Archive for April, 2007

Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems

Friday, April 20th, 2007

by Paul Zimmer
University of Georgia Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

six

Think “Harry” from Harry & Tonto

crossing to sunlight revisitedIt is not often that a “new and selected” documents the progressions, departures, and returns of a writer’s consciousness as lucidly and profoundly as Paul Zimmer’s Crossing to Sunlight Revisited (the long-awaited sequel to 1996’s Crossing to Sunlight: Selected Poems). Zimmer’s newer poems are at the start of the book; they chronicle his ascension into, what seems to be, comfortable old age. Note that “old” is not my word here; in fact, in his preface, Zimmer informs us that he is “no longer an aging poet or an older poet.” He says, “I am an old poet.” 

So, what does it mean to be an old poet? The opening poem in Crossing to Sunlight suggests that to be an old poet means to finally understand one’s place among other lives, or at least to feel comfortable in it. The poem that begins the book, “Because I am Heir to Many Things:,” speaks to the idea of fitting one’s hollow perfectly. The narrator describes a grouse as “just another brother” reflecting a soul that feels at peace with his fellow lives. He deems every life equal and thus has nothing to envy; rather, he has an immense sense of brotherhood.

Zimmer’s identification with other creatures manifests itself successfully in these new poems not only because it is unifying, but also because it beautifully defines Zimmer as an individual. This self-definition is a constant throughout the book, appearing in both new poems and old. As connected as all things are, they are equally separate. For instance, in “Zimmer Lurches from Chair to Chair,” the narrator states, “Zimmer speaks bravely to his body, / addressing it from forehead to toes.” Here, the same respect that is given to the grouse is given to his own body as an individual and distinct entity. It has its own life, separate from Zimmer, but it is also a part of him and under his control, also like the grouse, which, it seems worth mentioning, is primarily a game bird.

But more than just living elements are rewarded such immense respect from Zimmer. He praises the intangible elements as well; in “The Moment,” he likens silence to a worshipful ceremony: “I come upon three solemn yearlings / attending the silence.” The word “attending” here allows the reader to understand silence in a new way. Silence is often thought of as nothing, but here it is observed as though it were a holy presence. Zimmer subtly points out that in this way, animals can often be highly perceptive, perhaps more so than humans. These yearlings—deer I think—have an obviously acute sense of the spiritual even if they are not cognizant of it as such.

The respect that Zimmer displays for other living beings goes beyond appreciation; it is often homage or admiration. This is the case in my favorite poem of the collection, “Dog Music.” I give you the whole of the first stanza:

Amongst dogs are listeners and singers.
My big dog sang with me so purely,
puckering her ruffled lips into an O,
beginning with small, swallowing sounds
like Coltrane musing, then rising to power
and resonance, gulping air to continue—
her passion and sense of flawless form—
singing with me, but mostly for the art of dogs.

I love this poem. Again, the concept of interspecies unity surfaces. The dog takes pride in howling for and with her master. Singing the duet allows the dog to be both a lone wolf and a pack animal. She is not singing for her master alone, but for herself and “the art of dogs.” Nevertheless, the man and the dog are not independent of one another; they have become a pack, a herd, a flock, a team.

The understanding and appreciation for life that is present in Zimmer’s newer poems is in its larval stage in his older poems. Instead of the comfort with mortality that we see in the last lines of a newer poem, “Desiderium” (“The unfaltering sunlit parade / Of faithful moving toward God” reminiscent of, though contrasting Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Towards God), we see a fear of death or growing old that precedes its acceptance.

If one fears death and death is inevitably set into motion by the maker, then God himself is death—and to be feared. From “Zimmer in Grade School”: “I feared everything: God…” And later in “What Zimmer Would Be”: “I saw my aunt die slowly of cancer / And a man struck down by a car.”

One of the most chilling poems in the collection is an older one. It’s called “The Brain of the Spider.” The spider is bloodcurdling enough, but that’s not enough for Zimmer, who goes on to the brain.  Consider the final three lines:

The unnerving grayness of its patience,
White speed of its sudden charges,
The raven segment it maintains for death.

The spider too will die and maybe it unaccountably recognizes this, reserves a certain portion of its awareness for something like departure, perhaps extermination. Either way, whatever fear I had of spiders before reading this poem has only been compounded by the idea that somewhere in its tiny head it has a brain somehow similar to my own— even if only in the fact that we refer to it as a “brain.”

