Reviews

Blessings and Curses

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:12:47 GMT

Blessings and Curses, by Anne Whitehouse, 2009, Poetic Matrix Press, 113 pp., perfect bound, ISBN 978-0-924276-3-7, $15.00 (www.poeticmatrix.com). Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University, Anne Whitehouse now lives in New York City and has published an earlier collection of poems, The Surveyor's Hand, as well as a novel, Fall Love. Her Blessings and Curses volume contains forty blessings and twenty-four curses, set between one introductory and one closing poem. As far as the vision in the book is concerned, I feel heartened by the breadth of sympathy she has and especially by that for animal life. In CURSE IV she describes the senseless act of someone overturning a pigeon's nest and destroying the eggs. Then she continues to tell about her own observations of the pair that occupied the nest. Finally, she laments the lack of eggs and fledglings this year and rounds out with "Those who despise/pigeons/will despise me/for writing this:/their life/is as worthy/as any other.” This is a simple enough sentiment, but a welcome and all too rare one.

Elsewhere, nature brings out the best in Whitehouse, with lines that build an impressive atmosphere, such as those beginning BLESSING IX:

The magical rocks of Hamilton Falls

shine silvery even when dry

because of the mica.

Also mineral-laden schists,

they are not like New York City rocks

cropping up in big slabs,

but small pebbles tumbled

smooth and flat as coins

in the cold rushing waters

of Cobb Brook.

The use of visual detail distinguishes CURSE IX, which tells about the decline of a poet "who was not good or kind,/but he was memorable.” Early in the poem the ash hangs from the poet's cigarette before dropping off, while at the end, his condition is summed up with the echo of the ash image as he is left "clutching his dead cigarette,/the ash scattered on the table,/staring into nothing.” Likeable character or not, the poet's fate was not a matter of indifference for Whitehouse, who has a sharp interest in the circumstances that surround those cursed with misfortune. CURSE XXII is written as an account quoted from a person who lived in Warsaw at the outbreak of World War II and sees the city destroyed, lives broken and ended, and finally is left to reflect on why she survived. The speaker's voice is effectively elemental for all the horror contained in what she has to say.

Shifting from vast historical drama to family relationships in CURSE XIII, we find abstractions moving into the text: "With a legacy of struggle and distrust,/so much jealousy and so little love,/we practiced stealth tactics,/intent on undermining each other.” Accurate as this may be, it doesn't make for the kind of lyrical poetry that grows out of the rocks at Hamilton Falls. Even the nicely stated ending ("I'm left in an empty field/gleaning regret, while birds fly over,/finding nothing, crying,/too late, too late?”) doesn't quite lift the poem as a whole to the lyricism in some of the others. When family affairs are blessings, as in BLESSING XXIII, they appear by way of language that can't escape becoming mundane at times:

Meanwhile, Steve was calling me to the table,

where he and Claire sat waiting to eat.

The food was ready, and so was Aunt Mildred,

her response rising uncontrollably, like sap,

or like my own characters who didn't hold back

when in love, though they might be deluded.

Too often, the poems sound flat. The lines progress without giving us much to enthuse about by way of a surprising word, lyrical phrase or the intuitive flair that brings free verse to life. Sometimes a phrase that feels natural enough to use in speech or prose but which doesn't add to poetry is retained to the detriment of the whole. In BLESSING II for example, the opening stanza includes this:

She accepted his gifts

with grace and pleasure,

not plagued as I might be

by the fear that she

didn't deserve them

and so must reject them.

Without arguing either for a minimalist approach or too much zeal in cutting the unnecessary from a poem, I could still see a case here for less is more with something like:

She accepted his gifts with grace

not plagued

by the fear that she didn't

deserve them.

I would have been happier in many places by having more suggestion and less outright explanation. CURSE III begins by signaling, at least with the mood, of what is to come rather than making the events speak for themselves. "Sometimes tragedy can strike/out of nowhere./Everyday obligations pale/to insignificance/in the great shock;/ordinary life is put on pause,/and another life takes over.” Had the poem started with the next stanza and "When Patty's twenty-year-old son/was arrested at his college/and accused of selling a drug,/he was instantly expelled/and sent off to county jail” it would have generated immediacy with a simple but well stated passage that stimulates the reader's appetite.

I like the observation Anne Whitehouse makes at the end of BLESSING XXV with "Go, Reader, to your ease!/May you give minutes where I spent years!” In this case the effort involved much reflection on big issues made accessible as anecdotes and observations. As much as I like the concept and structure of this book, I feel frustrated by extraneous thoughts such as this one that follows the lines just quoted: "The effort means nothing to the work,/but it is everything.” To close, I offer some lines from BLESSING VII which show the poet in a more convincing tone, as she refers to the cicadas that emerge in a seventeen-year cycle:

In the ecstasy of union her wings grew still

as he burst into the culminating solo.

In the Ohio River Valley

at the height of the year,

they were as numerous

as drops of rain.

Falling off the Bicycle Forever

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Michael Rattee, Falling Off the Bicycle Forever, Adastra Press, 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027, ISBN 978-0-9822495-5-0, 64 pages, 16.00. Reviewed by Alan Catlin.

Of the approximately 75 new chapbooks and full-length books of poetry I read the first half of 2010, a good number of them fall into what could be called a school of writing. These books are often published by academic presses, or by small presses with editors formerly associated with universities and their writing programs. These well-schooled writers all seem to have one thing in common: polished surfaces without depth.

Movements, such as the Fluxus and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetic school, were all the rage once. An eclectic coterie of like-minded individuals established publications, published their friends and advocates, and the flame burned brightly−in a remote corner of the literary world. Did anyone outside of this tight, enclosed group take this movement seriously? You were either in or you were out, and who cared anyway? Other academics. Now we have the "polished gem school,” which falls somewhere in between the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E crowd and the purely self-referential, academic poets.

Perfect examples of this style are the recent 2010 contest winners of the Mississippi Review Book Contest. Two of the books in this series are unreadable, one of them is borderline bad, and the other could be good, if the poet followed her basic instincts and wrote from her heart−though she chooses not to. Sometimes a lot of learning is way too much. Sometimes the books are just too bad to bother with; nice to look at but who needs to read them?

Michael Rattee's latest book is particularly refreshing in this context, as he is not guilty of adhering to any school or fashion when he writes. If there is one characteristic that distinguishes his writing, it would be that he chooses to be true to himself, that he writes directly from the heart without pretense or hyperbole. These finely wrought, deceptively simple-seeming poems continually impress the reader with their maturity, a maturity not only of voice but also of vision. For Michael's subjects are timeless: the world around us and the people in it.

Weather

"And start to die together”

—Donald Hall

If you and I are not forever

then neither is this weather

sooner or later the wind

will stop the crazy clouds

the thunder quit yelling its clichés

and lightning will cease

disfiguring our world

all at once or slowly

it will change

and though one of us is gone

we will recognize the other

stepping into different weather

and be uncertain if it is

for the worse or better

In this collection we learn of Michael's life, the joys and terror time well spent and well lived. His poems are more personal than most of Bronk's brief ruminations, more accessible than Ritsos's short fervid poems, more colloquial than most of Corman's but have elements of all of these masters of the form. There are echoes of fellow New Englanders here as well−Robert Frost and Donald Hall−but in the end, Michael Rattee is a rare poetic spirit and a true independent. "Falling Off the Bicycle Forever” is the third book of Michael's (one in collaboration with his son, Kiev) published by the preeminent Adastra Press. All of them are worthy of any serious reader's attention.

Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tia

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tia, by Penelope Scambly Schott, 2009, Rain Mountain Press, 42 pp., paper, ISBN: 0-9802211-5-3, $10. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

The southernmost range of the Black-billed Magpie in the New World extends to northern New Mexico, that landscape occupied also by Penitente moradas and old adobe churches where votive paintings give thanks for an assortment of miracles. That a bird as distinctive as the magpie should be cast in a mythological role is appropriate for this region whose culture seems rooted in nature and not simply housed in buildings. Penelope Scambly Schott won the 2009 Ronald Wardall Prize for her chapbook in which the Magpie is granted not only the power of speech, but of poetry.

Naturally, there is more than a touch of magic about what happens here, for instance when Magpie says that on the black mountain "each of my loose feathers /sprouts a dark spruce.” (MAGPIE CONFESSES ME) There is also a touch of humor about the dialog when Magpie asks "Tell me your sins Tia./(I, of course, have none.)” and goes on to play the confessor’s role’

"Okay, tell me another.

I hit a parked car and skedaddled.

I do that every day.

But I didn’t leave any note.

Auntie, you have sinned;

I always leave my white called calling card.”

Self flagellation lingered into the twentieth century in this area, having first developed when lay preachers were left to take the place of priests in out-of-the-way villages. Whether as fact or rumor, the practice continues to be a part of the regional psyche. I once knew a poet from Arroyo Hondo who made a living selling satellite dishes when his grandfather had been the Hermano Mayor of the village. To go from a seemingly medieval way of life to a technological one within two generations was quite a leap. As astonishing perhaps, as having a magpie speak! But speak Magpie does. MAGPIE ASSAULTS ME ON ASH WEDNESDAY opens:

"Past the fanged hounds on LAS CRUCES to
PENITENTE Lane where slush thaws into ruts,

I traipse to the cemetery through February mud:”

and eventually Magpie is found waiting on a gravestone with some advice:

"Tia, I told you this morning
to just keep moving.”

Anyone familiar with northern New Mexico will be able to complete the fine landscapes the author begins to sketch with spare but telling details such as this beginning to MAGPIE’S SHADOW: "The shadow of the mountain/lay behind the mountain,//and if it cast blue on the snow,/I didn’t know it.” On the other hand, if you are a stranger to the mountains and the cutting edge that winter has among them, you can still appreciate this little book as a fitting introduction. Penelope Scambly Schott’s writing is impressive for the instinct she has in making her main character poetically credible, as well as in showing us a New Mexico (in MAGPIE DISPATCHES ME) where "Everything/looks familiar://rusty cans from pinto beans,/and two dead lambs, nothing/but pelt.”

The Broken Bone Tongue

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The Broken Bone Tongue, Dianna MacKinnon Henning, Black Buzzard Press, 3503 Ferguson Lane, Austin, TX, 78754 ISBN 978-0-938872-42-9 80 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Alan Catlin.

A quote from poet Mary Oliver introduces The Broken Bone Tongue, creating a certain sense of expectation in the reader. To me, Oliver’s work is a kind of compounding, that is taking the work of other, better poets such as Emily Dickinson, layering the ideas found within the work, adding a requisite, often astonishing number of clichés, and recapitulating a point stated in the opening lines, insuring the reader cannot possibly miss the point of her piece. This sonata allegro theory of composition, removes the element of surprise and wonder for the reader, though it rarely disappoints by deviating from the programmed method. Oliver is the perfect poet for people who do not read serious poetry or read poetry seriously.

With this unfortunate set of expectations, I began reading The Broken Bone Tongue. The book is divided into sections in the table of contents but not in the text; an unfortunate disservice to the poet. The separations are meant to delineate thoughts, themes and methods of composition. Having them run together confuses the reader and hinders his enjoyment of the work. And there is much to enjoy here, though continually referencing the table of contents detracts from the experience.

The opening title section is probably the least enjoyable. MacKinnon is a skilled poet and teacher who runs a poetry retreat with her husband and has taught many workshops including prison ones. Her strengths are not best displayed in these animistic, metaphysical poems that feel self-conscious and derivative. The problem with anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, of ascribing human qualities to animals or birds, is that you run the risk of being pretentious rather than achieving an intended universal poetic truth. I wouldn’t say these poems are pretentious, but I do not feel they reach the kind of grandeur the poet had intended.

The second and third sections continue this animistic writing but by the middle of the third section the natural world begins to become particular. "Having Eyes in a Dark Place” uses the growth of potatoes to good metaphorical intent leading toward the tight, moody, "Van Gogh’s ‘Potato Eaters.’” At this juncture the book begins to play into the poet’s strengths; more deeply personal, well-wrought, emotionally engaged poems such as "Reading Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’” which poignantly concludes,

You cannot recall what hour
he was whisked away in a kaleidoscope of sirens,

the house suddenly grown so large you no longer fir
comfortable inside. Didn’t even the doorbell wither
to a barely audible sound, and didn’t you think it him
ringing, his house key again locked in the car?”

The concluding six sections of the book mostly continue the poet’s exploration of the personal, the real and the rooted. "After Li Po’s ‘The River Merchant’s Wife’”, ”A Journey to the Father on the Gurney” and the concluding political poem, "The River Divine (After the Battle of Fallujah) are examples of the poet’s strengths working at a high level of accomplishment. One poem in particular, "Bent Bird” combines all her poetic gifts in one spectacular, albeit brief, wonderful poem worth the reading of the whole collection to find. Other readers may disagree with my assessment of the metaphysical pieces which are not lacking in craft or vision, but seem overshadowed, in this instance, by the more personal work.

A Few of the Mini: poems of the small, neglected & out of the way

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A Few of the Mini: poems on the small, neglected & out of the way, edited by Robert Beum & Roy Scheele, The Dolphin Press /Three Sheets Press no address provided, npg, $10.00, 2009. Reviewed by Alan Catlin.

The cover art, in the manner of a Cornell Box, gives us a sense of what is inside: mostly minimal, self-contained, short pieces often with a natural theme. While these poems are minimal they generally avoid abstraction or the brief epiphany that can make a form such as the haiku of interest. In fact, most of these poems suffer from a lack of urgency that makes the reader sense there was no driving inspirational force behind them.

Exceptions to this sense would be the work of Maria Melendez and Judy Ray. Ray’s poem "Written on My Father’s 86^th Birthday” clearly evokes something essential, ”Low rows staked out/but the earth is waiting./Where is my father? I ask.” The sense of deep personal loss is palpable. Similarly her "Cistercian Abbey, Le Thoronet, Provence” speaks of loss evoking the tragedies of senseless wars and ethnic cleansing, the universal through the particulars of place. Her poem, "An English Girl Dreaming of America” feels less successful than the others. Whatever its failing, this, and her other selected poems, seem among the most successful in the collection.

