Archive for June, 2008

The House of Marriage

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

by Erin  Hanusa
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

5_5

Quiet Riot

hanusa cover

American poets often teeter over a fine line between individualism and egotism.  On the one hand, such poets have a responsibility to exemplify and elucidate their uniquely American philosophical perspectives—perspectives that likely include some affinity for Emersonian self-reliance and individualism.  On the other hand, personal experience and so-called self-expression are too commonly mistaken for valuable, and the ideal of the self as a vessel for poetic experience is reduced to self-centeredness and artistic tackiness.  Erin Hanusa’s debut, The House of Marriage, wobbles across the aforementioned fine line, sometimes devolving into tedious moments of self-interest and, thankfully, sometimes exploding the self into something larger and more striking.

Throughout the book, Hanusa has a good eye for description and an excellent feel for great words in good places.  In “Beachgrass” for instance, she describes the titular subject: “The backyard sand loomed ineluctably / lunar: nightscape transformed / into a glowing undulation of white.”  Her voice, unmistakably feminine in perspective and subject, moves steadily through each of the book’s four sections and returns repeatedly to motherhood, fatherhood, birth, and the relationships that develop out of each.  Despite these consistencies, there is sometimes an aversive smallness about The House of Marriage that proffers an indifference to the speaker’s assorted and very specific situations.

Where Hanusa’s debut feels like a welcome relief to the ironic, lexical babble that sometimes seems to dominate contemporary poetry, it is often equally self-interested.  Hanusa sometimes mistakes trivial personal moments for moments of broad poignancy.  In “A Bridge Building Competition” for instance, she sandwiches an ambiguous and unconnected stanza about a speaker’s father and sister between two stanzas about a sixth-grade science project.  The transition between the final two stanzas is a good example of Hanusa’s heavy-handedness:

                                   …To list
the things I remember about her
would be to act like she’s dead,
but that would be mistaking her for me.

The weight the teacher loaded on
collapsed my bridge easily.

Veiled by her appealing and sporadic sense of rhythm and rhyme, the emphasis Hanusa places on this blaring temporal leap is obvious and damaging.  Not only is the literal situation of the poem unclear (is the sister dead? is the speaker dead?), but the method of connection through disconnection that occurs between the two stanzas is overused and undeveloped.  Such moments, while uncommon in the book, are unsustainable fabrications, and the strained severity with which she treats this colloquial occurrence undermines the speaker’s obvious sincerity. 

A majority of the poems in the book revolve around colloquial experience, and most of them treat such experience effectively and with great sincerity.  The short final poem of the book, “Conception,” is one such poem, and although its lyric voice strays a bit from that of its preceding poems, it is one of the best in the book and one of the better poems published recently by any press.  Earlier in the book, it seems Hanusa’s more structurally consistent poems are also her most syntactically and thematically consistent.  Her poems of couplets and tercets are often her best, if only because they add a sense of visual formality to her overwhelmingly viscous voice.  For instance “My Father’s Fruit Trees,” a beautiful poem of nostalgia, ends with a touching and comical moment between a father and daughter:

And one morning
he squeezed them, still green,
grunting, forcing resistant

bodies onto the juicer’s spike
spilling pale fluid and seeds.
We drank silently then, waiting

to see who would admit first
the sting of unripe lemon,
not orange, burning in our throats.

Here, in the father and daughter’s collective mistake, emerges a palpable moment of silent awareness between the two characters.  Hanusa’s poems are interested, perhaps primarily, in uncovering and understanding moments of silence as they pervade common life and personal experience.  Hanusa’s speakers are often silent observers of nature or people, and even when they are participants in the goings-on of their own poems, they seem to reflect silently after the fact. 