Raven segment or not, death quickly takes its place as the central force in the older poems and though I realize that many New and Selected collections are organized with the newer poems at the front and the others in later sections, I feel that this might not have been the wisest decision for Zimmer’s book. A more interesting arc would have been to mirror the very arc of life that is spoken to so eloquently throughout these poems. I say start with the old, terrifying poems, build up the fear of death and slowly move into its acceptance. Then end with “Because I Am Heir to Many Things:.” Maybe I am only saying this because I desire a successful model for aging.

Unfortunately, if Zimmer’s aged wisdom proves apt in displaying human-to-human and human-to-animal relationships, the animal-to-animal relationships leave him with the full blown preciousness he’s usually able to keep at bay. Two horses who “rub muzzles” are particularly disappointing victims:

Together they prance to
The choicest pasture,
Standing together and apart,
To be glad until
They can no longer be glad.

You should never speak the word “prance,” let alone write it in a poem.

Despite my opposition to the book’s arrangement, the final poem works well as a closer. Again a grand similitude is made—the universe within an apple. I’ll leave you with the last stanza of “In Apple Country”:

I lean back in my garden chair and watch
The great harvests turn slowly in vast distances—
Red, yellow, green, their blemishes and tiny wormholes
Revolving in the October sky all the way
Out to the round ends of the universe.

*

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Citizen of…

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

by Christian Hawkey
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

4

“There were no stars”

hawkey cover

Christian Hawkey is clearly a genius.  Try this:

             The code word, he whispered, just before
              letting go, was code word.  Asshole,
              I thought, watching his head
              get smaller and smaller until it ended
              in a puff of dust.

Or this:

We exchanged looks—all three of us—
& mine was totally better:  it had rose-colored sequins
glued along the hemlines & the word sneezeweed
in one pocket…

He has the perfect hipster sense of language, the way to turn the phrase and turn the image so that it continually unfolds along its opposite edge, bringing the idea back onto itself before moving forward again.  He can flip his tonal register at any moment by sliding quickly along a new linguistic thread.  His writing is not narrative or linear, but rather (dare I say it), rhizomatic—each phrase, clause and word offering a new branch of exploration. Of course he can start talking about his look as though it were a garment—that little pronoun “mine” is the chute shooting off—and aren’t you glad he did?  The poems have the ability to continually revise themselves, and it’s fun, playful.  This is what the New York School was all about, right?  Being able to engage in meaningful play—and it’s not all surface.  Try this one:

When I touched you
you crumbled

into a mound
of soft, cold bees.  There

was a hole in the roof.
There was no roof.

It’s stunning.  This sense of the body’s collapsible boundaries and modular pieces forms the most exciting component of Hawkey’s work—he’s able to use the body as its own landscape, pulling it apart across his canvases before putting it back in compelling new arrangements.

So why four stars?  In large part, because the vast majority of the poems do not to live up to their initial promise.  What starts out as a compelling reversal is repeated and turns sour in its repetition—it becomes a device or an engine, rather than a necessity or a virtuosic turn.  It begins to feel narcissistic and formulaic, and it becomes harder and harder to see the gems for the rough.  Immediately following “there was no roof”:

I saw something flit
between two stars.

There were no stars.

Hawkey’s press release comes with praise from John Ashbery:  “What emerges is a portrait of a medium like the one we live in, with all its unexpectedness.”  And I will say that my experience of the poems changed dramatically when I read them on the subway.  They were in fact the perfect counterpoint to a loud subway preacher, the screeching of the tracks, a couple of breakdancers, and the guys selling bootleg DVDs in English, French and Spanish.  But do I really want poems that don’t want my full attention?  The lines do come wonderfully in isolation in the midst of distractions—it’s a bit like flipping through film stills rather than watching a film. 

The bulk of the poems seem curiously self absorbed, and I say “curiously” because the poems seem generally opposed to the idea of a coherent self (there’s even an epigraph from Foucault:  “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.”).  One of the most charming quotes of the book: “Gender:  pending.”  The self is never whole or stable or even reliably human.  “I was on mute,” begins one poem.  The first quarter of the book features a number of transformations into birds.

The one explicitly political poem, “Birth of a Nation” begins with an epigraph from NPR about East Timor, but the poem begins by taking the word “birth” literally, and then enters into surreal questions about the place—the fact that East Timor is a real place seems entirely unimportant, or at the very least uninteresting.  The poem is made entirely of questions:

Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do their articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts?  Does this cleanse their
national language? 

Is this a meditation on American self absorption—the inability to know the other?  Or is this a demonstration of American self absorption—the preference for one’s own fantasy over research or encounter.  Similarly, I find it odd that the film “Birth of a Nation” finds no traction in the poem.  It’s almost like the moment when Liza Minelli refers to finding the “final solution” for getting people to pronounce her name properly in her introduction to “Liza with a Z.”  Does she not know what that means?  Or does she just not care?

