of engagement, not a reader’s retreat.

not yet abloom

planted in the army boots:

pink geraniums

In war there are moments of peace, in peace reminders of war. Rick Black’s miniature collection of 32 haiku gets at the essence of things as he sees them in Israel - universal, cyclical, flipped.

The Power of 14 Lines

2010-05-19T03:06:00.001-07:00

Broken Sonnets

by Kathleen Kirk

Finishing Line Press, 2009

24 pages, $12

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

What is it about the sonnet that has given it such staying power? Just seeing one on the page provokes an instant leap of recognition, a feeling of greeting an old friend with pleasure and looking forward to seeing the new clothes she is dressed in. Unlike some of the other poetic forms (villanelle, sestina, pantoum), which can often feel forced or artificial, or at least can reflect the great effort that went into confining the poem’s natural movement into a constraining form, the sonnet is a more elastic form that can have endless variations. Even the different possible arrangements of the lines can result in poems that look very different on the page--the octave plus sestet has a whole different feeling from the three quatrains plus rhymed couplet, or from seven unrhymed couplets. Another attraction of the sonnet is its length--with only 14 lines there’s no time for introductions or digressions; the poet has to get to the heart of things quickly and has to write economically, with great compression and concentration of words and images.

Kathleen Kirk’s chapbook consists of 22 sonnets and is a strong collection. The title might lead us to expect variation or violation of the sonnet form, but this is mostly not the case. With a few interesting exceptions, the sonnets have the traditional number of lines (although there is variation in the layout of stanzas), and several of them are rhymed. I think the title refers more to the recurring themes of the poems, as in the chapbook’s opening poem, “Damage.” It’s worth quoting in full because it’s a strong poem, and it introduces many of the recurring themes and images of the book--loss, pain, love, light:

            To be broken is to be whole again
   with the full power of the mind. This is what
   the poets will make me cross out. Listen,
   then, before the damage is done--the cut

            made permanent in print. I stood on the back
   porch, pounding on the brown door--not
   to get in, not to get out, not to get back
   at anyone for harm done. It wasn’t shut--

            it stood wide open like my mouth. Hung
   there on its hinges like my wide open
   silent mouth. Pain is a song I’ve sung
   so long you can’t even hear it now. Open

   your own broken heart. Look! Look how I’ve split
   the wood! Look at the golden, streaming light!

The image of light occurs throughout the book, as can be seen in many of the poem titles: “Light/Falling,” “Light Is,” “At Dusk,” “Day in Night.” These are poems grounded in the life of a family; we read about moments of love and loss--the death of a parent, the mystery of children, the love of a husband (including the humorous poem “My Husband the Electrician,” and the two poems that close the book, with their beautiful evocations of erotic love).

There’s a lot of variation in the arrangement of stanzas in these poems--in addition to the traditional octave plus sestet and the three quatrains plus couplet, there are several poems with no stanza breaks, several arranged in stanzas of 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 lines, a few with 7 (or in one case 8) couplets, and one with the unusual arrangement of 7 + 1 + 7 lines. The poem that departs most from the sonnet form is a prose poem called “Prose Sonnet to the Silent Father.” It consists of 14 short numbered sections, some self-contained and some enjambed; the theme of the poem is the speaker’s inability to communicate with her father. As an example, here are the last five sections:

10. I need to learn how to say the opposite of what I mean but without irony

11. (a prose tactic, yours).

12. I need to learn how to leave silence at the center

13. and still be able to sign my name to it

14. as if it were written by me.

In a very interesting move, section 7 of this poem is a blank line.

I like the way images of dreaming intersect with the everyday world in these poems, as in “Interpretation of Dreams” when the poet is trying to explain the meaning of a dream to her children: “I can show them symbols in the living world:/ ‘Here is green holly hidden in the hedge,/ with its sharp dark leaves and its berries, blood red.’” And in the poem “Dreaming in Couplets,” the speaker moves from a mundane scene of slicing bread for dinner into a dream sequence: “Over the water, I remember how/ to fly, the secret hidden for so long/ . . . Here we are in the leaves/ of grass again, flying toward our griefs.”

In short, if you like sonnets, this book will give you a lot of pleasurable reading.

Beautiful/Brutal: Poems About Cats by Amy Miller

2010-05-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

Beautiful/Brutal : Poems About Cats by Amy Miller Cyclone Press, Ashland Oregon, 2009 34 p., $4 Reviewed by P. Nelson Would it be critical “overkill” to write a very serious review of a book of poetry about cats? Let us see. ------------------------------------ The history of animals on the planet—sorry! the history of animals in literature is, not news in either case, not good. While there is much serviceable and entertaining prose, most animal themed poetry is well intended dreck and if you don’t believe me, check out even a good anthology, such as “The Great Cat” (Knopf, 2005). The almost intractable problem is this—animals, even domesticated ones, are “Other”. Hard to get inside their heads. (Though there have been commendable efforts, the best often least known, such as Will James’ semi-stream of equine consciousness “Smoky” and Jefferies’ magisterial allegory, animated by a lifetime of forest and game keeping, “Wood Magic”. Mostly, we have recourse to facile mythologizing –(my cat Isis or Loki) or simple sentiment (and some say the same deflection “informs” our dealing with another utterly Other, God).* An entire book could be written on the stupendous disappointments of animal themed literature and reader, I hope you do it, taking, please, my title “No Paradise, No Paragon” while you are at it. Are we beating around the bush here? Yes. Because the fate of animals makes me sad and the status of animals in literature makes me (less) sad. And of course, I dislike having been wrong about the chapbook in hand, Amy Miller’s “Beautiful/ Brutal”. A very nicely printed little number. 11 x 13 cm., with good typography, sporting a stylish cover and maroon fly leaves, the kind of attractive article, too small for the regular shelves, you’d expect right at the cash register, the hope being you will pick it up in lieu of the change you’ll be getting from you $15.95 purchase of the latest Billy Collins. “Cat Poems” right next to “Sayings of the Buddha”, “The Tiny Book of Haiku”, and “Pocket Sonnets”, a cute, “niche” book, easy to buy and easier to forget. Such archness IS beside the point. Except as indicating how this reviewer was wrong. Time, in other words, to let the critical cat out of the bag. Miller’s book is not just a good book of cat poetry, it is a good book of poetry. She has looked carefully at cat/human relations, the familiar-strange middle ground of contact, done the hard work of close perception and then shaped this coming-to- knowledge into free verse that is effective, informing; at times affectionate but not sentimental. ‘She was sleek and frightened/and slick as oil under the flatbed,/ sliding backward to a corner./ I reached a finger into the dark./ She purred, took a step, waited./ My finger found her ear, soft as a bird, and she bit- a savage sudden grab.” (from Stray) There is an almost Herbertian quality or turn to some of the poems and curiously, it is this artificial, slightly baroque touch that grounds and confirms the naturalness and rightness of this work. You look at them/differently now… the cat, alert on the windowsill,/ has no eye for horizons./ With legions of limp gophers/and cottonball quail chicks,/she has made you understand this./ You have wiped blood from her bowel /.... You came to this island / to drink the world,/ but the brew is bitter:/ nutmeg and brine,/ camphor and salt,/ the rind of the melon./ Animal medicine./ And you/ drink. (from Animal Medicine) All of us, poets, at various way stations of our lives, have written of desire, betrayal, death, loneliness, of Auden’s unholy trinity of Terror, Concupiscence and Pride. These are our intimates and familiars. But to write well about another creature whose reputed favorite activities are grooming and sleeping is a rare achievement. (In the act of focus upon the creature, the poet can return to deeper themes, clarified and enriched by the glance of self-forgetting.) “There is no destination./He plays with a light orange ball/that is all turnabout,/banked off a baseboard,/sideways off his paw, his tail, coming round /like a boom. Ball and cat/and house ignite a universe/of acceleration, tangents struck /at random, every outcome / branched with outcomes of its own,/ every turn a life begun,/every pause a brink /before the infinite.” (from The Cat Instructs) Miller’s book, keepsake sized, is indeed a keeper. ------------------------------------------------- * For an assertion that the human is likewise chiefly & inaccessibly "Other", see Nietzsche. ------------------------------------------------- Statutory disclosure : the reviewer shares his life with a cat, “Storri”, “For she counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.” (Chris. Smart).

2 Short Reviews

2010-03-13T16:42:00.000-08:00

The Abstracted Heart of Hours & Days

Eleni Sikelianos

Bonfire Press, 2008

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

Every once in a while you find an unusual chapbook. The Abstracted Heart of Hours & Days, kept me busy with its allusive, disjointed, psychology of hours. These fragments carry labels (not really titles) such as, “Second Experiment with an Hour” that seem to apply to complex and lovely drawings of flower-like structures surrounded by tiny illegible script. Below these drawings are oddly evocative poems. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say broken pieces of this chapbook-length poem. For instance, the third section of “(Second Hour’s Residue) (Public)”:

equipped

with rations, reasons

“old as I look,’ says the hour,

speaking through a woman at the counter

I would like this petal-edge hour to reassemble a ranunculus, to

white out portions of the hour that please us less Stand back and

look at this hour its hands waving at the out out edges

But, the experiment doesn’t always work. At times the language becomes so abstract and strange that the phrases mean anything and nothing, seemingly lost in their own rhetoric. But for the most part Sikelianos uses skillful language juxtaposed with her obsessively detailed drawings to allude to something that we can never capture—the phenomenological experience of time passing. Her project fascinates and often astonishes. Leaving behind the ubiquitous narratives found in most chapbooks, The Abstracted Heart of Hours & Days is an event engaging the reader in active and invigorating ways. And Sikelianos’ method may be the only way to approximate the experience of consciousness adrift in time.

