Archive for October, 2006

A Little White Shadow

Monday, October 30th, 2006

by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Fluid Correction

a little white shadow When erasures are done right, some fascinating associations occur, and a new kind of life can be created for a text. Found poems, sure. But only in the sense that the “chosen” words stay put on the page and, rather than being bolstered by whatever narrative formerly accompanied them, float on their own. When you boil it down, the writer is picking through a heap of words and picking out the ones that cast the finest glint of light—pretty much the same thing as a “poet” creating a “poem.”

In the tight and tiny A Little White Shadow, Mary Ruefle tries her hand at what might be called a book-length erasure (a series of untitled erasures, if you wish), to swift and satisfying results. When I say tiny, I mean tiny; the book is 5 ¾ by 4 ½ inches wide and 42 pages deep. It’s Ruefle’s ninth effort, and her publishers seem on board; the book is printed to seem a relic. The text she erases from was initially published in 1889, and the small book offers browned pages and oldish, inky typeface. The “little white shadow”— the title of the erased work—is cast by Wite-Out (Liquid Paper?) with only a few choice fragments remaining on each page.

There’s not nearly enough salvaged from the initial text to make any guesses about it, save for the fact that its a weird bit of something. Still, I’m sure I’d take Ruefle’s version. The archaic look of the book helps, but from the beginning, she takes control of the composition and reveals a controlled, mysterious poetry:

                  one in ruins

            struck
notes            whose sounds
                 spent a winter here

Mystery consumes both the book and the reader, making the brushes with wisdom all the more arresting:

the       dead

          borrow so little from
                        the past

           as if they were alive

You can go a number of ways with this text. You can do your best to unveil a narrative thread. You can use it as a back-pocket piece for a quick escape-and-return. Or, you can probe the fact that in so many places, the Wite-Out is thin enough to read what’s underneath. And attribute what you want to an apparently hand-glued “envelope” on the second to last page.

Either way, the subtle confidence that’s flush with this insoluble charade is its best quality; Ruefle’s innate poetic impulses allow the philosophical postulations that emerge to inform the cryptic images and vice versa, asking more questions than she answers, all the while building to a final image of the letter—“a letter,” we’re told, “God / changed.” The syntax leading up to it leaves it opened—was God himself changed by the letter, or did God change the letter? Why would God want to mess with anyone else’s words? Well, why would anyone do anything, for that matter—and the words are there, Ruefle proves, for whoever wants to claim them.

Tags: 6 stars, John Deming, Mary Ruefle, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

The Burning of Troy

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

by Richard Foerster
BOA Editions 2006
Reviewed by Julia Istomina

Effectual Strangeness

foerster cover Books written in the aftermath of personal suffering or the death of a loved one sometimes leave an antipathic reader, who is not close to the “victim,” drained due to the often predictable literary interpretations of the stages of the author’s mourning.

This given, I anticipated much from Richard Foerster’s ambitious title. I wasn’t too surprised, then, at the swings in emotion through the three invariably unbalanced sections of Foerster’s dirge—or at the fifth-to-final poem “Smoke Tree,” which culminates with “I was no longer sad.” Furthermore, Foerster’s puzzling formal tone and diction makes the book a demanding read—though reflections and refractions of light and landscape save the movement here, revealing perplexing, sensational, and even addicting one-liners.

At first I expected a framework of Greek myth and an invocation of muse—I received the latter in the opening poem, as the narrator surveys his empathies and concludes with an italicized, “There is no death in this world / of beauty. No life you cannot pluck / back out of thinnest air.” But Foerster is not giving away the ending: continuing through the book I found less of a soliloquy on death and more play with language and the everyday instances of being human.

Foerster is brilliant at coming up with unexpected words that stifle any presuppositions. For example, in “The Convergence,” we have “but look, that shoal of menhaden / the striped bass slices through.” So unforeseen is the conjoining of “shoal” with “menhaden” that at once I begin to understand Foerster’s poetry in terms of color, of light and dark. And in the title poem, we get:

Even her jeweler’s terms
To describe shifting auroral
Patterns seemed neon buzz
Meant more to dazzle unlikely
Prospects than define
Infinite illusory depths:
Fan harlequins, peacock
Tails, chaff and straw,
A mackerel sky roiling
With rarest sunset reds –
“much like Napoleon’s gift
To Josephine, The Burning
Of Troy.”

In his subsequent notes, Foerster comments that Napoleon’s gift was promptly lost by Josephine, making this momentous gift as fleeting as the deathly “burning such as his, / I once laid waste / a citadel, spent all I had.”

Although there is exquisite word and line formation, Foerster largely abstains from experimentation with form. The only two poems that diverge are “Tithonus” and “Smoke,” where colons jarringly separate (or sew together) disparate components that mostly leave off verbs, thereby favoring image over action. This technique allows Foerster some strangeness, and where there is only the space of a few words he creates an effectual, paradoxical image. However, he undermines the careful segregation of parts by beginning “Tithonus” with “Sarcophagus of morning” and ending with “sarcophagus of mourning.” Pun oh so intended, received, and denied.