Maria Melendez is the boldest of the poets here. Her "Nude Sonnet” is a raucous, in-your-face tribute to her lover’s body described with brio, humor and true appreciation. "American Adhaan October 2001” is a quite mournful beauty; a reflection of the world’s inherent beauty in a time of crisis and chaos. Sometimes prayer helps. All in all this small sampling of her work show a poet of range and accomplishment.

A E Stallings is the kind of writer students of poetry love to talk about. The work is well-wrought, careful and formal, showing a deep sense of understanding of the poetic conventions and the history of verse. That said, it is also the kind of poetry that stifles the imagination and has done more to make poetry the marginal art form that it remains in this country simply because it begs to be taught. In an age of MFA’s and PHD’s based on the philosophy of how to read the text and what the text means as an entity, the reading of these so-called texts is getting lost. As one PHD student recently remarked to me, "No one reads stories anymore.” Or real poems about real people either.

Of the five remaining poets in the collection, none stand out as original, enlightening or noteworthy. Many of the poems are rooted in the physical world but none derive any kind of particular spiritual or artistic understanding of it that deserve comment. A brief perusal of the credits in the rear of the volume indicates that one piece by editor Scheele was published in Poetry. As one would expect with a Poetry poem, it is a pedestrian piece with a predictable insight that neither moves nor amazes the reader. If anything, it reinforces the notion that mere association with a great artist, in this case Georgia O’Keeffe, does not produce Art simply by proximity.

A note about the curious nature of the format of A Few of the Mini. Despite its handsome layout, lots of clean white space and a fine art cover, the lack of such conventional niceties as a table of context, pagination and author’s bios seems more perverse than functional. Perhaps, it was a matter of cost. Still, it seems logical that if you are going to produce such a fine, if limited selection of poems, you might want to make the text reader friendly on a basic level.

To Fly Without Wings

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

To Fly Without Wings by Judy Ray. Helicon Nine Editions (www.heliconnine.com), 2009, 106 pp., paper, $9.95, ISBN 978-1-884235-42-9. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Born in Sussex in the south of England and now at home in Tucson, Arizona, Judy Ray has experienced many landscapes and societies in a personal journey that has taken her to Uganda, India, New Zealand and Australia. Being observant both of her physical surroundings and the ways of the people she encounters, she produces poetry that both describes a place and explores the possibilities for anyone who cares to learn from different cultures. The first section of her book is rooted in England and memory. “The Kitchen Table” recalls the concerns of country dwellers and a time when houses and furniture were distinguished by textures.

Talk of the village or the height of runner beans,
reports on cows or broken machinery flowed
down the grooves, along with children’s chatter
of school or horses, and on later visits tales of travel.

As anniversaries of war’s beginning sand endings are observed (I happen to be writing this on the 70th anniversary of the first day of World War II) we hear of statistics and historical significance. Personal memories run to recollections that may appear slighter at first but carry all the weight of events, such as these from “Armistice”:

My sister and I, bearing
cardboard trays like old-time
ice-cream vendors at the movies,

knocked on village doors
and offered poppies
to remember the non-survivors.

Judy Ray’s accounts run to village life of a different kind in the second section, which opens with “Tin Roof,” a simply conceived poem that creates a memorable picture. If you have ever spent a night beneath such a roof in a climate that outrains even English rain you can recognize this atmosphere.

Tin roof spells prestige
in a village of thatch
Ping ping pingping pingping ping
In the rainy season tin roars
louder than a waterfall’s
full-chorus anthem

For all the local color in the book, it is no travelogue. Judy Ray’s view of the world runs deeper than its surface, however rich that may be. “Written Small” is a poem in which she contemplates a ballpoint pen and asks, “But what if I were in prison/and this my sole, rationed tool?” Between the familiar pen and a dramatic circumstance we have to explore that awful loneliness and the political realities for those who do end up with a view through a window as their only freedom.

a glimpse of Bird would be a wonder.

Water the Moon

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Marick Press (www.marickpress.com) 2009. $14.95. ISBN 10: 1-934851-12-4. ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-12-8. Reviewed by Burgess Needle.

In her poem, “A Brief History of Time,” Sze-Lorrain writes:

Beauty is in the streets. Write everywhere.
Undefined but pure, spirit is the raison d'être.
After this year, everything else is an illusion,
a sky falling out, just an incidental dream.

Truly, this collection feels as if the author wants to make certain at least her descriptions and analysis of the world remain if the sky falls or the universe implodes. Drawing from a rich background of music, language, food and art, Fiona Sze-Lorrain pulls from the symbol and paradox of the collection’s title and first poem, to present unexpected delights in surprising contexts. Nine of the poems present food or the preparation of food as a metaphor for comfort, a bridge to memory and a standard for excellence.
A voice from the poem “Privilege” states:

“One thing,” he proclaimed, “That all great chocolates have in common is that they are all different.”

The same standard may be applied to these brilliant poems. And, in a line from “Instructions: No Meeting No World”: “Each sweetness tastes different.” This differentiation applies equally as well to the range of topics and style in Water the Moon.

Within the first and title poem, the author offers a hint of where she is about to take the reader. Describing her grandmother’s deft attention to the creation of mooncakes, she writes:

Time to transform the mooncakes golden—
over heat for thirty minutes. Her discreet
Signature before this last phase: watering
green tea over each chalked face. What is she
imagining again? That some day grasses
Spout with flowers on the moon?

How reassuring to track one’s course through Water the Moon and discover upon the barren lunar seas the appearance of food! Not merely food, but a luscious litany of recipes and dishes that allows one to be hit by an awareness of food’s preparation, placement and import.

...Grains of red beans churn in her palm,
their voices a song of cascading waters.
Rinses every seed warm to her touch, a blender
crushes them until they are sand
Soft enough to waltz once a finger dips in them.

So much of food is to Fionna as those madeleines were to Proust: a means of crossing time and space. In “L’Assiette de Trois Amis,” she writes of cutting into “lean chunks of foie gras...his knife spelt sensuality...” Here is where cool intellect and wit is quite aware of food’s sensuality, in some ways reminiscent of Lawrence’s “Figs”:

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled
four-petalled flower.

Given her background in music, the surprise comes not so much from references to composers or compositions:

Sloshing

in her womb, you would crimp your ears to Dinu Lipatti’s
golden 45 rpm vinyls or Bach Partitas
or Schubert’s Sonatas, forging brain nodes,
forming notions as unsettled as fingers one by one.

As from the grand range of styles that have captured her attention.

The voice continues to reach

octaves until it breaks an imaginary line.
Thick and taut, the line trembles like the old
tramway path that crawls down Belleville where
sparrows titter over first dawn:
piaf, piaf, piaf.

[from: “We’ll Always Have Her”]

One more paradox: here is a collection of poems by a writer whose life and work is infused with music, yet the word ‘silence’ appears in thirteen poems. Not only does ‘silence’ appear, it becomes palpable enough to acquire and lose gravity.

Silence lost gravity and hit
the floor

[from: “A Course in Subtlety”]

Silence implies the loss of sound. The moon offers no auditory possibilities. Yet, the promise of water opens the door to life and with life the chance of sound.

These are poems by someone immersed enough in so much of the universe, from its carnal appetites to its soaring music, that she is not afraid of redrawing and renaming its basic elements. In her poem “A Brief History of Time,” there is a reference to “Rimbaud's verses were scribbled on the wall.”

