Saint Monica
by Mary Biddinger
Black Lawrence Press
42 pages, $9
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk
Saint Monica, by Mary Biddinger, is a harrowing and hilarious account of a girl growing into her doubled self, the one born to “walk backwards / before ever running forward” who girds her loins along the way and learns plenty by going through the communion line twice. This girl, named Monica, is somehow the Saint Monica of the title, also known as the patron saint of alcoholics, abused women, “disappointing children” (from an information page in the front the chapbook, crediting an online Patron Saints Index), and “difficult marriages.” All that is represented—with dark comedy—in the details and narratives of these marvelous lyric and prose poems. The book starts with a bang, Monica in the hospital, wrapped in gauze, wrapping the reader in these stunning lines:
…. The owls would like to unwrap
her, as owls do, always looking
for the next loose shutter, the goldfinch
bathing in a pile of spilled parmesan
in the convenience store parking lot.
Yes, the predator is always on the lookout for any tiny golden thing preoccupied with its own pleasures or needs, but the reader senses that the wounded Monica of the opening poem will now always be aware of its lurking presence.
After this, we watch the young girl grapple with her various fears and her fierce desires, say, for “Kevin McMillan bare / to the waist in an apple tree” or “Kevin at the wheel with a copy of Vonnegut in his pocket.” She’s definitely feisty and spots other predators in time to fight them off, as in the ironically titled “Saint Monica Gets Her Man.”
…. When her
stepfather lowered himself into
the cellar, Monica was ready: a jar
of pickled eggs and an awl.
When the boys under the bridge
stopped her, she didn’t stop, only
poured a handful of gravel
from her sleeve, went on walking
toward a stand of elms and phlox.
But the vulnerability of that goldfinch is sustained alongside the feistiness of the girl preparing for womanhood. That grown woman still wonders about wishing on a star, still hopes for a magical or movie-like transformation. The Monica emerging from the mummy-like gauze of the opening poem has also survived the trials of a Monica on “automatic” in the book’s penultimate poem, “Saint Monica and the Babe,” a poem full of motherly wonder but also childish fear:
The baby wailed during his christening,
but that was just the fear
of candles, the heavy oils Monica
was too afraid to wipe off right away.
In the end, “Monica Wishes on the Wrong Star” but not really. She reconsiders the whole thing: “Maybe they were both the wrong star.” There’s a poignant sadness at the end that does not undo all the strength and yearning that’s come before. The voice at the end of this chapbook sounds sad but accepting, intensely alert, human, alive, and aware.
***
by Mary Biddinger
Black Lawrence Press
42 pages, $9
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk
Saint Monica, by Mary Biddinger, is a harrowing and hilarious account of a girl growing into her doubled self, the one born to “walk backwards / before ever running forward” who girds her loins along the way and learns plenty by going through the communion line twice. This girl, named Monica, is somehow the Saint Monica of the title, also known as the patron saint of alcoholics, abused women, “disappointing children” (from an information page in the front the chapbook, crediting an online Patron Saints Index), and “difficult marriages.” All that is represented—with dark comedy—in the details and narratives of these marvelous lyric and prose poems. The book starts with a bang, Monica in the hospital, wrapped in gauze, wrapping the reader in these stunning lines:
…. The owls would like to unwrap
her, as owls do, always looking
for the next loose shutter, the goldfinch
bathing in a pile of spilled parmesan
in the convenience store parking lot.
Yes, the predator is always on the lookout for any tiny golden thing preoccupied with its own pleasures or needs, but the reader senses that the wounded Monica of the opening poem will now always be aware of its lurking presence.
After this, we watch the young girl grapple with her various fears and her fierce desires, say, for “Kevin McMillan bare / to the waist in an apple tree” or “Kevin at the wheel with a copy of Vonnegut in his pocket.” She’s definitely feisty and spots other predators in time to fight them off, as in the ironically titled “Saint Monica Gets Her Man.”
…. When her
stepfather lowered himself into
the cellar, Monica was ready: a jar
of pickled eggs and an awl.
