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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, 07 Jul 2008
Book of the Day: To Curve by Michael Daley
What I like best about the poems in To Curve by Michael Daley is the dreamy, yet precise, quality of their narrative: Daley is striving not for flat realism but the kind of heightened realism that constitutes memory. The scenes shimmer, with full awareness of their import.
This poem is a good example:
My Sister Is A Flight Of Birds
I'm standing on ice, a flight of geese
fleeing the moon, skimming the roof,
dampens the air. Seven quiet birds.
I have been saying their names so long
and now I can't remember
what their sudden rising means.
They call on the chill air
and let me be. When I slept, I hoped
never to wake and write these poems.
I'm not the man for this.
I wanted fire whispering over pages,
glowing in cloud. Instead,
I have spent my life as a man ice-fishing.
My line jigs down a hole
and sometimes in winter dawn
I draw up one freezing fish, and I'm surprised
holding it out, my glasses fogged like Dad's
under the small brim of his hat
on mornings he tightened our skates.
Can you remember anything from childhood?
I only know how ordinary we were,
sliding on the snow.
All night I kept these words beside my head,
white faces of skaters, a few haunted birds.
The image of "white faces of skaters, a few haunted birds"--that haunts the reader as well.
Book of the Day: Threat of Pleasure by Philip Memmer
Philip Memmer's poems are a form of thin ice: they seem safe to tread, but before too long the unwary reader will plunge through to the cold and darkness below, which in the case of Memmer is an enlarged awareness of the darker, hidden meanings of experience. Threat of Pleasure is both an elegant exploration of common life and the dangers that lurk beneath.
This poem is characteristic of Memmer's technique:
Parking Lot
Beneath the lights,
paramedics
tatter a sheet
of unmarked snow--
the shape in slush
the body leaves
tells how long help
took to arrive.
Already now
it fills with snow,
fading to gray,
then even white.
Even at night
the white hurts eyes
beneath the lights
of strip mall lots,
and nights are long--
the kids have hours
to find this snow,
unmarked, lit-up,
and waiting, still,
to be re-scarred
by sports cars named
for birds of prey.
Memmer's work is striking and unsettling.
Book of the Day: Liquid Like This by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Leslie Anne Mcilroy's poems are always intense, and not easy to read. I don't know of a poet as skilled at distilling fine music from the raw emotions of love, loss, and pain. Liquid Like This is a relentless, breathtaking collection.
Consider this poem:
Again
To start with the smack of your hand
would be foolish. The start is in the preparation,
the sleek micro-fiber skirt over tight skin,
the thin-stretch blouse that scrapes the nipples,
hair up, neck long inside the collar of leather
and chrome you tell me to wear to dinner,
where I sit panty-less on a cool black chair
anticipating the next penetration
through an opening of your choice.
You tell me when to smoke
and light my cigarette, feeding me
one bite at a time--each smaller
than the last--richer. You tell me
to sit still and spread my legs, moist
and open, making room for your fingers
beneath the table. You say you will
whip me tonight and I am eager
for the burn, the bending over, exposed,
your mark on my body. Each touch--
lick and lash--fueling this graceless
need for surrender, the giving up
like a dark, hot storm when all the lights
are out and anything can happen.
All I can say is, wow.
Book of the Day: Glass Garden by Ken Pobo
I consider it high praise to call Ken Pobo's poems well-crafted. In Glass Garden, Pobo pays careful attention to the construction of his poems, and the result is work of crisp rhythm and sharp images: analogous to the glass sculpture that he often writes about.
Let's take a look at one of Pobo's stronger poems:
Cobalt Blue Vase
As I peruse creased copies
of Life, a cobalt blue vase grows
hands, taps me. I take him
off a shelf he gladly leaves--
no more waiting
behind inferior glass tumblers,
awful melmac cups. Home at last,
I carry him across the threshold,
dash out into the garden,
pick two Blue Girl roses,
six Pouffe bellflowers, and
an uppity penstamon, pour water,
stick in stems. How handsome
he looks in the sun. That was
eight years ago, and now
we're the neighborhood's
happiest couple--my glass vase
shines as I do when I hear
his blue heart beat,
see his open blue mouth.
These lines are as smooth and polished as the vase they depict.
Tue, 10 Jun 2008
Book of the Day: Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner
The poems of Michelle Stoner's Flats and Riots are highly charged, even erotic, in their close attention to physical things.
Consider "Like Me":
Like Me
You're like me: amazed
when I don't hate
science
fiction,
amazed by physics
and her chemical brain;
like me in small tightening skin,
flat some days,
ethereal depths and riots
others
sun turns me
and the name of adventure
exotic messages sent
along untapped wires
like me.