Fern-Texts

By Reginald Gibbons

Hollyridge Press, 2005

Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt

A short chapbook review is better than a long one when a series of poems is so carefully interwoven that they become an event in which an intimate conversation unfolds between the reader’s inner voice and the poems. But, Fern-Texts is actually a three-way conversation since Gibbons invites S.T. Coleridge, as represented by his journals covering roughly 1772-1834, to join us.

As you may imagine, Fern-Texts is therefore impossible to excerpt and even more daunting to explicate since neither can be done without marring and diminishing the work. Sadly, this is a review, so a small excerpt and a few observations are required.

The chapbook is, it seems to me, one long poem divided into eleven sections. The lines are most often seven syllables long interdigitating down the page like fern fronds or ice crystals ferning on glass. In his first two poems, Gibbons places a quote from Coleridge’s journals at or near the poem’s opening, then associates in an interesting, autobiographical way that never becomes too idiosyncratic or cloyingly confessional. For example, the second poem begins:

“Love transforms the souls into

a conformity with the

object loved—" And when I too [1796?]

was twenty-four I had my [1971]

own experience of such self-

transformation that I could

not yet seize or recognize—

Once we have the idea, Gibbons sprinkles Coleridge’s thoughts, musings, and observations here and there throughout the poems. Gibbon's is completely at ease joining himself and Coleridge in a fluid progression that seamlessly builds a serious and thought-provoking conversation. Buy it. Read it. You won't be sorry.

Imagining the Past

2010-02-24T18:56:00.000-08:00

Silk and The Ragpicker’s Grandson by Bert Stern Red Dust Books, 1998 39 pages including Afterword Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer Family history can be a rich vein for poets to mine, and this chapbook by Bert Stern is filled with voices from the past--his wife’s great-great-grandfather, a nineteenth-century silk trader, and his own parents and grandparents, who came to America from Moldavia early in the twentieth century to escape the pogroms. The poems are memorable, direct, and moving--the voices speak to us in an immediate way. Part I of the book contains seven poems about Stern’s wife’s ancestor, Frank Woodbridge Cheney, who went to China in the mid-19th century to trade for raw silk for the family business in Connecticut. Stern explains in the Afterword that he wrote these poems while living in a house that had been in his wife’s family for three generations--a house that was full of “benevolent ghosts” which he finally had to write about. These poems--some in the first person, some in the third person--give a vivid picture of the strangeness of Hong Kong and Shanghai through the eyes of a foreigner, someone who was there to conduct business but who was haunted by the memory of his dead mother, Waitsill, and his three sisters, who had died while the family lived in Ohio before returning to Connecticut: Father said God damn Ohio and we came back, to Connecticut and true settlement. The wilderness killed Waitsill, then the girls. This left a tear in him and me. . . . . . . . Our destiny was silk. The details of the life Frank observes in China are fascinating and strange, but the strongest emotion of these poems lies in the speaker’s constant awareness, all through his travels, of his lost family members: Death had followed him 6000 miles and never had been a stranger. In a clasp of memory as in a cameo locket, he still held his mother’s and his sisters’ dying faces. In the final poem of the series, standing on the deck of a boat in an icy wind, Frank thinks about the contrast between his cold isolation and the sweet smoothness of silk: he would stand here forever in this desolation without companionship or any kindness of heart, and he was driven here by silk, the fineness of fabric, the sweet lingering of the fingers as they caressed it. Part II of the chapbook, which consists of nine poems about Stern’s parents and grandparents, was more difficult for him to write, as he says in the Afterword: “It was harder for me to make peace with my own family ghosts than with the ghosts of strangers.” He goes on to say: “I myself became American by turning away from my own dead, who had left me only a few scattered tales of their old lives and little of their lore. But when the time came that I needed them, with a real aching, the fulfillment came, as it always does, through the imagination, where alone we can have knowing.” From that emotional turning point came the poems in The Ragpicker’s Grandson, many of them written in the voices of Stern’s mother, aunt, and grandfather, as he imagines their past and their journey to America. (Several of these poems also appear in Steerage, Stern’s more recent book-length collection, another remarkable book.) His mother’s journey through life was perilous from the very beginning, starting in the womb when her mother was threatened by a muzhik with a knife; she “ didn’t want to be born” and was turned upside down before birth; she was so sick with a fever on the boat to America that her family didn’t think she would live. But, as Stern writes, My mother who wanted not to be born grew up, married, was my mother, suffered. All suffered to bring me here to this room bigger than the house she was born in. In the moving and memorable poem “Steerage,” Stern’s mother speaks in the first person about what the boat trip to America was like--the crowdedness, the smells, the sickness, the endless rocking. And then the sighting of a bird when they were almost there: “There was a bird I liked, / its name was I don’t remember./ It skimmed the waves when we were a day from shore./ . . . When the ship came into the harbor/ my spirit was waiting for me./ It was dancing on the sand,/ like a bird at the edge of water.” Two other poems are about Stern’s grandfather, who sold rags and old clothes after he came to America. We hear his voice in a poignant prose poem: “In the afternoon the cart is full of rags, the clean ones I’m selling, the dirty ones I buy. Once a week when I come to the Hertel section I drive by the house of my son who won’t talk to me. He’s ashamed. I disgrace him. Sometimes the grandson is in the street playing games with a ball. I don’t talk to him, he don’t talk either. . . . Who am I to be ashamed of? A man making a living, driving a horse and cart, looking out at the world.” The chapbook closes with a short third section--two poems which, as Stern says, “bind me in a circle with my ancestors.” The last one, “A Little Poem” (which appears again, with a few revisions, as the opening poem in the later volume Steerage) is one that I immediately added to my list of all-time favorite poems--the poet’s voice is so wise, and so tender, and so humorous: Oy, Gott, send me a little poem, you’ll never miss it. Sweet gottenyu! You know how I could use it. Not Paradise Lost, noch, or the Book of Job I’m asking, only something normal, a little poem proper to me. . . . . . . . Did I say I want to hear the earth thumping in it like in the beginning, on the third day? . . . . . . . No, a little poem only, to watch water flowing through rocks, fishes still in the current, geese flying over, noisy, like children.

Medusa Discovers Styling Gel by Dian Duchin Reed

2010-02-10T15:55:00.000-08:00

Medusa Discovers Styling Gel by Dian Duchin Reed Finishing Line Press, 2009. 27 pages. $14. Reviewed by P. Nelson “Don’t be stupid.” This might be the prime moral exhortation were it not for the many one word negations, such as “Goebbels”, by all accounts, a very intelligent man. So OK, “let’s not be verbally stupid”; there is never, ever, virtue in that. Possibly the chief value of Poetry is as a kind of reciprocating engine, producing and recycling verbal intelligence, more effectively as container and medium than for any particular content or message, a perpetual notion machine that makes the reader smarter simultaneously with his investment of that intelligence in the poem’s own potentiality for meaning. And so it goes, the most ascendant of Hegel’s Aufhebung, a Convolvulus, and yes, it really is that simple! We pause, dear reader (always assume one reader) for rebuttal and to assert that this unintegrated arabesque is not nearly as detached as it must appear but derives from the work in hand. Because the poems in Dian Duchin Reed’s’ "Medusa Discovers Styling Gel" are intelligent* (and nothing rebarbative, as when the Brits say “clever”, in the praise), instantiating a verbal alertness where words reflect and refract in arrangements that compose the unified object of many facets. Can we count on Space? But it was less / than nothing before the Big Bang ./ Even now, confronted by a massive object, / it bends the truth, stretches the facts.//And that trickster Time,/ as dependent on speed as any junkie,/ always relies on someone else’s /perspective, having none of its own.//Perhaps Truth does not exist. Perhaps /the universe is composed of Consequences/ instead. And perhaps Consequences / are the only path to an honest universe./No matter how long it takes, no matter/ how far from the sources, Consequences / will always catch up with us./Then, the Big Bust.( from The Search for Truth). “Matter” being a pun that matters. Most of the poems explore an argument that extends, for force and effect, through one long sentence so that redaction does this work a disservice. Yet every map moves me/from metaphor to mystery//my own town shrunk down/to a dot, all spheres turned to/ a series of concentric circles. //Evenings, the swish and crash/ of sea onshore reminds me/of cymbals, of the hopeless // hope of symbols. I need no flowers, my only rose/the compass rose.//in whose petalled points / I lose myself/to show the better ways. (from “The Mapmaker Muses ) At its best, the writing is vectored in that perfect location of inevitability and surprise, reminiscent of Heather McHugh or at a more distance remove of prose, Donald Barthelme. Among Reed’s big subjects are fate, loneliness, truth, the Medusa, Epicurus, all sat down and effectively interrogated in a focused light as if she knows what most contemporary poets forget: every poem is guilty, guilty of the gravest crime, Existence, its only possible expiation being the transcript of the transgression, the poem itself. ‘Lucifer’s reaction to his own dizzying/descent, the kind of cosmic crash/that lovers of commotion might/consider dazzling, a work the meek /cache to praise the sun’s daily glissade / to music that’s so subtle, its silent.” /(From Dazzled) If there is a criticism of Reed’s brilliant successes, it is, as usually the case with persons, along the line of their virtues. There’s a sometimes relentless, working-it-too-hard monotonic quality, though this persistence and pursuit is also, subtextually, a pointing to and moral insistence that in a world exiled from its own best garden where “Fame and her best friend Fortune strut down the street arm in arm with their double dates, Pain and Fear", we must do better, be brighter. Only an old bold critic (careless of crashing) would prescribe a writer’s next book, suggest that Reed’s further advance might involve a step backwards to the bad poetry badlands of looseness, inexactitude and dreamy relinquishment. But something like that drift is what makes Tennyson deeper than Browning, Coleridge more compelling than Byron, Thomas’ plainsong more plaintive than ... Never mind. We await the next turn of this author’s poetic karma-dharma wheel. *[And by "intelligent" one means capacity and capability, verbal mindfulness in its many modes, including the emotive. For the most exhaustive (some say exhausting) study of intelligence as moral moderator, succeeding and failing, see Henry James, The Golden Bowl.]

thought-fish by Ruan Wright

2010-01-20T05:54:00.001-08:00

thought-fish
by Ruan Wright
Moon Journal Press, 2009.
$6.95

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

thought-fish. If the title isn't intriguing enough, then the cover art seals the deal. You can hardly help yourself – the color, the geometry, this ethereal woman ascending to where? Who cares! The design by Moon Press Journal, the cover illustration by the poet Ruan Wright herself, establishes a mood – experimental, optimistic, unique.