If the individual poems in Hanusa’s book are sometimes inconsistent, the book is held together tightly by its common thematic threads and its strong voice.  The consistency of these commonalities edges toward monotony, but this is also in part because Hanusa furnishes her speakers with a deliberate and linguistically extravagant sense of the world.  It isn’t without a few standout rough patches, but The House of Marriage is a capable debut, and while Hanusa’s mode of quiet contemplation may have a relatively specific contemporary audience, her intelligence is obvious and praiseworthy.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Quaker Guns

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

by Caroline Knox
Wave Books 2008
Reviewed by Richard Scheiwe

5_5

Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses

knox_cover“You’re the elastic limit,” we were told,
and with reason. Hooke’s Law
states that within the limit,
strain is proportional to stress.
                   from “Hooke’s Law”

The poems in Caroline Knox’s sixth collection, Quaker Guns, embody the dichotomies and disparities of American poetry: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Neo-Formalism, everything under and in between. Hooke’s Law is an apt metaphor for Quaker Guns, the Law stating, “as the extension, so the force”; something can only be pulled apart in perfect proportion to the strength of force being applied.

From “Hooke’s Law” onward, voices and forms and styles pull the collection apart, rendering it consistently difficult to decode: too many voices giving way to too much “flotsam.” But even if Quaker Guns proves unstable overall, Knox’s daring competence of pastiche and tangential movement might leave you anticipating a subsequent, or previous, volume. 

This isn’t a Book of Forms, per se, but Knox provides supplies a directory anyway. From the sixth section of “Hooke’s Law,” her intentions are made plain:

The book you are reading,
Quaker Guns, contains the
sequence you are reading,
two sonnets, two haiku,
a sestina, an homage
to George Herbert, some tercets,
a masque, two translations,
two erasure poems, an elegy,
recipe, a song, an ABC,
an eclogue, a canzone,
a group of rubayyat, and other poems.

Formal variety, sure; what Knox doesn’t explicitly acknowledge are the disparities in voice. One could as easily generate a “voice” catalogue relative to their own associations: “A Dance” with Susan Howe, “Dove” with Ted Hughes, “We Beheld Two Nebulas” with Robert Pinsky and “Oldest Dog” with Stanley Kunitz.

In “A Dance,” the voice is firmly controlled: complacent but not absent authority:

Bouki fait gumbo
Lapin mangé li.

Bouki • Wolof for hyena;
Verbs are French: fait, mange.

And later: “Compare Aesop fait (get Greek word for “tale”) / Compare LaFontaine fait fable. / God gives but, but He does not share.” Yet things change in the next poem, “We Beheld Two Nebulas:”; we’re confronted with a newfound cosmic fluidity:

first, the nebula Midges, a diffuse
nebula, and like all diffuse
nebulas, a luging blob

wheeling light, the starry map
of cells which die every day,
a seed-shaped clay molecules…

This wavering between associative logic and a more narrative logic is the consistency of Quaker Guns, for better or worse, as Knox augments this ir/resolution with rhyme, dialogue, surrealism, repetition, catalogue, and persona, keeping us off balance, uncertain.

Knox also builds an occasionally-lovely barrier with her peculiar dependence on self-referentiality. As already evidenced with the sixth section from “Hooke’s Law,” her formal poems are unnecessarily conscious of themselves. In the sonnet “Scenery” from the long poem “Face-Masque,” she writes:

popping with rhetorical questions, afloat
in blancmange literally, or sinking in it, says:
The wrong sestet hooked up with the right octave?
Would I swallow that, hook line and sinker?

And in “Coordinates,” a poem written in tercets: “Here is something you can substantiate: / these are nonce tercets; every line / rhymes with another somewhere or other.” Finally, she offers a poem whose subject is self-referentiality itself; the title (“The Title”) appears in the middle of two sestets, and states, partially quoted:

The poem begins all wrong in medias res
so it looks like a fragment, a throwaway,
something that goes nowhere—

…

But still

THE TITLE

was and is here, down in the middle of the
poem, halfway down the page…

The charm of “The Title” is that the act of reading the poem is the point; self-referentiality is the point. Self-referentiality also works in “Line Poem,” composed of long lines. Instead of acknowledging itself in the meat of these lines, the poem relies on the objective correlative, connecting the physical properties of the poem to an exteriority only hinted at by the title:

Long jetty, shell-racked jetty, cracked warped planks.

…

A twill tape measure, an audiotape cassette unspoiled and puckered, shining.

A bike chain and a bungee chord. A möbius strip and a broccoli elastic.

