Public Poetry

SLIPSTREAM by Carol Westberg

I enjoy the poems in Carol Westberg's Slipstream a great deal for the way that they test, and then surpass, limits. Both lyric and narrative, Westberg's poems develop a distinctive vision.

"Fear of Flying" is especially characteristic:

Fear of Flying

In our house pots sprouted wings,
flew swiftly after sharp words,
and kept on flying for days
after anyone forgot what set her off.
Was it the cat's paws
on the dining table? Knives
placed with blades facing the wrong way?

At the piano I sent my fingers flying.
For those hours music took over,
became refuge, proof of passion
and of tenderness.
After lessons I drove the back roads home
to practice, practice,
as if practice might prove my worth.

A gull sails on an updraft, keens
over the farmhouse a thousand miles inland.
The family crest rots slowly in the basement
where our father has forgotten it,
and our mother wills its damp demise.
Land-bound, we slide on in our lifelong roles:
matriarch, peacemaker, fuckup, scapegoat, clown.

In our house dreams flew under the radar.
I flew only at nighttime, alone,
thin arms outstretched.
By day I wondered what a flock might feel like--
inconstant formation,
each riding another's slipstream,
some taking turns at the lead.

While this is ostensibly a poem about fear, it is actually a poem about overcoming that fear, yearning for the slipstream. The poem's irony is powerful, and the rest of the book explores the tension in that yearning.

GODS & MONEY by James Brock

The ironies in James Brock's Gods & Money are both droll and sharp, as Brock examines the true objects of our worship and how we connect with them. Whatever our gods are, they are often not holy.

"Your Life as a Wealthy Man" is characteristic of this book's technique:

Your Life as a Wealthy Man

You decided to give up the poetry thing,
made money as a script doctor, which got you
into real estate and land brokering, which got
you out of law school, which included a short
stint web-mastering an S/M gay porn
site, which lead to the gig as an investment
banker. You sold cars. You sold personal wealth
plans. You went in for futures trading. And let's
say you made it easy. Here it is, the payoff:
you go to your female dentist from Brazil, her office
on upper 5th Avenue, and even the doormen
wear shirts that you would've paid your soul for
in your former life. They let you in. Her Brazilian
assistant, Moira cleans your teeth--she is blonde,
dark-eyed, and she is wealthy enough herself
to buy her own implants. She tells you she owes
no man anything. Dr. Pereira comes in, and she
smells of orchid and silver, and she's likely Moira's
older and prettier sister, the one with the wiles
to leave Brasilia and her father's deputy
ministership, high-tail it to London, landing
in Manhattan. She puts her perfect tiny
fingers in your mouth. "Your gums are very
firm, James." Of course, they are. And then
she makes the mold for the cracked tooth--it's
a temporary job for now, and she gives the
mold to Moira, who takes it to the lab where
four cousins, each a virgin, each seventeen
years old, fashion the filling. Dr. Pereira
shakes the nova-demerol cocktail. "Do you feel
any pain, James?" No. Not at all. But you are
weeping, sitting on all this dough, knowing
you'll have your own post-colonial island,
a porcelain cap, a titanium bridge,
weeping, weeping with money. And thus, it
is such a small mercy to issue, your own
private, final solution: Let every poem
be rounded up, blindfolded, and shot.
You could give those orders, with
these attendant women, your new world smile.

Nicely done.

THE RANCH WIFE by Robert Cooperman

Robert Cooperman's The Ranch Wife is a compelling narrative sequence about a woman's hardscrabble marriage and subsequent journey to a fuller life. Cooperman writes in a straightforward, accessible style that draws deeper resonance from common experience.

Here's one good example:

The Ranch Wife Remembers the Smell of Sweetgrass

At our wedding
after the country quartet
had snapped shut
their instrument cases
and driven off,
Rick burned a braid
of dried sweetgrass:
blessing the happy lifetime
we'd have together.

"Close your eyes,"
he smiled, "and tell me
what it smells like,"
the grasses hissing
with a perfume
of cold, starry nights.

We kissed and waltzed
to the same song
we heard in our heads,
the aroma of prairie grass
sweeter than my glimpses
of the Northern Lights.

I close my eyes, now,
and relive that night:
our four-poster festooned
with wildflowers,
Rick and me so starry in love

we gave strange, secret
names to the constellations
when we stood by the window,
wrapped in one blanket
and each other's arms,

still smelling that love knot
of sweet prairie grass.

