Mon, 04 Apr 2011

WORD PROBLEMS by Erin Murphy

I find the pithy poems of Erin Murphy's Word Problems delightful; they are high-energy romps that sear with their insight.

I especially like "This Just In":

This Just In

The breaking news…
is there’s no breaking news.
No one died. There were no fires
or bribes or lies. No buildings
exploded or imploded. No one
voted. Nothing happened today.
It’s a disaster. Let us pray.

What I admire about this poem is its sharp turn into irony, from the almost palpable sense of relief from a day without drama to the realization that such a day represents, in a day, pure nothingness: "Let us pray." And it does this in just seven lines. It takes a lot of work to make something seem this effortless.

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NIGHT'S BODY by George Keithley

George Keithley's calm, deliberate lines show the mark of a true craftsman, while his carefully evoked scenes and stories show evidence of a wide-ranging and adventurous mind. These two sources, in Night's Body, create a poetry of unusual richness and durability.

Here's an excellent example of Keithley's technique at work:

Living Again

Then he remembered the blue house where they'd lived.
Her hair nesting on her shoulder as in this photo.
The firm weight of her breast. His hand opened.
The frame struck the floor; glass shattered--

He tore his shirt to reach the pain. Now
he choked on the silence in the cabin.
No breath. The door banged open. He stumbled

through the pines. Into the meadow. Pools of snow-
melt among the budding thistles, lupine.
Still he did not cry out. His mouth a mute O.

Above the silver river he saw a hawk flicker.
His chest on fire, he forgot his right hand
full of excuses. Fell among mule-ear. Grass

growing dim. Waking, on his hands and knees,
he noticed the pain that gripped his heart
had eased into his shoulders. Deep

in his belly his breath welled up. Again
the hawk flashed its blood-red tail
in the wind. He rose, slowly. Saw tawny

cattails nodding. Poppies. The first purple
thistles. He listened. For what? When
he was about to die he'd remembered the dark

rain in her voice. Spring rain falling all night
in the Sierra, lifting the river above its bank,
drenching the green meadow, waking sun-gold blossoms.

Then did his heart recover its rhythm, his mind
its balance? He took two steps. Heard water churn;
slosh sedge grass, slap rocks. A chill light

rushed downstream. When he saw it shiver past
the black mudbank already he'd begun to choose
this life in which our words follow one another
to the end: snowmelt, granite, hawk, poppies, river.

I find this poem rewarding on the first reading, and more deeply engaging on a subsequent reading.

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CRACK WILLOW by Shelby Allen

I admire the way Shelby Allen's poems evoke a sense of longing and desire, to embrace the world as fully as a wide embrace will allow. In Crack Willow, the image of open branches in these poems' trees is compelling.

Consider this poem:

Any Tree Will Listen

If you can’t speak of it,
stand in the embrace of a Norway spruce,
branching to the ground.
All of Norway will shelter you
in a cloak of boughs filled with fjords of light./p>

The church of the trees has a place
for what you are carrying.
The brambled chaos of a forest
growing and dying can guide you:
an old beech stump
is becoming a new kingdom
for ferns and voles.

Full-throated magnolias
open for arias in spring,
but in winter, trees show you
their true shape. You belong to something
magnificent beginning in darkness
below the ground.  It branches out
while keeping the center aligned,
stands through the seasons and trusts
small seeds to the wind.

If you can’t find a tree
when you need one, all you need
is one green shoot making its way
through a crack in concrete.
Hardness doesn’t have to win,
you too can rise.

"You too can rise": that is the hard-won message of this fine poem.

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ALL SEEDS & BLUES by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

The poems of all seeds & blues by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu are charged with color and light; the best word I can use to describe their experimental shapes is spritely.

"Spring Fugue" is a nice example of this poet's technique at work:

Spring Fugue

Spring came and
storming
the eye the hour
the magnolia
the sun

expandable
beauty
up to my tongue

the goldfinch
the snake
rise
to understanding
hushed
the voice of the past

The poem darts between specificity--"the magnolia/the sun"--and abstraction--"expandable/beauty"--and does so with a deceptive ease. This prompts my admiration, because the larger abstractions seem are rooted in the physical and grow organically out of them.

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