When the boys under the bridge
stopped her, she didn’t stop, only
poured a handful of gravel
from her sleeve, went on walking
toward a stand of elms and phlox.
But the vulnerability of that goldfinch is sustained alongside the feistiness of the girl preparing for womanhood. That grown woman still wonders about wishing on a star, still hopes for a magical or movie-like transformation. The Monica emerging from the mummy-like gauze of the opening poem has also survived the trials of a Monica on “automatic” in the book’s penultimate poem, “Saint Monica and the Babe,” a poem full of motherly wonder but also childish fear:
The baby wailed during his christening,
but that was just the fear
of candles, the heavy oils Monica
was too afraid to wipe off right away.
In the end, “Monica Wishes on the Wrong Star” but not really. She reconsiders the whole thing: “Maybe they were both the wrong star.” There’s a poignant sadness at the end that does not undo all the strength and yearning that’s come before. The voice at the end of this chapbook sounds sad but accepting, intensely alert, human, alive, and aware.
***
I know// my wounds are reliable. Still…
Lines like this spatter like shrapnel though Jennifer Jean's chapbook, In the War. She uses six poems entitled Vespers and four called, In the War, as refrains that provide reflection and perspective while drawing the collection together.
The Vietnam war consumes these pages. In some poems we see through the eyes of the speaker's father, a soldier, who has been changed by his experiences in ways that make it difficult to return to his family.In other poems we meet the daughter who feels afraid of him and looks for ways to understand and re-connect. This chapbook is not a two-dimensional take on these sadly familiar issues. We hear the speaker struggle with her own aggression as she identifies with her father. We follow her brash attempts to build identity and find a life as an adult in the face of disappointment, confusion, love, and pain.
Lines like this spatter like shrapnel though Jennifer Jean's chapbook, In the War. She uses six poems entitled Vespers and four called, In the War, as refrains that provide reflection and perspective while drawing the collection together.
The Vietnam war consumes these pages. In some poems we see through the eyes of the speaker's father, a soldier, who has been changed by his experiences in ways that make it difficult to return to his family.In other poems we meet the daughter who feels afraid of him and looks for ways to understand and re-connect. This chapbook is not a two-dimensional take on these sadly familiar issues. We hear the speaker struggle with her own aggression as she identifies with her father. We follow her brash attempts to build identity and find a life as an adult in the face of disappointment, confusion, love, and pain.
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt
***
Class Project
By Jason Bredle
Genius Chapbook
http://www.chapbook-genius.com
On-line publishing (just like M&M's and Roku) is irresistible. So, scrabbling and emitting high-pitched squeaks of fear and general distress, the reviewer is eventually dragged by the tail into disembodied chapbooks. Genius is an on-line chapbook publisher (this may carry more truth than intended). We will get to Bredle's book, but first a little whining.
One misses the physical chapbook's lovely fonts, the letterpress texture on voluptuous paper. A reader pines for the hand-stitched bindings, the original cover art…alas. But it's the twenty-first century and the miracle is we still have some good poems.
To lessen the blow a post (post) modern reader can scamper through several authors stopping to sniff at a line here, forage for hallucinated syllabics there, chatter in disgust or envy all the while tapping the mouse looking for rhyme and rhythm (sometimes even reason). After scratching at five chapbooks on Genius' website, I bumped into Jason Bredle's Class Project. It's not my usual fare. But hey we're Lewis-and-Clarking it.
The chapbook's surreal slant slides down a few silly rabbit holes. But Bredle more often and more effectively begins with a distracted voice repeating a common conversational phrase that unravels to reveal the speaker's weird angle on the world. Sometimes this is simply arresting though not without interest.
For instance, Red Soda begins, como se dice please don’t kill me//is something you once wrote on a piece of paper/and tore into smaller pieces/ and threw from the observations deck of a tall building/ which I thought beautiful. This is beginning to be interesting, but oddly is not strange enough. And the poem doesn't do anything with the sense of fascinated dread evoked by the image.