Moving effortlessly between the abstract ("physics/and her chemical brain") and the physical ("like me in small tightening skin"), this poem draws unexpected connections. Stoner, with great economy, makes great leaps.
Book of the Day: How to Make a Mummy by Mike Smith
In reading How to Make a Mummy by Mike Smith, I often found myself chuckling or even laughing out loud. Smith guides us on a comic romp through history and contemporary culture, with a sharp eye for absurdity.
Consider this poem:
Tips for a Traveler in the Land of Giants
Not daylight, but a single bulb
hanging above, its brightness
a finger in the window frame's
smallest crevice...
You wake there to singing, lovers
bathing in a tub so large you squint
to see its far side. Start to step,
and everything
is soaked and slippery. Remember,
size counts, and you've yet to learn
what hazards even the smallest room
can hold. So when
they get to their feet, avert your eyes,
or thinking your wildest fantasy's
within your reach, and blinded by light
reflecting off their skin,
you'll tumble right over the sill.
(Once alone, vault the sink
with a toothbrush to reach the soap dish
and get a drink.)
Do not explore. That glistening razor,
sloppily perched, is always a danger,
and their falling towels may seem
a pleasant way
to go, but you can't think like that.
In fact, better not think
at all; it will only lengthen
the loneliness.
Slink, instead, between the slats of the vent
behind the sphinx-toilet. The trip
is hours long, but you're safe there.
The weather's temperate,
and they don't have pets. So get some sleep,
and in order not to feel the passing
pace of every fugitive
moment, tell yourself
that though morning is miles above you
where you are, it is happening
for someone,
somewhere.
This poem looks at a familiar landscape--the bathroom--with a strikingly fresh perspective. Seeing old things in a new way is the heart of Smith's distinctive vision.
Book of the Day: Theban Traffic by Walter Bargen
Walter Bargen's Theban Traffic is an adventurous book, retelling ancient myth in a contemporary narrative context in the mode of prose poems. I found the poems brisk and entertaining.
Here's a sample of Bargen's technique at work:
New Waves on Old Water
Stella travels two thousand miles to sweep up the dust of another relative. Whole mountain ranges pass below her quicker than dreams. She perches on the edge of a continent.
Because they cannot see each other, they cannot exchange diseases though the distant unease is worse. Though they cannot share a bottle of wine their separate glasses overflow with a blush of light. There is a smeared stain in the air like a burning city. Over the phone, he hears her say that's the sun setting over the Pacific.
The trees drop all their leaves. Each leaf falls into its own winter. They heap up words so the fire will thaw whatever has frozen. They throw children in and see how brightly they burn: one in Mexico, one repeatedly breaking his collar bone like a twig of kindling. Another crosses borders, not to flee old wars, but to escape into the skirmishes of marriage.
In a house facing west, Stella sits through the evening. The relentless line of horizon breaks through her. Waves claw the beach, dragging back the half-alive. Slicking the sand, the tide arrives like a rash. Plumes of water crown the tops of rocks. She feels a salty spray blow across her face. Marooned in the forgotten middle of a continent, Jake strolls uneasily looking around at what they've forged of old seas.
Never dull, always striking, Theban Traffic bustles and hums in its narrative flow.
Mon, 19 May 2008
Book of the Day: The One Remaining Star by Susanne Dubroff
Susanne Dubroff's poems in The One Remaining Star burn. They are incisive and unsettling. Consider this poem:
County Auction
You would not think
that among all these
rainsoaked to townspeople
and the worn down
possessions, placid, valueless,
wedding pictures would be auctioned off,
bid on for their frames.
But the face of the bespectacled,
Terrified, nineteen twenties bride
might have been the face that foresaw
They would come,
Rainsoaked, and stay all night
'til she was sold.
The tone is sinister, the implications powerful. Dubroff is a compelling poet.
Book of the Day: John Henry's Partner Speaks by David Salner
John Henry's Partner Speaks by David Salner is a compelling volume. Salner closely examines the experiences of working people, and the result is consistently illuminating.
Consider "The New World," which recalls the life of his immigrant grandmother:
The New World
I have been imagining how my grandmother
would have left Hungary, with only a sweater
to cover her bones, squinting at the sun
in the haze of the ocean, as her new husband
plays something like a guitar, but smaller.
She joins him in a chorus about a horse
who responds to the touch of a Gypsy trainer
but not the whip of the Hungarian master.
These newlyweds left in a hurry, carrying only
the little guitar and the old gray sweater.
The wind whips over the great steel decks
as she tells a joke about the subtle difference
between luck and fortune. They squint at a spot
suspended over the ocean. Even I see it--
that opal haze, brilliant with vagueness.
