Archive for May, 2006

Half Wild

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

by Mary Rose O’Reilley
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3

A Load of Warm Souls

oreilly cover

The word “soul” is printed fifteen times in Mary Rose O’Reilley’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, which is probably too many for any single volume of poetry.  Predictably, her obsession with the soul signals a preoccupation with death, a well-worn path in poetry that much of O’Reilly’s book travels.

This preoccupation begins with the first poem “Twin,” probably the finest poem in the collection.  It explores the partial death of the self.  The speaker seems to have lost a twin either before or during birth, and says, “You were the part of me/ that gave itself to death.”  This death is haunting, especially with such gruesomely scientific words as “caul,” the portion of the amnion that covers the head of a fetus at birth.  The poem ends with a couplet, “Sometimes I waken/ with an infant’s shriek” and we suddenly find ourselves in a dark and cryptic world.

O’Reilley has many ways of measuring death in her poems.  Arguably the most effective is making visible the remnants of a life, as she does in “The Dead.”  Here she accuses the dead of having been too careful in life, as well as in the preparation for death:

their clocks never
run down,
their silverware
shines in its coats.

As often as her poems are based in the reality of life and death, O’Reilley sometimes enters a world of fantasy.  In “Bluebeard’s Wife” she doesn’t abandon the subject of death, but addresses it by retelling the story of Bluebeard, a serial killer that murdered each of his wives and stored their bodies in a forbidden room.  The speaker says of the newest wife, “she’s had so much practice/ not smelling the dead.”  These lines imply the wife’s forged reality and life of denial—a startling moment in the poem, somehow more so than when she writes, “the murdered women/ will stir.”

Some of the most successful and inviting poems in the book deal with the title theme, Half Wild.  The imaginative life of stones is presented in “Field Guide to North Shore Geology” which begins, “the stones are telling each other lies.”  We are let in on the secret lives of stones and O’Reilley’s relationship with them.  Another poem, “Scholar’s Garden,” details a scholar’s fondness for ravens and his preference for ravens over crows.  The speaker says of the scholar, “He once knew a raven who spoke Mandarin passably well.”

Despite the well executed dark tone, O’Reilley’s language often veers into the over-dramatic.  In “Sister Joanna Washes the Floor” she writes, “a deck worn soft/ at the margins of mystery.”  The “margins of mystery” don’t inform us about the deck of cards or anything else.  Other poems, like “Home Farm,” indulge in lines like “relentless desire” that are not only overwrought but set in italics to further emphasize the unnecessary.  These indulgences act as a disinvitation.

At her best, however, O’Reilley undoubtedly manages to recreate and call forth the wild impulse within us all.  Finally, our “skin puckers, thins,/ breaks into feathers” and we “belong to ourselves no longer.”

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


For Love of Common Words

Monday, May 15th, 2006

by Steve Scafidi
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

4

Death-Obsessed

for love of common wordsWhen I first flipped through Steve Scafidi’s new book and saw a thin poem titled “Ode to the Middle Finger,” I figured I didn’t even have to read it to know it was going to be what most novelty poems are: brainless sludge.

Surprisingly, the poem wound up being a genial elegy to Johnny Cash. And it’s even more surprising, later in the book, to see he also wrote an elegy for Run DMC DJ Jam Master Jay. This is characteristic of For Love of Common Words; just when Scafidi seems to have settled on an aesthetic; a form; a temperament; whatever; he turns a surprising corner. This accounts for the bulk of the book’s successes.

For Love of Common Words is the second book for Scafidi, a cabinetmaker from West Virginia. The first of three sections includes his poem “The Egg Suckers,” which won the 2005 James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah. Part One seems nearly a constant celebration, and “The Egg Suckers” is among its better poems. In the section, he goes to no lengths to hide his romantic side. He writes well about animals, which is nothing if not “pleasant”—especially in the opening poem, in which “Mr. Garland Calhoun, an ordinary bear/eight foot tall with top hat” makes his way to a wedding. Sounds like a child’s poem, but by the end of the book (or this review), one comes to see it has greater implications.