This is a lovely poem about love, capturing the heady rush of a new relationship, and which forms a contrast to the darker poems found elsewhere in the book.

INSIDE THE EMBRACE by Gayl Teller

There's a lot of humor, tinged with knowingness and sometimes sadness, in Gayl Teller's Inside the Embrace. Teller's poems move, in their unobtrusive, quiet fashion, through a broad range of subjects, engaging them with the same wry sensibility.

"Morning" is one such poem:

Morning

It comes like a call from someone in the past,
some old friend we'd forgotten on a swing
in memory, sweeping us into those striations
of rose and gold, hints of purple pulling us
through some sorrowful vortex, as she pumps,
and we begin to stir up those subtler hues,
little vibrancies we've learned from her,
and from so many others we've met along the way,
as we are so much more than our given primaries,
as our people palette can save us our lives,
and just as our small eyes can contain
that vastness of sky, I tell you, it's that beautiful,
this little shift in perspective, to forgive.

"This little shift in perspective" is quietly and nicely stated.

OPEN BETWEEN US by George Looney

There's a lyricism in George Looney's Open Between Us that reminds me, frankly, of James Wright. Wright was a poet who often evoked the harsh Midwestern landscapes--both pastoral and industrial--with some of the richest music of any American poet. Wright's presence in Looney's poems is clear, evidenced by the multiple epigraphs and allusions to Wright's work; but his spirit, his sound, is present as well.

Consider "Breaking the Surface":

Breaking the Surface

Loss, just the threat of it, drives us
to a nearby town with a bar
open another hour. In the parking lot,

the fins of old cars remind me
of monsters I believe
still break the calm of certain bodies

of water. Over gin we discuss
Lacan's Other, its relation
to children pulled from the Ohio

Wright elegized. Both of us believe
the Other's who we speak of
when we speak of things breaking

the surface, that the Other is
our disgust of ourselves
taking form. We rage against

how it creates legends. We'd like to
drop depth charges, leave it
for dead. All we can do is keep watch

and note the risings. Come this far
for gin, we hope to make it back
without loss. In Scotland, people gather

at Loch Ness with cameras to
capture what they believe in.
We believe what rises from any murk

is what we let loose. That it returns
to remind us words are born of loss
and to take us home when the last bar

open anywhere closes and the gin and talk
come to nothing--the way back
a dark state route where lovers pull off

and park in fields. All the way home
we know what's happening,
fins breaking the surface of winter wheat.

I like this poem a great deal. There are far worse masters to emulate; Looney takes Wright's graceful example and tunes it to his own elegant meditations on loss.

ALL OF A SUDDEN NOTHING HAPPENED by Janet Smith

What I admire most about the poems of Janet Smith's All of a Sudden Nothing Happened is the tension they embody between placid surfaces and underlying turmoil. The poems are dark and interior in their focus, but never despairing: instead each poem enacts the process of thought and feeling.

"What I Learned" is one strong example:

What I Learned

Mount Conness flared with ice.
A single cloud traveled the sky. The creek
flashed with small mirrors. Columbine

and penstemon burned like candles.
Grass, spring snowbanks, winter-bent saplings,
clouds, willows, ouzels floated

toward me. The light grasped every-
thing, warmed sap, vein, roots, then divided
the ground--dark and bright.

In college they taught us the mountains
are dead. That's when the sky begin to lose
pieces of itself. I sat in rooms.

I believed in books and long
educations; arguments squatted
at the center of the universe.

The old self died; I didn't notice.
A dog snapped at the moonlight.
I shed my animal body, assumed another.

So, I had not expected this again:
a breathing soft and close, a wordless
reason. What I felt reached

into my brain, showed its true
disguise, made me its companion,
had me love it again.

I knew the theories, but the world walked
toward me anyway. "It's beautiful."
That is an argument.
I got down on my knees.

Here the interior vision opens out into a world of startling beauty: the interior world drawn out into the exterior world. I love the ending, so frank in its sense of wonder.

EARTHQUAKE SEASON by Jessica Goodheart

I like the careful precison of Jessica Goodheart's Earthquake Season. The poems of this book move, line by line, through the daily world, and often startle us with their insights.