Foerster—at his most engaging during dissections of his floundering (or absent) faith—puts his own depth behind “the color of things.” Unlike many other writers, he resists using religion as a crutch for personal philosophizing, but invokes first feeling and sensory perception, then content. This results in works that are often anti-pastoral, in that truth is unveiled where romanticism once hid it, and the author is very much sitting beneath the litmus tree, shooting the shit among “the pungent slop of pigs.”

My biggest criticism of The Burning of Troy is the unevenness of subject and tone. Sometimes we get the straight and narrow, as in “Among the Daughters of Lycomedes.” Then there’s the Gothic evocation of Dickinson in the tight and narrow, yet dark-edged, “Samsara.” The book deals overtly with death and with the shadow of a deadening belief system. Consequently, it deals in the self as purveyor of sanctified experience. The most successful poem is “Spoons,” with its nothing-missing yet sparse imagery, and a language that exploits suffocation. Through its devices it causes a sort of choking in the reader:

In the momentary convex
Gleam of one stainless
Steel spoon held hot
From washing, the stippled damp
Wiped all at once clear
With a cloth, just as the hand
Begins to ease down toward the tray,

How grief can shimmer up
Through such idle motion-
How the weight of a left arm
Draped over another, as a finger
Seeks to feather a nipple
Into flame, can seem six-
Feet’s worth of dirt atop

A ravaged cage, while lungs
Struggle beneath to find enough
Breath to say No, I can’t
Breathe like this – then as quick
All slips into place, rattling
An instant before that silence
After the drawer’s slid shut.

All of which is enough to make me cry uncle. The jutting end-stops and convolution of images denied, the pacing that seems irregular but is truly mastered in its effect, this is the Foerster I admire. In accordance with the “high-art” formalities of Foerster’s tone and diction, The Burning of Troy works for the reader if the reader is willing to work for it.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Julia Istomina, Richard Foerster
Posted in reviews

Guilty at the Rapture

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

by Keith Taylor
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Stick to the Prose

Keith Taylor’s new book Guilty at the Rapture is not a very exciting collection of verse. However, definitely worth a read are Taylor’s prose poems, which contain both good storytelling and the subtleties you might hope to find in any decent book of poetry.

The title poem tells of the relief Taylor would find at being left alone with the damned on Judgment Day. Taylor remembers himself as a young boy whose life was all misbehavior and guilt in an intense rural upbringing suffused with Christian values. The poem is humorous and unburdened, offering clear insight and solid “telling.” American Christian conservatism continues as the focus throughout the first set of poems.

Unfortunately, other than “Guilty at the Rapture,” the poem-poems don’t hold many kicks. Those that begin with promising intrigue and intelligence, such as, “The Stud: Galahad, Alberta, 1927,” tend to fall flat in their closing lines. Taylor seems to focus mostly on drawing pictures with his verse, but he makes the images too available to be of much use. In “Grandmother Triptych” he writes:

We remember her black dresses
shining like Bibles, her hand
moving lightly over our backs and arms…

Lines like these seem on the verge of some insight or image that would reframe everyone’s concept of something familiar—in this case, Grandma—in a new and sympathetic way. Unfortunately most of the poems do not go the distance.

After reminiscing about his Christian upbringing, Taylor introduces the prose poems. Anyone interested in the poetry world would probably thoroughly enjoy “First Reading.” In the piece, Taylor sneaks into a James Dickey reading and watches him sweat, swear, and offend almost everyone in the auditorium: “The nuns in the front row, who had been getting more and more agitated for half an hour, were obviously upset. Several left.”

Where Taylor’s verse lacks punch, “First Reading” steps in with a laugh-out-loud conclusion. With similar strength, the close of the short story/prose poem “A Foreign Language” is both meaningful and effective. Taylor adeptly closes with the human condition of holding singular, contradictory desires: “I didn’t want his mother to tell me that I had stayed too long in her rented garage. Most of all, I didn’t want her to tell me that I had left too early.” That Taylor’s prose can convey this unexpected duality highlights what is absent from his verse.

Thus I find myself wishing that later pieces of verse, like “Hitchhiking,” had been written in prose. Taylor’s efforts to tell stories in the more digested and concise format miss the mark almost every time. One exception is “My Education in Paris” which catalogues the women who turned Taylor down without his even propositioning them:

A young Persian woman whose name meant “little white
flower that grows in the desert” – at least that’s what she
told me and I wanted to believe her – said she wouldn’t
sleep with me because I was too old.

I was 22 and I hadn’t asked her either.

A French woman I did ask said she was very pleased but she preferred women.

Wherever Taylor uses this self-effacing humor he makes an impressive connection to the reader that is personal and unpretentious, and is as memorable as his anecdotes in prose. Unfortunately, the bulk of his verse is not nearly vivid enough to stand out for either its observation or its construction.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Keith Taylor, Matt Soucy
Posted in reviews

Kitchen Heat

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

by Ava Leavell Haymon
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

If you can’t stand the title…

haymon cover Trees are great. I remember once listening to some geezer prattle on, going as far as to call them amazing. He further established his geezerness by adding, “Their merely being there means something; that soon we may touch, love, explain.” I must say that I was a little taken aback—we had just met and already he was being this forward with me. But that is, perhaps, heading too far down the wrong road.