*

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Hometown for an Hour

Monday, April 16th, 2007

by Jennifer Rose
Ohio University Press 2006
Reviewed by Sharon

5_5

Memory of Place

hometown for an hourJennifer Rose follows a deceptively simple concept with her second collection: poems written as “postcards” describing a variety of destinations across the U.S. and abroad. While this sounds like an appealing project for any writer, Rose, a city planner and skilled poet, complicates the snapshot of each locale by interweaving rich figurative language into real and imagined histories. Winner of the 2004 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Hometown for an Hour presents a keen understanding of the particulars of place— a collage of images and memories that reveal how quickly one traverses the line between wanderlust and displacement.

The arrangement of the book charts the narrator’s travels by way of association rather than geography. The first half includes poems about places familiar to Rose, such as the shores of her Massachusetts home; she also indulges memories relative to her childhood in the Midwest. These poems alternate between moments of joy and sudden pain, as in “Evanston Postcard” where she writes of a visit to her native Illinois: “I saw the garage where my mother died. / I don’t think she knew how her suicide / would change us.” The poems meander west, south, then to eastern Europe — seemingly random shifts connected by surprising irony, as in the series of poems linking the Civil War with World War II. In “Virginia Postcard,” the apparently patriotic speaker describes a visit to Appomatox:

Daughters of the Confederacy had left fresh flowers
and flags for their heroes. (I suppose German attics

are full of swastikas.) I wept for the one
Union soldier buried there.

The next poem, “Lipik Postcard,” positions the narrator in Croatia searching another well-tended graveyard for the headstone of her great-grandfather, a Jewish innkeeper’s son shot and killed by Nazis. In Lipik, however, the one enemy soldier buried alone has no mourners: “Only one grave here has been forgotten:/ a German grave, overgrown with weeds.” The shared experiences of war thus unite disparate geographies with lingering grief and grievances.   

Rose’s attention to sound and mastery of form also distinguish this collection. The book abounds with poetic forms, including sonnets and terza rima, though rhymed quatrains dominate — neat blocks of verse that suit the photos, buildings, windows and other spaces framing the worlds that Rose evokes. Playful sound adds highlights (“Waitresses in lace pour demitasse / from a silver samovar, and there’s local / whitefish caviar. The musicians play old repertoire”) that ignite unexpected rhythms:

is it too cliché, too busman’s holiday,
to come here and stare at the ocean, as I do?
Would you get blasé, trading its trinkets all summer?

Although the majority of these rhymes offer nice flourishes, Rose occasionally gets carried away, producing a sound dangerously close to singsong:

What frock will July wear today
and would she like fog’s tulle or not?
The cardinal’s livery—just outré!
(At least that’s what the house wren thought.)

The book also references cicadas, crickets, hermit crabs and foghorns in fully a third of the poems—a preponderance which begins to feel less like deliberate repetition and more like the poet’s personal clichés. Several poems get caught up in their own cleverness, mixing metaphors and spinning puns which ultimately add up to little more than a list of flowers and insects. At times, the postcard conceit, too, feels forced—even disappears abruptly with the collection’s sole prose work, “Letter from Orahovica.” This piece stands out not only for its format (a letter), but also for the sudden departure from the poems’ primary narrator to a new one: a German soldier who witnessed a fellow soldier sacrificing himself alongside a village of Croatian prisoners. While the soldier’s letter tells a fascinating tale, this story feels a bit awkwardly wedged in with the rest of the collection.

Despite these occasional distractions, Hometown for an Hour shines most in its surprising connections between place and memory. Ultimately, the book reads less as a series of postcards than as passages from the journal of a highly observant traveler, one taking a journey to escape some private loss yet finding echoes of it everywhere. At their best, these poems explore the lingering grief of history or else induce a deep longing — the weary traveler’s desire for love and home.

*

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Dominant Hand

Monday, April 16th, 2007

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Mayapple Press 2008
Reviewed by Lanie Wilt

6_5stars_6

Brain Wins

kelikowske_coverElizabeth Kerlikowske opens Dominant Hand with a drawing duel between her left and right hand, each vying for dominance. Their struggle is an exploration in perception, a mapping of the fight for dominance between two sides of the brain set in opposition. Music and mutability flow from the left hand as the right carefully orders and renders its surroundings. Conflict turns to climax when the right, frustrated by the leisurely wanderings of her partner, delivers the finishing blow, grabbing her “…perfect roses…by the…stems and [holding] them tight, thorns/ and all”—“That would hurt everybody.”

