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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Tue, 26 Oct 2010
THE COAST STARLIGHT by Belle Randall
What I admire most about Belle Randall's The Coast Starlight is the book's strong control of sound and rhythm in the service of sharp observation. Randall's work is tightly formal, yet this tightness is not a constraint, but instead an anchor for powerful feeling and images.
School Boys On White
Damp brick, dark brownstone frame a square of light
Cornered by the long November street.
Late sun brightens the square where two boys fight.
My view of them from here is so complete,
It seems a painting called School Boys on White.
The bully who has won but isn't done
Becomes a silhouette, abstract and small,
Well balanced by the placement of the sun,
The iron gate that breaks the small boy's fall.
The cry to fifth floor windows travels slow,
As slow as we are slow to make a call,
Who watch paramedics closing up the show,
And come forth after lights and wail retreat,
To witness blood like mittens on the snow.
The scene of violence here becomes oddly still, the fight receding into the striking image of "blood like mittens on the snow." The iambic beat marches the image to its strong finish.
TAKE-OUT: SONNETS ABOUT FORTUNE COOKIES by Kim Bridgford
Kim Bridgford has a real talent for finding unique poetic subjects and then constructing infinite variations of those subjects. Her new book, Take-Out: Sonnets About Fortune Cookies, confirms this observation.
A sequence of sonnets that riff about the pithy predictions found in Chinese fortune cookies, Take-Out surveys its subject with wit and panache. Here's one example, "The Ship":
The Ship
Don’t wait for your ship to come in; swim out to it.
Lucky Numbers 5, 17, 11, 34, 7, 42
It is invigorating just to swim—
Activity that swerves from the pedantic.
Yet what if as you’re paddling limb by limb,
The ship you’re swimming to is the Titanic?
Perhaps that’s just the way that poets learn,
That when they finally see the dream’s true price—
The beauty of its shape from prow to stern—
It runs into a startling piece of ice.
Maybe it’s better to keep it down to size,
The dream of glory destined to capsize:
Instead the ship that’s making its last run,
Retirees on the edge of what was fun,
Or something smaller yet, for one or two,
The barely glimpsed tight smile of a canoe.
The poem makes a clever contrast between the image of the Titanic and a simple canoe--opting for the latter. Nicely done.
THE DAY AFTER I DROWNED by Betty Lies
I admire the zeal for experience that pervades the poems of Betty Lies' The Day After I Drowned. Fully living is not for the fainthearted, these poems suggest, and they seek after the full life, before all else.
"For the Dark" is a small sample of Lies' technique at work:
For the Dark
Lately I've thought it would be good
to cut a coat of darkness, out of whole cloth
of shadow, proof even against the flood
of moon pouring its white stone path.
If my hand could cover the sky
I'd cancel glitter from the world:
no stars, no rockets, grinning liars,
charmers, sparks that spit and turn
against the fire where they rise.
I've been years on the road to calm,
have gone through Hopewell, Hazard, Paradise,
somehow evaded the lanes of flame--
(in the town they call New Hope
stones run like honey in the sun, rivers glow
blue glass, and daytime creatures flap,
pinned by their own long shadow).
Last night I dreamed ten shady roads
but found myself once more
under the sun's thumb, that hot goad
herding me back into the glare.
This poem does not confront the dark as much as it accommodates it, acknowledges its existence, while still striving for the light, "under the sun's thumb," being driven back to bright glare.
NYMPH, DUN, AND SPINNER by Dolores Hayden
I like the quiet stillness of Dolores Hayden's Nymph, Dun, and Spinner: the fluid yet colloquial formalism of these poems gives them a contemplative air that yields striking insights into the connections between the human mind and the natural world.
Here's one example:
Advanced Study
--Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
Cork floors ensure a quiet workday morning,
the redwood walls are soundproof, walls of glass
reframe dry slopes of oaks and eucalyptus
where California quail scoot single file
along a split-rail fence. The scrub jays squawk.