Trees are great because, where I’m from (earth), they’re disabused of their leaves every fall, and every spring new leaves fill the trees like so many green birds returned from their winter quarters. Related or not to this photoperiodic process, the trees themselves grow year to year, reaching higher and higher into the sky, thrusting farther and farther away from the niggling concerns of us human beings. Really, trees are something amazing.

But poets are not trees. Perhaps not all people who write poems are poets, but perhaps that has nothing to do with our purpose here (I’ll let you know when I find out what that is). Ava Leavell Haymon is a woman with an interesting name who lives in Louisiana and writes poems about small things that, by the peculiar alchemy that is poetry, become larger. Whether this is a trick of the light, whether mirrors and small German children named Hans who have a smoking habit are involved, or whether an actual chemical change has been effected is a question that will take some time to address. But first, lest you, dearest reader who has taken a break from looking at pornography, think I’m a lunatic with a thing for trees, let’s get back to the idea of the first paragraph.

Most or many of the poems in this book, which is not a selected or collected, were written and published a long time ago (some even in journals that are still extant). As the acknowledgments reveal, one poem was published in a journal in 1985. That’s over twenty years ago, to you and me. Many poems were published in the eighties, many in the nineties—including a good chunk culled from chapbooks published in 1991 and 1994.

Why is this at all relevant? Because this is 2006, and including poems from so far back, which one of the blurb writers amusingly refers to as “her marvelous new poems,” says something about the poet, the publisher, and the poems. (As a person who enjoys comedy writing, I usually take the time to read the backs of poetry books.) And it’s not like Haymon hasn’t published a book in the past twenty years—she just published one (coming in at a scant 52 pages) in 2004.

This sort of curatorial anachronism argues any number of points: that the poems’ quality is of the timeless variety, that their concerns are of the timeless variety, that, perhaps, the poems have been collected around a particular theme, rather than just collected from some period in her writing career. It also suggests that the poet hasn’t been doing much writing lately.

Haymon’s poems deal with her relationships—with her husband (largely the first section, “Choosing Monogamy”), with others when she was a child (largely the second section), and with her children when they were growing up (largely the third section). The poems are full of characters, most of them family members. Grandma may be in Boca now instead of a chaise on the first floor and little Cindy may have become emancipated at fourteen instead of marrying a plow, but the basic paradigms of these relationships have not moved much. My point: 20-year-old poems about familial relations shouldn’t necessarily feel dated today—even if the escaped lunatics who fill the radio and television airwaves with their ravings are right that our culture is coming apart like a Kazakhstani space shuttle on reentry (disclosure: they’re not).

The poems in the first section of the book take some interesting turns: “On the screen in a darkened movie house, my own breasts / glowed back at me from a dressing-room mirror” (“Rare Night Out”). “I bring a rhinoceros with me,” she writes in “Endangered Habitat,” a villanelle (which is actually pronounced “guzzle”) about desire and monogamy. The poems chew on monogamy and all its requisite ingredients/themes, as poets sometimes do, by employing the imagination. We have the beloved’s body parts, the acts of eating (sometimes, understandably, the beloved’s body), hunting and fishing (in the literal and the metaphoric sense), a phallic rhinoceros horn. Monogamy is difficult she seems to be saying, especially when rhinoceroses are involved. “The only trouble with monogamy / is that it’s not what we long for / and know we can never have.” Word.

The poems in the section also, regrettably, take a few ho-hum turns. “I want to rub your hands / between mine. I want to rub / your back and legs with / cedar-smelling oils,” from “Choosing Monogamy”), adds up to not exactly Justin Timberlake-¬sexy territory (though, in truth, Justin is just now bringing sexy back—these poems, being as old as they are, were no doubt written at a time when sexy was missing [presumably, it had burrowed deep into Burt Reynolds’ mustache]). And that’s a bit of a problem when the section is, more or less, about sex. But, a few other light missteps aside, the section is a successful monograph on monogamy.

“My grandmother sent me out to get the eggs,” begins the poem “First Grandchild Breaks the Egg with No Shell,” a typical enough poem for the second section. A common rural event makes the turn to violence and potential life lessons:

Next morning I saw our breakfast eggshells,
crushed, in a saucer in the bright chicken yard.
The hens were pecking at them,
eyeing me—standing on one foot
outside the fence—with the lidless gaze
chickens turn on the enemy.

Other themes of this section: grandparents and uncles, Sunday school and lost teeth, old photographs, family recipes, Christmases, birthdays—simple things all, but decent fodder for these sorts of poems.

