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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Sat, 28 Aug 2010
I enjoy the poems in Carol Westberg's Slipstream a great deal for the way that they test, and then surpass, limits. Both lyric and narrative, Westberg's poems develop a distinctive vision.
"Fear of Flying" is especially characteristic:
Fear of Flying
In our house pots sprouted wings,
flew swiftly after sharp words,
and kept on flying for days
after anyone forgot what set her off.
Was it the cat's paws
on the dining table? Knives
placed with blades facing the wrong way?
At the piano I sent my fingers flying.
For those hours music took over,
became refuge, proof of passion
and of tenderness.
After lessons I drove the back roads home
to practice, practice,
as if practice might prove my worth.
A gull sails on an updraft, keens
over the farmhouse a thousand miles inland.
The family crest rots slowly in the basement
where our father has forgotten it,
and our mother wills its damp demise.
Land-bound, we slide on in our lifelong roles:
matriarch, peacemaker, fuckup, scapegoat, clown.
In our house dreams flew under the radar.
I flew only at nighttime, alone,
thin arms outstretched.
By day I wondered what a flock might feel like--
inconstant formation,
each riding another's slipstream,
some taking turns at the lead.
While this is ostensibly a poem about fear, it is actually a poem about overcoming that fear, yearning for the slipstream. The poem's irony is powerful, and the rest of the book explores the tension in that yearning.
The ironies in James Brock's Gods & Money are both droll and sharp, as Brock examines the true objects of our worship and how we connect with them. Whatever our gods are, they are often not holy.
"Your Life as a Wealthy Man" is characteristic of this book's technique:
Your Life as a Wealthy Man
You decided to give up the poetry thing,
made money as a script doctor, which got you
into real estate and land brokering, which got
you out of law school, which included a short
stint web-mastering an S/M gay porn
site, which lead to the gig as an investment
banker. You sold cars. You sold personal wealth
plans. You went in for futures trading. And let's
say you made it easy. Here it is, the payoff:
you go to your female dentist from Brazil, her office
on upper 5th Avenue, and even the doormen
wear shirts that you would've paid your soul for
in your former life. They let you in. Her Brazilian
assistant, Moira cleans your teeth--she is blonde,
dark-eyed, and she is wealthy enough herself
to buy her own implants. She tells you she owes
no man anything. Dr. Pereira comes in, and she
smells of orchid and silver, and she's likely Moira's
older and prettier sister, the one with the wiles
to leave Brasilia and her father's deputy
ministership, high-tail it to London, landing
in Manhattan. She puts her perfect tiny
fingers in your mouth. "Your gums are very
firm, James." Of course, they are. And then
she makes the mold for the cracked tooth--it's
a temporary job for now, and she gives the
mold to Moira, who takes it to the lab where
four cousins, each a virgin, each seventeen
years old, fashion the filling. Dr. Pereira
shakes the nova-demerol cocktail. "Do you feel
any pain, James?" No. Not at all. But you are
weeping, sitting on all this dough, knowing
you'll have your own post-colonial island,
a porcelain cap, a titanium bridge,
weeping, weeping with money. And thus, it
is such a small mercy to issue, your own
private, final solution: Let every poem
be rounded up, blindfolded, and shot.
You could give those orders, with
these attendant women, your new world smile.
Nicely done.
THE RANCH WIFE by Robert Cooperman
Robert Cooperman's The Ranch Wife is a compelling narrative sequence about a woman's hardscrabble marriage and subsequent journey to a fuller life. Cooperman writes in a straightforward, accessible style that draws deeper resonance from common experience.
Here's one good example:
The Ranch Wife Remembers the Smell
of Sweetgrass
At our wedding
after the country quartet
had snapped shut
their instrument cases
and driven off,
Rick burned a braid
of dried sweetgrass:
blessing the happy lifetime
we'd have together.
"Close your eyes,"
he smiled, "and tell me
what it smells like,"
the grasses hissing
with a perfume
of cold, starry nights.
We kissed and waltzed
to the same song
we heard in our heads,
the aroma of prairie grass
sweeter than my glimpses
of the Northern Lights.
I close my eyes, now,
and relive that night:
our four-poster festooned
with wildflowers,
Rick and me so starry in love
we gave strange, secret
names to the constellations
when we stood by the window,
wrapped in one blanket
and each other's arms,
still smelling that love knot
of sweet prairie grass.
