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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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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.