Recently I read a publisher’s lament that out of 50 chapbook contest finalists, over 20 of the manuscripts were almost indistinguishable, lacked a distinctive “voice.” The poems seemed workshopped to death - rough edges smoothed, loose ends tightened, exclamations muted. A poet gives something up when toning down, but this is not Wright’s problem.

Ruan Wright gives up nothing! “Oh Earth! Give way and let me in…” Wright exclaims in the opening line of her poem titled “Insomnia.” She illustrates her four yoga poems – “Balasana,” “Dandasana,” “Shavasana,”” Tadasana.” She shapes and breaks lines to her own liking, steps into a male chauvinist’s shoes, then drops a dead sparrow on your doorstep – stunning and still. After each poem I had absolutely no idea what was coming next. Two playful short poems appear. Why? Because they do.

Fat

In my dreams
I’m a cat
svelte
and lithe
with nine
long
lives
each of them
fat.

thought-fish is no New Age Yoga poetry collection, yet it does have something of that eclectic feel. I almost found myself looking for a yoga CD tucked inside the back cover, but the thought vanished when Mary and Jesus appeared. The few poems deeply based in the Christian tradition strengthen the contemplative grain of the whole collection rather than disrupt. “Worm” is one of Wright’s best, and for anyone who has ever sat in a childhood Sunday School class and wondered exactly what it meant when instructed “Jesus died for our sins,”- it’s a flashback, skillfully carried forward.

Worm

Was it the lie I told in Fourth Grade,
That saved my skin, but gave Clyde hell –
Is that the sin you saved me from?

Or the time I told Mum I’d cleaned my teeth
But hadn’t – she must have known,
She always did – was that the one?

Or the lie I tell myself each day
That I am OK and everyone else is wrong
Or just as bad, so it’s all the same?
...

So what’s next? How about board games? “We Played Monopoly” and “Tiddlywinks” take us right into Wright’s childhood in 1960s England. Her direct language, not folksy but comforting nevertheless, mirrors the nostalgia of rainy days stuck inside a grandmother’s house, or the reassurance of worn 500 pound notes, game-money hoarded and counted. Mostly, Wright reminds us why any of this matters at all. It is what good poets do.

Monopoly

Do you remember how we played
Monopoly the long days of summer?
You were always the racing car,
I was always the flat iron, ….

And does it matter if you don’t remember?

Well, yes,
it does now,
now that our childhood home is gone
along with our parents,
and our childish selves are buried
somewhere
under the dirt of so many years of work
and child rearing and
trying not to go bankrupt or end up in jail.

For all her play and unpredictability, there is a pervasive quietude throughout thought-fish that weights it. Remember the woman on the cover? Look again. She seems to ascend unencumbered. To do so requires an interior launch pad, confident and known. Annie Dilliard’s book title “Holy the Firm” comes to mind and easily describes a place Wright herself seems to inhabit. Each poem is a bit of this world – reeled in. thought-fish.

Further Adventures of My Nose by John Surowiecki

2010-01-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

Further Adventures of my Nose by John Surowiecki Illustrated by Terry Rentzepis Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005 $10 Review by Laurie Rosenblatt Small in size, text in Cochin with titles in Copperplate, printed on soft paper, and bound with a hand tied brown hempen string—ok, I don’t really know it’s hemp, I didn’t try to smoke it or anything—still, Further Adventures of my Nose, is gorgeous. And Ugly Duckling Presse doesn’t rest on its laurels, they throw in color illustrations by Terry Rentzepis to boot! So, what’s the catch? John Surowiecki’s chapbook is, let me say it again, beautiful, but it is not, if our reviewers are a representative sample, for everyone. Some readers may find Rentzepis’ surreal illustrations frightening. Ok, ok there is a nose standing in a field--grass below, trees behind, sky above—a nose free from its face looking at the reader with asymmetrically placed eyes. There is also a print of The Beloved with her cello (she has no nose), and a nose posed with several noses painted by Picasso. Finally, yes Virginia that is a tumor penning a postcard. For some readers the poems may be hard going as well. If you don’t like Gogol and Sterne, if Ionesco and Durang set your teeth on edge then Surowiecki’s chapbook is not for you. In addition, some readers may find Surowiecki’s poems unpleasing simply for taking on, as they do, cancer of the nose. On the other hand Further Adventures of My Nose, is definitely for some people, me included. And, Surowiecki should be required reading for anyone working with people being treated for cancers of the head and neck. Though serious in intent, the poems do not speak in earnest tones. Nor is this chapbook sentimental or upliftingly courageous in the manner of a Lifetime Special or a Disney film. So if you’re looking for a cancer story to make you feel cancer might be tolerable all the while dutifully providing that little frisson, that small taste of suffering that makes the telling believable, Surowiecki is not your poet. “My nose/walks the world while I’m only a mirror to it...,” the absurd premise concretizes that me-not-me feeling when the body betrays through cancer. It’s a shock when some part of your body goes solo, revolts, seems to develop independent intentions, a purpose of its own. In “Epigraph & Epigram” the speaker first quotes Sartre— But in order for this absolute exteriority to be given in the form of the “there is,” there must be a world… He then gives us the view from where he stands, “Either everything exists except my nose/ or nothing exists except my nose which/ somehow amounts to the same thing.” Just so. The nose goes through some indelicate changes, it grows colorful, grows a tumor; then takes off, travels, and starts a family. Finding itself far from home, and perhaps feeling a bit guilty, the nose writes e-mail from Egypt: Sphinges have no noses no larynges, either. They remain silent on the subject of everyday life & refuse to covet the stir & wealth that lingers closest to the ground. Sphinges are ¼ Pharaoh & ¾ housecat. They behave like antimatter. A nose, on the other hand, connects the causeless world to another lacking consequences ABC. Always be cartilaginous. How else would the speaker show us his mutilated face, his horror and shame, without sending the reader right out of his or her chair? In, “A Nose of Color,” the speaker eludes feeling, dissociates rather than taking inventory and unbundling his feelings for us: He has become a nose of color’ unfortunately, that color is purple, darkening to ruby unparagoned, color of the Crab, of shadows sliding along fresh morning snow, of a plum hastily stolen, flesh to flesh, stone to heart, skin to livid skin. Dr. S**p points out pustules, papules, rhinnorrhea, ______, _____, _________, & _______. Current has spilled somewhere,…. (A Nose of Color) Now a separate individual, the nose has become heedlessly, recklessly colorful. The betrayed speaker attempts to deny the consequences—first by comparing the hideously abnormal color to shadows on snow, then to a plum—chasing solace through lyrical description and sensuous associations. The word livid brings us back to reality—and sends us back to that plum. Stripped of, “hastily stolen” and “flesh to flesh,” the plum has a nasty exactness and tormenting clarity (like the Sphinges). When, Dr. S**p speaks, the reader gets only a couple of technical terms before running into blanks—anguish and fear deafen us as well. Somewhere current has indeed spilled in this chapbook where playful word choice and an artful, almost light voice give the poems an edge, a false bravado whistling in the dark. This tightly wound speaker, made nearly insane by horror and suffering, reveals the terrified depths sounded during treatment for cancer. He lets us watch him sweat and spin punning, ironic, absurdist attempts to distance himself from pain. We end up face to face with agony. And sometimes, for instance in “Daydream No. 2: Speaking of Oral Sex” or even more starkly in “A World w/o Odors,” only small stylistic flourishes such as, “w/o” and “&,” provide an anemic feint before we take it on the nose (as it were): There is a darkness of another kind, a place of dead shapes & flat sounds where nothing rides on the air, where lilacs & the ocean are only sad movies of themselves. In this same vein, the final poem, “Follow Up” speaks plainly and truthfully about the human inability to sustain intense feeling: Dread is a vague sensation of discomfort from a barely remembered dream. Joy has slipped away, H2O thru fingers. Sublime purple skies are pushed aside. Floods recede & droughts are quenched. You know, it really lasts only so long---- ----this new appreciation for life. This is a gutsy chapbook about a terrifying illness by a skilled and humane poet. It’s worth the trouble.

