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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Thu, 23 Oct 2008
Book of the Day: Our Parenthetical Ontology by Deborah Poe
Our Parenthetical Ontology by Deborah Poe is unusually wide-ranging in its subjects. What unifies the poems is Poe's scrutiny of what experience means in a larger sense, her examinination of experience in light of questions of being:
The Burning Question
of why the mid-day
tennis shoe sand shuffle
traipses beside the
florescent silk strewn cactus
flower well beyond its prickly
and why the red rock
arches its back
to bend returning to the ground
its erosioned gymnastic
balanced under sun beams
and why the unpeopled plateaus
chant back their green-eyed
I see you seeing me
and lichened to another
are infiltrated by elemental earth.
Ultimately, every poem in the book comes back to the same burning question(s): What? Why?
Book of the Day: Killing the Buddha by Nancy Thompson
Whenever I read a book that engages Zen Buddhism, I find myself calmed, as the Zen sensibility calls up a sense of stillness. Against this experience, Nancy Thompson's Killing the Buddha is unusual: it invigorates as much as it invites rest. Thompson writes with a definite edge.
Consider "Curing Paralysis":
Curing Paralysis
Elusive and unreliable as it is, the wise man straightens out his restless, agitated mind, like a fletcher crafting an arrow. (33)
Tonight a woman says she is plagued.
Thoughts of women, children,
men she does not know batter her mind
like memories of stillborn babies,
car-struck dogs, lovers'
betrayals. She wails for those
who do not know she's wailing,
and suddenly I want to howl, too,
recollecting a self who cringed
from the hunger of gaunt children
on 34th Street,
who wanted to strip the world
of guns and bombs,
rescue battered cats.
The arousal of thoughts is sickness;
not continuing them, medicine;
tonight, I want this woman
to infect me.
This poem is indeed a howl, not a whisper, yet it retains the luminous awareness that the best Zen poetry cultivates. Nicely done.
Book of the Day: Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse by Anne Harding Woodworth
The suite of voices that comprise Anne Harding Woodworth's Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse are vivid and propulsive, grabbing your attention right away. Consider chapter one, which introduces us to Lacey, one of the central figures of the story:
1 In which Lacey offers a setting, high and low, old world and new
When you come from the mountains or come from the hills,
even the hills of Tennessee, no flat moves you
except if you see it from a ridge or a pass
or an airplane you jump from and land so that you
walk where marsh once drenched earth and now cotton grows tame.
Over Levadia's plain in Greece--circling 'round
like that, you land, get dragged, walk back to the mountains.
The going up is easy though knee cartilage
is frayed like shoelaces, awning rope. It's the walk
down that's hard because your feet and ankles push up
into your shins into your knees into your heart
cavity, shoulders, neck, the wheeze of your throat, your
pituitary. Juices burn, they don't relent
for your pain, familiar pain of common descent.
That's Paul, not me. Oh, no. My knees are fine. Just fine.
The house next door is the color of dead leaves, oak
and tulip trees, clapboards like loose bark, roof slanting
both ways, shingled, sparkling with black and gray cinders
and copper flashing 'round the stone chimney that smoked
white on cold nights before Sybil died and husband
Gaddis was left free to try on her dresses, all
of her jackets, and look into the mirror with
a comfort at last, relief he'd not known before.
I know he loved her, he did, I'm so sure of that,
and once I saw him kiss the face in the mirror
tearful in the early days of widowership.
I find myself wanting to hear more. Reading the book, I do.
Book of the Day: The Mackerel at St. Ives by Arthur Brown
I greatly enjoy the subtle, wry lyrics in Arthur Brown's The Mackerel at St.Ives. Brown is a careful formalist, but the strong structure of his poems undergirds a fluid surface that moves gracefully though varied emotional states.
His craft is on strong display in this poem:
Theresa
No child has left me dazed like you just did--
I mean for having grown into adulthood.
"There's no one home but me," you said. And I said,
"Things have changed." That's more than obvious.
We heard you born from just outside the door,
and seeing what sex you were, that all was well,
we ran for beer and brought St. Pauli Girl
into the room itself, and saw you off
within hours--your mother and father a family.
You say you had a summer guest from Spain.
Now you're headed off to Martha's Vineyard.
Tell your dad I'll call him in July.
Tell him I'd like to share a Guinness with him.
And tell your mom I had a dream of her--
we were climbing a snow-covered mountain.
Give our love to Anna, our goddaughter,
and Benjamin, the baby--is he walking?
Hanging up, I pick up crumbs from the floor--
my wife's downstairs, the children upstairs fighting.
It was your manner, remote and understanding,
your portrait-of-a-lady voice and presence,
that's given me this taste of obsolescence.
Rooted in the present, this poem evokes the past and glimpses the future, all while drawing a loving portrait of the young woman who is its subject. A strong achievement.