This is a lovely poem about love, capturing the heady rush of a new relationship, and which forms a contrast to the darker poems found elsewhere in the book.
Mon, 12 Jul 2010
INSIDE THE EMBRACE by Gayl Teller
There's a lot of humor, tinged with knowingness and sometimes sadness, in Gayl Teller's Inside the Embrace. Teller's poems move, in their unobtrusive, quiet fashion, through a broad range of subjects, engaging them with the same wry sensibility.
"Morning" is one such poem:
Morning
It comes like a call from someone in the past,
some old friend we'd forgotten on a swing
in memory, sweeping us into those striations
of rose and gold, hints of purple pulling us
through some sorrowful vortex, as she pumps,
and we begin to stir up those subtler hues,
little vibrancies we've learned from her,
and from so many others we've met along the way,
as we are so much more than our given primaries,
as our people palette can save us our lives,
and just as our small eyes can contain
that vastness of sky, I tell you, it's that beautiful,
this little shift in perspective, to forgive.
"This little shift in perspective" is quietly and nicely stated.
OPEN BETWEEN US by George Looney
There's a lyricism in George Looney's Open Between Us that reminds me, frankly, of James Wright. Wright was a poet who often evoked the harsh Midwestern landscapes--both pastoral and industrial--with some of the richest music of any American poet. Wright's presence in Looney's poems is clear, evidenced by the multiple epigraphs and allusions to Wright's work; but his spirit, his sound, is present as well.
Consider "Breaking the Surface":
Breaking the Surface
Loss, just the threat of it, drives us
to a nearby town with a bar
open another hour. In the parking lot,
the fins of old cars remind me
of monsters I believe
still break the calm of certain bodies
of water. Over gin we discuss
Lacan's Other, its relation
to children pulled from the Ohio
Wright elegized. Both of us believe
the Other's who we speak of
when we speak of things breaking
the surface, that the Other is
our disgust of ourselves
taking form. We rage against
how it creates legends. We'd like to
drop depth charges, leave it
for dead. All we can do is keep watch
and note the risings. Come this far
for gin, we hope to make it back
without loss. In Scotland, people gather
at Loch Ness with cameras to
capture what they believe in.
We believe what rises from any murk
is what we let loose. That it returns
to remind us words are born of loss
and to take us home when the last bar
open anywhere closes and the gin and talk
come to nothing--the way back
a dark state route where lovers pull off
and park in fields. All the way home
we know what's happening,
fins breaking the surface of winter wheat.
I like this poem a great deal. There are far worse masters to emulate; Looney takes Wright's graceful example and tunes it to his own elegant meditations on loss.
ALL OF A SUDDEN NOTHING HAPPENED by Janet Smith
What I admire most about the poems of Janet Smith's All of a Sudden Nothing Happened is the tension they embody between placid surfaces and underlying turmoil. The poems are dark and interior in their focus, but never despairing: instead each poem enacts the process of thought and feeling.
"What I Learned" is one strong example:
What I Learned
Mount Conness flared with ice.
A single cloud traveled the sky. The creek
flashed with small mirrors. Columbine
and penstemon burned like candles.
Grass, spring snowbanks, winter-bent saplings,
clouds, willows, ouzels floated
toward me. The light grasped every-
thing, warmed sap, vein, roots, then divided
the ground--dark and bright.
In college they taught us the mountains
are dead. That's when the sky begin to lose
pieces of itself. I sat in rooms.
I believed in books and long
educations; arguments squatted
at the center of the universe.
The old self died; I didn't notice.
A dog snapped at the moonlight.
I shed my animal body, assumed another.
So, I had not expected this again:
a breathing soft and close, a wordless
reason. What I felt reached
into my brain, showed its true
disguise, made me its companion,
had me love it again.
I knew the theories, but the world walked
toward me anyway. "It's beautiful."
That is an argument.
I got down on my knees.
Here the interior vision opens out into a world of startling beauty: the interior world drawn out into the exterior world. I love the ending, so frank in its sense of wonder.
EARTHQUAKE SEASON by Jessica Goodheart
I like the careful precison of Jessica Goodheart's Earthquake Season. The poems of this book move, line by line, through the daily world, and often startle us with their insights.
Consider the book's title poem, "Earthquake Season":
Earthquake Season
We can hardly tell anymore
whether the earth's trembling wakes us
or my seismometer heart.