However, in other places Bredle's mild madness has more method. Take these lines from Candy Fountain. Pretend it's not raining or pretend the city has enough awnings. /Pretend you remember the last time we spoke. …My favorite story/ isn't the one about the boy/who falls into the abandoned grain elevator/but the one about the boy/who erases his memory to save his dying mother. /Pretend this song doesn't remind you of the desert/pretend it reminds you of the carnival. Like a slightly mad social smile, these lines attempt to cover only to reveal the denied lyricism and loss. Touché Philippe Soupault!
By Jason Bredle
Genius Chapbook
http://www.chapbook-genius.com
On-line publishing (just like M&M's and Roku) is irresistible. So, scrabbling and emitting high-pitched squeaks of fear and general distress, the reviewer is eventually dragged by the tail into disembodied chapbooks. Genius is an on-line chapbook publisher (this may carry more truth than intended). We will get to Bredle's book, but first a little whining.
One misses the physical chapbook's lovely fonts, the letterpress texture on voluptuous paper. A reader pines for the hand-stitched bindings, the original cover art…alas. But it's the twenty-first century and the miracle is we still have some good poems.
To lessen the blow a post (post) modern reader can scamper through several authors stopping to sniff at a line here, forage for hallucinated syllabics there, chatter in disgust or envy all the while tapping the mouse looking for rhyme and rhythm (sometimes even reason). After scratching at five chapbooks on Genius' website, I bumped into Jason Bredle's Class Project. It's not my usual fare. But hey we're Lewis-and-Clarking it.
The chapbook's surreal slant slides down a few silly rabbit holes. But Bredle more often and more effectively begins with a distracted voice repeating a common conversational phrase that unravels to reveal the speaker's weird angle on the world. Sometimes this is simply arresting though not without interest.
For instance, Red Soda begins, como se dice please don’t kill me//is something you once wrote on a piece of paper/and tore into smaller pieces/ and threw from the observations deck of a tall building/ which I thought beautiful. This is beginning to be interesting, but oddly is not strange enough. And the poem doesn't do anything with the sense of fascinated dread evoked by the image.
However, in other places Bredle's mild madness has more method. Take these lines from Candy Fountain. Pretend it's not raining or pretend the city has enough awnings. /Pretend you remember the last time we spoke. …My favorite story/ isn't the one about the boy/who falls into the abandoned grain elevator/but the one about the boy/who erases his memory to save his dying mother. /Pretend this song doesn't remind you of the desert/pretend it reminds you of the carnival. Like a slightly mad social smile, these lines attempt to cover only to reveal the denied lyricism and loss. Touché Philippe Soupault!
Bredle uses many end-stopped lines. Repetition and rhetoric hold the disparate memories, observations, idiosyncrasies, and dream-images together. The technique gives the reader a place to rest before riding the next riff. The method at its weakest is still intriguing in a horsing-about-in- the-dorm-room way. But sometimes Class Project's dissociative surface suddenly delivers. How can you not check that out?
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt
*****
Eros Among the Americansby Christopher Cessac
Main Street Rag, $10, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-59948-2279
So much to love in this chapbook in the Editor’s Choice series at Main Street Rag, and so many personal connections! Poet Christopher Cessac won the Kenyon Review Poetry Prize for Republic Sublime, and Kenyon is my alma mater. Cover art is a huge tusked woolly mammoth in a painting by Michael Roch called Lincoln, Illinois: 10 acres per head, and I was in Lincoln, Illinois, teaching at Lincoln College, when a student found the tusk of a woolly mammoth on a field trip for biology class. (I got to stick my arm up this tusk before it went off to be professionally cleaned.) And I haven’t even got to the poems yet, which remind me (and blurber Edward Byrne) of Richard Hugo’s “triggering towns.” (I’ve written my own chapbook manuscript of town poems, so I feel it, man!)
Anyhoo, you’ve got to love the premise: a set of poems titled for actual U.S. towns (or unincorporated communities), all with some echo of eros in their names. Or actually named “Eros,” as in “Eros, Arkansas,” the last poem in the book. Other towns are Amor, Troy, Keats, Loving, Laura, Ovid, Homer, Valentine, and so on, so you can see that Cessac has chosen towns named for an erotic word—“Romance, Wisconsin”—or poet—“Milton, Louisiana”—or character—“Ophelia, Virginia”—to pursue his topic of “eros among the Americans.”