The third section is again a bit adventurous, relatively speaking—lines stretch to the end of the page, alignments go wacky, the character Denmother (a sort of everymom/antimom) makes several appearances. A sonnet about her daughter cheekily begins, “She’s 14.” (The preceding poem talks about her son at thirteen years old. Unfortunately, the poem about her daughter is the fifteenth in the section, and the one about her son is the fourteenth. Oh well.)

This line from “Invocation,” which begins the last section, explains a lot of what Haymon’s up to in the book: “Inhabit my kitchen: / It’s here, only here / I can believe and not recoil. / Here, if anywhere, time stills.” Will do.

Again, most of the poems in the section, as in the rest of the book, are about small things: carving a pumpkin, domestic rituals, family vacations. But Haymon does manage to make interesting poetry out of the mundane, and her perspective is brave and honest (she says of her son, “he floods me through with Queen Jocasta’s joy”). The poems—which heavily favor standard syntax, complete sentences, images and a strong narrative element—are well crafted and, with the passing of time, I’d assume, they’d gain in significance.

It’s clear that this is not the poetry of the future, and I have my doubts that it’s even the poetry of the present. Then again, deserts in the American West are littered with thousands of quartz Ozymandiases that once stood as tall trees.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Ava Leavell Haymon, David Sewell, Louisiana State University Press
Posted in reviews

Moraine

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

by Joanna Fuhrman
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Review Moraine

fuhrman cover Don’t worry. Moraine is not a textbook on geology. Fuhrman helpfully provides the definition: “a mound, ridge or ground covering of unsorted debris, deposited by the melting away of a glacier,” but she chooses to riff off the domestic implications of unsorted debris, the gunk of cut stems in the sink, ice cubes and mirrors. Fuhrman’s time scale is personal rather than geologic. It is a protective, middle landscape that does not reach too high or too low. Instead of Atlas holding up the earth, the poems seem to be holding up the sky, both bravely keeping the middle space open and frantically warding off the void of eternity. What’s left is Fuhrman’s language, which skips delightfully but never quite flies.

Every poem in the book is titled some sort of “moraine.” In “Partial Escapist Moraine,” she writes to her friend Noelle Kocot after the death of her husband, the composer Damon Tomblin: “Let’s pretend we’re on a trip. Rip out the moldy sky, package our emotions in even intervals so the jury will have no doubt about our business acumen.” This initial strategy seems to fail after the first section lapses into the silence of an asterisk. The second part resumes: “I’m sorry I can’t help you today…You know I pray to my atheist god to make me ashamed, to be a train to take you away, a joy train unashamed … the lights in your name more awake than this death conglomerate was ever asleep.”

This passage demonstrates a skillful balance of centripetal and centrifugal emotion. No single mood is allowed to take the ball and run, whether grief or imagined joy, humor or ponderousness. The god in the passage is atheist. Death is conglomerated. The tendency to spin out into the cosmos, or even into an extended metaphor is carefully muted. But there is no howl, epic or otherwise.

In literary discussions of masculine and feminine ethics in Frankenstein, it’s been said that the masculine idea of justice means determining right and wrong, and that the female idea of justice means that no one should suffer. Such differences humorously play out in several places in Joanna Fuhrman’s book. In “Bayonet Moraine,” the speaker imagines herself both male and female:

Then I was a man again.
The monorail twisted through the hydra.

Then I was a woman again.
My breasts: life preservers for opposing armies.

In “School Days Lost Song Moraine,” first-graders are involved in a conflict resolution workshop (!). One girl insists she is a sponge in the sink, and soon all the other girls join in. But the boy stays apart, dribbling an imaginary basketball. The teacher asks the girl to think of something they could all do together.

“We can all be in the kitchen/…and he can be a basketball player.”
Wouldn’t his playing cause the dishes to break?” The teacher asks.

“No,” the three-foot girl explains, “he will be a basketball player
not playing ball.”

Throughout Moraine, any emotional or linguistic tendency to break out of orbit is paired with a twin bringing it back to earth. All escapes are partial escapes. “Cento Moraine #2” is a standout two-part poem evoking the atmosphere more than the fact of the attack on the twin towers and the subsequent televised war. Part one starts to grieve for the lost twin, but part two almost seems to give up. It starts: “There is no longer any use in harping on.” The poem ends, “Two, of course there are two.” For Fuhrman, that statement runs deep. This eternal pairing seems not as much a dilution or an intensification of emotion, but an acknowledgement of the fact of gravity. Here a reference to Emily Dickinson almost visibly wards off the depth of its own implication. There, singularities, even “the unkissed/ data specialist, audience rear” are eventually paired off. How this happens is funny but never quite laugh-out-loud. Likewise, while I am struck by the good sense, compassion and playfulness in the book, I find myself listening for a scream that never comes.

Tags: 4.5 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Joanna Fuhrman, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Astoria

Monday, October 16th, 2006

by Malena Mörling
University of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Dead All Over

morling cover

Malena Mörling’s opening poem in Astoria, “If There is Another World,” is the best in the book. In it the speaker explores the many worlds that exist within the one world we all live in, concluding that we don’t need to leave this world to find another, and that we certainly shouldn’t wait until death to do so:

Especially since there is a kind of moth
here on earth
that feeds only on the tears of horses.
Sooner or later we will all cry
from inside our hearts.