And, later, in “L’Assiette des Trois Amis,” are the lines:

Who was he,
that Symbolist poet who defined seeing
as renaming or forgetting the thing one sees?

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is undoubtedly familiar with Rimbaud’s “Vowels”:

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:

As Rimbaud was willing to assign colors and connotations to vowels, Sze-Lorrain is capable of and willing to create entire worlds within the microcosm of every poem. Water the Moon is a luminous blending of memory and art worthy of your attention and possession.

beloved on the earth: 150 poems of grief and gratitude

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:33:34 GMT

Review of beloved on the earth: 150 poems of grief and gratitude, edited by Jim Perlman, Deborah Cooper, Mara Hart, and Pamela Mittlefehldt, Holy Cow! Press (June, 2009), 255 pages, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-9779458-9-4. Reviewed by Paula Ashley.

I received this book to review with no little wonder as to how I would react to the poetry as I am no stranger to grief and the experiences of death. My first inclination was to turn to the poems concerning the death of a child. But I found the table of contents in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Scanning the list, I found the names of poets well-known to me and others I was not familiar with. So I turned to the preface for wisdom as to how to approach the anthology.

Jim Perlman, editor and publisher of Holy Cow! Press, wanted to create an anthology of poems on grief and gratitude following the death of his mother. He discussed the project with his friends Deborah Cooper, author of four poetry chapbooks who uses poetry in her work with hospice, Mara Hart, a writer of memoir in poetry and prose, and Pamela Mittlefehldt, a poet and mystery writer. They joined Jim in editing this book.

After issuing a public call for poems, they received over two thousand poems. They considered many issues in their selection but ultimately decided on the ones that spoke most intensely to themselves. They decided against organizing the poems by topic as many poems could relate to a number of the categories, but they do provide an index in the back of the book listing the poems by primary focus: child, extended family, father, friend, grandparents, meditation, mother, sibling, and spouse/lover.

I myself came to poetry not by reading poems but by writing them after the sudden death of my son in a car accident. I was frozen by day, going to work, taking care of others in my family, going to a grief support group, and acting as if I were okay. By night, I could not sleep and poetry came to me in agonizing torrents, raw and unrefined, the wail of a mother who wants to “…howl like a wolf/like a blizzard wind tearing” as written by Mara Fulkner in Still Birth: A Psalm of Holy Week.

The grief in this volume is, for the most part, not raw and unrefined. It is distilled by art and often by the distance of time. I decided to read the book from the beginning as it was organized by the editors. I put little sticky notes on pages that spoke to my experiences. Fifteen years after the death of my son, my father died and caring for my mother became my focus until her death eight years later. In between I lost a good friend to breast cancer. I walked through poems of memory care units and Alzheimer’s wings. I looked back with poets on the meaning their parents had brought to their lives. I nodded with understanding for the vigils, the visitations, the dreams of the departed. I referred to the index in the back at times when I was not sure who the poem was written for. I found I could only read maybe half-a-dozen poems at a time because I would fall into a state of meditation and would have to put the book down. The book closes with Basho: “The temple bell stops,/but the sound keeps coming/out of the flowers.” And so it is.

This book is recommended for those trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one. It helps us to be grateful for their lives, to find their life alive in ours, and for the poets who can so beautifully articulate what we can only feel. It reaffirms that every life matters. That our life matters even though we too shall die someday.

Heavy Lifting

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Heavy Lifting by David Alpaugh. Alehouse Press (www.alehousepress.com) (2007). 108 pp., paper, $15. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Beginning at the back of David Alpaugh’s book, I cannot resist an essay with the candor of “The Professionalization of Poetry” with its clear intent to provoke thought about the way we conduct certain poetry activities in the USA. Of course how each of us will react to this depends on whose thought is being provoked. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets be forewarned that the author holds a low opinion of their work. He also questions “—the publication of flat, pedestrian prose with the assurance, explicit or implied, that it is the real thing.” Such essays ought to appear more often in literary magazines, something contentious enough to spur healthy debate. When the essay accompanies a collection of an individual’s poetry though, it cannot help but ask the question of what “the real thing” is of the author’s poetry. I think, even though “Out of the Cornfields, Endlessly Flapping” elicits a smile, it is more fun than real poetry:

I'm a Graduate of the Iowa Workshop.
Who are you? Are you a Graduate too?

Then there’re hundreds of us, all doing swell,
thanks to Jorie Graham and Marvin Bell.

“Poet's Progress (from workshop to quarterly review)” is a four-line satire that may lead the reader to wonder, Is this me?

Showing your poems to the world
like a starlet shows her tits—
first in the back of the car,
then in magazines.

Okay, enough of this. It is a far cry from any literary review to the magazines overflowing with bosoms at the supermarket checkout. I acknowledge the author’s distrust in the poetry establishment and his desire to expose a perceived fraud, but prefer to turn to the poems of his own he has chosen to float on our literary seas.

In the opening section we find a sequence of reminiscences and observations, atmospheric and convincing. “What My Father Loved About Melmac,” “Singing Along with Miss Worrell,” and “Losing Control of the Toad” all testify that experience and insight are more important than academic schooling in writing poetry. The language is straightforward and the imagery is natural as in this stanza from “Deconstruction”:

And I was white as the housewife’s
wash you see every weekday at three;
yes, I was whiter than Moby Dick,
bobbing on an Ahab-angry sea.

Later in the book, in “Scene from The Book of the Dead,” a fine poem inspired by a painting on papyrus ca. 1450 B.C., the language is even more lyrical:

And so it behooves even the leanest of heart
to notice the feather hovering in the balance
before the trial by metaphor begins

how light it is, how lonely
how fallen from the sky

Turning to contemporary references such as a BASF commercial (“Not in Our Name”) or the evening news (“War and White Wine”) brings out a sharp response:

Six PM: Baghdad’s on the line.
Time for war and white wine.

The satire in Heavy Lifting is more appealing when directed at a political or social adversary. This is a book whose content covers a wide range and therefore it is likely to please or displease its readers in patches depending on their disposition or appetite for irreverence toward poetic icons. We don’t need the notes at the end of the book to underline the author’s opinions and one comedic version of a Reader’s Digest version of Milton as condensed by Robert Creeley would have sufficed rather than two, but let me end by quoting the David Alpaugh who can pick up a thread of memory and enhance its value by the alchemy of turning it to poetry:

That never again would Mom shout, “Butterfingers!”
nor grieve over china lying in ruins at our feet;
nor swear as she cut her toe on an unswept shard.
Pharaoh of our New Jersey duplex, Dad dreamed
of burial, near the Nile, with his favourite cup and saucer.
“Melmac,” he said, “would last ten thousand years.”

Vertebrae Rosaries, 50 Sonnets

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Vertebrae Rosaries, 50 Sonnets by Philip Dacey, Red Dragonfly Press (2009), 56 pp., $10, ISBN 978-1-890193-80-5. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Following up on a previous book of sonnets (The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan from Rain Mountain Press), Philip Dacey has collected fifty more poems in that form in this, his tenth full-length book. Where the New York poems thrived on observation and listening in on those around their author, these play with language as they wander into other, sometimes serious, sometimes poignant, areas.

