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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 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, 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 If I went alone to a grave, that way, distilled sharp as names uneasy but together– climb for hours the edge where each of us can feel or too much. Years ago from the air. You had to be concentrated as rock, 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 2010The 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 beside the river, its balconies stretch out, as if gliding their shadows will reach across to the other shore and pink blossoms separated from others of red now long gone and about those late afternoons sagging under the twisting limbs of shade trees. an upper trail, which yet creases the hillside, leads jutting just above us. Through our field glasses, and take on shapes similar to the puzzle pieces We will look back at that cluster of cottages and of course, they’ll also seem so much closer. 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 "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":
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 We no longer even move our lips to ask 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 MS stood for Mary Shelley, or magnetic storm, Metrosexuals mimic Mona Lisa’s smile, moan 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 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 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 The breaker on the back road relic of a dead life Fire never visible for all the damp. 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, Down on the world, Like tar glitter, What if, obedient, A Roman niche Feed them What if I offer nothing Splinters that hobble me, And robed in grave grass, 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, I like to sit on the porch, I look up into the bamboo, too, It hasn’t. I try to catch it moving. When I awake, the cat is gone. 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 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 Evoking the Cold War, with humor, "fate's joke," in elegant rhyme: well done. |
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