Who knew? This odd and charming fact coupled with the last two seriously reflective lines make for impressive lyric. With this poem of inspiration and assurance as the opener—one might even see it as a call to action—I expected more in the same vein, but things only got darker. And though the opening poem deals with death to some extent, it does more for the cause of living than it does to examine the possibility of an afterlife. Quickly though, death becomes the subject of and motive for Mörling’s poems.

But before Mörling delves into the aphotic zone she has a short poem called “A Story”(followed by one called “Becoming a Coat” which I mention only because at first glance I read it as “Becoming a Goat” which of course would be a million times better). “A Story” deals with what we hide from the world, our secrets, rather than what the world hides from us—or more accurately, what we are often too ignorant to find. I bring up this poem for the sake of discussing one incredible image:

the rats you once saw standing
on their hind legs
at the dump
late in the dark.

Though I can’t help but picture Templeton here, what interests me most about the lines is what is left untold. What was the unnamed “you” doing in the dump, late and in the dark? That’s the secret, and what is left to be imagined is undoubtedly the most interesting part.

Now, back to death. In “A Wake,” Mörling details a conversation with a friend who has just been to a wake. The friend sounds happy, content with the way his dead friend looked—and beyond that, content with the way he left this world. He explains the deceased was an alcoholic that, despite a number of attempts to give up drinking, always returned to it and ultimately chose his own end. There is something to be said for controlling death in this way, some appeal that comes with power, though by the poem’s end even the speaker doesn’t sound satisfied. She brings up a take on death familiar from Lorca—that it’s a beginning instead of an end, a true celebration. By now, the idea of death as a celebration, though encouraging, is far too conventional to be inspiring.

Early on in the collection is a poem called “Wearing a Death.” Like “A Wake,” this poem is familiar and too predictable. The idea is permissible, but the approach is fair at best. The whole poem is in the title; we wear death like an accessory despite its inevitability. The wordplay in this poem is perhaps the most inconvenient for the reader: “Not the sole of a shoe, a soul.”

I don’t mean to give the impression that Mörling can’t or doesn’t succeed with the Death Poem. She does and sometimes in the most difficult fashions. One example is “Traveling.” Here is the first stanza of this two stanza poem:

Like streetlights
still lit
past dawn,
the dead
stare at us
from the framed
photographs.

Eerie. You may say it’s been done before and you’d be right, but it’s done well here. The streetlights still lit past dawn take on a sort of extraterrestrial life, and I turn all the photographs in my apartment face down for the day. The idea that the dead are still traveling through time makes death more appealing somehow; death might be interesting if we get to see what happens next.

Mörling is best when she takes death and doesn’t worry about the fact that it is an overwrought topic to begin with, when she just lets it consume her. This is when the refreshing lyric is formed. Too often her speaker is predictable, fearful of death and overcompensating with bravery—like Jack in “Above the Expressway” who nobly wishes to be thrown into ocean when he dies so the fish can eat him. When Mörling is able to look at death from afar, when she’s vague and mysterious about lifelessness and the fact that she’s still living, her verse is most stunning:

There are shadows of scarecrows on the earth
that rise at noon
and vanish into the wilderness
of their own hearts.

Tags: 4 stars, Malena Morling, Melinda Wilson, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

Upon Arrival

Friday, October 13th, 2006

by Paula Cisewski
Black Ocean 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

O, the Birds

Cisewski Cover The day you read the middle section of Paula Cisewski’s first book is, in all likelihood, a day you will spend considering birds a little more than usual.

When you’re two or three poems into that section—titled “How Birds Work”— you might be tempted to say enough with the birds. But the avian poems keep on a-comin’, and the more feathers that fly as repeated birds thwack into your temple, the less you mind; what started as sweet becomes a sort of punchy, obsessive mania surrounding those cuddliest living dinosaurs. I don’t care if you’ve had enough birds, you can almost hear the poet saying, have a few more:

Teach them a word. Hello. Home.
How dainty they seem and their beaks pull meat.
Of the sky again or singing and hidden.

This obsession serves as a microcosm of Cisewski’s finest trait; she is best in Upon Arrival when she gives in to her most manic impulses. The least interesting poems in the book render an image of a poet sitting at her desk trying to write the best poems she can. The Simic-like posturing that opens “Tyros’ World Tour,” for example, is overstated:

Each of us captaining
a solitary lifeboat.
As if we are lost
at sea. We’ve never
been to sea…

But mimicking the control of Simic’s mania is needless for a poet with other promising impulses, and it’s when she apparently loses preconceptions that she’s most in control. Take this rather random slip into exclamation and rhetoric in the book’s penultimate poem, “Opening Remarks”:

That’s the song I love!
Who titled me Distributor of Dirges?
Did I consent?