Private Graveyard by Arlene Naganawa

2009-12-15T03:14:00.000-08:00

Private Graveyard By Arlene Naganawa Gribble Press, 2009 $10.00 Winner of the First Gribble Press Poetry Contest Review by Susan Jo Russell Private graveyards—we all have them. Arlene Naganawa shares hers with us—the literal place, as yet unhaunted for the children playing there in the title poem, and memories of the individual dead who exist now only in images. The brief opening poem, “Compass,” almost an epigraph for the collection, which was the Gribble Press Poetry Chapbook Winner for 2009, draws the reader in with a question, as if to a friend met on the street, “Diane’s dead now, did you know?” The tone is deliberately too casual, too blunt—a cover for what the words can’t contain. “Compass” points to, encompasses, in its terse five lines, a central theme of this collection—it is not simply that we have become separated from those who once knew us, but that, in that separation, the very selves we once were are dead to us, as the devastating last line reveals, “and I’m not the girl in the flowered dress.” Naganawa’s work shows an easy spinning of meter and line. One rarely stumbles in a reading of her poems—image is supported by sound, without fuss, as in the insistence of hard “c” sounds that undercuts what might otherwise be too sweet a memory in “Diane Mae 1951-2005” (whom I assume is also the Diane of the opening poem): Your childhood friend (her hair slicked back with a headband, white plastic stamped with rosebuds) is standing barefoot under the sprinkler. It is not until the next couplet that the slight unease we already sense is made more explicit: “No one will give her/a map of her young heart . . . .” In these poems what is gone remains as an emptiness, never filled in, an open grave in the private graveyard. The people we encounter here confront an unrelieved wanting (“want,” as a noun, occurs frequently), as in this poem, whose title is its first line: It May Come As a Surprise but you are not the center of the universe anymore, not since your mother buttoned up her blouse and walked away, leaving you to watch pink clouds circle the sky over your crib, mobile turning on invisible wire. . . . Not all of the poems are scenes from lost childhood. Two, in particular, open up into an examination of fear, greed, racism, and the power relations of U.S. history. “Great Northern Railroad” recounts a story of a Japanese farmer who never recovers his land, and the life that land would have enabled, after his internment in the U.S. camps. “Peaches in North Carolina” is a surprise in this book, a leap from the poems of loss that are closely connected with Naganawa’s own history. This ekphrastic poem is based on a photograph of the lynching of John Richards in 1916 from Without Sanctuary (edited by James Allen; the reference to this book might have been made more clearly). It is a remarkable interpretation of that photograph, juxtaposing the imagined dailiness of the lynchers and the lynched with the almost sensual violence of the act itself. Although a poem or two did not lift me beyond a simple sadness for those who die too young, most often Naganawa’s imagery and deceptively straightforward language express a palpable longing and regret. The children in “One Afternoon” already yearn for something they can only describe by imagining objects they might find in the woods: “whole robin egg, shed snakeskin/mouse skull, perfect and clean.” Nagawana’s poetry reveals how the persistence and accumulation of loss, death, and unfulfilled promise claim pieces of the self, pieces of history and culture, leaving holes in the fabric that can’t be repaired.

From a Burning Building by Kerry O'Keefe

2009-11-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

From a Burning Building by Kerry O’ Keefe March Street Press, 2005. 25 pages, $9.00. Reviewed by P. Nelson I’ve never met an extended metaphor I liked, especially my own, as the device stretches easily to Cutetitude and the shallow reaches of self congratulation. This said, it is an old and not very bold image—the poem as plane. Frequent poetic flyers, we’ve all been on board the relentlessly ground bound object that rolls down the runway and never takes off. When what we want is transport - velocity, lift off and flight. Uncommonly, one encounters poems already airborne, your awareness coeval with their instantly at altitude attitude, a craft that has already passed several thresholds of thrust (V1, V2) and is immediately in its ideal poetic element, which is Ariel’s. The best poems in Kerry O’Keefe’s chapbook “From a Burning Building” are of this type. Winter grass cracking under their shoes/ as they stand and look at the eight-paned/ window that blew off the house last fall./ The squirrels now able to scratch through/to the garbage on the porch …/ Their children throw a ball back and forth, not used / to seeing him there in the yard. The man and woman/ navigate all the familiar distances, less urgent.— from “Ex-Husband Comes to Pick Up Ladders”. The topics are the usual destinations-estrangement, divorce, death, the consolations of children and new love. Yes, we’ve all been here and for good reason; these are the hubs of the human heart. The day you learn the terrifying difference in the air/between the sound of a man quiet in another room,/ and one who has gone… Left to barter with pictures and helpless pets. / For a few weeks, the smell of the food you cooked./The fading world of the bed. Cigarette ashes left / for a while, then everything clean. The way, for years,/ you confuse each new, beautiful thing you encounter/with the casual habit of a weak and oblivious god. --- from “Worst Fear” Such poems are not necessarily reliant on an exoskeleton of linked imagery (the best mechanical means for making Post-Metrical poetry). Rather, they occur within an epistic framework of testimony (lest this seem critically gratuitous, consider some alternatives: the meditative, the dramatic, the dialectical, the pastoral, etc...) where images aren’t so much produced and laid out as appearing and surfacing; imminent but determinate .(And this not to diminish the conscious artistry of such a method where judgment must be deployed at its extremist verge). Maybe I’m talking out of my critical hat, believe me, more Emmett Kelly’s than Adam Verver’s but consider the uncanny sequencing of A sense of what is foreign./The leaves breaking. The hills/weighted down with guilt over /the yearly lewd display. Still/only able to do what they know./Endless reaches of geese/trying to look brave in their dissembling.// A lone traveler/trying to reach the gate before/ the plane takes off….the season left behind for all/of its reasons … a passage that convinces us way before (yet literarily after) the convicting title “Before Signing the Papers.” In a sense the poetry seems co-generated by a dually operative containment vessel consisting of an intense outward thrust to express surrounded by a constricting force, pressurizing the internal matter (or as the poet better puts it-“‘Let the unspeakable weight against the pleasure of a song, isn’t that how it is every day?’). When this pressure lessens, as this reader believes it does in the more “positive” poems about children and new friends, the lines flatten out, lacking, as I take it, a recombinant genesis that is strictly linguistic. You could call this ambient force “history” or “Truth”, the seemingly more endurant element of Keats’ famous compound. It is Truth, in the conveyance of Poetry, that elevates these poems from the low lying arbitrations of so much chapbook verse and that makes this propellant little book worth reading. Which is what, to begin with, we booked the flight for. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And speaking of containment vessels, the March Street Press of Greensboro N.C. has produced an exemplary chapbook of the nonletter press variety, one right sized for the hands, with careful typography and layout including that rara avis of contemporary publishing- the chaste, alluring plumage of a title page properly set.

Four for the Price of One

2009-11-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

An Uncommon Accord Poems by George Kraus, Marcia Arrieta, Pat Landreth Keller, and Michael Carman Quartet Series, Toadlily Press, 2008 64 pages, $14.00 Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer Kudos to Toadlily Press for this excellent idea! Each book in their Quartet Series includes four different poets, with sections consisting of (in this book) anywhere from 10 to 14 poems by each poet. The reader can gain a good idea of each poet’s voice and subjects, while at the same time appreciating the volume as a whole--an interesting and rich tapestry in which four voices are joined together in a kind of mutual conversation. This book is also very nicely designed--the typeface is the readable and elegant Sabon, the page layout is spacious, and the artwork on the cover (by Myrna Goodman) is repeated in an innovative way on each of the four section openers. Toadlily should also be commended for choosing a printer that’s a member of the Green Press Initiative, “a non-profit program dedicated to supporting authors, publishers, and suppliers in their efforts to reduce their use of fiber obtained from endangered forests.” According to Toadlily, printing this particular volume in this way saved 1 tree, 345 gallons of wastewater, 1 million BTUs of total energy, 44 pounds of solid waste, and 83 pounds of greenhouse gases--something all publishers should strive for, and an increasing necessity if books printed on paper are going to survive in the future. The poems in this chapbook are powerful, characterized by intense and expressive language. George Kraus’s poems, with strong and compelling images, are filled with faces and bodies--a shipwreck survivor, a woman under the spell of a magician, dawn personified as a clown with a cracked and peeling mask. The bodies of passengers in the aftermath of a bus crash (possibly the bodies of all of us, at the end of life) are “so peaceful they seem asleep,/ without blood or bent bone./ . . . Now they no longer move,/ nor speak enigmatically in dialect,/ nor chatter busy as leaves/ when the wind strolls in a stand/ of eucalyptus trees. The air is pale/ without assurance of garlic,/ or the dark smells of soils/ black under fingernails.” Describing the skeleton of a woman who was tortured in El Salvador, he writes (in a strong villanelle): “A modesty a feast of birds did not strip,/ Suspended over other stark debris,/ I think it should be told another way. / . . . Upturned eyes that left the light of day,/ Her torturers I hope will always see,/ A perfect skeleton in weathered slip./ . . . I think it should be told another way.” Marcia Arrieta’s poems are grouped under the title “The Curve Against the Linear,” and many of them play with this idea of opposites. The poems are constructed with short phrases (often just one or two words in a phrase), extra space in the interior of lines, ampersands, and no capitalization whatsoever (even for proper nouns). This can get a little repetitive, but when the language works, it really works. The juxtaposed phrases and lines are often evocative and moving, as in her opening poem, “it happened long ago”: hermits & monks. eagle. rain. the dream of the island. . . . . . could I ask you to reconsider? the charity of yellow flowers in wind. . . . . . mansions of sense. mansions of silence. learning to see. the ladder opens. the gate closes. hourglass & field. She uses the language of mathematics and physics, as well as a philosopher’s questioning of the world: “forest. three hills. nonlinear equations./ free oscillations. forced oscillations./ perturbation. significant. insignificant./ i analyze alone.” After reading her poems, I feel as if I’ve been on a journey: “between lives. between dreams./ ordinary./ sacred.” Pat Landreth Keller’s poems are characterized by strong narratives. In the moving poem that opens her section, “Draglines,” she tells the story of two young girls, twins, who were murdered and drowned: “water lapping the willows/ barehanded man whipping wire into lassoes/ spinning those girls like sugar tied back to back.” And she ties this story to an old woman’s memory of being molested as a child: she said she’d kept the taste of metal on her tongue fingerprints on her thigh old as she was said the twins never would quit turning in her mind washing into the river out of the river hair tangled in the willows just like wanting she said just like words In “Snowscape,” a poem about a small wedding in mid-winter, the realistic opening stanzas of a ceremony in a room shade into memory and the snowy world outside, as the couple gradually becomes part of the natural world: “We are being married in this room. In silence./ His breath moves like a glacier. We are being towed/ in its wake like trees./ Surely it will turn into water,/ and we will find ourselves on the edge of things, sending forth/ shoots and buds and little leaves.” Her language is beautiful and memorable. Michael Carman’s poems have to do with intersections and meetings and connections. In the spare couplets of her opening poem, the speaker encounters two horses in a wild and deserted place. It’s a haunting poem, and the short enjambed lines keep it moving forward: “The North Sea has no direction/ here. It beats the rocks on all/ sides of this island. / . . . I see two horses/ shamble knee-deep in yellow grass./ They look at me as if I were the/ wild one. . . . Eyes on me, they stop/ where the grass stops. This/ is all they can do. This is/ as far as they can come.” In other poems, she traces traits that connect different generations of families, and she connects the personal and the political: in the strong and startling poem “Beets,” a woman preparing beets for dinner is connected in a very immediate way with another woman, a terrorist bomber in another country: From my knife springs the radio running underneath the faucet, hot skin slipping off like a disguise. Stems ribbed with grit light up in veins while a rat-tailed root-string burrows to the center of the earth and out the other side of the world where another woman straps a bomb to her belly, explodes a restaurant by the sea. In “Opera House in Time of War,” an American flag draped over the front of the opera house is a visual reminder of the war, while inside “tuxedoed, cushioned/ in choice orchestra seats,/ men weep at the final thrilling scene/ as if Valhalla in flames/ could lick us clean.” This volume is a reminder of the importance of the poet’s voice. There are common themes and subjects in the poems of all four poets--the natural world and its mysteries, narratives of pain, death, love--but each poet’s voice stands out clearly as a unique one, and together they have created a memorable chapbook.