Split vanilla pod inset with paltry-looking flat oily brown seeds.

Authority develops because of her faith in the energy of her accumulating imagery. “The Title” and “Line Poem” are top-notch self-referential poems. But over the course of Quaker Guns, her self-references are so many that they begin to occlude the overall goal of such a task.

In the title poem, Knox explores the idea of Quaker guns, a term for fake guns used to trick enemies in battle:

But these aren’t worth the powder
it takes to blow them to hell.

…

They’re Quaker guns, a creative ruse, the kind you couldn’t and wouldn’t
fire: they’re flotsam, jetsam, or any old trees, ships’ logs.
They’re broken masts. They’re Friends of the Friends.

Along with Hooke’s Law, the book title is a natural metaphor for these poems; are these poems, in their variety, designed as self-conscious stand-ins? Toys built so well they come to life? When you have a sampler of everything, it’s an easy wonder if any are the genuine article. In Quaker Guns, some are, some aren’t.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Apparition Wren

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

by Maureen Alsop
Main Street Rag Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

4_5

Rain King

alsop coverThe cover of Maureen Alsop’s Apparition Wren is intriguing; it’s exciting, even, the colors, the costume, the sky and telephone wires. In addition, the costumed woman on the cover is upside down, unless I turn the book upside down. There are endless easy metaphors to be cooked up there. I’ll leave it.

The books starts with a poem called “At the Table of Longing.” The title, while setting an important tone—one of appetency and other strong subjective responses—is nevertheless frustrating. These thirsts surface in the verse itself; there is little use for such a frank title:

  But this memory of salt
  salvaged my thirst—

  like a skittish horse
  bearing the scars
  of its own blood

Also, I’m not really sure how one can bear scars of one’s own blood. What does that mean? I’ll leave it.

More interesting than Alsop’s stake in horses is her concern with things female. In “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman & Bird,” we learn “quickly to pipe songs / which rose wildly upward / into the sky’s orange skirt…” These lines are fanciful, even visionary. But the preceding lines rob them of this spirit: “A woman, a soldier, a bird—all born / within cages.” I can imagine the womb being a cage, a bird’s egg being a cage, but these creatures are not born “within” these things. The act of being born is a breaking out, an escape from these things. The lines don’t sync up, not to mention the all too tired metaphor of cages, of a woman being born into a cage. I’ll leave it.

A more explicit “female” poem is “Isobella,” and though Alsop sometimes stretches nice images too far, there are some stunning lines in here. The poem is intimate but detailed; it delivers the affectivity of a failed pregnancy:

  After what I believed to be a few bones, and much bleeding,
  I buried what I could of her.  I fingered
  the remnant bulge between my hipbones—inside

  would always be night now.

Beautiful, painful, but perfect. These first few lines of this poem are executed with precision. It’s the following line that again siphons life from the poem: “I shut out all the stars…” Overall, “Isobella” is powerful, but slips into some gynecology talk that doesn’t fit with the tone of the poem: “winter’s secret vulva. My callused fingers, speculum-cold.”

Alsop’s explicitness is sometimes welcome in comparison to her esotericism. In a previous untitled poem, Alsop offers these lines:

  / /  / / / / / / / /  / / / /  / /
   / / / /  / /  / / /   / / / / / /  / / / / /

  ///////// /// ///// / ///// /////// ///////
    //// /// ///////// / /// ///// //////

It goes on that way for four more lines.

All obscurities aside, several poems in Apparition Wren are stellar. Two of these are “Draft” and “Wolf in My Glass.” The former has an excellent title, especially in view of the subject matter of the poem, possibly a parasitic twin, another that didn’t make it.  Here’s the first stanza:

  For all my twin knew  the white ink
  on the white page
  was the tremulous arc
  of sun. A copper flare    patterning
  out of sound.  The throaty murmur
  of a bird trapped in a mason jar.