To set a tone, the first sonnet, “Serenade,” takes an Associated Press news release to the effect that “cellar-door” was picked as the most beautiful sounding English word. “You are as beautiful as the word cellar-door” Dacey begins before pursuing a journey he couldn’t resist. By the middle of the book, sets of five and three poems respectively appear as “Postcards from Vietnam” and “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (D.C.),” and register all the more effectively in contrast to the lightness elsewhere. In the “Whitman: The Wall” section, one line reflects the vast social upheaval brought about by that war: “Just that. America’s great reading lesson.” As good poetry always does, another of the Vietnam themed sonnets turns an abstraction into a concrete image: “The secret/ingredient is the rice in Grandfather’s bones.”

“The Mother” is another short sequence, starting out with a study in language designed to slip a cushion beneath the facts. “‘Penis’ was not a word my mother used,/preferring ‘doololly,’ its music and color,/how it trivialized the organ that had caused/her so much trouble, grief, year after year.” Finding the right word(s) for the occasion rests at the core of creativity for a poet. Dacey adopts the persona of the famous choreographer in “George Ballanchine: Centro Sonnet” to mull the comparative qualities of their art forms. “Turning out ballets is like making furniture./God invents and creates, I assemble.” he opens, moving on to the practical advice “Forget/your soul, I want to see your foot.” and ending with “Who’d ask a rose to explain/itself? I’m a dance supplier, a circus man.”

When he is serious, Philip Dacey isn’t daunting, and when he is humorous he isn’t silly, rather bringing to his work a mixture of learning and a deft touch with language. This results in some memorable observations like the nude in the first of the “Nude Quartet” saying “I want my flesh to migrate into paint,” and “I want to gather a bouquet of eyes.”

These are sonnets dusted and polished for the present day. In a word: suave.

The Short Imposition of Living

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of The Short Imposition of Living by Matthew Keuter, Rain Mountain Press (2008), 128 pp., $10, ISBN 0-9802211-0-2. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Matthew Keuter’s book doesn’t offer an easy point of entry despite an array of virtuosic titles like “How to love your country when it has become like a spider bloated on blood as big as a whale at war in a bathtub” or “What is true remains true inside of a wave.” There is a spontaneous energy throughout, with poems alternating between longer and shorter, sometimes very short, lines, and we could be forgiven for thinking we are walking as we read, head-on into gusts of poetry. With an imagination running freely, Keuter takes on personal and public lives and even history. Consider:

Marco Polo crawled naked out of the Hudson with a pen
dripping from his mouth like an unhappy snake.
(The zero politics of self-defense)

Such inventions signal that nothing is to be taken for granted, no matter how familiar the names or what expectations accompany a given situation. This unpredictability is what makes poetry the healthy counterpart to the rhetoric of public officials, even when the poem seems to be avoiding politics.

“The Crazies” is written in prose form and opens:

My mother’s side of the family is chock-full of witches. I fell compelled to say these are not women who were beaten by impotent husbands or murdered by god-fearing priests. These were the real spell slingers who gave better than they took. The most powerful was my Great Grandmother Adel. She had eyes men desired to drink water from.

while the title poem, after some pages of text of mixed, mostly longer, line lengths, tapers off in its closing stages:

when my
father
knelt & asked

for the knife
to dig
a shallow pit

for just a fist
full
of Helen’s ash?

“Here she is
you sonuva bitch.” also
is
your elegy.

Way beyond any attempt to paraphrase, the contents sparkle with surprises and kick hard when the author desires it. Nothing is to be taken for granted. We might take Keuter’s advice from his poem “Breakfast eggs and beer”:

It’s best to read poetry first off
before the clutter of the day takes shape...

and keep on reading for the experience of taking a vigorous ride on the language. By the end, we might be re-assessing our perceptions of what goes on in the world we thought we knew around us.

The New York Postcard Sonnets

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan by Philip Dacey, Rain Mountain Press (2007), 74 pp., $10, ISBN 0-9786105-7-1. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

I spent a single overnight in New York back in 1977 and visited some museums and Central Park. Aside from the impressions conveyed on television dramas, that is the sum of my experiences with the city, so I fall into the dangerous category of those who might easily fall prey to false impressions. At the same time, I know from other cities how they cannot be summed up by describing buildings or the layout of their streets, rather by the people and specific energy that moves through them. I turn to Philip Dacey’s collection of fifty-five sonnets with the wariness of someone who is more drawn to open spaces than the prospect of urban density. It doesn’t take long for Dacey to persuade me that to anyone with open eyes and an open mind, New York is endlessly fascinating.

It is interesting that the author has chosen such a disciplined form to describe such a varied and tumultuous place. The self-imposed restraints serve well to focus on the stream of details that make New York into Dacey’s personal city. Don’t expect an archaic tone to these sonnets. They are in the voice of a conversationalist and sometimes sound deceptively casual. The rhymes are not forced, but pairings of words with similarities, such as: Park–York, heat–appropriate, or dermatologist–mole–rest–Lowell. This is a labor of love that never registers as if the writing had been the solving of a puzzle.

Dacey goes into Public Library’s Main Reading Room in poem #4, where it is a “great nave of a cathedral for the bookish” and comments “Listen closely and you’ll hear brains hum.” When he listens to talk in the streets (#17), he hears:

“I can’t figure out if he’s shy, retarded, or gay.”
“Art feeds this town the way cars feed Detroit.”
“Just earning interest in so yesterday.”

Sometimes a scene contains another scene, or story, like a babushka doll. At a piano recital (#39), the author finds himself staring at an audience member with two hooks where his hands used to be:

I wondered: had he been a pianist once?
Did he dream himself into each performance?

Even entering his own apartment (#14) gives Dacey a memorable visual:

My apartment? After a dim hall, it’s a burst
of light.

The reader’s journey is taken with a companion whose interests are often cultural, who goes to hear Sharon Isbin, makes a pilgrimage to Whitman’s birthplace, and attends a Shakespeare performance in Central Park, but always with an eye for the spontaneous happenings around him, for instance the nuns crossing the park on roller blades, umbrellas jostling together in the rain, or a Yiddish/klezmerfest. Whatever the ingredients, each sonnet works them in its tight format and produces a series of sharp, heartfelt poems. The more Philip Dacey looks at New York, the more the city resembles the Korean pianist in his poem #40, who is so good, “I swear she got bigger and bigger as she played.”

Rooks

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Rooks by Gil Fagiani, Rain Mountain Press (2007), 76 pp., $7, ISBN 0-9786105-3-9. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

With a selection of photographs to help us visualize the Pennsylvania Military College, Gil Fagiani presents the experience of being a “rook” with immediacy and sufficient cautionary detail for anyone who might consider following in his path. He draws on his own time between 1963 and 1967 in chronicling the cadet’s life.

Noting the biography at the end of the book, I see that Fagiani hosts a monthly open reading at New York’s Cornelia Street Café and that he has translated from the Italian in the Abruzzese dialect, both of which are activities I suspect have helped develop the sense of immediacy in his poetry that speaks in a direct manner which is especially appropriate considering the attention given to the gap between the impression created by many a recruiter and the facts encountered by the recruit. From “Profile”:

I couldn’t stop nodding
that first day in uniform
at McMorland Student Center,
hearing you go on
about honor, duty, flag,
a staff sergeant shook me wake so hard
I thought my neck would snap.