The "great steel decks," looking out over the empty ocean, are an evocative image of seeking a new life. Salner is quite skilled with these kinds of subtle, resonant images, and they enhance the narrative arc of his short and long poems.
Book of the Day: Fallout by Frederick Feirstein
It is hard to imagine Frederick Feirstein's poems outside the landscape of New York City, where so many of his lyrics and dramatic monologues are set. His newest book, Fallout, powerfully considers the scarring of that landscape after 9/11.
Here's a poem that exemplifies the strengths of Fallout:
To My Younger Self
The past is like a library after dark
Where we sit on the steps trading stories
With characters we imagined ourselves to be.
Neighbors in clothing from our childhood stroll by,
Unmolested, nodding at us, benevolently.
One with your father's face tips his fedora.
You lower your face in shame. I look back.
Someone is sitting at a long table,
Reading in the moonlight. I must look startled.
He holds a forefinger to his lips,
As if it is a candle for the dead.
You tap me on the shoulder and I turn back.
The street is dangerously empty,
Except for the newsstand lit yellow
Where your mother in a blue nightgown
Showing beneath her coat buys The Times,
A pack of Kools and, eyeing us, lights one.
You race to her, turn a corner. Goodbye.
I'm frightened as if I'm a foreigner
In a city under siege. Yet I know
It is still mid-century. Underground
Are only subways carrying boisterous
Party-goers or somber family men
Working the night shift or harmless bookies
Respectful of the No Smoking signs.
I walk to where the newsstand, shut,
Advertises brand names I'd forgotten.
I shove my hands in my pockets and whistle
A song we danced to when we were young.
I walk on for blocks, until I smell
Smoke from the burning borough of the Bronx.
"A city under siege": this is the feeling that these strong formal and narrative poems capture. The fallout is considerable indeed.
Book of the Day: Pointing at the Moon by Bill Wunder
Bill Wunder's Pointing at the Moon is a haunting series of narratives and lyrics about the Vietnam War. Wunder has the unusual achievement of finding the larger spiritual import of the scenes that he narrates: as a result, the Vietnam of his poems seems different than other poetic work about that war and landscape.
Here's one example:
Mama-san
Old woman squats at barracks end,
boils cabbage, fish heads and rice,
jabbers over a dented, black steel pot
left behind by the retreating French.
Every day the same smile,
rotted teeth, red from betel-nut.
The same stained black, silk pajamas
and pointy, sun-bleached hat.
She never learns our names. We think
it's the language, but she has seen too many,
knows we will all leave
one way or another.
The figure of Mama-san is one of permanence: the American soldiers are evanescence. Wunder draws this contrast quite effectively, and the result is a powerful poem.
Book of the Day: A Temple Looming by Lenard D. Moore
Lenard Moore's A Temple Looming is a series of deftly-etched portraits in miniature. Moore, well-known as a haiku poet, writes these free verse lyrics with a light, spare touch, but every detail burns:
The Soldier
The photograph's subject now aged
through time's ripening; decades later
the background gray,
a dream.
Splendid in uniform,
the barrel-straight stare
of his pure black face
shines like a bullet.
Imagine he'd not returned
from the Great War,
leaving a void in his family,
and in this picture.
These poems fill that imaginary void nicely.
Thu, 01 May 2008
Book of the Day: Easy Marks by Gail White
Here's the most appropriate comment I can make about Easy Marks by Gail White:
Gail White
has bite.
Her poems,
no tomes,
can snap
or slap.
How daft!
I laugh,
but see
just me
entwined
in her lines:
For My Niece as She Enters Her Teens
One thing the Puritans were right about:
Children are savages. They have no mind
or morals, and their art-work doesn't count.
But now, thank God, you leave all that behind
and count as almost human--golden ore
that only wants a little smoothing down.
So now, the news flash you've been waiting for:
Your aunt and uncle didn't come to town
on a load of melons. We discovered sex
without your help; we drove our elders wild
with music, alcohol, and politics,
and wore our hair as long as yours, my child.
So don't suppose you understand pop culture
when you don't even know who Pogo was.
The Beatles aren't yet ready for the mulcher.
I still know several ways to get a buzz,
the Buddhist creed, and how to write free verse.
Your generation, love, could do much worse.
Cold. Nice
as ice.
Book of the Day: The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer
I greatly enjoyed The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer. It is a strong book about the connections between art and the world, about how vision and seeing.
Casebeer's poems are strongest in their images and the surprise they can lead to, as "Matisse Picasso" shows:
Matisse Picasso
Fountains silent in a year
too far gone for the rushing
water of summer pools,
the Paris sky heavy
with drizzle and mist
on our expectant faces.