What is Left by Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi

2009-10-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

What is Left
By Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi
Big Table Publishing
32 pages, $10.

Reviewed by Emily Scudder

Confession. I am a slightly too busy working parent. I read chapbooks in the orthodontist’s office, waiting in the car, while the pasta water is boiling (those are 8 good minutes!). If I have to spend too much time trying to decipher, unpack, unravel, or just understand the general gist of poem, well then, the whole endeavor becomes just another item on my to-do list. Less is more. Don’t drown me in thick language. I like haiku. I also like Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi’s chapbook "What is Left."

Ciampa-Leuzzi knows how to tell a story. Big Table Publishing likes to publish poets who tell it like it is, direct, no secrets or vague hints. They make a good team.

A Version of Relief:

One day, it just lifted –
The old, heavy sadness –
With the words of a friend,
Unwitting in his help,
Telling a story:
“My buddy – I grew up with him –
He has a crazy family:
They all hate each other…..

Dialogue is tricky. Italics or quotation marks? What form works best? Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi doesn’t sweat the small stuff, or so it seems, though her attention to line break, format on the page, and punctuation indicates otherwise. She makes writing a poetic line look easy. Like a smooth golf swing. Or perimeter shot - nothing but net! Her labor is hidden, well practiced, and I appreciate the lightness. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing superficial about "What is Left," but kudos to the poet who can make us feel the relentlessness of loss, whatever the kind, without feeling flattened or totally depressed.

It’s a Process

Mother does not love you.

She pushes you off a cliff
Is a cloud over your life
She leaves a bad taste
……
You try to do what they say
You try to detach, to leave her
And her vacuity
Where they belong:
Far away from you. You do try.

And she is funny. In "What is Left" there are 6 poems about writing poems - her own, her students – and others. It is both risky and bold business to include poems on writing poems, or that refer to the writer's insider world of submissions and rejections. I thoroughly enjoyed all six, but wondered, nevertheless, what a non-poet might think. From “The Business of Our Art:”

…
Submit outside our reading period and
Your manuscript will be summarily trashed-
Unread, of course.

Teachers should be this choosy
Lovers, too.
By the way, editing is now available
at twenty-five cents per word.

It isn’t that Ciampa-Leuzzi wants you to share her exact thoughts (although you might), it is that you sometimes have thoughts, exactly the way she describes her own.

Stealing Time

Today a stranger, a mailman, whistled at me
While I drove down the street
Minding my own business.
Surprised I looked in the sideview mirror
and saw his blue bag and long mailman’s chain
Swinging from his belt loop as he walked.
That’s how I knew he was a mailman.
Looking straight ahead again
I saw that the cross street in front of me
had the same name as one of my sisters.
And I thought: when was the last time I saw her?

Ciampa-Leuzzi offers up no heavy-handed theme, or obvious sequence in her debut chapbook. We are free to roam around, pick and choose, never doubting that we might be loosing the literary thread. What a relief! Think Globally/Act Locally. I kept thinking of this slogan as I read "What is Left." Ciampa-Leuzzi writes about the particulars of her life, and soon her particulars seem loosely related to your own.

After by Nancy Pagh

2009-10-15T02:59:00.000-07:00

After by Nancy Pagh Floating Bridge Press, 2008 25 pages. $12.50 Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt Spare, balanced, well-made—and that’s just the chapbook design! If you’re a poet, don’t write another line. Move directly to Washington State just for the chance to be published by Floating Bridge Press. The elegant cover of “After” by Nancy Pagh suggests the eye’s image and after-image having stared at a bright light or the sun. It’s just right since these poems bounce off a phrase or two from other writers. Such extensive use of epigraph may suck the energy from one’s own work like a black hole, the inspiring lines might impose a mannered tone, or the rhythm set an awkward gait. Perhaps the imported text distorts the new poem by simply encouraging it to hew too closely even parasitically to that original perspective, voice, or style. In short, “After” is a bit of a high-wire act. But if you like to see high-fliers fall, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Pagh skillfully avoids each trap in these technically interesting, lively, smart, and compactly complex poems. She builds on her sources allowing her own associations to take us to different insights carried along by her appealing voice. I know. Gush. Gush. Gush. Not as interesting as a little action with the tooth and claw. But really, the poems are fun, skilled, and (how rare is this) surprising. Pagh doesn’t shy away from the big names. She engages Emily Dickinson in the title poem and wrestles TS Eliot in a wry poem called “Love Song,” where we find, “the virgins are thirty and forty and going/ to the sperm bank./ The medical technician witnesses/ immaculate conception every day,…This poem clings closely to the original in its rhythms, vocabulary, and subject matter (modernized of course), but somehow manages a poke at Eliot and deference to his poem without cringing subservience. It ends with a final look at the technician: In the lab Monday afternoons he stirs, dissolves, with sugar spoons the Sweet’N Low, the saccharine, and then imagines online sirens giving head while women ring the waiting room. I do not think he’ll sing to them. In another poem, Pagh takes off from Pat Lowther’s observation that the octopus, “is beautifully functional as an umbrella; at rest a bag of rucked skin sags like an empty scrotum,” to explore a woman’s vulnerability to a certain type of male character observing: …when you first know them; the loss of youth, integrity, or wife clear in each lovely unsure gesture you mistook for tenderness Exact and apt, the line breaks lend delight to insight. And although Lowther’s images are so interesting and strong, Pagh isn’t overwhelmed instead opening out into something related yet fresh. Fnally, in the poem “Before,” Pagh uses a snippet from a creation story, to tell her own story about desire and its origins: …--all was oyster shell and butterclam. The raven’s groak. The muskrat’s little hand, a pattern pressed in crust of sand was delible. No metaphor at all. We lived each in our own body and happy there. The poem continues to refuse metaphor, “No metaphor at all” and “Only the birds dreamed their falling,” while weaving concrete images suggesting desire, writing, and ending: ….You were likened to no object whatsoever. That was our practice, also. Then somebody said beautiful. Somebody wrote a poem. And somebody wasn’t, and hurt. I know fire was involved: we built the flame and made the char that wrote it. These days the poetry biz is sometimes awash in blather, low bars, lazy observation, and tatty notions. You’ll find none of that here. Pagh sets the bar high. Then she sails right over it.