Sometimes your aftershock footsteps
make me cry out. I'm not talking
about anything as trivial as the sun
but the loss of it.
What if I die without you
on the greasy tiles of a Taco Bell
in that radioactive light
where no one ever hopes
to look beautiful?
And yet this morning,
the floor rocked me
gently to the breakfast table
and you were there
with sunlight on the cactus.
And the only death I found
buried deep in the paper
as if beneath the collapse
of a house: a boy not yet fourteen
shot in the neck
under an open sky.
The varying scenes of death, culminating in the haunting image of the dead child, build to a powerful and unsettling climax.
Wed, 23 Jun 2010
Remembering Allen Hoey and Richard Moore
I'm sad to report the passing of WordTech author Allen Hoey this week. We published books by Allen in 2008 and 2005. Allen was a poet whose work melded traditional Western forms with influences from a variety of other traditions, including Eastern thought, country music and the blues, and more. His work could both swing and contemplate, and the same cannot be said of many poets. He will be missed.
I neglected to report this last year, but WordTech author Richard Moore also passed away last year. We also published a couple of titles by Richard, one in 2007 and one in 2008. Richard was a master of formal verse: in his hands rhyme and meter were tools that he wielded effortlessly, and the result could break your heart with its piercing of insight and emotion. While his work was less well-known than some others of his generation, it is no exaggeration to say that he was a peer of X.J. Kennedy and Richard Wilbur in his command of technique. The world has lost a great craftsman.
Mon, 07 Jun 2010It's with sadness that I report the passing of WordTech author Rane Arroyo last month.
Rane was the author of The Sky's Weight, which we published in 2009, and several other collections. He was a graceful poet who never shied away from the difficult parts of the world even as he celebrated the world's persisting beauty.
He will be missed.
BARNEY AND GIENKA by John Surowiecki
I love the the mix of private and public history in John Surowiecki's Barney and Gienka--it's a rich and complex collection.
The blending of the two flavor of history is well-exemplified in "Bolivia Street":
Bolivia Street
It's the last of the nation streets. After it
are the tree streets and then the president streets.
When it gets paved, shoes and lungs
get brushed with tar and the low-hanging
leaves of maple and oak get cooked.
Barney says there's nothing there anymore:
no candy store, no theater, no bakery,
no tailor shop displaying a boy's hound's-
tooth jacket with leather shank buttons.
The metal shop is a graveyard of parts.
The war plaque has no room for new names.
And since the bees have disappeared
the azaleas suffer and the thyme is winter-quiet.
Each house wears the face of someone old
and failing and shadows of airplanes dart
from roof to roof like angels of death.
The neighborhood changes, and this also exmplfies the flow of larger historical streams: much is lost. This poems is a deft and powerful evocation of memory and history.
DREAM BONES by Linda A. Cronin
Linda A. Cronin's Dream Bones is a strong collection that bravely confronts the difficulties of living with pain. These poems do not flinch in the face of difficulty, and they invite the reader on a difficult journey alongside them.
Here's a good example of the book at work, "Diagnosis":
Diagnosis
Waiting in the exam room,
I imagine the x-rays,
clean and stark,
harsh black and white images
edges clearly delineated.
Here -- good. There -- bad.
Negative and positive
outlined purely.
Defined by light. By rays.
So when the doctor hangs
the x-rays before me,
I'm not prepared.
Before me a world of
shadows. Clouds of gray.
Edges smudged.
As if a child's eraser smeared
the images. Sweat blurring
the lines. The doctor explains.
Shows the outline that creeps
beyond the border
until it slips away.
Black and white,
negative and positive,
into uncertainty bleed.
"Into uncertainty bleed": if there is a more precise evocation of the burden of disease, of being subject to the difficulties of the medical system, I have not read it.
The poems in Bobbi Lurie's Grief Suite positively burn with their subject: they burn with a purifying, forging fire, in which grief becomes white-hot and focused. Lurie is a fearless poet, and Grief Suite is her strongest collection yet.
Consider "Traveling North":
Traveling North
Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. The flat landscape. The blazing heat of cornfields. The landscape and body are one sensation.
Everywhere the books of atmospheric pressure. This book smells like miracles. That you were the chapter. That I was the slaughter. That sheep, my inheritance. That you were the shepherd who lead me here. Your hand reaching out to strike. Your hand reaching up to brush the hair from your brow. I never knew which. I never knew when. Your hand.