We wait in a queue
on the steps of the palace
with the others to find
what passed between them.
To find myth revealed
in the line of a rosy nude,
in blue on blue. How easy
to love the graceful curve
of hip or breast. To love
the way works are hung
in pairs, patterns that repeat.
The way they give up
their essence until slats
of shutters become
the metal strings of a guitar.
Here, art transforms, and is transformed in turn, bringing the reader along.
Book of the Day: Country Music by Allen Hoey
Allen Hoey's Country Music contains an unusual amount of life, and I don't mean this as faint praise. Ranging between short lyrics and long, loping narratives, Hoey brings in a multitude of voices and experiences, as well as brief evocations of the natural world.
The title poem gives on instance of the capaciousness of Hoey's work:
Country Music
Mothers and dogs die, and fathers too; in the fullness of time
they all do. Wives and husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, and lovers
run away or break your heart. Someday, someone will smash
your car, your truck, whether it's some dumb-ass in an SUV
or only a deer whose trajectory through life has the misfortune
of intersecting yours a few feet this side of the shoulder--
crumpled fender, bent frame, or just a broken headlight, your baby
ain't the same, and, even apart from the increase you know
your premium will reflect the next time the bill comes due,
it hurts. At some point in your life, unless you're someone
I'd never want to sit next to and sip a beer, you've felt
a little sad and maybe lonely when you've heard a train whistle
keening through the trees on a dark October night. At three o'clock
the wind batters rain against the bedroom window, debris
from the porch roof clatters on the pane, and you lie awake
thinking about how years ago you might have done something
different than the way you did it and rehearsing the many ways
your life might've changed. But would you give up the feeling
you get listening to the slow breath beside you, reassuring,
keeping you in bed when part of you wants to get up, get
the bottle and sit at the kitchen table with only a smudge of light
coming in from the one lamp you've switched on in the living room,
listening to that wind, those twigs and branches racketing
against the glass and clapboard--would you, could you
be any happier, really? A piece of pie, maybe, some stale
remnants of a birthday cake. Instead, you lie in bed, hear
the faint strains of a fiddle, the twang of a Telecaster,
and in the wind the wailing sound of a pedal steel guitar,
all of this put to music--this life you've maybe lived.
Tinged with regret, this poem is nonetheless a celebration of wisdom hard won. Well done.
Book of the Day: Rose Fever by Barbara Daniels
What I admire in Barbara Daniels' Rose Fever is the way she searches out feeling in even the most everyday objects. She writes in a quiet, unadorned style, but her poems have a sly movement from specicity to larger truth.
"What Saves You" is a good example of Daniels' technique:
What Saves You
A bowl of dark oil
stands on your table.
You dip your fingers into it,
cover your whole hand.
You call your feeling sadness.
It is despair. People say
you choose your sorrow,
that truck parked on your chest.
You don't have the strength
to sweep through a store,
buy a stark new lampshade.
huge ovals of purple soap,
white sheets that would bloom
in moonlight. All the utensils
of the heart. You don't paint
a blue sun on your forehead.
Remember prayer?
You squeezed each finger,
gently, eyes tight shut.
It was only an attitude.
But surely it saved you,
didn't it? Didn't it teach you
strangeness? The florid colors
behind closed eyes?
Snow clots the grass outside
your window. If you look
directly into it, can't you
remember the idea of light?
Moving from "a bowl of dark oil" to "the idea of light"--it's a big leap, but Daniels' technique is equal to the task.
Book of the Day: Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven
Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven is a quiet book, balancing a tone of lyric introspection with an unusually wide range of subjects, including China, spirtual concerns, and family history.
Let's look at "Willow":
Willow
All China a green-gold row of them.
When you walk through--
delicate, skirted, light-limbed
and yellow, swishing their loveliness
in the wind--they brush
the whole of you.
The Han are awfully dark
to love such hair: one single tree
the parasol of thousands
of years of poetry.
It is essentially
a pastoral tradition, a light
gesture in a concrete sea--
this park, these willows,
these bamboo growing near,
as if forever curtained
beneath these trees
Li Bai still sprung
pure passion from a flush of wine.
And if you listen
you can almost hear him:
bamboo, bamboo, the green shoots
of earth, heaven when they brush
these yellow skirts!
Looking both inward and outward, Dust and Bread is a book of subtle power.
Book of the Day: Telling Time by the Shadows by J.M. FitzGerald
John FitzGerald's Telling Time by the Shadows is an unusually frank confrontation with God. FitzGerald's poems challenge the emptiness of the universe, questioning how we can intuit God's presence in the shadows:
The Misunderstood
As for the talking,
if I wanted something said,
it would be here.