Instantly, the violence of domination slams mind and body into something singular; the struggle is over—perception united by pain that will punctuate the pages of the rest of the book. While “Dominant Hand” is foundational within the collection, its importance is only apparent after one has followed Kerlikowske into the intimate recesses of memory, brushing away cobwebs and clutter into the corners of a mind alive with pains and pleasures distinctly feminine. The power of the mind, its action on and against both body and its environment, is explored throughout Kerlikowske’s line, silhouetted in surreal poems like “Gestalt Primer” and associative streams of thought like “Morning, Asylum Lake.”

The most striking moments of the book are deeply invested in the bond between mothers and daughters. The apparent death of the poet’s mother at the age of thirteen weaves in and out of nearly every poem in the collection—a spidery “web of misery [that] glistens in the dark” (“Damage Ode,”), the speaker confessing, “I never stopped missing her” (“Persephone”).

Kerlikowske’s retelling of the classic myth follows her younger self through the loss of her mother at the onset of womanhood, the fumblings and grief of finding her way into womanhood alone, and the healing which the birth of her own daughter brings. The lines of the poem blossom with beacons of love and grief calling for mother to return, swaying in a landscape of waiting:

…I made nature
in her image: blue birds for her eyes, canaries
of hair, a monarch of lips. Every pansy
a cameo of her face. If she saw herself,
she might remember where she belonged.
I stuffed milkweed pods with fluff like the
down pillows we slept on, like the presents
she’d left on my chair, each of the twelve birthdays
she was there. I created prairie in the pattern
of our tablecloth, but by thirty, I knew she
wasn’t coming back.

Ultimately, the speaker experiences the pain of having to leave her own daughter, then concludes with an uncharacteristically hopeful passage describing a long-anticipated reunion in the underworld:

My heart beat fast and the light of wild
mustard and goldenrod burst into view, and there
was Mother, cleome smile, her loom, arms held
out at last for comfort.

Men occupy a separate sphere within the text. Many are menacing, hungry like Hades stealing away, this time, mother from daughter in the cycle of separation bound up in sexuality and flow. These are men, as in “The Days”, that rush “into vulnerable beds, destroying homesteads, / breaking up families, and carrying off beloved nouns: the / cow, trust, Sis.”

Other men are alluring and strong, for example, in moments spent admiring the strong working back of a “husbandman,” men allured and enjoyed by this feminine voice—embraced, then abandoned, “not forever but long enough.”

These moments of company, more than connection, crystallize as the warmer passages in the text. Solitude, however, dominates Kerlikowske’s meditations, stalked by death that’s a “petal practically transparent” (“Waiting For It To Stop”):

You want to spend time in your room alone
but they stalk you there,
the ways you might die,
one to each corner.
(“Your Deaths”)

In “Waiting for it to Stop,” the speaker is alone after a shower with her lover, looking out into the rain thinking of the husband and children who are off swimming “on the other side of the state.” The pain and hollowness of her existence vibrates on the page, while rain-cloaked we watch her settle her gaze on

…a bee husk on a windowsill.
You want to be that empty.

Ultimately, Kerlikowske’s lines live among the lakes and leaves of Michigan shorelines. Through the turmoil of marriage and lovers, death and injury, we see the poet solemn under starry skies, quiet, still and searching for a sign. Perhaps “After You Left I Observed That All Things Take Flight” is the most haunting and lovely of the collection, standing out as a spell and a song: the meditation of a heart that has penned lonely lines in the privacy of night, minus the melodramatics.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s, Dominant Hand, is a book about being left behind, seared by the death of a mother whose absence follows her into the weathered mattresses of marriage and out into blackberry briers. The collection is a thoughtful, adamantly feminine investigation of perception and pain. The poems take patience, but persistence will prove well worth the while.

*

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Little Ease

Friday, April 13th, 2007

by Aaron McCollough
Ahsahta Press 2006
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

7

Paging

mccollough cover

I was trained to read poetry as an oral medium, but also to consider the page the primary mode of transmission—which is to say that the page constructs the voice that the reader hears in her head.  This may cause some problems—as when the words “prove” and “love” have ceased to rhyme for the reader—but it also provides for continuity and innovation.  If “prove” and “love” don’t rhyme, but I still like the couplet, might I not try to write other couplets that don’t quite rhyme?  It also means that even if I know that Yeats read his poems in the kind of chanting sing-song that I associate with a slightly embarrassing and shabbily dressed old man taking the stage towards the end of a regrettable open mic night in Philadelphia (regrettable in the sense that I wish I hadn’t gone, but really, I’m glad that Mr. ShabbyClothes has a place to go on Tuesday nights), I don’t have to stick to it.  I can hear Yeats in my own head, at my own speed, in my own voice.  And yes, it means that I have a theoretical underpinning for my angry glower at Mr. ShabbyClothes’ unpleasant young friend declaiming Dylan Thomas in a poor Irish accent that keeps wavering into a poor Scottish accent.  No, no, no, unpleasant young man—the book you’re reading from is designed to get the poem into your voice.  That’s a score you hold in your hand—you’re the instrument that plays it.