The cornfields are memories. You can not remember anything. The road is filled with dust haze. Your life is. Your death. I can not find it in this landscape. This collection of tendencies.
Though you are dead now. Though your hand would reach to strike. Though your hand would reach up to brush. The hair from your brow. Though light penetrates this. It is flat. It is frozen in self-image. I must resist the symbiotic wish. I must void the infantile condition. That region. This region. The atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of living.
Though you seemed invincible when your body moved. Though the way your hand. Would reach to your brow. Even though dead. Even though each wave of light penetrates. Even though only seems to slaughter. Sheep of inheritance.
Wake up at 4 a.m. Walk out naked to the porch. Skin shimmering. The way the word porch clings. The creaky swing. Dark lake of the body. What is always erased. The way your hand would reach to your brow and wipe your hair away. And it was always your hair. Always yours. And your face jutted into the landscape. This nowhere. This clicking sound of insects. Late summer.
I love this poem, recalling through death the "face jutted into the landscape. This nowhere. This clicking sound of insects." Death and memory fuse together to create a haunting new whole.
SLIPPING OUT OF BLOOM by Julie L. Moore
I admire the incisive poems of Julie L. Moore's new book, Slipping Out of Bloom. Her lyrics are brief, but resonant, in their short, carefully sculpted lines. They evoke far more than their modest surfaces might suggest.
"Becoming" is an excellent example of her strengths:
Becoming
Spring-thick with snowy
blossoms, the ornamental
pear tree slowly slips
out of bloom, sloughing off
petal by skin-soft petal, bleeding
green as leaf after spear-
like leaf thrusts through,
laying down one life
for another. How
willingly it becomes
and becomes.
Line by line, this poem poem enacts the process of becoming, tracing the flow of experience almost syllable-by-syllable. The poem is strongly-crafted.
Wed, 28 Apr 2010
THE PARK OF UPSIDE-DOWN CHAIRS by Alexandra van de Kamp
Alexandra van de Kamp's The Park of Upside-Down Chairs is a book of rich textures, rendered through the author's close attention to the objects of the world and its larger spiritual import.
Here's one good example, "Mailbox":
Mailbox
Painted black, blue or red, an object that rejects
the weather, it stands, silent-hooded sentinel, at the edge
of a road, while clouds conjure up their tenuous parades of
purples, greens, and grays. Still point in each day's Turner
painting, a mailbox is something the world dances itself
around. Like a flamingo wading on one leg, it is a pet,
a child's crayon-smeared shape leashed to the end of the
drive. There are too many centers to a life: our bodies,
our beds, the window's petulant glance. Meanwhile,
the mailbox waits, pressing itself into its one place--
a mouth we put our hands into, a little closet on a stilt,
a pillow of darkness we lay the pages of our life briefly
upon, an outstretched hollow arm.
I love that last image--"an outstretched hollow arm." It's resonant, and in its elongating rhythm at the end of the poem, perfectly emblematic of the poem's themes. Nicely done.
I'm a fan of poetry collections that invoke the form of a collage: a multiplicity of voices and perspectives circling around a central subject. Eve Rifkah's Dear Suzanne, a narrative of the life of the impressionist artist Suzanne Valadon, does just this, and quite well.
Rifkah's book alternatives between first- and third-person, narrative and interior monologues, and verse and prose, so it's difficult to capture all of its flavor. But "Resurrection" gives some indication of Rifkah's technique, speaking in Valdon's voice:
Resurrection
doesn't work for birds.
In earth among flowers
I buried my sparrow, when its quick-breath stopped.
I prayed as the sisters in the convent school taught.
I returned to the tiny grave
waiting to see my bird rise
and hop among low blossoms.
Day after day I waited.
Did that ungrateful bird fly to Paradise
without an adieu?
I dig through worm and stone
pale bones wrapped in muddied feathers.
This must be the end for all
souls feeding green shoots rising to the sky.
I will have no more of god-lifting.
The images--leaping from the sparrow to prayer to vision of Paradise--are rapid and effective in their span. This is a strong poem from a strong collection.
WHY WE HAVE EVENING by Leonard Orr
Leonard Orr's Why We Have Evening is a book of tender grace, spanning a wide range of subjects, yet all regarded with humor and affection. His understated craft offers subtle pleasures for the reader.