These lines exist as they do for the falling,
for the unrevealed hurt,
for God to cry and angels fear
at my corruption,
at my shaking,
at my curse.
I need time to get away,
but present demons love me worse,
and figure ways to pose as muses.
They point to where my secrets wither.
They bruise the heights and stir the lows
with longing songs that ever crave to scream:
Let me come back!
No voice is greater than this.
What happened to the blasted silence?
No one should believe I'm real.
I disclaim myself for persona,
or I'd be bawling.
The poem is over,
I used to feel.
But now who knows?
The sense here is one of longing, of agony, even a scream, and of uncertainty. FitzGerald's exploration of these feelings is powerful.
Book of the Day: Organs and Blood by Jean Hollander
Jean Hollander's Organs and Blood is a graceful, dignified lyric collection that explores the various intersections of human and natural experience: the body, history, growth and death. Hollander writes with a subtle and refined music that gradually brings her sharply-etched images into view.
"Despair" is one example of her technique:
Whatever the world really looks like--
is the tender green really grey --
we have eyes to think it beautiful.
The red-breasted bird feeding
its drab young with its own hunger
sees them in its own image
the fireflies dying as they light my bedroom
are dazzling in their promise,
the cat, its tongue rough in the confusion
of love and usage, sits at my hand
waiting for love's hand-out,
and on a cool night, this valley
this clover-covered lawn is paradise
though in your despair you plotted
to crawl out a window to death
but your very darkness kept you
from moving, for in our despair
we are helpless, the blind dog follows
its broken trail, the little frogs leap
into chlorinated water, they cannot help it,
though I fish them out over and over
the guileless moths wasting themselves
against the lights that save us:
cooking fires and lighthouses,
the simple flame of a candle--
ceremony and knowledge--
a radiance of night.
Emotion comes alive in these stately lines.
Book of the Day: Cloud Journal by David Rigsbee
We don't publish a lot of book-length poetic sequences: they are difficult to write successfully. Often in reading them, we find strong poems mixed with weaker poems, or a wandering focus. That's why David Rigsbee's Cloud Journal is such a nice collection.
Two long sonnet sequences comprise the book, and they are as different as can be. The first, "Sonnets to Hamlet," is a compelling narrative about the tragedy of a fire in the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina that killed twenty-five people. The second, "Cloud Journal" is an extended lyric exploration of place and perception. Rigsbee writes a quiet, fluid poem that allows his subject matter to radiate through.
Here's an example of Rigsbee's work, from "Sonnets to Hamlet":
Dragonfly September, birdsong is boilerplate.
The stir of heat, like a clothesline’s wave
keeps horizons indistinct: you suffocate.
An indigenous butterfly leaves the grave
to flit in children’s connect-the-dots down
cemetery lanes to haloed fields.
Time that is everything lies in the unseen;
a flick of its toad’s tongue yields
only one more spire-skewered prize.
Nearby the last cougar parts the weeds
leveling real estate with the same enterprise
that measures its life-dream in overloads,
where predator’s eye and victim’s throat
hold silence in place as you would a coat.
In its quiet detail, this poem sets the stage well for the horrific story it will later tell.
Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Changes at Amazon
Amazon is currently the largest online retailer for books, and we have made Amazon the major component of our strategy for selling individual copies of our books online: every book we publish has a link to Amazon.
Until now.
Amazon has recently made some distressing moves against print-on-demand (POD) publishers, which is the kind of printing my organization uses. Here's a brief summary:
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In 2005, Amazon purchased a print-on-demand printer/publisher, Booksurge. Booksurge is a competitor to the largest POD printer, Lightning Source (whom we use to print our books).
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Over the past few weeks, Amazon has been contacting some print-on-demand publishers and demanding that they begin using Booksurge for POD books sold through Amazon.
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If the publisher does not sign up with Booksurge, Amazon has threatened to remove that publisher’s books from direct sale on Amazon. The books would still be listed on Amazon, but could only be purchased from third-party booksellers who have listings in Amazon’s Marketplace network.
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Amazon has justified this move on the basis of improved customer service and faster shipping of titles.
We're concerned with this development. Based on these facts, here is how we will be responding to the situation:
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We have used Booksurge in the past, but were not happy with the quality of their printed products or their customer service. That is why we switched to Lightning Source. We plan to stay with Lightning Source and have no plans to add Booksurge as a printer. We do not want to compromise on the quality of the printed books we sell.
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Our books will continue to be available through Amazon, either for direct sale or from third-parties (if they enforce their ultimatum about using Booksurge or else).