Scafidi has an affinity for current events, particularly horrifying ones, and the terrified, death-obsessed narrator that emerges in parts two and three gives his first scare during “The Boy in the Pumpkin,” the penultimate poem in Part One. The poem describes a boy found dead inside the remains of a destroyed prize pumpkin. But “On the Death of Karla Faye Tucker” is even more horrific; in the poem, the narrator is morally stricken about whether or not to it’s appropriate to celebrate the death of an enemy:

                     …For Texas just killed a woman
    who took a pick ax for a while against
                     gravity and swung it
    down into the curled body of another
woman trying to sleep—just to sleep—one night
and who begged after a while more to be killed
                quicker and who was not…

At the end of the poem, he admits, “Karla Tucker was not my enemy./Horror is. That common murderous evil bitch.” So it becomes all the more interesting in “Implement and Icon” when which he makes the following confession:

I’ve needed to write about this for a long time—
      this pitchfork motionless here in the mind—
full of rage these days, full of murderous rage.

But if Scafidi shows an appropriate level of terror in the book, he occasionally indulges his romantic side a bit too much. One very good poem is spoiled by a clichéd last line which explains that one can live one’s whole life in America “and never learn how to love or how to be a man.” But his sharp sounds, rhythms and sense of grandiosity tend to make up for these slips. Toward the end of the book, as Scafidi’s formal concerns increase, nearly every poem mentions death by name, and cold horror finds balance in an imaginative world he’s able to access through his infant daughter—a world of faithless hope, and of fairy tale (he holds her in his arms and growls like a bear, perhaps Mr. Calhoun). At last, he explains to his daughter that night is “an idiot and blind, bigger/than your mother and I and we defy it with you.”

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Moongarden

Monday, May 15th, 2006

by Anthony McCann
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

7

Mindlessness and Mammalian Lyricism

mccann cover

Anthony McCann wants to achieve greatness, and he wants to do it with the grunting brute-force of a wildebeest.

Moongarden, the Brooklyn poet’s second book, is full of strong poems, strong images, and strong mammals. Wildebeests “are not horses, they are large/and shaggy scholars,” he writes in “Woe to the Wildebeest, Whose Flesh is to be Torn.” Beasts are scholarly to the extent that scholars are beastly; in essence all mammals are beasts, regardless of the habits that define them. In the same poem, wildebeests are fused with literati:

They are heavy-headed mammals and

it makes them sad,

it makes them hang their heads

which gives them a formal air

during lectures and group discussions.

McCann is also ready and willing to acknowledge his own beastly nature: “And here I am Mother, slick haired and heaving/A kind of elk, something, a sort of human elk.” But despite Moongarden’s amusing human-as-beast thread, McCann’s precise lyricism is what makes this book worth returning to. In “Ode to the Sky” he states his case: “This is what my lips are for:/Replacing all the words.”

The very fact that McCann’s able to pull off such a strong poem under a risky title like “Ode to the Sky” title speaks volumes for his ability, as does another of the book’s best poems, given the always-indulgent title “Sonnet.” The narrator gives a sense of place early—“I’m alone in the McDonalds, you don’t love me,”—before offering a wonderfully creepy parenthetical: “(Ellen knocks and reenters the poem        Hello Ellen).” The strange and lonely poem also offers a strange and lonely conclusion:

The CIA gave me acid                                Now I can’t die

O guardians of the eastern door

There is no way back to the sky

There are several moments in the book where McCann’s lyric touch is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, none more evident than in the book’s stunning Patersonian conclusion, “October.” The poem’s speaker exults over trees that have “squirrely fists,” over “fishes/and the sky,” and over a baseball game he’s watching on television. When October rolls around, he notes, even baseball “grows dense and solemn.”

The impulse behind fusing the intelligent and the animal is evident early on in Moongarden; it’s an impulse to access one’s inherent mindlessness, one’s plain being. “I, myself, should have been a thing,” he writes in “Ode to the Lake,” perhaps accounting for his interest in the moon (which is “A lifesize map of the moon”). He alludes to Stevens—who wrote about the notion of ascribing imagination to the moon in “The Comedian as the Letter C”—while deliberately avoiding mention of the poet by name: “According to The Poet—{Enter the Poet}—/The moon is not like anything.”

By the end of the last poem, one could say McCann’s found a way to achieve the mindlessness he’s after. A wildebeest might be large and domineering, but is by and large a beast of complacence. McCann’s speaker notes in “Radiance Through Fascism” that he doesn’t want to write “any beautiful poems/That are the sweet resurrection of lyrical pictures”; instead, he wants to want to help himself and others access the mindless. Finally, to “make people weep and fall in love with the land.”