One of my favorite poems in the book is "Asking":
Asking
Would we ever be so used to sharing a bed
we would spend the last half hour
reading our books and saying good night
without making love one more time?
Would we reach the point of watching a film
slouching side by side on a couch
without reaching under each other's clothes,
without throwing everything off,
each ravisher and ravishee, rapturous?
How many thousands of undisturbed nights
would it take, clinging, roiling, roistering,
not to feel that heat, our slick skin,
our delicate organs, soft flowers, sweet
bouquets we keep presenting to each other?
I love this image: "sweet/boquets we keep presenting to each other." A quiet, common image, yet in this context it becomes nicely evocative.
TWO FOR A JOURNEY by Carol Frith
Carol Frith writes in traditional forms, yet with a smooth, contemporary voice that invites the reader in. The shape of her forms--often sonnets--in two for a journey gracefully contains a myriad of insights and perceptions.
I especially like this sonnet, "A Souvenir":
A Souvenir
The air is birdless, a bell of sound, and you
repeat yourself. Hello, you say, Hello.
I hear that final o warping through
the horizontal light. The patio
has lost its shade. The air is white. I know
the sound of it, like breath: it crackles and sighs
until your voice is tangled in it. Slow
as light, you say. I let your breath surprise
me. Sunlight floods the lawn, our chairs. It lies
along the roses by the gate. We’re al-
most through. In the heat, a wind chime tries
to stir and can’t. Your voice is round and small
against my ear. A souvenir, perhaps—
like light—ephemeral, about to lapse.
I love that last line: "like light--ephemeral, about to lapse." What a sharp ending.
BIRD IN THE MACHINE by Eve Jones
There's an intensity to the poems in Eve Jones' Bird in the Machine that I find unsettling, yet engrossing. Her lines are taut, densely packed with stress, both rhythmic and emotional.
Consider this poem, "The Adulteress to Her Husband":
The Adulteress to Her Husband
Years later, I still see you
at the point of my departure.
Your arms fell,
your voice tore like lace.
I had left long before. Still,
you keep entering my dreams,
a distant bell rocking in its tower.
It surrounds me,
too blunt for longing.
Something in me wants you dead.
I could be the high-necked Victorian
pacing the garden,
the letter tucked in my ruffled black breast.
That way, I could be free.
But my hands stink of blood.
Call it what you will, love -
it was love.
When I buried it
it was half-alive.
"Call it what you will, love--/it was love./When I buried it/it was half alive." These lines are cold, even cruel in their brevity, and to my ear unforgettable.
The poems of Jennifer Horne's Bottle Tree move strongly over their subjects, sure-footed in their leaps and jumps. The precision of these graceful poems indicates the long care that went into their making.
Consider "Chinese Women Gathering Pecans in Tuscaloosa, Alabama":
Chinese Women Gathering Pecans in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Which of these is kinder to the eye?
The figures of the three women
padded and bundled against a chill day,
leaning their heads together to confer.
The symmetry:
three old trees, three old women,
providing for each other.
Their fat sacks, bulging with nuts
to be cracked later and savored
for the dry and chewy sweetness.
The unexpected connection between old Chinese women and the landscape of the South is a welcome one: it brings a new light to a familiar environment. Horne's poems frequently achieve this kind of shining.
The poems of Susan Sindall's What's Left take a striking look at the world, finding import in strange, everyday scenes that blur the distinction between real and surreal.
The macabre humor of "An Oven" is characteristic of Sindall at work:
An Oven
In my charred oven,
ravioli’s bursting open, will burst and spill.
The heat’s too high and just right.
From the back of my oven,
half-lidded yellow eyes,
a stirring of shiny charcoal fur,
bumpy tail curled to nose.
Use has scratched
leathery paw pads with
cross-hatched,
white hieroglyphics.
Have you been sleeping here since your death?
Have I roasted my companion?
The quirky detail of the bursting, spilling ravioli in the charred oven gives way to a death image, of sleep. Here is a vague, unsettling feeling: what's left, indeed.
There's a great deal of precision in M.J. Iuppa's Within Reach. These poems accrete small detail after small detail, which coalesce into dense, expertly-sculpted lyrics.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is "Artifacts":
Artifacts
From the worn treads of my shoes
clots of mud come loose
and fall onto the plank floor.
Fragrance of earth, remnants,
last straw of winter–
visible marks shrinking to questions.