Consider the book's title poem, "Earthquake Season":

Earthquake Season

We can hardly tell anymore
whether the earth's trembling wakes us
or my seismometer heart.

Sometimes your aftershock footsteps
make me cry out. I'm not talking
about anything as trivial as the sun
but the loss of it.

What if I die without you
on the greasy tiles of a Taco Bell
in that radioactive light
where no one ever hopes
to look beautiful?

And yet this morning,
the floor rocked me
gently to the breakfast table
and you were there
with sunlight on the cactus.
And the only death I found
buried deep in the paper
as if beneath the collapse
of a house: a boy not yet fourteen
shot in the neck
under an open sky.

The varying scenes of death, culminating in the haunting image of the dead child, build to a powerful and unsettling climax.

Remembering Allen Hoey and Richard Moore

I'm sad to report the passing of WordTech author Allen Hoey this week. We published books by Allen in 2008 and 2005. Allen was a poet whose work melded traditional Western forms with influences from a variety of other traditions, including Eastern thought, country music and the blues, and more. His work could both swing and contemplate, and the same cannot be said of many poets. He will be missed.

I neglected to report this last year, but WordTech author Richard Moore also passed away last year. We also published a couple of titles by Richard, one in 2007 and one in 2008. Richard was a master of formal verse: in his hands rhyme and meter were tools that he wielded effortlessly, and the result could break your heart with its piercing of insight and emotion. While his work was less well-known than some others of his generation, it is no exaggeration to say that he was a peer of X.J. Kennedy and Richard Wilbur in his command of technique. The world has lost a great craftsman.

Remembering Rane Arroyo

It's with sadness that I report the passing of WordTech author Rane Arroyo last month.

Rane was the author of The Sky's Weight, which we published in 2009, and several other collections. He was a graceful poet who never shied away from the difficult parts of the world even as he celebrated the world's persisting beauty.

He will be missed.

BARNEY AND GIENKA by John Surowiecki

I love the the mix of private and public history in John Surowiecki's Barney and Gienka--it's a rich and complex collection.

The blending of the two flavor of history is well-exemplified in "Bolivia Street":

Bolivia Street

It's the last of the nation streets. After it
are the tree streets and then the president streets.
When it gets paved, shoes and lungs
get brushed with tar and the low-hanging
leaves of maple and oak get cooked.

Barney says there's nothing there anymore:
no candy store, no theater, no bakery,
no tailor shop displaying a boy's hound's-

tooth jacket with leather shank buttons.
The metal shop is a graveyard of parts.
The war plaque has no room for new names.

And since the bees have disappeared
the azaleas suffer and the thyme is winter-quiet.
Each house wears the face of someone old
and failing and shadows of airplanes dart
from roof to roof like angels of death.

The neighborhood changes, and this also exmplfies the flow of larger historical streams: much is lost. This poems is a deft and powerful evocation of memory and history.

DREAM BONES by Linda A. Cronin

Linda A. Cronin's Dream Bones is a strong collection that bravely confronts the difficulties of living with pain. These poems do not flinch in the face of difficulty, and they invite the reader on a difficult journey alongside them.

Here's a good example of the book at work, "Diagnosis":

Diagnosis

Waiting in the exam room,
I imagine the x-rays,
clean and stark,
harsh black and white images
edges clearly delineated.
Here -- good. There -- bad.
Negative and positive
outlined purely.
Defined by light. By rays.

So when the doctor hangs
the x-rays before me,
I'm not prepared.
Before me a world of
shadows. Clouds of gray.
Edges smudged.
As if a child's eraser smeared
the images. Sweat blurring
the lines. The doctor explains.
Shows the outline that creeps
beyond the border
until it slips away.
Black and white,
negative and positive,
into uncertainty bleed.

"Into uncertainty bleed": if there is a more precise evocation of the burden of disease, of being subject to the difficulties of the medical system, I have not read it.

GRIEF SUITE by Bobbi Lurie

The poems in Bobbi Lurie's Grief Suite positively burn with their subject: they burn with a purifying, forging fire, in which grief becomes white-hot and focused. Lurie is a fearless poet, and Grief Suite is her strongest collection yet.

Consider "Traveling North":

Traveling North

Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. The flat landscape. The blazing heat of cornfields. The landscape and body are one sensation.

Everywhere the books of atmospheric pressure. This book smells like miracles. That you were the chapter. That I was the slaughter. That sheep, my inheritance. That you were the shepherd who lead me here. Your hand reaching out to strike. Your hand reaching up to brush the hair from your brow. I never knew which. I never knew when. Your hand.

The cornfields are memories. You can not remember anything. The road is filled with dust haze. Your life is. Your death. I can not find it in this landscape. This collection of tendencies.

Though you are dead now. Though your hand would reach to strike. Though your hand would reach up to brush. The hair from your brow. Though light penetrates this. It is flat. It is frozen in self-image. I must resist the symbiotic wish. I must void the infantile condition. That region. This region. The atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of living.

Though you seemed invincible when your body moved. Though the way your hand. Would reach to your brow. Even though dead. Even though each wave of light penetrates. Even though only seems to slaughter. Sheep of inheritance.

Wake up at 4 a.m. Walk out naked to the porch. Skin shimmering. The way the word porch clings. The creaky swing. Dark lake of the body. What is always erased. The way your hand would reach to your brow and wipe your hair away. And it was always your hair. Always yours. And your face jutted into the landscape. This nowhere. This clicking sound of insects. Late summer.

I love this poem, recalling through death the "face jutted into the landscape. This nowhere. This clicking sound of insects." Death and memory fuse together to create a haunting new whole.

SLIPPING OUT OF BLOOM by Julie L. Moore

I admire the incisive poems of Julie L. Moore's new book, Slipping Out of Bloom. Her lyrics are brief, but resonant, in their short, carefully sculpted lines. They evoke far more than their modest surfaces might suggest.

"Becoming" is an excellent example of her strengths:

Becoming

Spring-thick with snowy
blossoms, the ornamental

pear tree slowly slips
out of bloom, sloughing off

petal by skin-soft petal, bleeding
green as leaf after spear-

like leaf thrusts through,
laying down one life

for another. How
willingly it becomes

and becomes.

Line by line, this poem poem enacts the process of becoming, tracing the flow of experience almost syllable-by-syllable. The poem is strongly-crafted.

THE PARK OF UPSIDE-DOWN CHAIRS by Alexandra van de Kamp

Alexandra van de Kamp's The Park of Upside-Down Chairs is a book of rich textures, rendered through the author's close attention to the objects of the world and its larger spiritual import.

Here's one good example, "Mailbox":

Mailbox

Painted black, blue or red, an object that rejects
the weather, it stands, silent-hooded sentinel, at the edge
of a road, while clouds conjure up their tenuous parades of
purples, greens, and grays. Still point in each day's Turner
painting, a mailbox is something the world dances itself
around. Like a flamingo wading on one leg, it is a pet,
a child's crayon-smeared shape leashed to the end of the
drive. There are too many centers to a life: our bodies,
our beds, the window's petulant glance. Meanwhile,
the mailbox waits, pressing itself into its one place--
a mouth we put our hands into, a little closet on a stilt,
a pillow of darkness we lay the pages of our life briefly
upon, an outstretched hollow arm.

I love that last image--"an outstretched hollow arm." It's resonant, and in its elongating rhythm at the end of the poem, perfectly emblematic of the poem's themes. Nicely done.

DEAR SUZANNE by Eve Rifkah

I'm a fan of poetry collections that invoke the form of a collage: a multiplicity of voices and perspectives circling around a central subject. Eve Rifkah's Dear Suzanne, a narrative of the life of the impressionist artist Suzanne Valadon, does just this, and quite well.

Rifkah's book alternatives between first- and third-person, narrative and interior monologues, and verse and prose, so it's difficult to capture all of its flavor. But "Resurrection" gives some indication of Rifkah's technique, speaking in Valdon's voice:

Resurrection

doesn't work for birds.
In earth among flowers
I buried my sparrow, when its quick-breath stopped.
I prayed as the sisters in the convent school taught.

I returned to the tiny grave
waiting to see my bird rise
and hop among low blossoms.
Day after day I waited.
Did that ungrateful bird fly to Paradise
without an adieu?
I dig through worm and stone
pale bones wrapped in muddied feathers.

This must be the end for all
souls feeding green shoots rising to the sky.
I will have no more of god-lifting.

The images--leaping from the sparrow to prayer to vision of Paradise--are rapid and effective in their span. This is a strong poem from a strong collection.