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We have posted additional sales links on our websites for individuals to order the books we sell--specifically, to Barnes and Noble and Powells.
We think it's important to offer our readers multiple outlets to purchase our titles, so that the decisions of a single vendor don't affect customer choice.
For more information on Amazon's actions, this site offers a useful overview of information and the industry's response.
Tue, 18 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Smoke and Strong Whiskey by Robin Chapman
The poems in Robin Chapman's Smoke and Strong Whiskey are inward in their focus; whether narrative or lyrics about landscapes, they prompt a meditative attention from the reader.
"Shadows" is characteristic of the interiority of these poems:
Shadows
And who is it, standing
In the shadows, waiting these weeks
To speak to me,
And each time she motioned
I turned away?
For I had sharpened a knife
And cut my heart free
Of the man we loved
Who could not be in our life--
Mumbled into the phone Goodbye
And now I feared
That she stood with a knife
In her own childlike hand
Meant for the wild grief
Closing her throat.
I was afraid
I’d done her an injury
I could not mend--left her alone,
Dying of hunger and need.
Or was that me?
And the woman in the dark,
The one whose anger
Had sharpened the blade?
And there’s more to say than this,
For I dreamed I walked,
A woman grown, down a lonely path
And came upon
Two dark and curly-headed girls--
One sad, one sullen--
And held out to each my arms.
Went on with toddlers
Slung on each hip.
Dark, dreamlike, "Shadows" is haunting in its quiet intensity.
Book of the Day: Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree by Edward Dougherty
Edward Dougherty's Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree is a quiet, graceful collection of lyrics and narratives about the author's time in Japan. Reflecting the understated aesthetic so prevalent in Asian poetry, Dougherty's poems are mostly small exursions into revelation.
This poem is characteristic:
Origami
Folded by an old woman, silver bird
what do you know? Your paper feathers
are slippery. You give the light back.
At the flash she dropped like a rag.
A single day, a single bird: the day
that repeats itself with each crease.
The hours stretch out like crows' wings.
Samuel said he wanted to come here
to help people forget the past. My eyes burn
with the day's unrelenting length.
My life is brief and my sight short.
No wonder she keeps turning paper
in her creased but unburned hand.
While each poem might work on a modest scale, cululatively Dougherty's work expands the reader's awareness of human connection, history, and the world.
Mon, 03 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Sort of Gone by Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh's Sort of Gone is a dynamic narrative about men pursuing their dreams of playing professional baseball. Using varying techniques and voices, Freligh presents a rich portrait of these players' hardscrabble lives.
A good example is "The Wages of Sin in Western New York":
The Wages of Sin in Western New York
Fourth of July a tornado crashes
parties, backyard picnics, tosses ten
houses a dozen miles north, plants them
in a farmer's field. A warning
God's running out of patience,
says the parish priest, prompting
a parade of people to drive out after mass
to witness just what He has wrought.
Al finds a pair of sneakers that exactly
fit his feet, a catcher's mitt, nearly new,
a birthday card signed Marge and Greg,
a baby doll without its head. Wonders
what Marge did, or Greg, to piss off God,
make Him stir the air with His index finger,
twist the wind so it blew their lives
to kingdom come. What could He
do now to Al, his family, snug in their Chevy,
a blue bead in the rosary of cars strung
bumper to bumper in both directions,
do to them when they bend
to say grace over Sunday dinner?
Suppose there's a heavenly blackboard
somewhere bearing their names, a blizzard
of chalk marks tallied by angels
waiting to give the high sign to Him
that they've run out of chances, time
for a natural disaster to show who's boss.
Afterward would some small boy sift
through the rubble, think about
the wages of sin? Or would he test
the leather of a catcher's mitt, think
finder's keepers, loser's weepers?
No romantic illusions here, the quest of these players still has its own kind of grace.
Fri, 22 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Second Opinion by Leatha Kendrick
Beneath the colloquial surface of Leatha Kendrick's Second Opinion is a life-and-death struggle: a battle against cancer. The quiet tone of Kendrick's poems reflects a determination to find what is worth living for, to find brightness in even the darkest days: the underlying gravity makes the poems' appreciation of the daily rhythms of life that much more poignant.
Consider this poem:
Christmas, Adolescence, Yin and Yang
My first love called them Skeeter and Bite.
Equal, then, if small. Skeeter got most
of his attention. Now that right
breast's shadowed, a dark harbor
to what will not differentiate, but does
its incessant adolescent dance. Light
and unseen shadow. Eye of light in darkness,
eye of darkness in light--two nipples
staring from one divided chest. They'll lift
one out, the eye sewn shut by mastectomy.