The Loneliness of Dogs by Tim Mayo

2009-09-29T06:41:00.000-07:00

The Loneliness of Dogs By Tim Mayo Pudding House Publications, 2008. 28 pages. $10. Reviewed by P. Nelson Reading chapbooks, the physical act, is a kind of metaphor for the lexical process, the pages in open tension between the regulator of our thumbs, like the flexion of attention, open, in suspension between engagement and a dismissing closure. What sets the main spring of mind going is, I am convinced, the apprehension of “voice”. (Which is not to be conflated with “music”. The next time someone rhapsodizes about poetic music, recommend to them five minutes of Bach and when they say they meant a different kind of music, well, that conversation can be continued). So by poetic voice we mean something very different from our usual simian jabber, its finest quarter hour the shower’s aria. Voice is that strange positing identifier, both constituting the poem and constituted by it, an event at once a prior and a posteriori. (That’s enough Kant cant for one review. Nothing new here either. Please proceed- ed.) OK, I like “Tim Mayo’s” voice. “Now I see I lacked imagination/writing so many poems in that same person/until the I of my typewriter wore out,/and I was banished from the page, guilty of nothing more than my own experience.” (from “The Confessional Poet’s Confession”). Here is an educated man who knows more than he shows and knows we know it (which is a high degree of refinement), who isn’t afraid to refer to Georges de La Tour, The Dark Lady, the Agora, “The Flea” or even tell us “ About spelling the human masters were never wrong”. (Nota bene: how one tires of unlettered poets or worse, those that leave their education behind as if it were a leash or muzzle that they might more authentically bay under some sub-prime moon.) The master lyric poet of our day has written (somewhere) that the best poetry “comes from our deepest being, decision and self-forgetting” (reviewers, especially Y.T., take note!). But we can’t all be Seamus Heaney and in lesser hands the poetry of deep being becomes the monotonous boom -boom-boom of Forester’s Marabar caves.* Mayo is poet of quotidian and intelligent self- remembering, his aim not to take us where we’ve all been so old boldly before (say via zany spacing and page layout) but to use poetry’s received grain to communicate and put, in every sense, a lucid gloss on the matter in hand. Only the lights’ greater clarity/and the subtle change in suits/seem to fall in spades on their faces, as if the painter suddenly knew/this story that repeats itself-/diamonds, clubs, it doesn’t matter-/ we are cheats at heart, suspicious/of the other who always wins.” (From “The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, after de la Tour”). A certain kind of reader may find some of the poems here metaphorically underdetermined. I thought a few of Mayo’s endings a bit pat, as if the poet couldn’t resist a “natural” conclusion, one too easily at hand as in “The Red Convertible” where the male as a type of pistoned motor, conclusively hopes “for the red convertible of your smile to pass by and give him a lift.” I don’t think that will quite pass a rigorous inspection. Overall, Mayo’s judgments are consistently good in a free verse finding shape in sound, rhetoric and proposition. Most admirable is his vital balance between the freight of meaning and its engine of conveyance, what Heaney calls “stamina; the distribution of the argument over line ends and stanzas, more a matter of vertebrae than plasm.” But I digress, for it was there I found this seal of a warrior saying farewell to his wife. The fine detail of his muscled calf as he turned from his spear, shifting his concern to his wife’s imploring arms, made me think Id found mine. I didn’t know then that an art of significance was what I was searching for, nor did I see the true meaning of his implied turning back. None of this was etched into that piece of colored glass as I saw the sun flash through it highlighting each muscle of his readiness to leave for something he deemed more important than love. (from “The Counterfeit Seal”) There is more weight of meaning, at an almost Empsonian curvature, on this quarter page than in a whole box car of contemporary poetry, not to mention prose. But again it is the poet’s voice we react to, if we do, first and last, a vibration along the deepest lines of our linguistic being that resonates a responsive voice, one almost our own. [*EMF’s translation of the caves’ speech as “Everything exists, nothing has value.” is perhaps not entirely literal.] ____________________________________________________________________________________ At Fiddler Crab we are inclined to comment upon the positive; “the rest is silence”, ever the most effective criticism. Thus preambled, as one who worked briefly (and unsuccessfully) in both computer and letter press production, I know there is always a good reason (and sometimes a good excuse) for mistakes in printing. So the good folks at Pudding House Press - dedicated as they are to chapbook production - may want to know that 7 of the 21 poems in my copy of The Loneliness of Dogs have typographical anomalies, mostly flawed letter fill. It’s the kind of thing a reader hardly notices the first time, which upon repetition makes for ever more anxiety and distraction, a glitch that’s an itch. Someone at the press needs to come up to scratch - so we don’t have to.

Two chapbooks by Susan Terris

2009-09-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Poetic License Adastra Press, 2004 20 pages, $14.00 The Wonder Bread Years Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2009 30 pages, $10.00 Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer Susan Terris is a versatile poet, and these two very interesting chapbooks are quite different from each other. Poetic License, the earlier of the two, is a tribute to forty poets, divided into thematic groups like “On Love,” “On Fear,” “On Loss,” “On Consolation.” Each poet is represented by one 7-line poem, and four of these short poems make up each thematic group. In Terris’s words, she is attempting to “capture a fleeting, impressionistic view of how each of these poets speaks to the world,” using some of their characteristic vocabulary in each poem while at the same time writing her own new poem as an homage to the poet--a kind of snapshot of the poet’s themes and style. The poets are well known-- Bishop, Plath, Stevens, Auden, Roethke, Pinsky, Hirshfield, Collins, Dickinson, Frost, Glück, among others--and the reader has the enjoyable feeling of encountering old friends in new outfits. The poems are skillfully written and do a good job of evoking each poet--for example, here are some lines from the Jane Hirshfield poem: “Sometimes a snake coiled/ On a rock will flick out his tongue,/ Test the possibility of change.” And here is Billy Collins: “I am amazed/ By the hat, the gun, the sudden flash/ As water seeks its own level.” It’s almost impossible to separate the pleasure of reading these poems from the pleasure of looking at this chapbook and holding it in the hand. Beautifully designed and hand-typeset by Gary Metras of Adastra Press, the book is letterpress printed on heavy cream paper, folded and sewn by hand. The lovely interior design accommodates the structure of this book perfectly: there are two 7-line poems on each page, separated by an ornament, and the title of each poem is the first name of the poet in a handsome italic font. In order to help the reader identify the poets (the style and the first name usually, but not always, provide enough clues), there are two foldout pages in the book--one at the beginning and one halfway through--that list the poets’ full names. I feel that this book is a labor of love--both the writing, as an homage to the forty poets, and the printed chapbook itself, as a beautiful example of the bookmaker’s art. It’s very good to know that this kind of bookmaking with patient hand labor still exists. The Wonder Bread Years is very different in tone and appearance. This chapbook is centered in the 1950s, as represented by its material culture--the cover shows a mother and daughter in a typical kitchen of the time, putting the finishing touches on dinner while the father relaxes in the next room with the newspaper. A look at the Contents page is full of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in that era: among the poem titles are “Carpet Sweeper,” “Brownie Box Camera,” “Shoe Fitting X-Ray Device,” “Soda Fountain,” “Double Feature,” “Victrola,” “Phone Booth,” “Skate Keys,” “Running Board,” “Laundry Chute.” (One could say that our culture is poorer, or at least very different, without all these wonderful objects and devices.) Terris is very good at evoking the look, feel, even the smell of these objects, as in the “sweet alcohol stink” of the ditto machine, or the “shadows of my foot bones/ moving inside the outlines of new Mary Janes” in the shoe-fitting X-ray device. Her voice is lively and humorous, and she also brings out what it was like to be female in that era, with painfully achieved permanent waves and constricting girdles and “tit enlargement machines,” as well as the unspoken “maxims for life” that girls absorbed from the culture: “Never take what you really want./ Do make do. Never ask for more.” In the later poems in the book, the speaker is older--there are references to wedding presents, to the poet’s having a daughter, then three children. A recurring image in these last several poems is that of a key--for example, in “Running Board” she talks about watching “Father’s old movies . . . trying to find the key to who I was/am.” I would have liked to hear more about these connections between the speaker’s growing-up years and her adult life as a mother and poet. In “Smith-Corona Typewriter” we learn that the poet went to grad school and is a perfectionist about writing, and that now she has a daughter who marvels that there used to be typewriters that didn’t have a screen--but it’s a poem of reminiscence where we don’t hear much about the speaker’s feelings. In the final poem Terris constructs a “Rube Goldberg machine” from many of the objects described in the book--garter belt, metal curlers, film strip, skate key, reel, roller, bobby pin, etc.--and ends with these lines: “When I finish building/ My Rube machine, it won’t call my mother/ or feed the dog. But, with luck, if I find the key,/ it will, somehow, make up the last poem for this book.” Maybe the key that unlocks the past and explains who we are can’t ever really be found--but poetry is one of the best ways we have to try to do that, and these evocative poems are an interesting exploration of that territory.