Perhaps the best of these lines are the last line and a half. Again, we have confinement and the need for escape. The image is lovely and offers a fine sense of urgency. The first lines of the second stanza are italicized, though the purpose of these italics are unclear: “What flittering garden spins / awake in us.”  The italics, no matter their purpose, remind me of a theme from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.  Eugene Henderson travels into the deep African jungles and resides with a tribe that uses the phrase “Grun-tu-molani” to mean “you want to live.” It is the desire to live, the yearning for life that awakens in us all. The conscience that demands “I want, I want” is the conscience that drives us to the search for escape.

Admittedly, “Wolf in My Glass” makes me think first of Radiohead. But despite the associative powers at play here for any individual reader, the poem as an organism, rises above and becomes its own beast. The poem deals with death: “Is this death or is he howling?” The properties of death will always be elusive and as such they fuel an often incomprehensible desire within us to conquer death. As Henderson notes, “We hate death, we fear it, but when you get right down to cases, there’s nothing like it.”

Bellow’s Henderson also makes a claim about the nature of poetry. He claims that poetry is beauty and enchantment and that we must let it “reach” and “penetrate” us. Alsop’s poems are reaching and verge on penetration.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Do the Math

Friday, June 20th, 2008

by Emily Galvin
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

7

Shoe-ful

Galvin--Do the MathExpectations run high for a debut book of poems; critics and readers alike search for the intangible that merited this particular manuscript’s salvation from the slush pile. Even higher expectations await the progeny of famous writers who must prevail over the assumption that they have achieved publication by connections, rather than merit. In her first collection of poetry, Emily Galvin – daughter of renowned poets Jorie Graham and James Galvin – sets the bar higher still by employing a wide array of complex and challenging interdisciplinary devices. Do the Math spirals out of the mathematical foundations of Fibonacci and Euclid, at times risking clarity, readability and meaning in search of new literary ground.

The collection opens with a wholly unnecessary and unintentionally patronizing introduction by Barry Mazur, a Harvard mathematics professor. While Mazur makes an earnest attempt to explicate the inner workings of Galvin’s mathematical verse structures, the very presence of such an introduction undermines the idea of the poems as viable creative works. An introduction should, at its essence, argue before the reader that turning the page will prove worthwhile. It should not supplant the ability of the reader to discern the meaning of a poem or interpret its structure independently. Galvin’s reliance on a mini-mathematics lecture to prepare the reader to view the poems in a certain light is troubling.

Introductory transgressions aside, Galvin immediately redeems her literary efforts with the first poem, “Spiral,” a challenging and rewarding simulacrum of a word search puzzle. Without spaces between words, and without a guide to navigating the maze of words, the reader must fail many times before ultimately finding the method to the poet’s madness. The poem ultimately consists of several smaller poems, seemingly unrelated but equally confessional, one consisting of only a single word – “Insidious.” Yet, even in this brilliant reformation of the traditional poem, Galvin is challenged with a pervasive detachedness – the poem often seems disjointed and unconnected, crystalline forms without rhyme or reason.

What follows “Spiral” pushes the limits of poetry further, as Galvin introduces elements of drama into her verse. The aptly-named “Premise” sets the stage for performances yet to come, creating the sort of detail-obsessed theater set that might be demanded of an overbearing director. Yet, strangely, the performance itself exists solely for performance’s sake, as “at the moment, there is no audience but the chairs. Bolted-down chairs with folding seats, rounded tops and metal backs, upholstered in coarse red cloth.” As the crescendo of details and descriptions builds, what was once a theater set transcends the stage and becomes a distinctive moment in time. Galvin calls for “winter afternoon light, the light that hits an Iowa cornfield at about 3:00 pm on a sunny day in February.” These intense stage directions set the scene for the next set of poems far better than any introduction might.

What Galvin does next redeems many qualms that a reader might have with this collection, as she develops her setting into a series of dramatic vignettes, sparse interactions between two characters. The building patterns of conversation between simply named characters – First and Second, A and B, Greater and Lesser – provide an engaging insight into interpersonal relationships and dialogue. In the seventh stanza of “Euclid’s Algorithm,” Galvin creates an entire scene without words. Simple and repetitive, yet powerful, movements supplant the need for language without denying the poetic essence in each line:

(B. looks at the ceiling. B. looks at A.
B. moves hand towards A. B moves slightly
towards A.)
(A. looks at B. B. freezes. B. brings feet
together. (Add) A. opens mouth.)