We’re in the age of music from Sam and Dave, Jackie Wilson, and Shirley Ellis. And there are excursions to places with drink that promise good times, but deliver more desperate pleasures. With the bass playing loud, Fagiani leaves an establishment when scuffling breaks out in the lobby and once outside is backed against the wall by the wife of a colleague (a grizzly bear in a blonde wig) where she

shoves her hand between my legs,
“I hear cadet’s cock’s the best there is,”
her wig as crooked as her smile.
(The Chester Arms)

This edition includes the sobering pictures (photographs) of colleagues who died in Vietnam. Some tragedies came in less predictable circumstances. “Spring Parade” tells the story of Cadet photographer Pitts who is busily clicking at his camera when a train whose distance from him he cannot estimate because of a tunnel’s echo kills him.

Fagiani’s imagery clicks into place throughout with the precision of memories not easily lost. Here is the visual impression of the military as described in “Standards”:

His cap visor blazing with Bryl-Cream.
His head and face hairless as a honeydew.
His uniform with carving knife creases.
His brass pips dazzling like gold ducats.
His shoes punched out of mirror-polished molds.

In one poem, “Vietnam,” cadets encounter a lone anti-war protester and leave him humbled and bloodied. Their Major tells them not to take such actions because all the peaceniks want is “publicity for their filthy cause.” The book ends with “Spring Offensive, 1967.” It shouldn’t surprise us that the final line of the poetry is “body counts, body counts, body counts.”

In part, Rooks is also a reconjuring of youthful exhuberance and a literary time capsule from the sixties. For all its sadness, the account is told in a lively manner, perhaps with a little of the spirit of the Czech Good Soldier Schweijk. We should hope that the versions of history that survive begin with books like Fagiani’s, in which firsthand experience trumps the romance some would claim for military service.

Hard Blessings

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Hard Blessings by Patrick Carrington, Main Street Rag (2008), 42 pages, $10, ISBN 13:978-1-59948-115-9. Reviewed by Paula Ashley.

Patrick Carrington teaches creative writing in New Jersey and his poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals. His chapbook, Hard Blessings, starts with a love poem. “Patterns” uses the metaphor of needlepoint to draw us into this love: I feel sewed into you. Love poems are notoriously difficult and, wondering where this is going, I find my mind quibbling about the title. I would prefer “Tapestry” as more fitting with the needlepoint image. However, I feel his love and am engaged. Turning the page to “Jonagolds” I am now plunged into grief and the loss of this love: “At first frost I poured you,/watched coming winter blow/your ashes to glass across the lake.” These lines leave me cold, empty, and sad.

The rest of the chapbook takes on a journey through the byways of grief. The third poem “Cul de Sacs” is written in the second person as if Carrington is looking at himself from a distance: “Let’s say one night you want to forget.” He has entered that stage of grief where everything seems remote and unreal. But this emotional distance doesn’t last long, as Patrick picks up the first person narrator again in the fourth poem.

The thread of poems takes us through childhood memories of a crazy aunt, advice for his son, the loss of his grandmother. The landscape reflects his mood as September yields to winter. The narrator wanders the bleak streets of lonely towns, lingers on barstools, and meets women who do not penetrate his heart. The town itself shuts down as the factory closes: even the alley cats are thinking in terms of goodbye. In “Nowhere” the book closes without redemption as the narrator mourns the aging of his own body, the hoarding of his memories, and the longing for: that face/that might turn my weary body toward home.

Hard Blessings is a poignant journey through loss yet lingers in the loss, instead of taking us on a path that might eventually lead to recovery and the finding of meaning in life. Having experienced the loss of a child myself, I find nothing here to guide me or others through grief and back into the world. I find no spiritual exploration of the meaning of life and death. Poetry is one way we connect to our feelings and resolve them, but Carrington seems to be using his poetry as an excuse for publishing instead. I don’t want to seem too harsh as the poems themselves are well crafted with memorable images and deft use of metaphor. Perhaps it would have been better for Carrington to wait until he had resolved his grief and moved forward in life in order to give us a more memorable experience. Resolution is an inside job. It can be aided by writing but does not come from finding another as Carrington implies in his last poem.

Venus in Retirement

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Venus in Retirement by David Michael Nixon, Foothills Publishing (2007), $7. Reviewed by Stephen Lewandowski.

David Michael Nixon has been one of the mainstays of the Rochester, NY poetry scene for as long as I can remember. Our friendship goes back more than thirty years to when we met at Jimmy LaVilla-Havelin’s Poetry Central reading series in the big lounge of the downtown Universalist Church. Perhaps we had just heard a trenchcoat-clad Marvin Bell read his work.

Venus in Retirement is Nixon’s fourth chapbook of poems, and he has published one full-length collection, making him a candidate for a “new and selected poems” that would bring these and new poems together. He is a serious poet, and his work merits the closer, longer, deeper look that such a publication would bring.

Venus in Retirement is a selection of twenty seriously humorous poems, meaning that the poems harbor an intent beyond a mere laugh. They are thoughtful, clever and dextrous. They play with language and concepts, and many achieve a laughing “aha.” Nixon is not afraid of taking a poem to the “dark side,” as he does in

See Puff Drive the Dragon
Look Jane. See Spot bleed.
See Spot eaten
by the dragon.

See Puff drive the dragon
off, as Dick pukes
in the green bushes.

Look Jane. See the dragon
run. See Puff slash the
dragon open. Look Dick.
See Spot stagger
out of the dragon’s torn
guts. See Puff lick Spot clean.

Look! Look! See the dead dragon.
Feel us all back together,
happy, alive.
See what Puff has done.

Peter, Paul and Mary channeled through the Brothers Grimm sponsored by Our Daily Reader.

Many poems seem like fragments of another reality, interesting bits and pieces, but the shards are all we have, and from them we can try to re-construct the poet’s universe. Nixon often suggests the trouble we have in getting the pieces to fit back together, and these poems remind me of the darkly incongruous poems of Russell Edson. Two poems begin with

The Trouble
When he held himself,
it was an embrace
like no other, and
it was good, but there
was something missing,
so he had to go
out and find other
arms, and that’s when all
the trouble started.

The poem’s a single sentence but broken into lines that propel meaning unlike a simple linear prose line and compel the reader to slow, start again, double/back within the poem. After reading a short poem, Robert Bly asks, “Would you like to hear that again?” but he really meant, “Stand up and use your ears like a man.” (Ives)

David Michael Nixon is an elder statesman from the stateless Realm of Poetry. He works hard and long for Poetry, listening and speaking. We should listen to him carefully.

Restalrig

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Restalrig by Julia Wendell, Finishing Line Press (book of the month feature, March 2007). Reviewed by Clarinda Harriss.

My father was a literature-
turned-oil man...

I’d hold my nose from car to refinery glass
door....
“That’s the smell of your bread & butter,”
my mother would admonish....

Reading these lines in Julia Wendell’s poem “Slick,” from her latest collection, Restalrig, you’re apt to be reminded of Anne Sexton’s “And One for My Dame.” The Sexton poem opens thus:

A born salesman, my father made all his dough by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.
A born talker, he could sell one hundred wet-down bales of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and the sales
and make it pay. At home each sentence he would utter had first pleased the buyer who'd paid him off in butter.
Each word had been tried over and over, at any rate, on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.
My father hovered over the Yorkshire pudding and the beef: a peddler, a hawker, a merchant and an Indian chief.
Roosevelt! Willkie! and war! How suddenly gauche I was with my old-maid heart and my funny teenage applause.
Each night at home my father was in love with maps while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs....