Sotto Voce

2009-09-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sotto Voce by D. Antwan Stewart Main Street Rag Publishing Company; $10 Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series 2007 Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell Sotto voce means to speak under one's breath or, in music, a dramatic lowering of tone—not a simple decrease in volume, but a hushed quality. D. Antwan Stewart’s poems are, indeed, hushed, yet full of emotion. They are about the whispering life, the internal patter that accompanies the daily wanderings of the soul—invisible to others but perhaps the strongest reality for the self. The first poem opens with the hush of dusk that “begins with simple house cats/crouched/behind the queen palms.” It is perhaps the quietest poem in this book but, as its concluding lines suggest, a disquieting quietude pervades throughout: “the grass like clouds/before the gathering/of storms.” Boundaries are everywhere in Stewart’s work—between love and hate (or, as one poem suggests, between love and apathy), between sleep and waking, evening and morning, reality and something that may not be reality. Often the speaker is moving between boundaries, trapped on one side, trying to reach for or understand the other. In the title poem, one lover listens to a violin played “horribly” in a neighboring apartment as the other sleeps, able to ignore, or pretend to ignore, what is amiss in the music and in the relationship. The sound of the violin is a hushed sound—it “whispers” into the room—but the emotion it incites is both strong and understated: . . . I have to contend with the snore caught in your throat, which I suppose is your subtle way of saying a duet with this indelicate violinist is better than a conversation with me. . . . Stewart’s poems also deal with the hushed identity of a gay man—the young boy’s pretense to his buddies that he likes girls, his relationship to his family (“how I was caught once/prancing around in fluffy pink slippers”), the first adventurous, risky searches for sexual partners, the impact of HIV/AIDS. These poems are competently written, but I feel that I’ve read some of these stories before. It is when he pushes past the expected stories of young gay male experience to a more profound investigation of mind and body that Stewart’s strong, inventive language grabs the reader, as in his praise of the tongue in “Even Bones,” which ends with a passage describing how the tongue might reach . . . those unknown places where even bones quiver the way a river slicks then swallows whole all the various stones. Stewart has an ear for the rhythms of the language; his lines roll softly, but insistently, over the reader, carrying us along on a rush of words without overwhelming or drowning us. We are lifted just above the surface, just far enough to draw breath, as in his beautiful “Elegy” which captures the dailiness of survival and remembrance: This is how I like to remember you— not the mattress worn smooth, nor the dishes filling the cabinet with dust. But the sun ravaging you with light, those birds lost somewhere in your body’s cast shadow. The poems hover, always, on the edge of sadness, or on the boundary between sadness and something that is not happiness but, at least, not quite as sad. In the final poem, “Coming to the End of My Sadness,”—another poem in which the edges of reality blur—the narrator has sunk so far into himself that even the dog refuses to acknowledge him (“She’ll bare/ her fangs if I dare touch/her, resist me holding/her warmth against/my belly”). Yet a frail hope surfaces on the border of despair—a self-mocking hope, it is true, but nonetheless a turning toward life. This book is full of birds and music, of reaching out and turning in, of sadness—even bitterness—but a determination to persist. Stewart’s sotto voce words are worth listening for through the surrounding din.

In What I Have Done & What I Have Failed to Do

2009-08-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

In What I Have Done & What I Have Failed to Do Joseph P. Wood Elixir Press, 2006 $8.00 Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt In a recent issue of Poetry, Jason Guriel gives an overdue caning to poetry that, “doesn’t so much describe its objects as obscure them with prefabricated language as airy as bubble wrap…” Since most of us can’t suppress a guilty flinch, then who the hell is Joseph P. Wood? I need to know ‘cause I want to lick his brain. And what relief to find “In What I Have Done & What I Have Failed to Do,” a smart book with enough craft, and no confusion between fresh and blood, no shortcuts to shock. A quick jog through this chapbook reveals a title poem bristling with interesting abutment, followed by a poem in which Winslow Homer believed each American, “was a rowboat, a speck lost in the cosmos./ Collected, however, we were gathering/ waves: a repetitive brutality.” Later, “Total: A Biography,” plays with reductionism by presenting the measures and calculations needed to capture with absurd accuracy the speaker’s life. We meet bilaterally justified poems, poems with short lines, with long lines, in blank verse, rhymed—all done with an easy light touch. So when a poem entitled, “A Half-Century Contemplating the Double Helix,” winds on the page, I admit it’s not unexpected, but there’s much here that is. And Wood can be funny—“I Was a Finalist// for wife ignorer of the year, for fat-man-in-too-tight-/dress-shirt becomes ninth-grade laughingstock,/ for pet obsesser of Vega County. I was chosen/” And in “Very Minor Elegies,” Woods takes us from the opening question, “To whom would I show my superfluous nipple?” through the Pope, dreams of camping, fears about time and change, to end on his punch line (I won’t spoil it). “On Jasper Johns’ Targets,” first describes the painting’s “peripheries” before arriving at “the vanishing point, our dread/ exemplified by his busy brushwork.,” then bounces off the critical mis-reception before arriving at the painter--“If the world is to end, better to be luscious/ than panicked,” better to end up wearing the, “half-cocked grin of a fool”—a succinct framing of art’s perpetual unsolvable equation: dread + the appearance of ease + chronic uncertainty + pursuit of ‘the new’+ but-what-do-you-do-for-real-work = playing the fool (or maybe not but no one will be able to tell for a really really really really long time). Part of the interest in this chapbook as I’ve implied is Wood’s range. Here is part of, “Girl Says I,” was not the horse, lathered & fagged, dipping its mouth for drink nor the river, the heavy noxious brown, the knee-deep murk nor the swaying half-sawed elms, branches drooped & pollen-heavy nor the stumbling mid-air bee, its hum-brake-hum, on wing severed nor the severing, the cleaver’s cherry handle, the cattle’s flank grilling Longer lines packed (but not over-packed) with vivid detail that subtly evolves meaning and feeling through image and word until the poem ends: nor the language, the him-haw pleading, the take-me-back, the one-time night, the never-again, the never, the nor There’s no fluff or filler here. Not in individual poems and not in the collection as a whole. Wood’s poems poke, prod, smooch, dissect, hug, and pinch American politics, art, history, and culture.

Three Vanities by Lori Desrosiers

2009-08-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

Three Vanities Poems by Lori Desrosiers Pudding House Press, Chapbook Series 32 Pages, $10 Reviewed by Emily Scudder I read poetry for different reasons: to relate, to be exposed, to widen my range. Recently I have been drawn to quieter, more modest chapbooks, the collections that lack shiny covers or clever titles, but instead seem mature, almost like they like themselves, if a chapbook could. Lori Desrosiers’ "Three Vanities" is such a chapbook. It arrived in the Fiddler Crab post office box with a simple stapled cover and nearly complete lack of color, yet the exquisite cover line drawing (by F.S. Praze, 1904) of a woman, dignified, fully clothed, with her eyes closed and leaning on a straight back chair was anything but dull. I wondered who is this closed-eyed woman? Is she tired? Content? She could be either 20 or 40 years old. She looks old-fashioned, yet modern too. And she is beautiful, almost handsome. No doubt Desrosiers’ poems would tell her story, or of a woman like her, like so many. In "Three Vanities," Lori Desrosiers, not surprisingly, tells 3 stories in 26 poems: of her grandmother Beila, her mother Blanche, and herself. Desrosiers’ nameless daughters are present as well. However, it is the one story, universal, of generations of women circling each other, repeating patterns, that dominates the collection. From the poem “Little Toes,” the beginning and end stanzas: I don’t remember/my grandmother’s feet/but my mother says/her little toe was crooked, cuddling her fourth toe/just like my mother’s, /just like mine. My mother chose/to wear pointy shoes/which disfigured her toes,/my daughters also prefer fashionable heels./At the end of the day/they rub their crooked little toes. The Beila poems, chronicling the grandmother’s experiences as an immigrant from Russia at the turn of the century, use well the concise line, and are some of the strongest. Desrosiers does at times veer slightly toward the sentimental, yet, without question, the overall tender honesty of these family portraits wins out. From the poem “Red Lipstick:” She didn’t tell/until her last week:/she was ten years older/than my grandfather,/in fact, had been lying/for fifty years. Desrosiers' consistantly direct tone, coupled with historical and geographical references, such as to the Triangle Waist Factory Fire in 1911 or the Ukraine's river long ago, grounds the collection, and further enhances the chronological and familial thread. I always ask myself when reading or reviewing a poem, “Is the poem for the ear or the eye?” "Three Vanities" is a visual triptych that also makes for excellent performance poetry. In fact, to not read these poems aloud is to miss their energy, intonation, and how Desrosiers’ numerous musical allusions resonate in full voice. I would like to hear the author read them herself, but as a substitute, I recommend using your own voice. You will not be disappointed.

Postcards from P-Town by Steven Riel

2009-08-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

Postcard from P-Town By Steven Riel Seven Kitchens Press, 2009 Robin Becker Chapbook Series $7.00 Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt These days conflicts of interest entangle us at every turn. So in the interest of full disclosure: Robin Becker was, one summer, my teacher…in P-town (which I love). However, I do not know Steven Riel (though after reading his chapbook I wish I did). “Postcards from P-town,” is unapologetic, colorful, and fun—in other words, serious play. (That fabulous cover alone is worth the seven dollars!) Then there’s the If-you-are-here-to-judge-who-I-love-then-don’t-fucking-read-my-book dedication, “ …dear husband and best friend.” Bittersweet. These are glittering surfaces under which we watch politics, love, identity, and hope skitter and flit. To be seen, known, and (dare Riel even hope?) accepted scuttles, darts, sways, and sashays through these poems. The collection is perhaps less bedizened by craft than I’d wish, but it’s still busy as a thriving tide pool. I want these poems to be more successful. I hunger for form: wit in the structure, wicked enjambment, saucy puns, even the occasional sly anagram could work here (and I think Riel could carry it off). So intense was my desire, I searched for syllabics—no shit, counted on my fingers—but found none. Perhaps I missed something. So many poems in this collection succeed or partly succeed. And they always try hard. That’s a compliment (when did we all become cynics?). The poems address, identify with, and speak from within famous persons: “Robert Goulet Is Dead!,” “Kitty Carlisle is Dead!,” “Ishmael’s Afterthoughts,” a poem about reading Tennessee William’s obituary. In several poems, Riel’s speaker channels then makes into his own aspects of Lena Horne, Chris Evert, and Cindi Lauper. These ventriloquisms convey an interesting mix of anger, humor, admiration, and the seemingly inevitable self-loathing of the outsider. In “Lena Horne,” a poem in multiple parts, Riel oscillates between Horne’s voice and his speaker’s. Here’s a sample of Horne: Dixieland’s shears can’t snip me out. Today’s houses have antennas. MGM kept me out of the story so the plot would splice nice if I were gone. I have cause to dwell on it. The going’s a little rough until that sinister line in which the voice suddenly clicks when threatening to “dwell on it”. It works for you or it doesn’t. The voice mixes opposition, injury, tenderness, and sometimes tells more than shows as the speaker tries to hit all the factual points while keeping all the plates spinning. It’s a project that sometimes ends up in pieces. But Riel is passionate and expects the reader to do at least some thinking, which I appreciate and celebrate. Returning to “Lena Horne,” we have the speaker’s voice, “Days later, biographies/ fanned like feathers on my bed,/ I’m puzzling out your sorrows,/ trying on their contours.” And in “Chris Evert,” there’s this quiet, effective moment: She was the perfect avenger, a paper doll whose life had tabs my scissors could trace. After school, I’d try her on, let her overlay what was wrong. Riel ends with a sonnet eased from constraint, “For Patrick, My New Nurse,” in which the speaker notices that Patrick: …. remained unruffled (I focused on the telling little muscles at ease around his eyes) when my hard-on rose in thanks, alive Here Riel gathers force by playing off the loosened structure against the limitations imposed by illness. Gay identity is complicated, living is painful, being sick is humiliating, loving is sometimes at a distance and yet Riel brings it to us in this chapbook just as he finds it-- confusing, tender, enraging, agonized, vibrant, enduring—in short, damned difficult. Riel steps out to meet what comes with attitude. His next book? Looking forward to it.