To some end, then, she is the Distributor of Dirges, whatever that means; and the mania she’s really indulging in, we come to realize, is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions—indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself. Where these conflicting selves might be a source of conflict for some people, Cisewski’s best poems find an almost eerie comfort in them:

The emperor in me places himself in charge
of the olive branch in me. The waitress in me
sneezes in his glass of hundred year old port.

And later, she elegizes a friend, “Michael”: “The small selves we then were are / not here for questioning.” Her history as “waitress” reveals yet another self, and leads to the inevitable kitchen-as-heaven, god-as-chef metaphor:

…The kitchen loves the kitchen
and through its rapture of self-love trickles
bounty down upon us.

On occasion, Cisewski writes her way out of poems. In “Opening Remarks,” for example, the under-earned repetition in the last line serves as a bit of a spoiler: “into the drama the drama the drama of the human spirit.” But there’s a deep intelligence underlying each of these poems that help them escape the first-book “poems about paperweights” trap. Readers will find at least a small moment of ineffable satisfaction in most poems (you might have fun unfolding “Our Possible Brother”). She asks all the right questions, and the book’s final poem points beautifully elsewhere rather than wrapping us in tight.

In the end, she’s interested in that which is scattered, the way each person’s collection of selves might seem a sky-full of sparrows. The “selves” she offers here aren’t as sharp as Plath’s “old whore petticoats,” but if Cisewski takes the time to find ways to explore the unrestricted mania she’s hinted her selves possess, there’s no reason why she can’t develop them into a commanding presence.

Tags: 5 stars, Black Ocean, John Deming, Paula Cisewski
Posted in reviews

Three, Breathing

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

by S.A. Stepanek
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Take a Walk Outside

Three, Breathing is an ambitious, book-length poem, a Platonic reworking of Biblical language using a rosary of stanzas with prayer-like refrains. Often, the prayers proceed by invoking a category and its opposite soon after, suggesting the presence or absence of the Christian Trinity—or some other way to resolve the stalemate of logical paradox—and break through to the true object of our devotion.

The first 31 pages are short stanzas, nearly all of which start with the phrase “I am ashamed before…” This section is perhaps a few pages too long, and more rigid in its repetitions than other parts of the book, which take care to mix the refrains. Surprisingly, in those 31 pages there are no references to Adam and Eve’s shame upon noticing their naked bodies, nor are there contrasting celebrations of the flesh. A large majority of the stanzas do not express contrition for acts done or not done. “I am ashamed before the Great similarity/ of gray lines between lines and taking/ this forgiveness” is typical. Is the speaker ashamed of taking the forgiveness of similarity? But no, the phrase is “ashamed before” rather than “ashamed of,” and many of the stanzas depict abstract qualities that turn into a symbolism which cancels out its potential meanings:

I am ashamed before the Great effect
opening to the right page, erasing
the erasing of erasing itself.

A later stanza helps make this unexpected strategy more clear:

I am the great transference of shame and
the forgiveness of shame
having surfaces.

It seems that Stepanek wants to defuse the physical and moral specificity of shame and forgiveness, the faceted stigma of contrary terms, in order to evoke Biblical language without having us rest in the doctrine of any one religion, declaring at one point, “I am sphericity!” One aspect of this strategy is the author’s choice not to be identified by gender. Blurbs and bio have no gender tags, neutral or otherwise. The syntax is just vague enough to frustrate attempts to parse out the direction of shame and forgiveness: the arrows point both ways.

I am ashamed before the great clothing we
have mended and forgiven, as we take if off and nail
ourselves to the way of the
river.

This melting into flow and blur might point to a Buddhist questioning of all labels and categories:

I worship the Great Thought of no-Thought
as it settles like risen toast, as we rise
in the morning

However, in order to ensure that we do not rest in the comfort of a single metaphysics, this stanza is followed by a stanza declaring, “I worship the Great Absence of no-thought,” another declaring “I worship the vast Intuition” and the next declaring “I worship the sweet reasoning.” Stepanek also wants to ensure that we do not set up this idealized language as a substitute miracle, thus restarting the cycle of labeling categories, and blaming whatever does not live up to them:

I am the great deviation away
from war.
This is not about miracles this is not
about the way things can be this is about
the way things are the way things are in
the world.

After a series of “I mourn” stanzas, the content doubles back to earlier refrains in a way that seems more consistently humble and contrite, suggesting that some of the initial blurring of categories was not quite sincere:

I am ashamed before the great avoidance,
and this too is forgiven, this time with
candor.

At the end of 89 pages of metaphysical and religious yearning, there is no Deus ex machina, no clear summons to action, no solution to the contradiction other than the repeated syntactical suspensions of “and yet,” but there is a way to be at peace with language. We are constantly reminded of the philosophical tone of Wallace Stevens. Towards the end of the book, Stepanek writes “At the end of the mind, words soften in peace.” And later:

We seek the infinite direction, here,
and remain ashamed,
being the last miracle on the bus.

(This reminds me of the end of Joel Sloman’s “In A Remote Cloister Bordering the Empyrean,” the final poem in Hayden Carruth’s popular anthology The Voice That is Great Within Us, both titles invoking Wallace Stevens: “Like Samson I’m in the dark/ and continue to ride the bus.”). After the first section, the poem is well-crafted and more than interesting. There are so many good lines that it is easy to be carried along by their devotional intensity.