I can’t say why, but
pinch a piece to feel its powder
crumble between my fingertips.
Grit I brush onto my pants,
a gesture to keep whoever’s missing
within reach.
"Grit I brush onto my pants,/a gesture to keep whoever's missing/within reach": this is a resonant image, reaching through the physical into larger connections. "Artifacts" is emblematic of Iuppa's careful technique.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROOM IN THE WORLD by Carolyn Raphael
Carolyn Raphael's poetry has a strong neoclassical sensibility; The Most Beautiful Room in the World ranges widely through subjects such as art, philosophy, and history, frequently doing so in rhymed and metered forms. The result is a poetry that elevates its subjects, and the reader in the process.
Consider "Baby in the Hand of God":
Baby in the Hand of God
Why does this photo bring me such delight,
the naked baby in the dancer’s hand,
her face revealing not a hint of fright
but joy that she can levitate from land?
His body forms an arabesque, and hers
repeats the graceful pattern in mid-air,
as if she’d tried the earth and now prefers
to be one half of a celestial pair.
His darkness highlights her small, golden head,
his muscled flesh her softly-rounded line;
his face is profiled, hers full-front instead,
a counterpoint of worldly and divine.
She rests secure on his supporting arm,
exempt from gravity, immune to harm.
Describing a potentially perilous scene, the poem notes the joy that emerges instead within, and from, the image. The graceful lines embody the grace evoked in the image. Well done.
Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond by Pam Bernard is a powerful narrative sequence about a young man's experience in World War I. Bernard's poems have an understated, documentary feel to them, but the cumulative effect of the poems is undeniable.
Here's one sample poem:
February 1918
American Yankee Division training camp,
just south of Neufchateau, France
Rain has been continuous--
supply roads are muck beds full of lorries
sunk up to their axles, sodden
horses so weak from the crossing
they have forgotten their commands.
Drill fields are ankle-deep in mud.
At morning formations Raymond drops
from exhaustion and nearly drowns.
Tomorrow they leave finally for the front.
Many of the poems in the book are structured like this--short, descriptive scenes. But what a scene: the roads are "muck beds," the drill fields "ankle-deep in mud." And they haven't even reached the front! Bernard's book, through its accretion of these details, immerses the reader in the horror of war.
Fri, 19 Feb 2010
NECESSARY TURNS by Liz Abrams-Morley
Liz Abrams-Morley's Necessary Turns is a strong collection that makes its way through a breadth of subjects. What unites the varied poems is their close attention to what is resonant, and Morley's unusual angle of vision.
Consider "In a Beginning":
In A Beginning
who named the beasts—
And didn’t Eve name the musical instruments?
And maybe constellations
giving woman the gift of dreaming
even in this beginning
I like to imagine.
The names of the lost—
(lost names float like confetti)
land in my alternate universe where
slaves in Virginia would be buried
under marble or granite quarried Up North,
Vermont, maybe, stones etched with dates
and taken south mile by slow mile. Instead,
I walk among trees I can’t name,
cast my shadow on graves marked
only by numbered wooden stakes, gray moss,
deer paw prints and a few crow droppings.
Moments like these, when cows low and the mist
hangs so close to the grass they chew,
I cry for language. Violin,
I imagine Eve said when the wind’s string
sang a slow concerto. Flute: the wren’s trill.
I stop at anonymous #18.
Isaiah, I begin, and here, Jacob.
This poem imagines an alternate place of memory, of history, inquiring into the idea of personal and collective beginnings: "I walk among trees I can't name."
BODIES ON EARTH by David Swerdlow
David Swerdlow's poems are quiet, spare, and contemplative. Swerdlow's lines leap across the page, making careful use of both visual and sonic rhythm to guide the reader's attention across the space of his thought.
Death is a frequent theme of the poems of Bodies on Earth, as "The Lake" exemplifies:
The Lake
Right-angled light, cold window,
small and terrible
decisions left on the pier—
Muted white pines
crowd the water like men
who believe
in a mysterious God.
Over the water
small waves blossom
over the dead.
The images, carefully mapped out over the short lines and white spaces, encourage a close consideration of the sense and feeling of death, of foreboding, in the world. The poem, quiet as it is, is resonant and powerful.
REVIEWING THE SKULL by Judy Rowe Michaels
The theme of death pervades Judy Rowe Michaels' Reviewing the Skull, but the book is not so much haunted by death as informed by it: the poems acknowledge mortality, look it right in the eye, and strive to find peace and power in the life that is.