There’s a curious locution that has come to accompany the reading and writing practice that I’ve outlined in the last paragraph, and it’s “writing for the page.”  The less attractive younger sibling is “page poet.”  Of course, poets who consider the written page their primary mode of transmission actually write “on the page” and “for their reader” and Aaron McCullough is engaged in a compelling exploration of just what that page makes possible—and without quoting Derrida (though it would only be fair—McCullough quotes Foucault, and many of his ideas about surveillance and confinement seem to come directly from Foucault), McCullough challenges that connection between written language and voice.  For me, as a reader who’s reading practice is intimately bound up in the connections of voice and print, reading McCullough is often a dazzling experience, ranging from the simple integration of new symbols (his frequent use of “@” seems a pleasant analog to the frequent Pound & Creeley shorthand of “yr”) to the introduction of the unpronounceable “[::]” (It’s not part of an analogy, so don’t try “as”).  In some places it feels like a surrealist experiment, where my internal voice modulates itself without being able to explain why—and in other places it feels like a challenge.  Try this stanza:

fruit of the tree             |
fruit of the floor            |   the seeds
shuddering on the floor  |

Do those lines form a column barrier, instructing you to read the left column, and then the right?  Does one read straight across—and if so, what to do with those lines?  Virgules and brackets sprinkle the text throughout the volume, suggesting pauses, whispers, or resistance.  One poem uses only the letters from the previous lines—but starting in the center (so line 11 can only use letters in the order they appeared in line 10, line 12 can only use letters from line 9, etc).  Here are lines 9-12:

our birds are bathing
o draw      a  bath      my dear
o dra            b             y   ear
o   r    d  ar          ing

What could be gimmicky in the hands of another poet is playful here, although all of these quirks are used sparingly—they remain pleasant surprises, rather than boorish exercises.

The major achievement of the book seems to me its stunning pacing.  The book is a study in density—it manages to move between incredibly concentrated prose poems and incredibly airy free verse, with its “sonnets manqués” treading a kind of middle ground.  The book is in six sections, and they alternate between dazzling speed and careful meditation.

The book is supremely erudite, although it neither shows off nor explains.  In one of my favorite poems, “Adam Naming the Diseases,” McCullough scatters quotations from Milton (slightly remixed):

From the mountain between Jerusalem
I see them    kreutsfeldt     jacob    lou gehrig
before [my] eyes sad noysom dark    in which
the bandage “reeks”    the landscape has no term*

I think that the reader need not recognize Milton to recognize another, archaic voice being woven into the texture of the poem, nor is it hard, in our google-accessible world, to work backwards to the quotation.  Jan Vandermeer speaks in a number of the poems, the first ending with the delightfully unexpected “I got flo    I got flo.”  When words appear in the text crossed out, as in this case

come in     come in

no, come in incoming know

this hall is always open

it can certainly be read as a reference to Heidegger or Derrida, but I think it’s also easily accessible as a simple revision.  It strikes me as playful and inviting—the revised voice left visible on the page—rather than as an affront to the less sophisticated reader.  My favorite little reference is not to a theorist or artist, but rather to the structure of a High School Algebra problem:

and you know x     the neighbor cat      got hit

one cat-long wound      x       turned upon itself

in the right lane     (take away  x  what’s left)

The variable is mapped onto the cat, and then the loss is mapped onto the equation.  I found the effect both moving and charming.  McCollough’s masterful use of the space also paces the voice perfectly into a colloquial, suburban story.  There are no notes at the back of the book, but I’m glad not to have the quotations cited or the characters explained or the references glossed.  The poems are always inviting, even as they suggest that McCullough might have more in mind than can be gleaned alone from the text he proffers.

This volume is primarily playful, and refreshingly so.  My only complaint is that at times, McCullough lapses into a disjointed poetics that seems primarily concerned with stringing pretty, unconnected phrases and clauses, but these moments are the exception rather than the rule.  7 stars. 