* 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Meteoric Flowers

Monday, May 15th, 2006

by Elizabeth Willis
Wesleyan University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

6_5stars_6

Where Have You Been, Erasmus?

meteoric flowersWhen I was in 8th grade, a friend of mine needed to meet the required number of sources for a bibliography. He made up a book called “The Steam Engine” by an author named “H.G. Stein.” The teacher never called him on it, I guess because it’s almost too made up sounding to be made up. Elizabeth Willis’s new book has a poem called “The Steam Engine,” a title she took from Erasmus Darwin.

Maybe that last paragraph wasted your time. Prose poems can do that, too. A lot of prose poems are too long for their own good these days—so it’s nice to read Meteoric Flowers. Unlike many bawdy prose piles I’ve seen in various journals lately, these don’t come across as aimless freewrites that sideswipe “poetic” moments. Willis instead factions sharp non sequiturs: “I was looking for your mitt but now the last greasy shred is about to escort me over the cartoon cliff. If I could only get these eggbeaters to compensate for the anvil foreshortened above my head. I always loved your laugh.”

The book, like a lot of contemporary poetry, concerns itself mostly with language and its range of possibilities. The book’s opening poem makes her intention and obsession clear:  “The world is clanking: noun, noun, noun.” On occasion, she allows parts of language to take on various personas, for example, the letter W: “Among the lower orders, a W is sibilant.”

It’s an easy wonder that this focus on language might appeal strictly to the literary community. There will be few complaints, and language-focus isn’t what works best for Willis in this book anyway. It’s nice that the title is a nod to Wallace Stevens, and that his quote “A poem is a meteor” serves as the book’s epigraph. Though after a little deduction, the flowers don’t exactly blast into immediacy; if the book is concerned with meteoric flowers and meteor=poem, we’re essentially left with “poetic flowers.” Hmmmm.

The prose poems are divided into three sections labeled “Cantos,” and separated by three verse poems, “Verses Omitted,” “Verses Omitted by Mistake,” and “Errata” (reversing the form of a book written by 19th century poet Erasmus Darwin, she notes; all the poem titles come from Darwin’s work). The verse poems are less successful than the prose, but overall, if her relevant poem titles aren’t enough, the startling turns she takes are: “By evening we’re sewing a new kind of flag. In the muddy face of spring, someone’s slinging pretty frosting, fitting our thoughts with pear-like wonder…” Rather than hiding behind the form, she uses it to her advantage. Each small piece of prose, rather than a means of escape, is the product of a confident blend of chance and design.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Green Squall

Monday, May 8th, 2006

by Jay Hopler
Yale University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

5_5

Lizard Becomes a Verb

hopler cover

If one is willing to concede significance to the decimal system, there’s some nostalgia associated with Jay Hopler’s first book: he’s become the 100th Yale Younger Poet. I’m sure Hopler doesn’t mind being lumped in with that crowd, though the payoff in Green Squall comes from the odd way that he’s suited for solitude. The book’s narrator constantly compensates for isolation by acknowledging there’s solace in an imagined relation with his surroundings—a garden, a beer, grass that is “lizarding.” By the end, imagination is as real as anything else.

In a short poem, “Of Paradise,” he comments on a fisherman drinking a beer. The man is “Small and gigantic/In his white rubber boots,” and “a black fly is drowning” in the beer. At the end of the poem, the fisherman, the fly, and the narrator are linked: “How sick we are, the three of us,/Of Paradise.”

Over the course of the book, Hopler also does a great job painting himself as a tragicomic figure: he loves small things like clouds and grass; he likes being surrounded by strippers and prostitutes; he still lives with his Mom. A Berrymanesque dialogue develops between him and an unidentified “angel” in “The Frustrated Angel”:

He wants to know how often I’ve been mistaken for a shrub.
The Angel says if you beat someone long enough and hard enough,
They will learn to love you for it.
That’s mighty big talk, isn’t it Hopler—coming from a man who
           lives with his mother?
Hopler, I’ve had it with all your crying and complaining. If I
           wanted to hear whining, I’d kick a dog.

Apart from the narrator, the “mother” is the only human to enter the book. The fact that there are no witnesses allows him to re-imagine things as he likes, and at times, contradict himself. Usually exultant before sky or trees, he shows a far different imaginative state in “Self-Portrait With Whiskey and Pistol”:

 

How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky—
How disappointing it all is.