Journal of Lovesickness, Vol. 11 by Steve Price

2009-07-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Journal of Lovesickness, Vol. 11 by Steve Price Burnside Review Press, 2009 24 pages, $5 Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer When you first pick it up, this chapbook looks a little spartan--plain gray cover with black type, no author photo or blurbs on the back. But how can you not love the title--“Journal of Lovesickness, Vol. 11”--and especially the subtitle--“Advances in the Poetry of Heartbreak”--and the small drawing on the front, which looks like the logo of a medical journal at first glance but when examined closely appears to be the figure of a man playing a harp. I’m not usually a fan of prose poems, but the 24 poems in this book soon drew me in with their rapid-paced language and surrealistic images. The speaker is in love (all the poems are addressed to “you”), but it’s a difficult love affair with many frustrations--perhaps because, as the poet says in “Live & Learn,” “I gave you my life before I lived it.” Here’s an example of the quirky but compelling language this poet uses, from the poem “No Bail”: “I’ve been charged with threatening to love you. They put me in a cell filled with tiger lilies and Tom Jones playing over and over. . . . Gary brought me a harp and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. They asked if I had any remorse, and when I said no, they ordered me to disperse my emotions instead of unloading them all on one person. . . . This is a letter I’m not allowed to send you.” Or this wonderful sequence from “The Space You Asked For”: “I just want to do something right. . . . You back away, fall backwards over a pile of beer cans and squash a chuckwalla. Your deranged neighbor’s daughter watches it not die, and I would gladly trade places with it. I know, I have no business being in your hemisphere.” These prose poems are short--a quarter or a third of a page--but each one has a manic energy and a surrealistic yet coherent series of images and events. And there are moments of tenderness and optimism too--things get a little better as the book goes on: “I am yawning, and as I stretch I stretch in your direction, getting one pulse of a fingertip closer”; “Next time I hug you, I will not let you get away.” In the closing poem, the poet imagines his lover and his old car being “comfortable with one another, like old friends.” But this is far from a sentimental book--I would characterize the tone as one of fascinating weirdness. I wish this chapbook had a table of contents--the titles of the poems are interesting and resonant, and it would be good to see them all listed on one page. But that’s a minor point. This book carries you along in the current of its language, and it’s well worth picking up.

Little Oceans by Tony Hoagland

2009-07-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

Little Oceans by Tony Hoagland. Hollyridge Press. 2009. 39 pages. $10. Reviewed by P. Nelson The wacko right-wingers on shortwave radio are wrong – not necessarily about guns (everyman’s ideal son or Lost Father, I forget which) or taxation (legal robbery) or the Federal Reserve (semi-organized crime). No, they are wrong about paper money being worthless. In fact, your generic greenbuck has a commodity value of about 3 cents as a piece of competent (if aesthetically ghastly) engraving on good stock. And you’d do far worse than to send one of those odd objects (one denominated TEN) to Hollyridge press for the purchase of Tony Hoagland’s chapbook Little Oceans, though they will probably prefer Paypal, an oxymoron if there ever was one. And the point of this arch arabesque is that it is exactly the kind of gratuitous riff you won’t find in Hoagland’s sober, judicious (and for all that) engaging etudes. Honest work, with the ego as a point of view, not a spotlit stage for narcissistic crooning of the ole mi-mi-mi. Of the 27 poems all have social or broader relational concerns, save one and that one, surely taxonomically, is entitled “Personal”. Audaciously, there are two poems (“Home of the Brave”, “The History of White People”) that address race dynamics from the now novel (one might almost say colorful) perspective of the straight white man. ‘After so long seeming right, as in/true, as in clean as in smart, / … after so long being visitors/ from the galaxy Caucasia/now they are starting to seem a little/deficient, leached out, spent, colorless/ thin blooded, indefinite as in being too far and too long / removed from the original source of whiteness.” Hoagland understands that disciplined free-verse works when it is delineated to the shape of thought, measured by the poet’s distinctive (silent) voice; in this case, relatively short lines lenghtening unto long sentences. Not such a hard thing you'd think except so many makeurs-(did I say fakeurs?), do it poorly. The chapbook is, in the best sense, a quick read, fluent, informing and fault free (which is perhaps a different state of grace from “flawless”). Lyric poets are easily classified as hard or soft landers: the former step into a pirouette and accelerate before spinning out to the resoundingly conclusive footfall. Soft types like Hoagland can fool you when you turn the page and find two more lines to a poem you thought was ended. Opps! But with Hoagland that’s a mere typographical accident and no misstep by a poet who eschews the Big Gesture and Five Act Structure; it is the quiet voice of a serious man who prefers to draw you in rather than call you out. It’s a delicacy and refinement of a quintessentially and ever rarer American kind that is hard to represent adequately in short quotes. "In summer there was something in the selfhood of the wasps /that wanted to get inside the screened-in porch./ It sent them buzzing against the wire mesh, / probing under the eaves,/ crawling in the cracks between the boards./Each day we’d find new bodies on the sill:/ little failures. Like struck matches:/shrunken in death, the yellow/color of cider or old varnish.” A certain kind of entirely legitimate reader will miss the arc and buzz of stylistic fireworks. But flash-in-the-pan pyrotechnics illuminate, reflectively, only themselves while it is the pond itself, day-lit, even-tempered, capacious and world holding, deep, but calling not attention to its depth that we most value. A Little Ocean. This one well worth the sacrifice in passing trade of your $10 and three cent paper boat.

Your Whole Life by Douglas Goetsch

2009-07-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

Your Whole Life Poems by Douglas Goetsch Slipstream, 2007 Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt I read the author bios last. I do this not to keep the list of awards, fellowships, grants, and publication from placing its heavy thumb on the scales of my judgment, but rather to keep the inevitable irritation at bay when I discover yet again that even small “independent” presses take no risks. Alas, it’s no revelation that Douglas Goetsch has published just about everywhere a poet would like to be read. Or that he has at least two full-length books and three chapbooks already in print. And here is another. So, Goetsch knows how to hold a reader’s interest. And he catches a scene, a character, and a time with some precision. Yet this collection is uneven. Was it perhaps compiled from a couple batches of older and newer poems loosely connected by reminiscence? Near the middle of the book we find ourselves in the horse latitudes—Vacuuming, Haiku, Bill, and Recess, each strikes its predictable, flat, prosey notes without force. Even in otherwise successful poems like, Black People Can’t Swim where Goetsch sets the hook with, “When I told Patricia how much I loved the pool at the Y/ she said, ‘Oh, black people can’t swim,” he suddenly lets us off by telling too much, “We were all toddlers, or unborn, when Martin dreamed/of little black children and little white children/ going to school arm in arm.” Still there’s mostly good stuff in Your Whole Life, though not great stuff. For one thing, Goetsch comes up with some interesting titles and keeps up the arresting starts: “Coming home to a destroyed mailbox/ you experience a recognition problem/ like hearing your name called in a foreign city/” (You’ve Never Won Anything), or “My best friend gave me a girl.” (Delia). Another strength is Goetsch’s focus on thoughts, feeling, and moments that deliver that private internal flick of the whip when they come (reluctantly) to mind. As a not-too-biting instance, a poem about spending Christmas with a friend’s family, A Guest for Christmas, gives us that ol’ awkward holiday feeling when having arrived without a gift you find, “… there was one for you/ an emergency gift, not too expensive/ for either gender, such as a journal/or photo frame, and it shamed you/ to receive it…” Gone, one of the stronger poems, begins, “It’s easy to want someone dead./ Take this guy..” Goetsch ironically fumes, the impotent everyman behind the benignly blank face: …or the dickhead flicking a lit cigarette from his car to the sidewalk. Something tells me the woman tossing chicken bones under the bus seat, now licking her fingers, is of no use to the world. Doubtless if they were weeping in confessionals over their small though highly revealing offenses, or scribbling apologies in journals, I’d feel differently… In Poems You’re Not Allowed to Write, Sirens, New York City, and The Kingdom, Goetsch gives us a rough blank verse rhythm, an easy and believable voice, and a complex range of emotion—funny, angry, thoughtful. In these poems and others, the crisp detail works to show us specific people and places in a fine and familiar voice capturing the common awkward moment, the social lie, and the secret unwilling disappointment in poems that are skilled but not too ambitious or technically showy.