* 

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Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson

Friday, April 13th, 2007

by Sarah White
Spuyten Duyvil 2007
Reviewed by Komo Ananda

6stars_7

Plum Benefits

cleopatra haunts the hudsonLike plums? Good, so do I.  You might like them even better as metaphor:

 

 

I had to free my mind from the troublesome plum,
the notion of treasure in someone’s dim
past, plum to pull from the pie still dripping,
the one true plum, not anonymous plums in the jam
but Damson and sentimental ones, plums on the path
to somewhere, the trouble that simmers

within the skin, as purpose simmers
in pilgrims who choose the Way of the Plum.

These wonderfully meditative lines from Sarah White’s sestina “Plum” are pulled along with excellent external and internal rhymes. But even if we don’t get a sense of tranquility from the sound, we are lulled in by the plum as if it were a mantra.  There’s a mystical message in the many meanings and forms of the plum that we can envisage if we adopt the Way of the Plum.

White’s first book, Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson, provides an amusing journey through sound and meter, with an underlying emphasis on the power of a single word.  “Plum” is also an example of how she tends to reach for something spiritual in the mundane; indeed, her search is the search for Barlach’s “things behind reality.” This is not a new conquest for a poet, but the historical context she uses to frame her sonic and rhythmic paintings keeps the pages turning and leads us deftly in and out of the imaginative and literal worlds.

White doesn’t allow us to wallow in the esoteric.  As soon as we’re on the brink of being lost, she uses her historical poems to jerk us back.  In a series of four epistolic poems entitled “Pen Names: (1) Anne’s pen, (2) The Name Keats, (3) Woman Trabadour, and (4) The Blue stream,” White writes about men and women of letters, and how their personal lives have influenced their writing.  “Anne’s Pen” tells the circumstance of Anne Frank’s imprisonment (in hiding) and her friendship with her diary “Kitty.”  She uses factual information from Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl to create a metaphor for the Shoah and ultimately a metaphor for Anne’s death through cremation, like her lost pen:

Next day, the clip was found
among the ashes, not a trace
of the gold nib…must have melted
into stone.

In “The Name Keats” White puns a little with Keats’s name and circumstances; she illuminates Keats’s idea of negative capability alongside his own insecurities as a deathly ill writer who might not stand the test of time. Next comes “Woman Troubador,” in which White skillfully invokes the tradition of feminine perseverance amid patriarchal rule; revered women such as Dante’s Beatrice, who leads Dante to God, and Ysabella Castile, who helped her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon lay the foundation for the unification of Spain, make appearances.

In “The Blue Stream,” the final poem in the “Pen Name” series, White alludes to herself as a woman of letters.  She builds upon historical content, I believe, in an attempt to begin developing her place in the feminine poetic tradition. In the opening line the pen is addressed again:

My plastic pen has inched
across the page,
grown pale, and fainted
like some corset-clad,
consumptive girl.

She questions the pen for the lack of muse, or a woman’s place in poetry.

White is predominantly a poet of ideas; I was reminded of Stevens and the idea of extracting from the everyday experience to enter the imaginative world.  Two poems,  “City of Remembered Cities” and “Natural History Learned On The M-4 Bus” directly address the circumstances of a city. In “City of Remembered Cities” we are given a description of what cities were built upon, that the foundation of a city lies in its past, present, and future:

A river divides our city in principal parts.
Bridges are named for leaders,
victories, and lovers
who walk beside the river.

Any labeling of a bridge, be it by government or individual, is the imposition of the imagination. As the poem continues, history is presented as the labor of human muscle, succinctly leading to the present and future that includes all relevant parties:

Higher bridges
display the craft of steelworkers
and spiders. Lower bridges
figure in watercolors…

…Those who know who they are
are asked to be governors.  Thos who don’t
are asked to be actors.   Passengers
are asked to avoid irregular situations.

Thanks to alphabetical
order, the city remains grammatical.
Tallness rhymes with smallness.
Near a Spire of Triumph

burns the flame of our irreparable loss.

It seems a city is built on tangible things, but that its inhabitants become ingrained and rooted in its system and create narratives to survive.  They imagine the city indestructible until their stories no longer work, until history repeats itself and all are forced to look starkly on what’s been created in order to decided what might continue to work.  White demonstrates a keen understanding of the fact that imagination constructs a life as steel, governors and citizens construct a city—and that both are subject to revision with the passage of time.

These ideas have already been dealt with by Stevens, Milosz, Ashbery and maybe hundreds of others. At times White also perhaps borders on being lyrically sweet. But her interest in incorporating the feminine tradition alongside that of the kingdom of the imagination makes this book relevant. There is a time-honored tradition of skilled poets publishing first books late in their careers, and White shows a hard-earned sense of wisdom in Cleopatra.  There is also, on a very fundamental level, love and faith in language and the single word, be it plum, pen, city, imagination or reality.

