Thu, 12 Jul 2012

A BOUNTY OF 84s by Barry Spacks and Lawrence E. Leone

A Bounty of 84s by Barry Spacks and Lawrence E. Leone is a spritely collection of poems of stanzas that comprise 84 characters each, showing, despite their short length, how capacious poetry can be; I admire their combination of brevity and breadth.

"Be Simple" is a good example of this unusual book's approach:

Be Simple

What’s needed? Comes an answer:    
         Get yourself a radish.
  Oh get yourself a Japanese radish.
                   Be simple. 

    *

When first love bloomed it was so simple
                      then came the work –
                      after 30 years it’s simple again
                             go figure    
           
    *

Opting to say nothing 
                  they sat
                  each
                  refusing to disturb the other’s reverie
       be simple
                              sit with a lover

    *

Just her shadow on a rainy pavement
a misaimed photo

all that remains
           this memento by his bed
       unframed

    *

As a teacher, I led them to complexities,
oh many warring thoughts.
                    Now I give them
                  my Dalai Lama smile

    *

   He who simplifies
respects complexity,
      does it the honor of
           strict simplification
      kensho by kensho

             *

We do get wadded up,
     defended in our own knot
when all we really desire
     is to river,
     all we need
       is to flow

    *

        Before dawn,
                    stumbling
then insanely slow steps
        to sit
        on a zafu
           with absolutely nothing to do 
            but sit

           *

Now that the neighbor’s baby has stopped crying 
             a vast nothingness
this simple bed
                       unshared too long

    *

          Simply the moon simply a river
fisherman fishing his line
             meets the water simply
    a fisherman fishing

             *

Not knowing what it is
                   to be simple
                   two old men exchange poems
                   on simplicity        
                   drink tea
                   laugh at the moon   

Simple? Despite its brief lines, this poem, in the way it circles around its subject, this poem is hardly simple--but it is powerful.

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BLIND UNCLE NIGHT by Art Homer

I admire the earthiness of the poems in Art Homer's poetry in Blind Uncle Night, their engagement with work and physicality. They feel real rather than ethereal or deeply ingrained in the intellect (though there is abundant intelligence in them).

"Buck with a Broken Horn" is a good example of Homer's approach:

Buck with a Broken Horn

First your ribs, your half-fleshed face, a hip socket
cocked above blown leaves-I call my eager pup
to "leave it"-then your rack, atypically narrow,
four points by the western count, sans eyebrow tine,
and finally the broken stump of your right horn
reminds me of the coyote chorus here two weeks ago.
Such jubilation that the owls fell silent.
It could have been the fourteen-point buck
that broke this near the base, a misplaced shot
from some early season hunter. I vote
for Mr. Big, killed days ago and processed
into steaks and summer sausage.
If I go hungry, neighbors say, it's myown fault,
because you'll feed us all, coyote, man, the lust
of does for stronger genes, and in the cold that waits
this year till spring to settle on the land,
the thousand gnawing teeth of mice,
and finally the land itself.

Ribs, face, hip-socket: this poem is palpable and engaging.

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A STUDY OF EXTREMES IN SIX SUITES by Irene Mitchell

The intense poems of Irene Mitchell's A Study of Extremes in Six Suites are remarkable for their fusion of music and memory. I am grateful for her skill.

Here is one example:

Chiaroscuro


White and flat as an altar,
tundra bruises against sky,
so pure
it's miraculous a thought survives.

This is distance without shadow,
without mist or gorge.
This is evanescent silence.
This is brooding.

The world is a disorderly place
of endless complexity,
cubes and cylinders on a bed of stone.
That's the beauty.

One covets a little glitter
against a darkening sky.

"This is evanescent silence./This is brooding." This is also powerful work.

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CARPE SOMETHING by Michael Milburn

The embrace of Michael Milburn's poems in Carpe Something is fierce: these poems grasp experience in their taut lines and don't let go.

"Lust" is a characteristic example:

Lust

Lust runs
a man as
a plow or

a gunned
motor, as
tiredness

and thirst
drive him
to satiety,

but what's
his intent?
Sex, yes,

though
sex fails
to get at

the heart
if you will
of what's

clamoring &
why, when
the stirring

on her side
says she's
not asleep,

I, who had
no plan to,
turn to her.

This poem is indeed stirring.

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HEART. WOOD. by Eric Torgersen

Eric Torgersen's poems in Heart. Wood. are dense with imagery and rendered memory. The result is a world that is full, alive, and rich within his sculpted lines.

"In March" is an excellent example:

In March

In the year's
new mud
we search out
every last
stick of wood.

We burned
in high winter
great logs,
their grain
and fragrance;

today
a damp,
chewed stick
is too good
for the dog

and fire exacts
rolled-up news,
last year's catalogs,
junk mail,
even books.

We burn
the chopping-block,
spread ashes
on the snow
over the garden.

The physicality of these lines immerses the reader in the scene they depict.

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WOMAN WITH CROWS by Ruth Thompson

What I like best about Ruth Thompson's Woman with Crows is the way these poems form a chorus that is a narrative of a life, indeed of memory itself.

Consider the spark evoked in "Fireworks":

Fireworks

Cars park in front of our house, sit there
till midnight. It's July, and hot. Rap thud, and rocket
whine, and the spit of firecrackers.
We look out our window to see the flash,
then umbrellas of stars open red or green or blue,
sift down slowly onto the dark hill. Soft as rain.

I remember lying on the grass with my friend Kurt
as running children called to one another in the darkness,
and the moment fell open around us - whistle and thump
and blossoming, and the drift of ash petals onto our faces.
Yet later, sitting in the open car, night in our hair,
we could not hold it. Fondness would not catch fire,

and we gave it up. Back at school he wrote a few times,
but friendship was nothing to me then,
tenderness was nothing, I was pursuing sex, power,
and did not have time for damp powder.
Only now do I think of him sometimes,
his sweetness which was like your sweetness.

Here in our bed tonight let us set match to fuse,
flame, blossom, open, drift like petals,
and in our hearts let there be the shapes
of all who have ever been there: lovers and friends,
wives and husbands and animals and children,
pouring molten as stars into what we are together.

There are many such poems in this book, embracing life with brio, connecting, touching.

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WALKING WOUNDED by Robert Hill Long

I respect the way that the dark poems of Robert Hill Long's Walking Wounded achieve redemption in their grim and graceful lines.

The book's title poem exemplifies Long's technique:

Walking Wounded

Strapped with a boy's lipstick-red guitar, this whitebeard
plays a last set for tips in a near-empty joint.
His longhair-boy band used to play Camp LeJeune, Fort Bragg--
head-shaved kids, beer-drunk, gung-ho, Saigon-bound. He fired

airbursts of feedback to shake them up, they yelled Fag
but sang along. Four hoarse hours later, pacified,
they called him Brother, packed his amp, shared killer weed,
girlfriend pics. Then flew off to join the body count,

or the amputees, or the ones with no visible scar
who zipped the war in their skin like a body bag
and came home to long nights, bunkered in the corner bar.
That's their whitehaired brother Orpheus who points

his red weapon at shadows, and sings, We were all gods
once. And fires the last note into the back of their heads.

This is a poem about wounded warriors, a brotherhood that transcends time, even as the men in this poem age. It's a powerful portrait.

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