"Climbing Eagle Crag" is one such example of Michaels at work:
Climbing Eagle Crag
for my parents
If I went alone to a grave,
took leave, year after year, with a single
flower–would loss grow clear
that way, distilled sharp as names
in stone? They chose ashes
flung in air. Each summer now, we four–
uneasy but together– climb for hours
along a brook, through hemlock,
over granite and blueberry, to find
the edge where each of us can feel
singly. Dread? Hurt?
Desire? Fear of saying nothing
or too much. Years ago
we learned the sharp, clear cry
that brings your own voice back to you
from the air. You had to be
shameless, high-pitched, sure
of getting a return. For just that moment
concentrated as rock,
surrounded but alone, I could
make distance speak.
Meditating on death, on memory, the speaker of this poem bridges the gap between the living and the dead: she "could/make distance speak." This is a powerful distillation, and characteristic of Michaels' work.
Sun, 17 Jan 2010
The poems of Edward Byrne's Seeded Light are lovely meditations on the eternal subjects of poetry--love, memory, beauty--but they are rendered in a personal, quiet voice that gives them a strong grounding in lived, and felt, experience. Byrne's loping couplets take their time to reach their destinations, and make the journey unusually pleasant.
Consider "Anniversary Visit":
Anniversary Visit
Tonight, my wife and I will arrive again at that inn
we first visited a decade ago. Nestled into a high rise
beside the river, its balconies stretch out, as if gliding
over the slow-flowing waters below, and in morning
their shadows will reach across to the other shore
like black boxes stacked on an Ad Reinhardt abstract.
We will walk a path that parts the garden flowers,
so orderly arranged with constellations of violet
and pink blossoms separated from others of red
and yellow. We will speak once more of that week
now long gone and about those late afternoons
when we had slept with tangled legs in a hammock
sagging under the twisting limbs of shade trees.
We will seek out those same old signposts along
an upper trail, which yet creases the hillside, leads
to that distant peak with its white curve of waterfall
jutting just above us. Through our field glasses,
the geometry of far-off farmlands will appear near
and take on shapes similar to the puzzle pieces
our son loves to fit together when we are at home.
We will look back at that cluster of cottages
from another age still filling the village in the valley,
and of course, they’ll also seem so much closer.
And then we will pretend we are ten years younger.
Wonderful.
THE SKY'S WEIGHT by Rane Arroyo
The brisk poems in Rane Arroyo's The Sky's Weight can lift the reader up from grief, even as the reader continues to acknowledge the world's sorrows.
Here's a short poem that distills the spirit of The Sky's Weight:
Come Back, Blue Jay
Let the cats interrogate far birds
to be forgotten after the sun returns to
its black hole throne. Daylight keeps me
safe from forever. No one has quoted
joy in years and yes it hurts
to be so jauntily human. Look!
A bluejay: blue, sky blue, like sky.
Clouds are slow period marks
in a profound letter to Now.
Why do we ever feel unloved?
"No one has quoted/joy in years": that's true. Yet it takes only the sight of a jay to make us ask: "Why do we ever feel unloved?" Why, indeed?
THE SORRY FLOWERS by Julia Wendell
Julia Wendell's poems, though often brief, are not lightweight. Their taut surfaces embody surprising emotional complexity, and she continues this trend in her new collection, The Sorry Flowers.
Consider this poem, "Counting Sheep":
Counting Sheep
I’ve got my mother’s breasts & hips,
my father’s hands & calves,
his easy slimness—her high-pitched voice,
his obsession for being right,
her obsession for being righter.
Two arms for his, two for hers,
I watch the boomerang
on my loft ceiling: fan blades
throwing memories at the stilled moon.
Her gift of sound, love of horses;
his, of poems & words
cantering across the history texts.
His bad stomach, her worse heart.
Her way of playing angry
fingers on invisible keys—
Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum—
of glaring, “Couperin, my favorite,” while meaning
"Don't ever speak to me that way again."
If you ignored a problem,
would it just go away?
I read between her lines,
watched her chest move up & down,
sat by her bed & listened to her breathe:
Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.
It’s okay to go,” I whispered, hoping
if I gave her permission
she would just go to sleep.
The mixture of anger and love in this poem is striking. The bitter memory of silence, of difficult parents, is leavened by the gentle image of sitting by the bed, listening for breath. Wendell is a strong poet, and this poem's complexity shows why.
