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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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Fri, 01 Dec 2006
Book of the Day: Egyptian Compass by Pauline Kaldas
When I first read Egyptian Compass by Pauline Kaldas, I was transported into a world partly different from my own: a world that bridges Egypt and the United States, the Middle East and the West. Kaldas' book looks at Egyptian culture with American eyes and American culture with Egyptian eyes. For me, who has lived in the U.S. for my entire life and has only travelled out of the country a few times (to Canada), this literary immersion in the duality of two cultures is fascinating.
Consider this poem:
Rubies
Why dreams blood colored
suggest sky colors
earth mixed with sea
to yellow green red of feast days
a thousand crowds picnic
among sidewalk grass.
Holidays are full of little girls in ruffled dresses, hard leather shoes,
pigtails and ribbons, socks with lace
growing up into tight dressed high heeled teenager
swinging her round of butt across Sunny's Supermarket
aware of her hair
swaying her back.
The fruit seller's son scratches his head,
stares at the daughter
light brown hair and blue shoes clicked away
entering a crowded bathroom, the mirror catches
the whiff and curl adjusted midway to forehead,
a madonna Barbie, 100 pound price tag.
Crowned, adorned with Ken
providing French bedroom decor
the breeze's slight wisp into the stark undertone
of lace curtains drowned with yellow daisies
to undo the buttons.
Here, the scene of the daughter's Barbie dolls is played against her father (himself "the fruit seller's son") remembering the Middle East, exemplified by the contrast between "stark undertone/of lace curtains drowned with yellow daisies" and "sky colors/earth mixed with sea/to yellow green read of feast days." Kaldas uses bold swaths of image, of color, to convey the poem's delicate emotions. Well done.
Book of the Day: The Saint of Withdrawal by Eric Schwerer
In The Saint of Withdrawal, Eric Schwerer crafts poems that are challenging for the reader. Pushing narrative, and sometimes grammar, to a point that most poets would not, his work frequently opens up startling perspectives for the reader. Consider the dark wit of "A Dog Named Went":
A Dog Named Went
The room blue by day
dark by night
has a small story to tell.
A boy collects bones,
paints pictures, scotch tapes them
to his window. The mother
pulls them off.
The silly-headed sister makes pretend
cobwebs with her hair
where the glass is still sticky.
The dog lost for days.
The father thick
behind the car's windshield.
Then the four of them
at dusk in the lawn
calling Went! Went!
in the air. One day
the dog comes bounding back
and seasons press
like hands against glass.
This is one of the more straightforward poems in The Saint of Withdrawal. Cumulatively, the vision of the world they present is at once familiar and strange--and certainly memorable.
Book of the Day: Flume Ride by Midge Goldberg
Midge Goldberg is a poet who handles traditional form with brio. Less interested in contemplation than motion, Goldberg's poems are always in action, alive with rhythm and sharp emotion, as the title poem of Flume Ride exemplifies:
Flume Ride
Your arms slide around my waist, and we are going,
and I am pressed full length back into you.
We click and rock heavenward only knowing
the outline of the way but not the view,
the feel of every curve, turning and twisting.
Our fingers intertwine, and gravity
falls before us, leaving us resisting
in a well of weightlessness, then we
are dropping, through loops and lesser hills
of rapids run to overspills,
locked and tumbling together, falling
like eagles plummeting, calling,
until the boat slows, and we are there--
your fingers comb the water from my hair.
In reading Flume Ride in manuscript form, I found Goldberg's work energizing; I admired the twists and turns of her lines, and the emotional bite of many of the poems. Flume Ride is a bristling debut for Goldberg.
Book of the Day: Past Present Imperfect by William Ford
William Ford's Past Present Imperfect ranges over a varied series of landscapes, both artistic and emotional, in the poems' textured narratives, often from the world of jazz. "Scar Therapy" meditates on different kinds of pain:
Scar Therapy
After a session, I cannot put on
My own socks or sit
More than ten minutes
Without having to shift or cross legs,
Both bad for my condition
According to the physical therapist.
It's no wonder the rest of me
Turns inward, congeals into this line--
Right shoulder lifted,
Left dipping, every muscle
And tendon stretched or contracted
Abnormally. And what of the mind
And heart in the oriental
Oneness of everything?
I've demanded
The ex-cathedral judgments
Of jack boot conviction,
The broken down simpering
Of the confessional.
Three weeks old and near death
I starved from an inch of gristle
That closed off the small intestine.
My grandfather doc did it,
A sin in his profession, cut
Down the middle of my belly
And dug out the obstruction,
His knees raw from prayer.
The scar grew crookedly.
How much longer this pain?
Forget about pain, she says. It's only
The body's resistance to change,
That or quit the program
For a few weeks of relief,
The old confederacy reestablished,
Followed by ten years
Of gradual debilitation--
Cane, walker, wheelchair.
The scar will soften more,
She says, the more she breaks down
Old adhesions
Gently here, harder there
Until I unbend like a flower
If I, too, will settle down to the hurts
I enabled or did myself
Until the two of us have me
Standing up straighter.
As the poem casually unfolds, the hardened scars the speaker bears become more visible, distinct, and felt. Nicely done work on Ford's part.
Book of the Day: The Sudden Architecture of the Dark by David Floyd
David Floyd's The Sudden Architecture of the Dark is a gritty, often ambitious book of poems that draw much of their energy from the landscape of the urban Northeast, in particular Philadelphia, where some of the poems are set. The poems are often the antithesis of tender lyrics, as in the long poem "Hates" (a nod to Stephen Dunn's famous "Loves") illustrates. Or, to use another example, "Sonnet for the Nothing Man":
Sonnet for the
Nothing Man
He woke up with the stars in his face,
to the gentle indifference of the world.
Tired of the hubbub of his dreams--
promises left in the hair--the true faith
he has in faithlessness, he felt a wild
navigation within beginning to
calibrate. A tuneless cadence he could drum
his fingers to, tap his toes. Not a trace
of what he was was left. If put into words,
it would be like a sweet tyranny of rain
from without baptizing and soaking through
within. Its percussions on the rooftops.
The yellow flowers in the kitchen looked blue.
Prayerless, he waited for it to stop.
Floyd's poems, about persistence and perseverance, make his debut collection a strong one.