They say it’s good to have a gimmick in a chapbook—or, more vehemently, as in the musical Gypsy, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick”—but this is a good one! All the poems are in couplets, matching the love theme, except “Sappho, Washington,” which is in fragments, again, for good reason, as fragments are what we have left of this singular poet.
“Every love deserves a temple,” says Cessac in “Amor, Minnesota. “But days race and language / is rarely so resilient or inventive as evil.” Such warning and wisdom recur, immediately, in “Troy, Montana”: “We will always be unhappy / lovers—trying to set fire on fire.” And such “We” based pronouncements continue as we journey among the Americans to places like “Solomon, Alaska,” “Broken Arrow, Oklahoma,” and “Eve, Missouri.”
I love the intelligence, humor, and pith (as in core or heart!) of these poems. As Cessac says in “Ovid, Michigan,” “The goal is to be loved / not loveable and they are not the same,” but I do find this book loveable and, as Cole Porter might sing, “so easy to love.”
Review by Kathleen Kirk
***
6x6, no.22
Ugly Ducking Presse
Brooklyn, NY. $5
Ugly Ducking Presse
Brooklyn, NY. $5
The issue I have in hand of “6X6” magazine is an instance of what librarians call a serial. Librarians, I’m told, find serials of great interest for their unique* and repetitive elements. In this case, no.22 of a ‘zine-journal” that features 6 poems by 6 poets (that’s the defining feature) ; Lily Brown, George Eklund, Chis Hosea, Aaron McCollough, Ryan Murphy, Jennifer Nelson. If each poet has an individual style, collectively they are somewhat “post-mo,” reminiscent of Black Mountain by Bernstein out of Prynne. This is not to do them justice, read in their individual territories and at random, the effect of 6 makes you think about the possibilities of poetry and poetry as language object. As does the nicely/quirkily constructed unpaginated little paper carrier, with its good printing and layout, “hand bound with Keener rubber bands) and corners cut by volunteers”-to give you a 5 sided, implying a sixth, object that fits handily in the hand. The folks at Ugly Ducking know the difference between display and text type! The letter-press printed cover bears a distinctive title that is the first line of the first poem! Even if we almost in livre d’ artiste land, its the poetry that must matter and for me most resonant were Lilly Brown’s short lined lyrics, a bit like those phrases Ian Hamilton Finlay hung as stone entablature from mature trees,“This history is dual;/ your here is hum in the receiver.” Or “inside prism windows,/Tress point/up, their roots/sized to cut glass”.
*“6x6” does not have an international standard serials number
Review by P. Nelson
**
Bar Napkin Sonnets
By Moira Egan
The Ledge Press, $9, 24 pages
By Moira Egan
The Ledge Press, $9, 24 pages
Bar Napkin Sonnets, by Moira Egan, is a crown of sonnets and a tour de force! Winner of The Ledge 2008 Poetry Chapbook Award, it was published by The Ledge Press in 2009. And, thrillingly, Sonnet #16, which begins “Imagine that he’s never had a wife,” was part of a collaborative crown—imagine that!—called “What Lips,” which evokes Edna St. Vincent Millay and her love life (wild) and sonnets (tight), exactly fitting Moira Egan. Actually, Egan brilliantly adjusts and varies the sonnet form while keeping it intact. She freely changes the linking lines—in a crown, the last line of one sonnet is the first line of the next, circling back to the very first sonnet (hence, a crown!)—in clever and edgy ways that suit her subject matter: meeting men (some married) in bars, drinking, and writing poems on napkins. Because:
That unexamined bitch—life—slips right by
unless you’re smart enough to learn to do
whatever you need to scratch your deepest itch
and leave your bad-girl signature behind.
unless you’re smart enough to learn to do
whatever you need to scratch your deepest itch
and leave your bad-girl signature behind.