The Restalrig poems all cluster around Wendell's parents' death. They are lyrical within a single narrative: growing up in a household of considerable wealth and privilege headed by a charming, formidable Dad and a mother with whom the poet felt considerable rivalry, a household where political warfare erupted at the dinner table; being “given away” in marriage to a man she eventually divorced; the loss of the family home, Restalrig (“Rest-all-rigs”), pointing up her conflicted relationship with the momentos it had housed. Given that background, you might think you were in Confessional territory for sure—Anne Sexton most obviously (Wendell's parents even ate Yorkshire pudding while her father held forth on his pro-Viet Nam war views), but with a soupçon of Robert Lowell (Wendell's father was a Navy man too, and her family were clearly Brahmins) and of Sylvia Plath (the husband, for starters). Sexton and Plath both wrote about horses, too, and Wendell's bio note in Restalrig points out that she is “an avid three-day event rider.”

Keep the riding in mind. Maybe it's the horses—Plath and Sexton are at their least shrill in their horse poems—but whatever the reason, Restalrig has none of the hysteria, none of the hyperbole, none of the festering rage that defines the so-called confessional poets at their most, well, confessional.

Restalrig abounds, instead, in sharp imagery that seems to allow us direct sensory knowledge of the lost household rather than seeing it only through the poet's lens. The images are neither hideous nor pretty, neither sweet nor shock-value-rank, and the tone is warm. The mother has “stroke-strained” fingers, and we know they are also smoke-stained, for we've seen her “stubbing out her Kool cigarette// into the leftovers on her Wedgewood.” “The musk-mint of boxwood” (an image Wendell uses in several poems) “was my grandmother, her signature scent/ I hid behind,/ my mother calling to me across the pond.” (I suspect a Sextonite would remind us that, to some people, boxwood smells like dog urine.)

In one of the finest poems in the collection, “Airborne,” Wendell watches a great blue heron and asks,

Who'd named him with such magnitude,
compelled as we are
to stop in our startled tracks
& look up?

I know I'd never be called any anyone
great bronze daughter,
no matter how my flight
might surprise.

With what marvelous understatement those lines, which end the poem, suggest the poignant sense of never being quite wonderful enough to impress a worshiped parent.

But the daughter did fly. And does. Wendell's most recent previous collections, Dark Track, Word Tech Editions, Cincinnati, OH, 2005, and Scared Money Never Wins, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, 2004, depict the poet soaring at full gallop (as well as mucking the stalls). “Six geldings, two brood mares, a variety of young equines” are part of the menagerie Wendell lists in the Restalrig bio note.

Horses, and Wendell's passionate, deeply empathic relationship with them, are the center of both these earlier collections. In them, as in Restalrig, close observation and precise language give the horses and other “characters” to us, give them to us whole in all their sensory richness. I gave copies to my son—who is a horse veterinarian himself—because I knew he and his equestrienne wife, whose various farms have served as graveyards for many animals, would feel these poems, especially “Dark Track,” in their very marrow. The setting of “Dark Track” is the stable, where the names of dead horses (a premature foal, a broken-legged thoroughbred, etc.) get painted on a wall slat. It ends

Human beings

are the strangest of all, the need so much
light & air & proof to keep moving, every poem,
a name on a fence board.
Today we'll paint her high up & close to the others,
& for a while, the heaven of a filly's
sleek bones & speed translating fear
will make anything possible,
her dark track illegibly within us.

Restalrig places Wendell's parents' names on that wall, close to the others, high up.

The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats by John Surowiecki, Washington, DC: The Word Works, 2007 (Winner of the 2006 Washington Prize). Reviewed by George Drew.

She says there are holes in the light,
fissures that, opening to the past,
are born to collapse...

These lines, from “Mad Song,” are a concise summary of John Surowiecki’s poems: both their subject matter and their methodology. They also express perfectly how the poems leave us feeling: as if we have dropped a tab of acid and are experiencing hallucinatory associations of previously unimaginable dimensions. “All my poems are brief,” Surowiecki remarked recently. What he didn’t add is that each is very large in its distillation of the essential, possessing a power of perception that jolts. Each is a surreal cartoon—like something out of the Beatles, or a Dali painting: one of those weird disruptions of time and space. Consider “The Men in Marge’s Life”:

One liked her kamikazes and mojitos
and surprised her with nighties and mules.
One, an electrician, wound her life around his
as he would wire around his arm. One
had one nipple. One thumbed the moon

out of the sky as if it were a lozenge in a silver
wrapper and placed it at her feet. One provided
examples but never explanations as to why love
becomes unborn in a misappropriation of time.

One let her basil go to seed and her peonies
go flowerless; and in a snapshot she took,
one is his own ghost, double-exposed and half
cigarette smoke, floating above the first
unshoveled morning of out last hard winter.

How can one help but be taken, in every sense, by such charged imagery and metaphor? By such concise and powerful language? By the unalloyed perception that is both revealed to and forced on us? Indeed, this and all forty-three of the poems in this amazing book provide “examples but never explanations.” One might as well try to explain in simple terms the paradoxes of the quantum realm.

We read Suroweicki’s poems and are necessarily bewitched—by their twining of the minutiae of the “normal” everyday or mundane world (our perceptions, that is) and the really bizarre and surreal shifts into another dimension altogether. The metaphors the poet arrives at contribute to that mind-altering sense of the otherworldly bizarre: “artists with eyes like the bubble/ of a carpenter’s level” (simile); “that its fish wore fedoras” (shades of Yellow Submarine or Dali); “Even a cardinal, a quart of blood in a tree.” Plus, there is the sheer off-kilter descriptive power displayed again and again, as in “Operetta”:

They’ve saved their stricken mother,
blinding Death with their beauty and charm
and locking him in a pantry filled
with canned goods—which is why
in mid-January, their myrtle blooms

in driveway shadows and the blue
earths of hydrangeas reappear with
small orange butterflies falling from
the heavens to seek them out. Now
their winter nights are our June nights,
thick with the aftershaves of young men....

Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of Surowiecki’s poetry is the humor coursing throughout the poems. It is a clever and often sly humor that feeds into the surreal and bizarre elements, but what really distinguishes it is the way it often grounds itself in an equally compelling compassion. A very fine example of this is “The Angel of Death Returns to New Haven”:

The angel of death who placed the weight
of the world upon your helpless heart now asks
for our forgiveness, thinking he might have made
a terrible mistake taking you as early as he did,
not realizing what a good and principled man
you were and how the world would become
duller and cheaper and more brittle without you.

He drops by when we’re clearing out a spot
for your tomatoes, a balding man in Bermuda
shorts who asks if he can bring us coffee
and crullers or maybe pick up a few things

at Home Depot; and when he has nothing more to say,
he blinks and blinks and blinks and blinks,
holding back the tears the world has yet to see.