A red-brown mule deer ambles by my door,
browses long grass, twitches her drooping tail.
She ruminates, gazing at me, rotates
remarkable long ears, wide, white inside,
pointed. One ear turns left, one right, askew
to catch all sounds. She shifts, she's so alert
I freeze. I do not stir. She's satisfied,
two fawns, a buck, emerge from heavy brush.
The scrub jays squawk again. The mule deer jump,
swerve in one bound, reverse midair, stotting.
(We all show off up here, once in a while.)
High on the ridge, astronomers adjust
a radio telescope, listen to space.
This is a fine poem. Of course, in one sense "Advanced Study" refers to the poem's settting at a California university, but the poem itself also enacts the process of "advanced study"--the poem's observer studying the deer, the deer studying the scene. Nicely done.
Grey Brown's collection What It Takes is aptly titled: these poems are hard and taut, wasting no words, confronting the unyielding struggles of life and death and finding small moments to celebrate.
I think "For My Oldest Brother Who Was Blue" is an apt example of Brown's technique:
For My Oldest Brother Who Was Blue
Because he was so close to being
one of us, when someone asks
how many,
I always say five.
A blue baby,
as though he died
of premature, angelic sadness,
a sadness too great to contain,
tiny heart
constricting.
He was the beginning,
I was the end,
three others strung between,
and I can't help thinking
how he might have saved us.
First-born boy,
just the grounding
our young father needed,
ally for the later son
lonely in our house of sisters,
and what might our mother have been
without this first sadness?
The next child, a girl
fearfully conceived,
spoiled through caution,
through desperation,
might have settled
more calmly into second place,
the rest of us drifting
down through gentle memories
never stumbling through
such pregnant grief.
This poem is quite powerful, moving from a recollection of the stillborn child to the evocation of "such pregnant grief"--itself a doubly evocative phrase. Well done.
BELIEVING THEIR SHADOWS by Anne Colwell
What I like about Anne Colwell's Believing Their Shadows is that the shadows don't recede; they are constant companions. they walk with us, behind us, in front of us, interweaving themselves into our lives. These intense poems engage the reader in vivid, memorable ways.
"Christina River" is a good example of this book's strengths:
Christina River
Where the tree leans dead into the water
the current left silt, last autumn's
leaves. The season's first rain made the river
muddy, fat, like a woman
due in March, mumbling in its sleep.
Swallows chickadees,
and snakes come. The turtle,
asleep under flattened shadows
of water striders, feels the slow
blink of body in the current
and the fallen rain.
She will heft her stony back,
move on clawed, stump legs.
Water striders, born awake,
skate still, easy in the rippling--
believing their shadows, never
imagining how slender a thing it is
to walk on water.
"Water striders, born awake,/ skate still, easy in the rippling-- believing their shadows..." This poem moves lightly, even effortlessly, through its lines.
I find the poems of Loren Graham's The Ring Scar difficult to read--not because of their style, but because of their subject matter, a divorce and its aftermath. Using nearly endless variations of the sonnet form, these poems present, at times with artful restraint and other times with nearly bald honesty, the pain of separation and healing.
I think "The Ring Scar" is a good example of how Graham's sensibility and technique work:
The Ring Scar
It should have disappeared by now, this faint
line of pale skin where my ring used to ride,
but it persists. It faded overnight
from my palm, but on the back of my hand,
part of me most familiar, it has remained
for months: indented, obvious, a fine
shadow, a delicate burn never quite
healed. Nothing will erase that little brand:
I've stretched it, flexed it, held it in the sun,
but it will not be exorcised. It hangs
on like an old unwelcome ghost, a crank
spirit biding its time, making mortals wait
until the day when, for reasons unknown,
it leaves off haunting and suddenly is gone.
This poem itself leaves the reader with a "delicate burn," the stark image of the wedding band's absence. Powerfully done.