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC by Palmer Hall
Palmer Hall's Foreign and Domestic is a wry, accessible collection that easily connects individual experience to larger truths. Many of the poems narrate experience of the Vietnam War, and resonate in an understated way.
Here's one example, "Ghost Lights":
Ghost Lights
A still breath on the summer breeze
and high hills in Dak To loom
over us. No quick answers ever
spring to mind, no drops of peace,
not even less than slow, perhaps,
now, inertia, a gradual “settling in.”
We no longer even move our lips to ask
or, if we do, old slogans drop from voices
that always have an answer and never find
a truth, just wriggling obfuscations and
something like the Marfa lights dancing
at the dark ends of ancient tunnels.
The sense of foreboding here is strong: a sense of peace and truth is elusive, dancing "at the dark ends of ancient tunnels" (itself a potent image of Vietnamese combat). Well done.
There is both wit and lyric gorgeousness in Berwyn Moore's O Body Swayed, a collection that confronts the limitations of the body and celebrates the ways we surpass it.
Here's "MS," a sardonic take on the letters that name multple sclerosis, the subject of some of these poems:
MS
for David Lehman
MS stood for Mary Shelley, or magnetic storm,
for mackerel sky in Mississippi, or malfeasance
at Microsoft. The mother ship sank. Mother
Superior scoffed. The mystery shopper slunk
among suede mules and mauve sheets. Megastars
slung mud. Miscreants smudged murals. Such
mindless moosetwits, as if a maelstrom of slurs
and mean tones mangled Mahler’s 6th symphony.
Metrosexuals mimic Mona Lisa’s smile, moan
at muscle shirts. Students muddle manuscripts.
Sorry for Ms. M’s multiple sclerosis. Miniskirts
seduce money-spinners as mothers spit, mongrels
snarl, mendicants swoon, men shrug. So mind your
manky spirit. Mourn your shoddy moral sense.
So there! This is a well-done poem, a bright spot in a well-done book.
THE BODY TRIES AGAIN by Melanie Dusseau
The poems in Melanie Dusseau's The Body Tries Again are refreshing in their spark: Dusseau writes with humor and brio about subjects both physical and emotional.
"Ringside Heart" is a good example:
Ringside Heart
Muscle of our dark leaning
uncurls like the first fist of disease
in a body unaware.
Hands tremble, steady when bound.
The heart pumps, a fat pillow
of thunderous blood, useless
machination like breath,
a nova’s beam unseen
before it is murdered to pieces,
scalped star stuff strewn on the beach.
This heart could animate a corpse or a baboon.
Its only purpose to wet cells
and pray for hooves to crash on the bridge,
knock-deep timbre of wood
and the dark leaning forward of horses,
their flexing desire so like the heart’s
if the heart could lean.
But it will not.
It thuds in the empty church of the body
and waits as still air waits
for a storm to make it wind.
Here is a striking revisionary view of the heart, as a muscle, and what it embodies: the emotions in this poem are unexpectedly delicate.
Sheila Black's Love/Iraq is a book of striking power: a narrative of mismatched love set against the backdrop of the Middle East, specifically Iraq. Black's tone is at once intimate and cosmopolitan, as befits a subject as close to to the heart as love in a context as charged as Iraq.
"Bagdhad" is good example of Black's technique at work:
Baghdad
It is not Babylon. The city of candlelight
and travels of children,
but the real city
where men sell Adams chewing gum
and single cigarettes at the kiosk,
papers from Egypt and France, where there
are the dusty shipping offices in
the buildings with concrete fretwork,
lobbies of glazed tiles mimicking the legendary
mosaics, the billboards of Coca Cola
and condensed milk from America. This is what
I want, the city where you were a boy
distracted by a white moth
that fluttered near a flickering street lamp
(even then there were power outages,
even then the rumors of war). The weight
of the air against my legs. I want the sounds
that have no names—traffic, train, water gurgling
through a silted pipe, perfume flecked
on a hand, a man chewing charred
meat. I want what cannot be recovered.
The fifteenth seat of the third merry-go-round that
stretches big as the dying star, the one
we did not get to name between us.
The "dying star, the one/we did not get to name between us": that absence, that loss, is a recurring undertone in these poems, coloring the (to an American) exotic landscape of an ancient Middle Eastern city.