*

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The Errant Thread

Monday, April 9th, 2007

by Elline Lipkin
Kore Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

8

Fury Presses Intelligence

lipkin cover

Elline Lipkin has just come forward with her first book. It is a beautiful book, artfully honed; Lipkin, poetically speaking, is a class act. The poems are elegant in their style while restrained in their deployment. A rare balance of said, enough said, and taste. But before moving into specific features of The Errant Thread, allow me a couple of brief asides.

Literature is crowded with figures of anger. Most are fiery and self-righteously reactionary. Many a poem is a rant and vent. Many are full of irony and half-baked “Saturday Night Live” humor and artless wit. In many, sensationalism becomes a strategy. Fury is a dish—not often, but in many developmental cases—best served cold.

Literature is also crowded with figures of the instinctive journeys of children from obedience to equality and self-reliance. Often disobedience, or at least a balk, if not an outright refusal, is a part of the story. A child—no matter the degree of privilege or disenfranchisement—must find its way beyond the covenant of childhood to the promises of a more mature life. False starts, epiphanies, harsh moments of self-awareness, harsh measures of others, obvious parallels, betrayals and affirmations are all a part of the process—are all the stuff of experience. Blake is pretty good—and merciless—on the subject: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

In poetry it is not unusual to find a first book positioning the speaker of the work in the romantic position of meditating through the formalization of the poet’s own self. Sometimes disguised. Sometimes not so disguised. The real guise being that of the journey into the art form itself.

Among other things, The Errant Thread is a book positioned on refusal, expressing anger and wonder. It is more specifically the prayers of a daughter. The theme is Fury, but the poems themselves are deployed apollonically; the level of restraint and artfulness is high. The poet, unapologetic.

Lipkin steers her poems clear of flash and edge and fashionable displays of irony. Instead, her poems root and risk themselves in meaning and relationships. The poems locate themselves in France, Belgium, Rwanda, the United States. Philomela, Hebe, Athena, Thumbelina, Grimm’s The Maiden Without Hands, Snow White, the gift of an Elgin watch, caged birds, Miss Havisham and Estella all put in brief appearances.

The poems also locate themselves in the terrain of Will and Compliance, not as high in profile as perhaps a Thell, Antigone, or Catherine Holly (“Suddenly Last Summer”), three figures, daughters, involved with earthing and unearthing the truth of their situations. Recall how Catherine Holly confesses her inability to express the thread of poetry?

Of the three, only Blake’s Thell recoils to a state of “Perverted” innocence. Lipkin’s voice too is impelled through poetry to find her way forward. The first poem of the collection––peppered with ”spinsters” and “thread,” punctuated with “pattern” and “history”––opens entitled: “My Parents Meet at La Grande Place.“ The title indicates “parents,” but it is the father who foregrounds the poem:

Shop windows line the square, decorated
with endless patterns of ancient lace.
Spinsters working at their spools,
‘the last of a dying breed,’ he thinks,
their longing patterned into an intricacy
that unravels if only the smallest thread is pulled.

The second poem, one of this reviewer’s favorites in the book, features the parents’ union and foregrounds the mother. It is a prose poem, descriptive and clear. The last sentence of the poem is as artful as it is indicting in the revelation of will and motive, all the more poignant as it is framed in a clause coming from the mother herself:

Forty years later, looking at photographs and remembering what she clutched, my mother will say sweet asylum I called it all of these years.

(“Sweet Asylum”)

“Wife” and “daughter” are perhaps intrinsically places of “asylum.” Perhaps likewise are the notions of “father” and “son.” One might argue so also are the notions of sonnet, epithalamion, and ars poeticas made out of lines by Dickinson.

In the collection, there are also: a lament (for a friend’s wedding), ekphrastic poems, responses, an elegy, an ode to Limoncello, a concluding envoi. In the envoi, with the body’s back to a cathedral copula, the voice concludes by soaring with identity:

To the west, the sky drops its cape

straight into the sea. A ship sews
itself into the gold lining, the horizon
a seam. You divine a new route, vow
to circumference, ply each longing
like a thread pulled through.

*

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Music for Landing Planes By

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

by Éireann Lorsung
Milkweed Editions 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7

To Recall and Rejoice

lorsung cover

Éireann Lorsung’s first book, Music for Landing Planes By, is best described by the title of its final poem, “Prayer.” The whole of the book is an entreaty, but not only to the maker; it’s to all that is made: letters, bodies, darkness, sounds, shapes—it gives the impression of true appreciation, of a growing hunger for human experience.

