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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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Thu, 18 Dec 2008
Book of the Day: Slim Margin by Alison Apotheker
There is serious intensity in the poems of Alison Apotheker's Slim Margin. Strongly crafted and emotionally complex, Apotheker's work grabs the reader by the heart and does not let go.
"How Madness Found My Mother" is a good example of the strengths of this collection:
How Madness Found My Mother
Suppose, careening this night
across the Mojave, bounding
through burroweed and creosote,
these were not mere tumbleweeds.
Say they have gone mad from wind.
They straddle barbed fences
to fall back unhurt and wheel
in endless drills of duck-and-
cover over the desert.
What if she had heard in time
their tremblings, at first as faint
as a dust devil through lace curtains
strained yellow from sunlight,
then louder, more persistent
in their approach, the sound now
a tornado of teacups and tennis shoes,
would she have run to her windows,
flung each high in a flash,
her arms lifted as if in praise
of each open palm and glistening finger,
thrown wide the screened porch door,
the back door, the door leading
to the white garage?
But she does not hear the commotion
and sleeps through their caterwauling,
their game of cutthroat leapfrog
that bears down on her panes
and presses against her doors,
so that come morning,
when she goes to pick up her newspaper,
the door knobs don’t turn
and the windows won’t open
and in the cellar where she hides,
she hears them:
Don’t call the fire department.
Don’t call the bulldozers.
Your house is cast in darkness.
Let your eyes adjust.
The image of the whirlwind giving way to silent darkness: this poem is haunting and unyielding.
Book of the Day: A Memento Sent by the World by Marianna Hofer
In A Memento Sent by the World, Marianna Hofer's attention to the details of the world is that of a visual artist (she is that, as well as a poet): details are everything, revealing both the artist's care of the particular and the larger wholes they add up to.
"Blue Pears" is a good example:
Blue Pears
The ten thousand things
stand in the doorway
to a new world, solid
scarlet and green seckel
pear in hand, sunlight
ripe through a back
kitchen window.
Dropped from empty
second floor apartment
walkways, shadows spill
across your way down
narrow oil stained alleys,
disguise windchimes you
can hear but not locate,
sound that rolls over
the edges of fire escapes.
The new world revels
in a vibrancy that
crops up then fades
without second thought.
A back kitchen window
again. A just ripened
seckel pear in hand,
you bite hard, break
resilient skin, spill juice,
expose seeds as fossilized
teardrops embedded in
the white grainy flesh.
More pears, blue now
from the faded light,
sulk in the dark
bowl. You memorize
the color and feel
of ripe, reach for
the next pear all this
afternoon, no place
else to be.
"You memorize/the color and feel/of ripe." That is what Hofer's poems strive to do, and achieve.
Book of the Day: The Empty House by Faith Shearin
I like the poems of Faith Shearin's The Empty House very much. Shearin's poems have an emotional warmth and deft music that make them a pleasure to read. Here is one example:
Each Apple
At thirty-nine, each apple reminds
me of some other. The memory lives
in objects: fallen from trees or baked
like pie. I kiss my daughter and
remember my own face kissed.
All Broadway music is from a play
I saw with my father when his
eyes were fine. Maybe this explains why
the very old don't leave their houses,
why they eat no more than a few bites?
Drunk, full really, on memory
there is little room for anything new.
Each word has been spoken by a
thousand voices, each face is another
face rearranged. Night grows
thin and sticky as a spider's web:
even blue moons are not so rare.
The domestic image of the apple is familiar, yet it is rendered with a careful attention, and sense of its larger import (exemplified by the numerous memories it evokes), that make it complelling.