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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Mon, 14 Aug 2006
Book of the Day: Remedies for Vertigo by Walter Bargen
The strongest pleasure I get from Walter Bargen's brisk narratives in Remedies for Vertigo is a sense of departure: the speakers in Bargen's poems never stay in one place for very long. They are always striving, always seeking, always grasping for something that may be beyond their reach. Sometimes the need to keep going is itself the struggle. This theme is memorably depicted by Bargen in this poem:
To Keep Going
Far up the valley,
from deep in the willow thickets
along the creek, a birdcall
comes I don’t recognize.
Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote
that he would go away.
and the birds will still be
there singing. He was right,
he went away, and some of us
still hear him in the branches
beside our houses
and far up cold creeks.
But there are those birds
that have left too. The last
dusky seaside sparrow died
in a cage behind beach dunes
in Florida, unable to call in a mate.
The shrike, the butcher-bird, Jackie
hangman, the strangler, all names
for feathers on the same bird,
a songbird that goes against the grain
and with hooked beak breaks necks
of mice and other birds and sometimes
hangs their limp bodies on strands
of barbed wire where they dangle
like half-eaten laundry, their song
disappearing too, along with
the meadowlark that has perched on
a fencepost in my garden and tilted its
head back, stretching its neck, exposing
a black feathered necklace as it points
its bill skyward, clearly announcing
spring, a yellow-breasted soloist
fronting an orchestra of greening
grass, it too is going away, and for
no good reason that we understand,
and so there are fewer notes
to remind us of his going.
The victories in Remedies for Vertigo are hard-won, and not often transient. But the struggle, the striving, will continue.
Book of the Day: All This Could Be Yours by Laurie Blauner
Is "lush" an inappropriate term to describe a poem? I don't think so. This word kept going through my mind when I was reading All This Could Be Yours by Laurie Blauner. Blauner's lyrics immerse the reader in the body's music. Consider the dense consonance of the lines in "Clouds of Bones":
Clouds of Bones
accumulated around the small thickening fruit of organs
before you were born. Mother was the moon outlining,
encasing the blooming tree of your body whose branches
held up the refractable sky. I warned you, little sister,
that history repeats itself. I taught you how night
tossed objects up its dark sleeve only to have these tricks appear
at the appointed hour of morning. The stutter of daylight
couldn’t be kept out of our room by the heaviest
curtains. You can’t stop intentions, even the best ones.
Think of all the children that were lost between us.
Now mother creates her own world, a romantic clot
of stars dead center in her small evening. Me?
I often dream that I am out of my body, visiting
a cumulous chandelier or the mica-specked corner
of my childhood room, from within my body. But
you have learned your lessons too well, the clouds
of your bones became burdensome against the earth,
the moon reached out and took all you had to offer,
and you know the consequences of beginning the new,
inexplicable days like a blue, shiny place you just stepped out of.
I have one word: beautiful. Blauner is the very opposite of a poet of understatement: her lines are rapturous, joyful, alive.