Review by Kathleen Kirk
**
**
by Christine Vi-nan Nguyen
Birds of Lace Press, 2010
The second chapbook published by Birds of Lace press, blood and jasmine when i dreamed her is refreshingly non-conformist inside and out.
Take the outside first. A square of what must be kitchen wallpaper (teacups, flowers, leaves) is hand-stitched to the cover with yellow thread. The title and author's name are rubber stamped in purple ink over the wallpaper's design. The result is oddly attractive and made with care meant to seem casual. Vi-van Nguyen's chapbook opens like a calendar, horizontally, onto 8 x11 pages stapled in the middle, and looks like it just came out of a home printer. Overall, there's an unexpectedly pleasant unexpectedness.
On the inside Christine Vi-van Nguyen snaps shots from a first-generation Vietnamese daughter's hopscotch identity in both poetry and prose. She lands first on one side of the culture line then on the other, often standing with one foot on in each world. The prose pieces occasionally read like journal entries. The more successful prose pulls the chapbook toward memoir. The poetry has long lines, no observable form, and sudden strange and lovely lyrical moments.
blood and jasmine when I dreamed her, has perhaps too many words. But just as the reader flags, Vi-van Nguyen hits a note, "I'm thinking about cages." or "My mother's voice is difficult, deep and breakable, and I feel like I've waited too long." And moments like: "It was a heat-wave summer./ My mother's eyes./Her voice, saying/Every story is a ghost story. There are always ghosts.
The ghosts here don't haunt a stormy night's fireside or deliquesce into cliché. They infuse the relationships. Although the speaker's immigrant parents have a history obscurely moving below these surfaces, we don't get their stories. That history might give ballast and balance to the chapbook.
What stands out in blood and jasmine when I dreamed her (besides that elusive and interesting title) is dialogue. In a few exchanges Vi-van Nguyen gives us unique characters complete with relationships to each other and to others. Her dialogue snaps and crackles. In dialogue these poems find a voice and arrive home.
As a collection, the chapbook moves in a circle. The last poem though a different poem includes lines and phrases from the first. The circle closes imperfectly. This seems somehow true.
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt
**
**
Big Table Publishing, $10
This collection of poetry and short fiction speaks to women about the slings and arrows our sex is heir to. Following the author through a string of boyfriends, we face the familiar uncertainty, the let-downs, the traps. She knows how we deceive ourselves: “Yeah, I’m over him/I don’t need to keep checking my phone/to make sure it’s turned on . . . .” She knows the 12-year-old body image we can’t seem to escape.She knows the regrets—maybe the one who said he was from the Pleiades wasn’t crazy, but the Right One after all. Stratton has a handle on what we think we know about relationships, the humor and pathos of what we really know in our most honest moments (the double entendre of “We Lie Together”), and, in small glimmers, what it might mean to get what we really need.
Review by Susan Jo Russell
**
**
By Jason Fisk
Propaganda Press, $5
Jason Fisk’s chapbook, a compact 4 ¼ x 5 ½“, conveys a sagging spirit, indeed, starting with the cover—a photograph of a man, head down on one arm, clutching it with the other, a prominent wedding band the only detail. The poems offer a slew of depressed and even depraved characters, from the grandmother with Alzheimer’s who mistakes a closet for the bathroom, much to the delight of her grandson’s friends, to a range of persona dealing with broken relationships, unwanted or failed pregnancies, and suicide. Some of this gets tedious; the plain language doesn’t always sparkle, the juxtapositions are sometimes too expected (the depressive watching reruns). But there are gems—the afore-mentioned grandmother poem (“Spring Trip ‘94”) and the subtly disturbing “Tandem Bike” in which the “good grandson’s” self-consciously contemporary derision of romance is countered by his grandfather’s old-fashioned affection. Propaganda Press’s “mini poetry chapbook” is simple, but well-designed and sturdy, with cover and fonts carefully chosen. I look forward to seeing what other collections they pack into 48 mini-pages.
Review by Susan Jo Russell
Oh Forbidden
by Jill Alexander Essbaum.