At this festive time of year, God's breast
sees all, bears all. His eyes never
shut. Mary suckled Jesus, and
in some theologies, the milk
of human kindness flows
from His chest. At any rate,
that yearning to reach down and lift
someone to the heart does not depend
on breasts (I'm grateful to the man
who told me this, his eyes dark with grief.)
And yet, I lie abed touching the soft weight
splayed from breastbone to underarm and wonder
how we'd treat these dugs, these tits, if God Herself
floated forever and ever Amen in Heaven above
with lovely, heavy, downward-reaching breasts.
Mixing humor and spiritual yearning, this poem encompasses many of the strengths of Kendrick's wonderful collection.
Fri, 15 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Ancestral Radio by Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Edward Haworth Hoeppner's Ancestral Radio traces unusual connections between experience and our perception of that experience. Hoeppner covers a wide range of subjects, usually in an ambling free-verse line that takes its time to ponder, to meditate.
Here's one good example:
Poem without Hands
The idealist's question would be
something like: What right have I not
to doubt the existence of my hands?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
It would like stepping onto glass, unbroken sheets
to oval per instruction as a pony takes shape
in matchbook covers that would teach you how to draw.
But the mazed, concentric hoops of blunt desire
you've penciled, like so much bangle on your wrists,
resist the sudden transformation: no living animals
move from off these lines, their poor mathematics.
Without touch, far better the ivory slippers you have found
sleepwalking on water, slipping out beneath your robe
until you've reached the stairs and wake. A ship
inside a bottle, you stretch your arms against the walls
going down into the dark. You know the paintings hung
on the landing you can't see, but none of them are yours.
And what you must not do: reach out as you step down,
brush along the wooden frames and close your eyes,
stop here, put your too smooth fingers to your lips.
A poem without hands, a world without touch--an impoverished world, indeed. Hoeppner explores these ironies with wit and compassion.
Tue, 12 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: The Night Marsh by Penny Harter
Penny Harter's The Night Marsh is a book of discoveries. Harter's poems closely inspect the surface of the world, and delve beneath that surface as well, and the result is always a surprise.
Consider this poem:
Archaeology
She is always unearthing something--
here, a rotting bone a dog buried,
there, a headless doll with
stuffing leaking from its chest.
She digs in this field each night,
sniffing the dirt, savoring the strata
as she claws her way down
through soil and clay.
Perhaps the grinning skulls
of her cursed father, mother,
will turn up, blind as bulbs
waiting to sprout into her palms.
She carries resurrection in her hands,
her fingers splayed to sift the earth,
searching for some fragment of a skull
that answers to her name.
There is almost a physical, tactile sense of searching in this poem. Not only is "Archeaology" a compelling poem of seeking, it is characteristic of Harter's method.
Wed, 06 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Universal Monsters by Bryan Dietrich
Bryan Dietrich's Universal Monsters is one of the most unusual books I have read in a long time. Ransacking popular culture for images of monsters, Dietrich assembles them into an inventive pastiche that touches on the monstrosities in our own lives--our experiences, our culture, our fears, our pleasures.
Here's one poem that provides the flavor of Dietrich's achievement:
Dementia
"You can't kill the Boogeyman."
-from Halloween
You meet a woman, a worker of words
who loves O'Connor and Hitchcock's Birds,
all horror stories, the better for worse.
She's blonde and Wiccan, a comely curse.
Zombie, chainsaw, fetus, hook,
athame, candle, bell, book.
Her spell is modern, her interests, yours.
She knows of triffids and cepheids and spoors.
She, too, once sat in the glow of the screen
while the monsters processed and summer grew green.
Alien egg sac, mouthful of brains,
priest on the sidewalk, count the stains.
She takes you first by neck by eye,
then takes you again with the gorgeous lie
of language spun from the life she's not
lived so much as faced and fought.
Tooth, claw, razor, bone,
Halloween, Twilight Zone.
The monsters she has staked and boxed,
buried out by the hollyhocks,
outnumber yours by kith and kind.
Hulk, brute.... Malign design.
Rosemary's Baby, Eraserhead,
Race With the Devil, Dawn of the Dead.
You want her to know that you understand,
that sometimes the thing in the dark, The Hand,
is still attached to a heart that speaks.
The first date comes. You rent her Freaks.
Stalker, slaughter, barker, blight.
We live and love in black and white.
Universal Monsters is a truly ambitious book; it is, literally, fearless in the face of monsters.
Sun, 20 Jan 2008
Prose on Poetry: Classics and A Formal Feeling Comes
While the main focus of our press is poetry itself, we also try to publish books that expand a reader's thinking about poetry. Our Textos Books imprint brings out one or two books of critical discussion on poetry each year. The latest releases from Textos are especially notable.