Without words, A and B transform their conversation into an elaborate dance, bringing the literal rhythm of their movements into the meter and pattern of the poetry.

Near the middle of the collection, with the poem “Rhinestone Hair Clip,” the novelty of Galvin’s conversational poetics begins to wear thin. The fascinating form fails to overshadow a lack of fresh and engaging content. In this poem in particular, the two characters, Ann and Ben, search for Ann’s new rhinestone barrette to no avail. Ann evokes a potent anger and desperation for this inconsequential and seemingly vapid object. An eventual revelation that Ben possessed the hairclip all along serves not as catharsis, but as a source of infuriation for the reader.

Galvin abandons the binary conversations for a more traditional sort of poetry later in the collection, adding a much-needed sense of balance. “Light Warning” makes excellent use of Galvin’s well-honed ability to capture the essence of a scene in compact, three-dimensional verse. “You know how / The air feels after everything / Has been carried out, doors and windows closed?” These more conventional forms challenge her playwright’s voice and yield fascinating verse and witty interludes (“I think when you ask for advice, you really want accomplices”).

If Galvin wishes for this collection to demonstrate her mathematical prowess, then her highly regulated and patterned dichromatic conversation poems serve this end admirably. In serving as her debut as a poet, however, the mathematical forms risk creating a false difficulty, obfuscating meaning and form under layers of algorithms and fractals. While it is fascinating to read Galvin’s “Notes” section and learn of the mathematical secrets lurking in her syllabic arrangements and line numbering, it is imperative that the poems of this collection be allowed to stand on their own. Do the Math is a promising start from a brilliant poet, but it can only be hoped that her next collection will throw off the scaffolding and present the caliber of lyrical verse that she affords only glimpses of here.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


…and the whole time I was quite happy.

Friday, June 6th, 2008

by Marc Pietrzykowski
Zeitgeist Press 2008
Reviewed by P. J. Gallo

7

Monster Mash

pietrzykowski cover

There is a worrying tendency in poets who imagine and flesh out a certain class of post-punk, working class speakers to dismiss intellectualism and high-art for the sake of some obscene conception of credibility.  This kind of dismissal is prolific under the strains of the absolute dualism that plagues such speakers, but when a poet comes around and wholly defies these expectations, the expectations themselves are finally worthy of their own dismissal.  Marc Pietrzykowski’s debut, …and the whole time I was quite happy., is a beautiful argument for an infusion and overlap of a rough colloquial voice and a more conventionally modernist poetic tone, and it is a better book because of its refusal to adhere to any self-imposed and artificial idea of integrity.

The book is structured in an exaggerated biographical account of its pseudo-protagonist and appropriately begins with the speaker’s presumed childhood in which, “Uncle Patrick thought it’d be funny to get the baby drunk.”  With this opening line, Pietrzykowski introduces his book’s more overt themes, namely family and dysfunction.  But despite a prominent narrative cord that connects nearly every poem in the book, Pietrzykowski cannot help but spiral into a slanted description of disparate contemporary American realities and unrealities. 

“When Loverman Pulls Up,” for instance, is a slangy, noirish villanelle about a prostitute.  The poem happens to follow a poem with a realistic anecdote about a boy with a prostitute mother, and while the two poems are undeniably linked, their means and ends are worlds apart.  In a later poem, “Life On the Cube Farm,” Pietrzykowski’s variety becomes more apparent.  He describes an office: “A certain lichen grows on cubicle walls, / One formed from discrete objects: photos of children / And pets, happygrams, brightly colored advertisements.”  While these lines are not particularly enlightening, they do announce a certain accuracy of observation, one that exceeds the mainline narrative Pietrzykowski creates.