Pecan Grove Press, 2005. 38 p. $9
It’s Sonnets come again, like an old lover who has really been around. All those hot dates (Surrey, Sidney, Keats, Wordsworth, Moore, Millay) and especially the “Shakespeherian” threesome where every line had a delicious sexual contour. Essbaum’s sonnets take enormous risks along the same described line of passion and sex and a number of the gambles aren’t, in this reviewer’s view, winning. But I recall Hume’s Difference between dreams and reality; the latter has more “force and vivacity.’ And that should be the difference too (albeit reversed) between prosaic prose and lyric’s enchantments. Essbaum’s forte is force and vivacity. A reader will be moved by this book’s excesses as one won’t by a thousand more judicious and less fervent volumes.
Review by P. Nelson
by Holly J. Hughes
Floating Bridge, 2007
Review by Laurie Rosenblatt
According to the blurb on the back of this beautifully made Floating Bridge Press chapbook, Holly J. Hughes spent twenty-eight summers on Alaskan waters working as a cook/deckhand and fishing boat skipper. You have to love a woman like that. Especially when she writes spare, honed poems sparkling with technical terms and odd, interesting bits of nautical history—makes me want to try sailing by butterflies or by ravens! But it isn’t just technical and historical jetsam. Hughes makes her wind roses, barometers, bowlines, square knots, bitter ends, clove hitches, and forestaffs work as metaphors. Don’t believe me, buy the book and if you do check out, “Working on Deck!”
Fabulous Essential
by Niina Pollari
Birds of Lace Press, 2009
by Niina Pollari
Birds of Lace Press, 2009
Review by P. Nelson
In our late civilization’s polyverse of aesthetic valuation (what “late civilization” means), let’s hope you don’t view Maes the same way you do Mondrian or expect identical satisfactions ,or read Niina Pollari’s “Fabulous Essential” the way you would any old battleship row of Big Name Poets. There’s real snap, crackle and pop in her on the verge verbalizations, the cut and thrust incising objects that weren’t quite there, to begin with. Some of the synapses may misfire but this is charged, edgy stuff.
‘Yesterday is a low flying egret whose wingfeathers comb/the sweet hum from the air. Like a hand/ beckoning, huge and white,/the palm towards your little car./And the ripple results, that electrical wind/like someone’s invention. A circle/saw with a full set of teeth.”
 by Gary Copeland Lilley Hollyridge Press, 2005
Review by Laurie Rosenblatt
Black Poem, a chapbook by Gary Copeland Lilley, contains poems that later appeared in his full-length book. Poems in ghetto dialect show us a gritty neighborhood and the people who live there. The language is rhythmic, the content interesting, the voice convincing, but the structure in many of the poems here seems more like broken prose than poetry. Lilley gives us portraits and interactions, bite-sized pieces--a flavor of the time and place that leaves us wanting the short stories these poems seem to want to become.
|
Cleaving
by Dion Farquhar Poets Corner Press, 25 p.
Winner of the 2007 Poets Corner Chapbook Contest.
Review by P. Nelson
The retrospective poems in Dion Farquhar’s Cleaving occur in a territory somewhat in advance of the strictly personal and in view of Baudrillard’s dry plateau where the Revolution (a post-Postlapsarian restitution) not only didn’t happen but never could have happened.
The 1960s were our best shot at it as Farquhar shows in her fast paced, intensely enjambed and politically edged lyrics. Do they all work? Maybe not, but the poet is always alert to verbal possibility and knows the Poetic Dialectic cuts both ways, leaving a sundering and an adherence; call it a “cleaving.”
The Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed
By Olena Kalytiak Davis Hollyridge Press, 2009.
Review by Laurie Rosenblatt
Olena Kalytiak Davis’ The Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed, has a smart, wry, writerly voice speaking in mostly free verse poems that nevertheless are tight and focused, often riveting on the page. Her subject is a woman, a mother, a cheating wife, a falling-out-of-love lover—it’s a hectic, frantic, interesting ride.
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.
***
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.