While losing none of the surrealism that defines his poetry, Surowiecki employs a devastating humor that in its power is redemptive and thus grounded in compassion. That, too, is the power of the language itself: so sharp, so specific, and so playful. How many poets would conceive of death dramatically as an angel in Bermuda shorts who, realizing his mistake in taking so soon such a “good and principled man,” tries to achieve redemption through good deeds? Not many. We laugh viscerally at such a portrait, but we realize, by the end, the limits of death’s remorse: he still holds back “ the tears the world has yet to see.” There is both a brutal honesty and a deeply felt compassion. There is, in short, that which defines us, or should, as human beings.

So this is the poetry of John Surowiecki. In poem after poem he explores, with a variety of specific subject matter and poetic forms and varied and vividly expressive language, that “misappropriation of time” alluded to earlier, and in doing so deconstructs our “normal” perceptions so that we might re-appropriate our own humanity as it evolves in time and space. In the poem, “My Backyard Celebrates the Pope’s Birthday,” Surowiecki says that “The lilacs speak eleven languages.” So does he, and as we finish this wonderful book we smile, nod in recognition, and say:

Keep the tabs coming, Mr. Surowiecki, keep the tabs coming!

Thirst

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Thirst by Patrick Carrington, Codhill Press (2007), 32 pp., $10, ISBN I-930337-26-4. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

From the opening line in the first poem (“Learning History in Nursery School”) of this chapbook, in which “rain slid down on silk ropes,” to the “wet rings on pine” the speaker made as he “mumbled/ in shadowed booths” in the last (“Fresh Light”), Patrick Carrington’s sense of touch and texture illuminates the events he recalls. It is in details like the neighbor who “snores/ like a lawnmower” (“The Logic for Improving a Neighborhood”), that he effectively adds highlights as one might in paintings.

Another characteristic of Thirst is the author’s examination of religion, which leads us more toward abstraction, as in “I had always thought it complicated,/ becoming holy.” (“First Lessons in Grace”) Spiritual introspection is part of looking back on childhood in this poem, with its air of family confession in “the wine bruises/ he gave my mother,” and the well stated notion that “the ticket to forever might be more/ along the lines of an ample supply/ of 100-watt bulbs.”

I come away from these poems with the sense of having been in the company of someone whose idea of divinity depends on what he can see and connect with at ground level. The water that slakes this particular Thirst may have a calm surface, but it sparkles and isn’t shallow.

Playground of Flesh

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Playground of Flesh by Neil Carpathios. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag (2006), 76 pp., $12, ISBN: 1-59948-043-3. Reviewed by David Lee Garrison.

A visceral urgency pervades this book. It is about handling dead body parts and imagining yourself as a cadaver, hearing coins jingle in your father’s pocket while standing by his grave, using a washing machine as a vibrator or seeking sexual gratification with a vacuum cleaner, making love in the kitchen and hoping the kids will think you are washing dishes. Comic or tragic, every poem in this book hits you hard in the gut.

It has three sections. In the first, “The Smell of Death,” the poet recalls his childhood as the son of a surgeon, his own work in a morgue, and his father’s death. The second, “The Weight of Desire,” starts with a funny poem about budding adolescent sexuality, goes on to bare all in an unflinchingly honest exploration of the human need for love and sex, and ends with a poem about cicadas who wait seventeen years to mate and die “doing what they love.” The last section, “Moving On,” deals with marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, and intimations of mortality.

The title poem, “Playground of Flesh,” appears as the second one in the book. Although the title suggests sexuality, in fact the poem has to do with a summer job during college:

...I baby-sat bodies,
assigned each a name and number
for medical students who came in spattered coats
in clots of three around each slab,
unzipped their bag and said hello.

The poet describes what the medical students do with the bodies in clinical detail—it’s the kind of stuff that horrifies and fascinates at the same time. The poem ends with a surprise that mixes all of the emotions stirred up by the poem:

...I’d sit in a corner
pretending to read but pictured my head attached
to the bodies, my eyes closed, faking my death
just to have someone’s hands cup my heart
like a prize tomato.

As a way of teaching the surprise of poetry, I occasionally read all but the last few lines of a poem for my students and then ask them to give it an ending. If I were to do that with this one, none of them, nor I, would ever come up with anything like this. One of the main purposes of poetry is to knock us over with language, and no one does that any better than Neil Carpathios.

The clinical thread sewn into the first part of the book runs through the rest of it as well. In the vacuum cleaner poem, based on a newspaper article, the poet describes the severing of

...the ligaments
that connect to the man’s pubic bone,
the pudendal nerve in the perineum
which wires a man for pleasure....

The graphic nature of this description is effective because it helps to express the connection between our deepest physical and emotional needs. Why would a man insert himself into a vacuum cleaner? The man tries to explain to the 911 operator “through sobs / the weight of his desire, the bottomlessness / of his aloneness….” Yes, the whole thing sounds absurd, but we realize in reading this book just how much painful absurdity accompanies desire.

The poet brings philosophy and religion into this mix as well. In a poem about his father’s death, the poet recalls the stark statement by Democritus, “Nothing exists but atoms and the void.” The voice of the philosopher stands against his own cry of pain: “Stay with me a little longer.” As a poet and as a son, he finds it hard to be a philosopher at this moment. “I wish / I could say his dying was beautiful.” In the poem “God’s Experiment,” a kind of modern spin-off from Paradise Lost, he writes:

With x-ray eyes He sees
the hidden bones of desire.
He takes notes.
There is a file on each one of us.
I say let Him look.

This poem, and the whole book, say, in effect, “okay, God, take a good look at this creature driven by desire, take a good look at what you made because I can’t be anything but what I am.” “God’s Experiment” ends with a line that sums up Playground of Flesh through the image of the defiant tongue of writer and lover: “Let this sharp tongue eat its way into paradise.”

Blue Ribbons at the County Fair

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Review of Blue Ribbons at the County Fair by Ellaraine Lockie, PWJ Publishing (2008), 63 pp., $10, ISBN 0-939221-45-4. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

Here is an entire collection of prize-winning poems, hence the beribboned title and, I suspect, the consistent immediacy of the work. Lockie’s note at the end of her book explains the celebratory attitude she inherited for competition while growing up on a Montana farm. Prize winners need to make an impression quickly, and this is a poet who moves along at a good pace and makes good use of each line. “How to Know a Prairie Poem” tells us what she sees that others might too easily overlook:

A sea of native grass and sage scents
narrated by waves of sound
with whispers from a skunk-drunk coyote
And inhaled smoke-signaled history
on hillsides pulls you back a century
into printed accounts of...

and on we go through stanzas that are a rolling landscape on paper. For the most part the lines are shorter, the tone less contemplative. Whether in the Himalayan cat with “Paul Newman’s eyes” or the “Man About Town” whose “stride was a study in meter,” we encounter common observations and occurrences elevated by deft descriptions. “Lost Legacy” describes Alzheimer’s disease “Where fragments of facts/atrophy into fiction,” and shifts key, taking its place among a number of sensitively written poems on such themes as old age. If one of these prize-winners stands out as a crowd-pleasing possibility to be read aloud, it is “The Affair,” which is sharp and cheeky and ultimately sobering. As are poems touching on the bomb attacks in London in 2005 or a response to abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. In major or minor, there is an appealing directness here of the sort that concludes “Imperfection”:

Fifty-five years and
finally unafraid to confront
the bare facts of human frailty