But lines like this reaffirm the fact that strong emotion is strong emotion. The apparent 180s offer the reader savvy shifts in mood; and whether full of glory or frustration, Hopler never becomes indifferent. The outstanding “Out of These Wounds, The Moon Will Rise” shows the way that a sense of one’s surroundings is in flux with one’s emotional and imaginative states:

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light
      in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new
Way of experiencing the world…

Hopler’s only real failures lie in infrequent “why hast thou forsaken me” theatrics. But there’s uncorrupted satisfaction when someone notes that imagination itself can sustain someone. And Hopler’s place as solitary man in a kingdom of the imagination ultimately makes him more Stevens than he is Berryman (ironically, the book’s worst poem calls upon Stevens by name). The ambitious nine-part “Of Hunger and Human Freedom,” the book’s centerpiece, falls a little short of its aim, but there are some great meditative moments. Freedom, Hopler writes, is not our natural state: “Our bonds define us, after all.”

Hopler’s work is chiseled, perhaps the best example lying the book’s excellent conclusion, “Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus,” when he’s finally buried in his imaginative fusion with his surroundings. The Yale competition was judged by Louise Glück, and to say that such poems are “Glückian” wouldn’t be a stretch, but I suppose that’s natural. It’ll be interesting to see whether he climbs the ranks like many of the 99 before him, or sinks to the bottom of the ocean like many others. I think there’s a good case to be made for the former.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Shake

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

by Joshua Beckman
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

8_5

A Karate Chop of Love

beckman shake coverAnger’s not a crime. Neither are shoes. Pot maybe. But I suppose with any, it’s a question of balance and self-control. There’s a lot about shoes in Joshua Beckman’s new book, and there’s definitely pot. There’s also a bit more anger than we’ve seen from him before. But the undercurrent of frustration, especially in the book’s opening section, is the most compelling thing here; and the way he masters it in the end shows yet another step forward for this increasingly important poet, and results in one of the better poetry titles so far this year.

I don’t mean to imply this is an overtly “angry” book. It’s not. Beckman’s traditionally adept at converting the personal to the existential in a deceptively plain-spoken way, and at encoding just what needs to be encoded to avoid self-satisfying autobiography. But from the opening section, “Shake”—the first of the book’s three sections, each a series of untitled poems—there’s a shift in tone from his previous three books.

The title section is thick with a sense of loss. There’s also the occasional hint of bitterness, as in the second poem when he references “the unbecoming ways/of everyone.” And in nearly every poem, a sense of powerlessness against some larger forces: “I too, at one time, felt the elation of being a small drunken cog/in a giant destructive empire” is followed shortly by “No one can explain even a little what’s going down.”

Of the potential resolutions to powerlessness, perhaps the most evocative is Beckman’s suggestion that “We may invent.” The fact that creation, especially art, can provide sustenance is something easy to ignore in contemporary America, as is “personal decay.” Embracing these things becomes an accomplishment of something against the nothing, a nothing that “no one can explain,” and that becomes more complex when one is overwhelmed with a horrifying political climate and an aging body. There is also the fever of lost love, as in these visions, which close the second poem:

your red pants, your cradled purse,
the next man who will leave
his lover for you.

The first section is only weak when the narrator becomes inexplicably sunny. Its eighth poem has some good stuff, but the opening lines “Beautiful rounded earth/we accept so your fluorescence” and the final line “That people, all at once, can be kind and thoughtful” left me flat. More attractive was the section’s ending, in which the narrator muses on the possibility of getting high with high school kids who’d think him “fucked up.” The narrator would like to warn them of a police presence in the neighborhood:

they would say we know, fuck them,
and we would know what they meant,
that they meant no harm.

The book’s middle section, “Let the People Die,” serves as a necessary bridge between the first and third. In the series, (a sonnet sequence, save for one poem that indulges in a fifteenth line), Beckman’s talent for incorporating repetition is central. He decides to be blunt about politics and religion, which is striking—“All this horrible conquering in the name of Christianity,”—but the poem that got me is the fourteenth in the series, which opens “I like your handsome drugs” and contains the laugh-out-loud lines “The man screamed out, ‘The/karate chop of love,’ before tackling that woman.” The karate chop of love comes up three more times in the sonnet, and serves as a servable metaphor for the book itself.

But a lot of the book’s frustration is controlled—and ultimately, purged—in the final and best section of the book, “New Haven.” I doubt if anyone’s written so well with the southern Connecticut city in mind since Wallace Stevens and his ordinary evening. There’s some melancholy (“the flat world of borrowed things”), some reflection on relationships (“A weak woman/will never make you happy”) and some good-humored cynicism:

wrapped in a blissful dream
the moonlight shines down
brightly—
but I don’t really know that
I just read it in a book.

