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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, 21 Apr 2008
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.