Beyond this momentum, however, we must survey all the cards on the table: a dedication “To God be the glory,” and an aesthetic that seems upper-case Catholic, especially in the construction of the book like a rosary, coupled with a constant yearning for saints, and angels. Yet despite the naming and renaming of God, constantly trying to get it right, to preserve the holiness of language, the form tends to distance the theistic presence both from the individual heart and the human community. Cosmically large abstractions are coupled with contrasting particulars that tend to become allegorical rather than symbolic. The form is so concerned with the one relation of the voice (I or we) to the object of its devotion, finding it everywhere at hand, that we lack a solid sense of a shared, actual world. Hints of this world are often brief, and more distant than we might expect: “We consider tender incidentals, anti-/freeze for the car/ because of the mother’s note.”

There is something strange about the constant distancing of particulars. There are many references to kitchens and tables, but no one makes food or sits down to eat. The newspaper gives no news (we only learn to stack them and wrap other things in them) and the mail never arrives. Trash is taken down to the basement but the garbage truck never comes. There is much music, and voices singing, and praying, but a lack of conversation. This world is a prayer, intense and heated, but it doesn’t seem free or physical enough to warm the heart or open up a wider sense of community. It is perhaps too good at evoking the inadequacies of traditional religious and philosophical language: one might feel that the solution to the problem is to close the book and take a walk outside. If you feel this is the case, I might recommend a rigorously cross-cultural religious thinker like Thomas Merton on Buddhism or an existential science fiction writer like Phillip K Dick. If you need a gorgeous, mysterious, and paradoxically austere metaphysics of the imagination, Wallace Stevens still can’t be beat.

Tags: 6 stars, Mike McDonough, S.A. Stepanek
Posted in reviews

The Pitch

Friday, October 6th, 2006

by Tom Thompson
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

City Palpitations

The cityscape feels fleshy in Tom Thompson’s The Pitch. The buildings have “pinkish tissue,” they are “swamped with sweat,” and machines are “wracked and frantic.” The city is alive and breathing, and people seem cold and made of steel. At times, the setting is frightening, though strangely fitting.

Thompson is delighted by buildings and their interiors as he exclaims in the title poem, “The Pitch (Invitation au Voyage)”: “What superb rooms these are!” His speaker asks if we can “install ourselves here” as though people are mechanical objects that need to be plugged in—perhaps a nod to the banal American office job and even more so to the political atmosphere, slowly making robotic subjects of us all. His somewhat creepy obsession falsifies the world to make it something new. Think The Matrix minus the somber booming of Morpheus.

Poems like “Gloss, Upwards” work towards imagining a city in which the development of structures is natural process. This poem is perhaps one of the oddest in the book, which for Thompson, means one of the best:

The water towers of New York are shivering like egg sacs.
Shall we tell them to get down from there?

Their hairy legs attract the wind
up where they were so recklessly scattered…

The idea that they were “recklessly scattered” conjures sympathy for these towers, way up there all alone. Despite the underlying sense that these towers are somehow our enemies, Thompson conjures sympathy for beings that are positioned against their will or at least beyond their control. But the poem gets eerier when the speaker addresses us and says “Hear them whinge in the distance like tree tops?” Their silence is something to be feared as their blooming or waking may bring destruction. The poem details an ongoing power struggle. The towers are being overgrown with leaves, the “other” nature is suffocating them and they dream of “imploding directly over our bedrooms, / drenching our night-things with a violent passivity.” The poem’s conclusion is fascinating:

…all their ambulatory innards, become our own.
Burying us quite silently from the inside. The way we like it.

According to Thompson, the skyscraper is a brand new kind of beast, maybe more beastly than any beast we’ve encountered before. They have made homes for themselves up there. And streetlight becomes knowledge; it “flows in the head and out the hide.” But in the same way that man-made constructions like buildings become alive, the natural elements like the sun become metallic objects, such as keys.

This trend becomes obvious after having read the first couple poems of the collection, yet Thompson continually confronts his reader with the idea, and at a certain point it becomes overbearing. In “The Goods,” once again inanimate objects have life. “Strip these walls to the hide, skin them of art, paper./ Compared to pure animal.” The last line here is unnecessary, overwrought. Nevertheless, the poem’s purpose is met.

My feeling is that it would do Thompson some good to find a second grand similitude; his “building-as-living thing” hang-up grounds The Pitch, which is nice, but it also follows him around just a bit too much. He is nevertheless skilled at presenting the most unlikely likenesses and shocking the reader into belief. His writing is obsessive, addictive, and maddening. The world he creates in The Pitch is, by the end, startlingly familiar.