The first is Classics, the latest collection of essays by the poet Rachel Hadas. Hadas is a distinguished poet with numerous books to her credit (including The River of Forgetfulness), but she is also a perceptive essayist about poets and poetic craft. Classics is part memoir, as Hadas explores her own background as a classicist and how that informs her poetry, and part critical discussion, as she considers a wide range of poets.
Textos' other major release this year is a reissue of Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes, a landmark anthology of poems in form by contemporary women. First published by Story Line Press in 1994, Finch's anthology laid to rest permanently an old saw that said that strong, feminist poetry could not be written in rhyme and meter. A Formal Feeling Comes went out of print after Story Line Press closed its doors last year, and Textos has taken this opportunity to bring the volume back to a reading public.
Book of the Day: Line Dance by Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker is the rare poet who muse revolves around joy rather than darkness. Even when confronting painful subjects, Crooker's work turns to the light. In Line Dance, her newest collection, Crooker continues this tendency.
Consider this elegy, which is anything but elegiac:
Blues for Karen
God does not leave us comfortless.--Jane Kenyon
The season of your death, morning glories trailed
along the wire fence, one tone deeper than the sky.
I still go to the telephone to call you,
but the lines don't stretch to heaven--
the title of a bad country & western song.
How could you die? We weren't done talking yet.
So I am trying to call you using the morning glories,
whose blue mouths are open to the sky,
whose throats are white stars,
thinking those tendrils could trellis upward,
hand over little green hand, so tenacious,
they hang on in any storm,
forgetting that the quick slap of frost
will put out those blue lights,
that the seasons will snap shut like a purse,
that this old blue world will keep on spinning,
without you.
Crooker's work has an uplifting quality that is rare among contemporary poets. I always find myself nourished when I return to her poems.
Thu, 10 Jan 2008
Book of the Day: Dislocation and Other Theories by Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy is a poet who writes with great flair and panache. This is not light or faint praise: Murphy's poems have an energy, an inventiveness, that is invigorating. Whether writing in free verse, form or prose poetry, her work examines the details of daily experience with humor and curiosity. Her latest book, Dislocation and Other Theories, bears out this observation.
Consider "Hula Dancer":
Hula Dancer
She will dislocate her hips. Or maybe they're already dislocated, a kind of double-jointedness, like the suburban girls back East who wrap their heels behind heads in slumber party stunts. There is fury in her rhythm, her belly a dark blur beneath coconut c-cups. More than once a drunk man in an airport aloha shirt has slipped a hotel key in the cinched waist of her grass skirt, slurring a room number in her ear. She drops the keys in the trash with the paper plates from this nightly luau staged by a fair-skinned businessman from Chicago. After the show, she'll change into a tank top and low-rise jeans with a red thong peeking up in back. She'll board the number 8 bus--named, after a decade of island time planning, simply The Bus--and listen to Ludacris on her iPod as she makes her way inland to neighborhoods where laundry stretches across apartment balconies. On Monday, her night off, she'll sit with a bottle of Sunny Delight under a line of dishtowels and her father's boxers as the wind picks up, lifting the clothes, bending the palms. And in between the buildings, pulsing low and steady, she'll see the real sun, Victoria's Secret red, right where it belongs.
While this poem is unusual among Murphy's work in being prose poetry, its fast-paced energy is not. Dislocation and Other Theories never lets you settle into a comfortable reptition.
Fri, 04 Jan 2008
Book of the Day: Shameless by Suzanne Roberts
Despite its brassy, sassy title, Suzanne Roberts' Shameless is a deadly serious book. Roberts takes the reader on a journey through heartbreak and loneliness to a brighter, stronger place. Her poems are haunting in their understatement, as the title poem shows:
Shameless
He knocks at the door, looks
through the window. You have no choice
but to answer. He explains that the end
of false religion is near. You'd shut the door
without an excuse, but he's tall and blond,
a thinner version, you think, of Barbie's Ken.
So you tilt your head with feigned interest and say,
Really? Tell me more. A harlot, he answers,
sits on the back of a beast. And?
The beast has seven heads and ten horns.
You say the woman rides him?
Yes, and exerts influence over the kings
of the earth. What's she wearing?
She's dressed in purple, wears a crown
of rubies, burns incense. She's exceedingly wealthy.
And shameless? He loosens his necktie,
puts down his briefcase, gestures with long fingers.
But the beast will make her devastated
and naked. He will eat her fleshy parts.
And she will burn with fire.
Yes, and he will carry out God's thoughts.
Intimate, longing with memory but recognizing the sober present, Shameless is a vital book of poems.