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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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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.