While Pietrzykowski’s (I’m as sick of spelling his name as you are of reading it) voice allows for some tonal variety, he adheres mainly to a colloquial, if grammatically indifferent, American mode of speech.  This voice allows for more than a few moments of beauty in itself, but in the heavy moments where Pietrzykowski transcends into an identifiably more poetic voice, a resulting sense of vocal contrast highlights important thematic moments.  In the longest poem in the collection, “Lost In the Land of the Holy Ones,” Pietrzykowski’s speaker recollects a drunk and druggy night of violence, personal injury, and restaurant work.  From a fellow employee putting screws in a customer’s chili to a near-amputation of the speaker’s finger to a hit-and-run, the poem is presented with an arc and voice aptly reminiscent of drunken storytelling.  At the beginning of the poem’s third section however, Pietrzykowski expands his speaker’s self-interestedness into a moment of applicable reality:

                 The time clock bit down on my card and so out
                  into 2:30 a.m. Sunday evening I was flushed,
                  finger wrapped and throbbing, six dollars
                  wadded in a corner of my pocket.  I stood
                  in the queer stillness and smoked a cigarette,
                  listening to the city call to other cities
                  across the vast pockets of nothing
                  that make America great.

This passage is distinctly American in its application of the self to a broader cultural state of mind.  Pietrzykowski not only transcends his own voice, but he also transcends the themes of socioeconomics and class in which he seems so interested.  His speaker arches outside of himself into Americanness and toward humanness. 

What makes these moments of transcendence so spectacular is their surprising subtlety.  As mentioned, Pietrzykowski’s voice is one of apparent directness and obvious intention, but underneath his explicit candor he very lightly touches upon important issues in an American political reality.  In “The Source Of Many A Fire” for instance, the speaker explains why a better playground is inaccessible:

                                  We couldn’t go there because mother
                       was afraid to cross the pedestrian bridge
         Spanning the interstate, and the only other way to get there
                       was to take three buses in a great loop around the city.

Here is a perfect example of the colloquial voice of Pietrzykowski’s speaker. Yet under this voice—which may be fittingly childlike—is a complicated and understated description of economic segregation.  The speaker goes on to make the disparity between lower and upper class abundantly clear, but this early moment of subtlety remains one of his strongest.  Its existence early in the poem and the book shows a great sense of pace on the part of Pietrzykowski—a sense of pace that is necessary if this kind of voice is to be effectively maintained.

At their worst, the poems in Marc Pietrzykowski’s …and the whole time I was quite happy. are entirely bearable.  At their best, they are very good.  His collection as a whole, in its encompassing narrative, surprising and interwoven subtlety, and thematic breadth, is excellent.  In addition to the poems cited here, “And We Moved Like Heat,” “Among the Ten Thousand May Be One That Returns Us,” “13,” and “Dog, Cat, Man, Bird, Bear, Wind, Day” are some of the best in the book, but they must be read in relation to the rest of the book to be altogether successful.  Pick this book up if only to prove that the ugliest book on the shelf can also be one of the best.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Sensational Spectacular

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

by Nate Pritts
BlazeVOX Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7.5

110%

pritts coverThere is an unabashed revelry in Nate Pritts’s Sensational Spectacular that reminds me of certain poems by Frank O’Hara. In O’Hara poems like “Having a Coke with You” or “Ode to Joy,” passions take precedence over highbrow intellectualism. As a result, the objects in the poem become manifestations of the poet’s more intuitive emotions. In Sensational Spectacular this tendency leads to an appealing, bombastic aesthetic. Take for example these lines from “A Day in the Life”:

                     Any patch of land with a giant grenade buried in it

                     knows exactly how I feel, like I’m about to be

                     all up in the air (…)

More ephemeral comparisons can be made between O’Hara and Pritts. Sensational Spectacular is bookended by two sections called “Secret Origins” and “The Brave and the Bold,” which catalog the exploits of a narrator and his friends: Red, Green and Blue. As in many O’Hara poems, Pritts’s concern in these sections is the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Red, Blue and Green get in fights, play games, fall in love, and have adventures. The result is an intimate look into a “scene.” Just as O’Hara’s poems encapsulated the burgeoning yet exclusive art and poetry communities in the 50s and 60′s, Pritts’s poems examine the inner-workings of a small select group:

        My friends and I believe in excluding newcomers

        from our secrets: secret lair, secret handshake.