The collection opens with an epigraph from the Gospel of Thomas that declares the earth an unseen kingdom and precedes the book’s first poem, “Being.” The spirituality is hard to miss: “A letter is holy. A story / is holy hands reaching out into the world.” The poem is celebratory and near its end, Lorsung makes a vow that at her end she “…will live inside whatever flies. / Burning, the brink of all things.”

Although the book maintains the feel of a long ode, it never levels off—in other words, it doesn’t get boring. It rises and falls, twists and turns, breathes. Along the way, an interesting and unexpected preoccupation surfaces: the notion of forgetting. Lorsung deals with memory in a variety of ways throughout the book, but more often than not the act of forgetting is at the heart of the sentiment. Forgetting is sometimes a desire, sometimes a cause, and sometimes a result. This obsession first appears in “How My Name Came to America”: “After some time people want to forget.” The poem isn’t explicit about why one might want to forget, but the ambiguity is a great asset; it allows for the individuals’ variances and allows the idea to be applied to most any aspect of life.  We see in “Knitting” that most anything can be a mode to forgetting: “There is forgetting in the density of raw new wool.”

“And Will Be,” which begins the book’s second sections, is a satisfying sister poem to “Being.” They share similar subjects and the former preserves the pensive, prayerful tone of “Being” and others. In fact, it brings into focus the notion of the spiritual in creation. The impetus—as we learn from Lorsung’s notes—is the Gospel of John 1:1. Perhaps the only downfall of the poem is its ending, which drives home the idea of the worshipful: “(Amen, alleluia).” The penultimate line would have made a finer ending as it exemplifies, in a more practical sense, the act of worship: “Whenever I can I will go out into the world singing.”

The majority of the poems in this collection retain an advantageous sense of ambiguity and craft. They are beautifully mysterious, open-ended and thus accessible. One in particular that lacks this touch is “Exclusion Pregnancy.” After reading the title, I already know too much. Lorsung has a knack for keeping the reader in the dark just long enough; it’s wonderful. This poem obviously misses that. Check out the first lines: “Sister, what is growing / in this body?” A baby…?

The book’s lesser moments are truly a side note here; by and large, Music for Landing Planes By is wonderful. Perhaps my favorite passage comes in an overtly titled poem: “Hail Mary.” Again, we see the spiritual, prayerful context, but the poem surprises us as many of Lorsung’s poems manage to do. This poem contemplates the nature of the universe, or even the earth. It discusses the possibilities of creators or beginnings:

At our parallel, in December, light
dims. To blue. Our star is moving

on the other side. I believe
there is a woman holding the world

like a little girl holds an egg
she finds in the grass in springtime:

Superb. There is an innocence here that is endearing. Imagine the creator as a little girl cradling an Easter egg. Now, I know this isn’t necessarily what’s being said here…but still.

Also in “Hail Mary” is the narrator’s great faith in humanity. Although it can be difficult to muster at times it is nevertheless a valuable and worthy faith: “You can know good will rise / from things, even if you don’t live to see.” These lines end part 2 of the poem and in a way, I feel like they could best end the book. Lorsung proceeds by questioning the creator:  “What is it / to be so large you can love us when we are so awful?” “Hail Mary” emerges as the most inspiring poem in the collection.

Later in Music for Landing Planes By comes a return. A poem titled “Forgetting in Multiple” speaks to our various selves, the individuals that make so many memories and forget them just as easily: “So much flickers here.” And it’s true; what determines which memories are for keeps and which are disposable? This is a somewhat terrifying and unpredictable unknown, but Lorsung takes control of it here. Forgetting can be a weapon—rather than merely a defensive tool—if one is able to control it.

At times Lorsung’s narrator slips into a strikingly internal state. It is as though she is falling into herself, exploring her own interior as it relates to the outside world. “In the Wide World” has a Dickinsonian feel to it, reminiscent of “The Brain is Wider Than the Sky.” As in Dickinson’s poem, we inhabit the undefined insides of things:

    …seven fish swim the air above one child’s head.

Eyes, deep holes, lakes, and ponds. People who drown and people
who do not drown; lovers, unborn children.

In the same way that the brain forgets, opts not to keep certain bits of time or material, it also can contain anything it has the will to contain. In a way, our physicality embodies everything that there is. We are all.   

Inevitably, Lorsung’s poems return to “failing to remember.” Here is the book’s longest passage on the subject:

Things that are hard to forget all at once. Things that are hard
to forget piece by piece.
        All the bridges.

All kinds of musty and fetid smells—wet dog, stale air,
ammonia, a mother slapping her baby.

Waking up forgetful of a death.

Until, in the end, “Everything is forgotten.”

*

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