Loss and frustration pervade this section too, but they are well-honed and approached with intelligence and, more importantly, balance. Occasional rhyming is a little less interesting, but the poems are consistently awe-inspiring and build up to more than welcome catharsis. We’re not used to hearing lines like “Listen, you little faggot” from Beckman, but as Gerald Stern once pointed out, Beckman’s is ultimately a poetry of affection. “All will reach an age and die at that age,” Beckman writes, and by the end, you may realize he’s right—this birthday party would be fucked without the karate chop of love.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Burn the Field

Saturday, May 6th, 2006

by Amy Beeder
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

3_5

The Flavor of Chance

beeder coverAmy Beeder’s debut is promising, but she’d do well to lay off the flowers a little. A highly observational book of poetry, Burn the Field occasionally gropes for subject matter, but has a great deal of sophistication and many surprising lines. Beeder’s at her best when she submits to her most absurd impulses. In “Cabezon,” one of the book’s better poems, she watches a stranger “shuffle up Washington street” as she drives by:

hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack
from the slit of your pumpking mouth;
humped over like the eel-man or geek
the dummy paid to sweep out gutters,
drown the cats. Where are you going now?

In this poem, the narrator sees something and meditates upon it. There are a number of poems like this, and many are good, but also read like “show-and-tell.”

 Beeder’s absurdity can be a treat, and when their fusion with the book’s recurring themes and images yield the most promise.  Two of the book’s best poems are among a handful involving roosters, the first of which is “Rooster Shadow.” The poem illustrates Beeder’s excellent ear: “and grackle black, grit-colored slivers of sparrow/or finch that grub for crumbs on every sidewalk.” And “The Cockfight” shows a dark side she may want to indulge a bit more:

                                      …When the victor
climbed the corpse and spread his wings
and crowed—a long triumphant crow, we fled
from that plank court into a rainy street
winnings in our hands…

 There’s also an intimacy with nature in Burn the Field that, at times, pays dividends: “When Heaven spoke through nature any cabbage/might show a rupture in the Human sphere.” But a lot of the book’s less exciting poetry comes when she gets a little too gushy about flowers and trees. This is where her show-and-tell description pays off the least.  When it does work, however, it’s worth it, as in her short meditation on a “Photo of Pasteur”:

Up to his neck in beet juice & the favor of chance
with a crookneck flask, the man who, attending a lecture
on childbed fever at the Paris Academy
sprung up impatient, shouting—

 I recommend the book and I think Beeder is skilled enough to hang around for a while;  lines like these show how much fun she’d be if she’d just indulge her cues toward mania.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


The Sadness of Others

Friday, May 5th, 2006

by Hayan Charara
Carnegie Mellon Univesity Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

2

Sadness Familiar

Charara CoverA book of poetry worth returning to is touched in some respect with the unexpected and unpredictable. In Hayan Charara’s second book, The Sadness of Others, they never arrive. The narrator, freshly abandoned by his wife, also struggles with his mother’s death. The intentions are there, and the emotions are there, but by and large the work comes off as sentimental, and almost every poem seems overwritten. In several cases, solid poems are spoiled by Charara’s attempt to write his way in and write his way out. Take the poem “To My Mother on the Occasion of the Fifth Year of Her Death.” There’s some nice narrative:

This year, I disconnected
the phone lines
and erased the messages
from my father and sister,
who mourn openly
and without regret.

But the poem hangs around long after closing time, and finishes with a cliché: “and each day is still /another to come.”

Generally, the problem is that Charara tries to make common experiences seem uncommon. It might have been more interesting if he’d gone a little deeper with issues relating to his identity as Arab-American (as he has done in lucid, affecting prose), because most of the book’s best work deals with that material. “More than We Dared” contains the great couplet “We married first cousins./We feared pork.” The narrator also recalls how “The nuns in grade school//said we worshipped the devil.” But poems surrounding this topic are few and far between, and while it’s touching how the lost mother looms over the book, I think he may have exhausted this topic in his first book. And the only truly unexpected moment comes upon stumbling into the electric “To My Ex-Wife.” He describes waking suddenly in the middle of the night, six months after she has left him: “at half past midnight,/I knew I had forgiven you.” But it’s only unexpected because it contains the narrative poise that the rest of the book struggles so hard to attain.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews