Public Poetry

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.

SEEDED LIGHT by Edward Byrne

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.

O BODY SWAYED by Berwyn Moore

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.

LOVE/IRAQ by Sheila Black

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.

Reading period is on: Some thoughts

We're about halfway through the annual submission period for the WordTech Communications poetry series. I haven't started reading in earnest yet, but perusing the large number of entries so far, I've seen a few trends worth commenting on.

One thing that I'm observing is a distressingly large number of submissions that show no evidence of having read our guidelines closely.

If you read our guidelines thoroughly, you're aware that the press places significant emphasis on the poet's ability to help promote his or her book through readings and similar events. A strong submission takes this fact into consideration, and the author makes some effort to tell us how they can assist in the promotion of their book. Such statements don't guarantee publication, of course, but a strong manuscript coupled with a strong record of doing readings--or good ideas on how to help promote the book--makes a very compelling case for publication. There are some of these submissions in the pool, but not as many as I'd like to see.

A larger proportion of our manuscripts include a standard cover letter with a biography and credits, a bit of discussion of the manuscript, and perhaps a line or two about which imprint the manuscript should be considered for--our guidelines ask poets to address this. These manuscripts are a bit harder to evaluate in terms of their sales potential, because the poet give little indication of how he or she might help promote the book. In such cases, when we have a strong manuscript, we have to make an educated guess about the book's sales potential, based in part on the poet's background.

The most disappointing submissions are those that come with only a brief cover letter and biography, or worse, no cover letter at all. Such submissions are usually set aside quickly unless the poetry is absolutely stunning. It's difficult to believe that a poet will be on board with our approach to publishing if they don't even make a cursory effort to show they understand it.

I make no apology for this approach to selecting our manuscripts. Excellence is the first criterion, but as a private press operating without subsidy from public agencies or private foundations, we survive solely on book sales. This absolutely requires the poets we publish to assist in the promotion of their books. There are plenty of presses out there that take a different approach, and if you're not comfortable taking a hands-on role in bringing your work to an audience, then we're not the press for you.

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

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.