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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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Fri, 19 Feb 2010
NECESSARY TURNS by Liz Abrams-Morley
Liz Abrams-Morley's Necessary Turns is a strong collection that makes its way through a breadth of subjects. What unites the varied poems is their close attention to what is resonant, and Morley's unusual angle of vision.
Consider "In a Beginning":
In A Beginning
who named the beasts—
And didn’t Eve name the musical instruments?
And maybe constellations
giving woman the gift of dreaming
even in this beginning
I like to imagine.
The names of the lost—
(lost names float like confetti)
land in my alternate universe where
slaves in Virginia would be buried
under marble or granite quarried Up North,
Vermont, maybe, stones etched with dates
and taken south mile by slow mile. Instead,
I walk among trees I can’t name,
cast my shadow on graves marked
only by numbered wooden stakes, gray moss,
deer paw prints and a few crow droppings.
Moments like these, when cows low and the mist
hangs so close to the grass they chew,
I cry for language. Violin,
I imagine Eve said when the wind’s string
sang a slow concerto. Flute: the wren’s trill.
I stop at anonymous #18.
Isaiah, I begin, and here, Jacob.
This poem imagines an alternate place of memory, of history, inquiring into the idea of personal and collective beginnings: "I walk among trees I can't name."
BODIES ON EARTH by David Swerdlow
David Swerdlow's poems are quiet, spare, and contemplative. Swerdlow's lines leap across the page, making careful use of both visual and sonic rhythm to guide the reader's attention across the space of his thought.
Death is a frequent theme of the poems of Bodies on Earth, as "The Lake" exemplifies:
The Lake
Right-angled light, cold window,
small and terrible
decisions left on the pier—
Muted white pines
crowd the water like men
who believe
in a mysterious God.
Over the water
small waves blossom
over the dead.
The images, carefully mapped out over the short lines and white spaces, encourage a close consideration of the sense and feeling of death, of foreboding, in the world. The poem, quiet as it is, is resonant and powerful.
REVIEWING THE SKULL by Judy Rowe Michaels
The theme of death pervades Judy Rowe Michaels' Reviewing the Skull, but the book is not so much haunted by death as informed by it: the poems acknowledge mortality, look it right in the eye, and strive to find peace and power in the life that is.
"Climbing Eagle Crag" is one such example of Michaels at work:
Climbing Eagle Crag
for my parents
If I went alone to a grave,
took leave, year after year, with a single
flower–would loss grow clear
that way, distilled sharp as names
in stone? They chose ashes
flung in air. Each summer now, we four–
uneasy but together– climb for hours
along a brook, through hemlock,
over granite and blueberry, to find
the edge where each of us can feel
singly. Dread? Hurt?
Desire? Fear of saying nothing
or too much. Years ago
we learned the sharp, clear cry
that brings your own voice back to you
from the air. You had to be
shameless, high-pitched, sure
of getting a return. For just that moment
concentrated as rock,
surrounded but alone, I could
make distance speak.
Meditating on death, on memory, the speaker of this poem bridges the gap between the living and the dead: she "could/make distance speak." This is a powerful distillation, and characteristic of Michaels' work.
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.
Thu, 29 Oct 2009
MOVING HOUSE by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
The taut poems of Angela O'Donnell's Moving House are spare but unrelenting in their accretion of detail. The composites that emerge from these details are beautiful, but in a dark way:
Breaker
At home among the slag heaps
where culm dumps rise camel-backed
against an ashen sky,
fathers did not embrace their daughters.
The breaker on the back road
stalked us in our dreams.
Blind and bent with age,
its black apertures menaced us,
relic of a dead life
in a slowly-dying place,
a town of heaving men
who slept upright in their darkened parlors.
Fire never visible for all the damp.
It smoldered low in stoves and furnaces,
burned quiet in our breasts,
smoke and soot the only signs of heat.
This is a bleak house, a house of little love or hope: "smoke and soot the only signs of heat." The poem itself smolders, burning, with restrained intensity. I find this poem, and its book, compelling.