Tags: 5 stars, Alice James Books, Melinda Wilson, Tom Thompson
Posted in reviews

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
University of California Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Finishing Off Nature

berss--artists cover I’ll finish off B’s Selected for you with 27 words: “Its alterity becomes a nuance of our ineluctable situation of futons, dishes, books, with the potential of a / destabilized surface of time, no outflow through pink walls.” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge—among the essential “smaller press” overlords in the last three decades of American poetry—flexes a swell vocabulary. But a peripheral, almost easy existential paradox is the most arresting thread in her work: the universe—in all its dense, personal and imagistic beauty—is somehow random, while fixed. The long overdue I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems displays Berssenbrugge’s explorations and reminds us of both the absurd delight and intrinsic necessity of suggesting logical hypotheses for the astonishing and unassailable—with singular perspective as perhaps the only bottom line.

I often enter New and Selected collections figuring they can go one of two ways, and thankfully Berssenbrugge’s is as far from a “lazy-producer clip-show” as possible. The book—a big kind of floppous thing, and not just to fit all those s’s, r’s, and g’s—offers without interruption a focused series of Berssenbrugge’s lyrics as they grew from tight-and-tiny sounds and images to long-lined, page-cracking philosophical and scientific ruminations. It appears an extremely selective selection, since very few poems appear from her early books.

The poems are ordered chronologically, and the Table of Contents sorts which poems come from which books. In the text itself, though, poems are not sectioned off; they lead one into the next, skipping years without skipping a beat, offering both an impressive readability and a clear sense of Berssenbrugge’s development. Early on, it seems, she did best to try a lot with a little. “Perpetual Motion” is drawn from her first book, Summits Move With the Tide:

You go to the mountains
stretch in the light aquariums
and wait—
stillness turns in its well

Pretty. Here reality is little more than an individual in flux with an instant. We move without notice into selections from her second book, Random Possession. The lyrics—such as these from “The Field for Blue Corn”—are still tight, but lean towards conversation:

Undiluted brightness is an aspect with heroic
edges, in spite of common immersion in sun
as from the lover’s face, veiled or aggressive
along a large but rhythmic wave. As with
land, one gets a sense of the variations
though infinite, and learns to make references

Years pass, her lines grow longer. In “Chinese Space,” a poem from her fourth book, Empathy, longer lines produce an intensity that borders on obsession:

The potential of becoming great of the space is proportional to its distance away from us,
a negative perspective, the way the far corner of the pond becomes a
         corner again as we approach
on the diagonal, which had been a vanishing point. The grandmother poses
           beside rose bushes.
That is to say, a weary, perplexing quality of the rough wall behind her
          gives a power of tolerance
beyond the margins of the photograph…

It’s almost as though Berssenbrugge is probing reality alongside her reader, all the while trying to accomplish, through both logic and association, everything a line has the capacity to accomplish. These early lyrics give way to longer and longer lines, and seem fitting practice for the sweeping grandiosity —and infrequent aimlessness—of her latest lines.

A lot of names could come up here; there’s the upside-down logical authority of Ashbery, there’s the geometric obsession of Ammons. There’s also a consistent answer to Whitman’s call that we stay abreast of modern science. The title poem from her sixth book, 1997’s Endocrinology, questions “How much evolution derives from ‘something in the air,’ / not a square of light above a niche in a white wall” before analyzing a man and woman dancing:

Think before the man and woman, their freedom of an animal among
silvery trees. Which trunks light hits is an endocrine
permutation, a state of being or a physical state. Hormones are molecules,
material, invisible. Their flow is random,
mesh through which a body is sensed, not an image. The form of her body
is important,
as how she is here, though there’s no physical evidence of her physical
suffering.

On rare occasions, the ambling associations and sciencey jargon become distractive, as though she’s somehow lost her center of gravitiy, and needs to work her way back. It’s in her nature to be long-winded—something the poet must’ve recognized, because some of her longer poems are presented here only in choice fragments. But her obsession with complexity forgives these episodes: if she’s strayed, it’s because she’s built herself away—and she always shows the drive to build her way back.

It would all be for naught if not for Berssenbrugge’s emotional subtleties. The book’s best selections come from The Four Year Old Girl, which establishes her maternal obsession, one delivered as both mother and daughter. Most of this stuff is great, though on occasion the level of “sweetness” may or may not jar you, depending on your own associations: “In this, daughter, you see more than I did at your age, because you see me.”

Berssenbrugge is continually driven to numerate what she’d probably concede is innumerable—nevertheless she proves it’s vital to engage in conversational analysis, and give such attention to the details that rest cryptically around the corners of scientific and aesthetic truth. “Human memory as a part of unfinished nature,” she offers, and it becomes the role of the individual to complete nature his- or herself: “wherever I look is prior absence.” As the book title suggests, she’s at last willing to offer artistic expression—with all its accidents and hopeless intentions—as the most effective method for truth-seeking. “I Love Artists,” among the new poems in the collections, pictures a narrator and her existential associations while visiting an artist-friend. Artistic expression works best, in the end, because while obsessive, it’s not looking for a singular answer: “I laugh when things coming together by chance seem planned.” I think most will agree that her results are deserving of honorificabilitudinitatibus.

Tags: 7.5 stars, John Deming, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Posted in reviews