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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, 29 Oct 2009
MOVING HOUSE by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
The taut poems of Angela O'Donnell's Moving House are spare but unrelenting in their accretion of detail. The composites that emerge from these details are beautiful, but in a dark way:
Breaker
At home among the slag heaps
where culm dumps rise camel-backed
against an ashen sky,
fathers did not embrace their daughters.
The breaker on the back road
stalked us in our dreams.
Blind and bent with age,
its black apertures menaced us,
relic of a dead life
in a slowly-dying place,
a town of heaving men
who slept upright in their darkened parlors.
Fire never visible for all the damp.
It smoldered low in stoves and furnaces,
burned quiet in our breasts,
smoke and soot the only signs of heat.
This is a bleak house, a house of little love or hope: "smoke and soot the only signs of heat." The poem itself smolders, burning, with restrained intensity. I find this poem, and its book, compelling.
ANONYMOUS FOX by Naomi Feigelson Chase
Naomi Feigelson Chase's Anonymous Fox is a striking collection of brief lyrics that engage their subjects with dark, gnomic wit. "The Dead Like Kites" is a characteristic example:
The Dead Like Kites
Arms like sails,
They shake their salt
Down on the world,
On me,
Like tar glitter,
Warning shots across the bow.
What if, obedient,
I offer them
A Roman niche
On my heart’s slate hearth,
Feed them
The day’s first bowl of rice.
What if I offer nothing
But rough bandage,
Splinters that hobble me,
Hands that clap ears shut,
And robed in grave grass,
Join them.
This poem engages in leaps of perception, as the speaker moves from the strange image of death kites, to joining the dead herself. It's a strange journey from a gray light into darkness, chilling and striking for the reader.
Green Diver by Peter Sears is a book that regards the world with amusement, affection, and concern. A variety of tones pervade the book; sometimes Sears writes with plain realism, and other times approaches a more surreal perspective on the world. The result, though, is always surprising.
One poem, "High in the Bamboo," shows Sears in his quiet mode:
High in the Bamboo
The cat likes to sit in the bamboo,
rest its head on its front paws,
and look out at the world.
I like to sit on the porch,
rest my head against the back of my old chair,
and watch the cat look at the world.
I look up into the bamboo, too,
glance back down at the cat
to see if it has moved.
It hasn’t. I try to catch it moving.
I don’t succeed. I squint to pretend
I am falling asleep. I fall asleep.
When I awake, the cat is gone.
I look back into the bamboo.
The bamboo tops move.
On the surface,this is a poem about nothing, or perhaps more accurately nothingness: on a deeper level, it is a poem about perception. Its quiet grace reminds the reader that everything in the world is worthy of attention.
THE GODDESS OF GOODBYE by James R. Whitley
The poems of James R. Whitley's The Goddess of Goodbye resonate with an energy that belies the somber subject matter of many of these poems: decline, disease, death. His lines are intense, fast-moving, even furious in their wit and rhythm.
Here's one poem:
Memento Mori
October is intent on having its way with us:
haughty glabrous moon glaring down,
bitter wind bossing us around like twigs,
your cancer still spreading like an oil spill
in the once-pristine waters of your body.
At the window, a gypsy moth is negotiating
between two compelling choices—
the path of blue moonlight versus the frail
glow from the lamp next to your bed.
Of course, the moth knows nothing of nature’s
cruel jokes, nothing of technology’s artifice
and its flimsy veneer of resolution, salvation.
Back inside the room, everyone hovers in
quandary, each pair of confused eyes soaring
to and fro, hoping to land on something painless
to talk about, something perhaps lost in a corner
or encoded in the scuff marks on the floor.
None of us has been given any directions.
No one knows exactly which way to turn next.
This poem moves rapidly until its haunting ending: "No one knows exactly which way to turn next." In its shape, it's almost as if the poem understands that the end cannot be avoided, but the journey can be embraced fully.
History and sharp craft come together in Larry Johnson's Veins, a collection of formal and free poems on a wide range subjects. What unifies these poems is their large sense of the interconnections of history and individual experience.
"Jean Sibelius Bags a Soviet Plane, 1948" exemplifies many of this collection's strengths:
Jean Sibelius Bags a Soviet Plane, 1948
The maestro’s yard, near mossed, penumbral pines,
Echoes the bluesteel hunting rifle’s crack:
The fighter circles, wings off—was it a Yak
9 or Mig 3? No matter. Another shines
In cloudsifted sun, dropping lower. He fires again,
Leading the target this time with a vow
To sacrifice his frozen Eighth if now
He pierces the smirking aircraft, causes pain
For one damned Russian cog . . . so slivery smoke
Trails from the engine. A wobble. The pilot turns
East, igniting oil billows out. Fate’s joke,
He thinks, watching the smeared speck as it burns,
Roils brumy below horizon, its soundless crash
Too soon avenged by his music’s snowclean ash.
Evoking the Cold War, with humor, "fate's joke," in elegant rhyme: well done.
DIMINISHED FIFTH by Jeffrey Bean
In the poems of Jeffrey Bean's Diminished Fifth, music uplifts, despite the diminishments of the world. "Major Third" is a good example of these poems' flavor:
Major Third
It comes from gravel lots where the state fair
pushes fried dough and bagged fish out the mouths
of red-lit tents. It’s pumped out of dunking booths
across the blocks and into windows, up the stairs
of the apartment where my grandfather is
dying in a room of mums. It’s the song of Sunday
traffic, the car horn’s hot punch to which he
tunes his hymn, the last tune he remembers.
It’s where the voices in rooms above him drift when
they cheer, or sing, when they ooh and ahh
or rise in anger, say where have you been,
when they call out for help or to mourn—even then.
It’s La Cucaracha.
It’s When the Saints Go Marching In.
Even in the face of death, one can soar on the wings of music, "when they call out for help or to mourn--even then." Such willingness to try flight is necessary in these trying times.