ANONYMOUS FOX by Naomi Feigelson Chase
Naomi Feigelson Chase's Anonymous Fox is a striking collection of brief lyrics that engage their subjects with dark, gnomic wit. "The Dead Like Kites" is a characteristic example:
The Dead Like Kites
Arms like sails,
They shake their salt
Down on the world,
On me,
Like tar glitter,
Warning shots across the bow.
What if, obedient,
I offer them
A Roman niche
On my heart’s slate hearth,
Feed them
The day’s first bowl of rice.
What if I offer nothing
But rough bandage,
Splinters that hobble me,
Hands that clap ears shut,
And robed in grave grass,
Join them.
This poem engages in leaps of perception, as the speaker moves from the strange image of death kites, to joining the dead herself. It's a strange journey from a gray light into darkness, chilling and striking for the reader.
Green Diver by Peter Sears is a book that regards the world with amusement, affection, and concern. A variety of tones pervade the book; sometimes Sears writes with plain realism, and other times approaches a more surreal perspective on the world. The result, though, is always surprising.
One poem, "High in the Bamboo," shows Sears in his quiet mode:
High in the Bamboo
The cat likes to sit in the bamboo,
rest its head on its front paws,
and look out at the world.
I like to sit on the porch,
rest my head against the back of my old chair,
and watch the cat look at the world.
I look up into the bamboo, too,
glance back down at the cat
to see if it has moved.
It hasn’t. I try to catch it moving.
I don’t succeed. I squint to pretend
I am falling asleep. I fall asleep.
When I awake, the cat is gone.
I look back into the bamboo.
The bamboo tops move.
On the surface,this is a poem about nothing, or perhaps more accurately nothingness: on a deeper level, it is a poem about perception. Its quiet grace reminds the reader that everything in the world is worthy of attention.
THE GODDESS OF GOODBYE by James R. Whitley
The poems of James R. Whitley's The Goddess of Goodbye resonate with an energy that belies the somber subject matter of many of these poems: decline, disease, death. His lines are intense, fast-moving, even furious in their wit and rhythm.
Here's one poem:
Memento Mori
October is intent on having its way with us:
haughty glabrous moon glaring down,
bitter wind bossing us around like twigs,
your cancer still spreading like an oil spill
in the once-pristine waters of your body.
At the window, a gypsy moth is negotiating
between two compelling choices—
the path of blue moonlight versus the frail
glow from the lamp next to your bed.
Of course, the moth knows nothing of nature’s
cruel jokes, nothing of technology’s artifice
and its flimsy veneer of resolution, salvation.
Back inside the room, everyone hovers in
quandary, each pair of confused eyes soaring
to and fro, hoping to land on something painless
to talk about, something perhaps lost in a corner
or encoded in the scuff marks on the floor.
None of us has been given any directions.
No one knows exactly which way to turn next.
This poem moves rapidly until its haunting ending: "No one knows exactly which way to turn next." In its shape, it's almost as if the poem understands that the end cannot be avoided, but the journey can be embraced fully.
History and sharp craft come together in Larry Johnson's Veins, a collection of formal and free poems on a wide range subjects. What unifies these poems is their large sense of the interconnections of history and individual experience.
"Jean Sibelius Bags a Soviet Plane, 1948" exemplifies many of this collection's strengths:
Jean Sibelius Bags a Soviet Plane, 1948
The maestro’s yard, near mossed, penumbral pines,
Echoes the bluesteel hunting rifle’s crack:
The fighter circles, wings off—was it a Yak
9 or Mig 3? No matter. Another shines
In cloudsifted sun, dropping lower. He fires again,
Leading the target this time with a vow
To sacrifice his frozen Eighth if now
He pierces the smirking aircraft, causes pain
For one damned Russian cog . . . so slivery smoke
Trails from the engine. A wobble. The pilot turns
East, igniting oil billows out. Fate’s joke,
He thinks, watching the smeared speck as it burns,
Roils brumy below horizon, its soundless crash
Too soon avenged by his music’s snowclean ash.
Evoking the Cold War, with humor, "fate's joke," in elegant rhyme: well done.