        We collect our separate feeling of scorn

        &rage& elitism the way other groups of friends

        collect sea shells on the shore of the vast

        ocean of Hello! (…)

The main difference here is the manner in which the people in the poems are presented to the reader. In O’Hara we get names like DeKooning, Ashbery, Freilicher and Goldberg, figures with personal and artistic histories. In Sensational Spectacular, the identities of the characters involved in the poems is masked and abstracted from the burden of history by their identification with the colors red, green, and blue. Red, Green and Blue feel like real people, but their personas and exploits develop in an imaginative otherworld, simultaneously like and unlike the world in which we live. If O’Hara had chosen a sort of dream-world constituted by his imagination rather than New York City, he might have written poems very much like Pritts.

There are many aspects of Sensational Spectacular that are unique. One of the most appealing nuances of his writing is its relentless sincerity. Nowhere in these poems does one get the feeling that the author is holding back or evading the reader for the sake of cleverness. The best poems feel unabashed and outrageous:

        My life is a funhouse:  giant faces taunt me

        & every cornering reveals another hazard

        volcano simmering in the guestroom, dinosaurs

        holding bazookas. As if their teeth weren’t enough.

In these lines from “Never Be the Same Again,” the giant faces, the volcano in the guestroom, the bazooka wielding dinosaurs push the envelope, but what they lack in terms of subtlety, they make up for with their wholeheartedness. For all the risks Pritts takes in Sensational Spectacular, he never veers into affectation. In a time when so many poems are nothing more than impressive panoplies and poets can find a million precedents to divorce themselves from taking responsibility for their lines, Nate Pritts is a refreshing, entertaining writer. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


My Zorba

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

by Danielle Pafunda
Bloof Books 2008
Reviewed by Caroline Depalma

7.5

Smash a Mirror with a Hatchet

pafunda cover

The speaker in Danielle Pafunda’s second book lies within the fragments of a broken mirror. Her search for identity begins with the creation of the imaginary alter ego, Zorba. Zorba is essentially male (among other things), juxtaposing the speaker’s essentially female identity. The book’s cover, bearing an axe atop a deep wash of pink, supports the speaker’s struggle to destroy an invented self she once felt she needed.

Pafunda is seldom forthright or even clear—and willfully so. But to call Pafunda’s book a gamble would do it little justice. Using images of body parts (frequently chopped away from the body) and the forces of nature which affect growth in both the male and female bodies, Pafunda smashes her speaker free from the outside in. 

The male/female interaction comes full-circle in “A Parsimonious Holiday,” wherein the speaker and Zorba interact on two different occasions and end up on different levels for the first time; the speaker finally begins to see the ill-effects of her creation. Call it a modern day Frankenstein. The second section, composed entirely of image clips, illustrates the fragmented mind as well as an example of Pafunda’s axe-chopped lines:

The tooth of a jimmied lock. I crossed the carpet, and smoothed
its tussled furs. In the closet. A determined grey stiletto.
The hangers were hooked to the bar, the rungs to the pants
by a series of pins through which one could look, could squint.
Safely.

“Safely,” amidst trapped objects, provides the narrator with comfort, which is also a mild relief for us after the first section of the poem, a view of the speaker and Zorba at a Mexican restaurant. A twist on the ordinary menu, the speaker wants a kitten while Zorba wants to pull the stitching of the waitress’s apron. In blatant disregard for the mind that created him, he refers to it as “a golden egg.” The poem ends with Zorba and the speaker at an ampitheater, where the speaker is again degraded by her invented love: they “said ‘great reviews’. Said, / ‘present company excluded,’ while Zorba put down his program.”

 
If the book is in fact operating as a broken mirror, we are not left without a tube of glue. The turning point of My Zorba begins after the conclusion of “A Parsimonious Holiday.” The speaker begins to realize, slowly, that she doesn’t need some invisible doppelganger to fully validate her existence: perhaps she is dignified on her own. The book then progresses into a series of letters, entitled “In the Iron Caisson,” wherein the speaker addresses everyone from her grandmother to her avon lady.

In the center of “In the Iron Caisson,” the internal monologue shifts to Zorba, with a one line section that reads: “keep your voice down.” Not surprisingly, the poem follows two pages after an address to the Colonel, which reads like a solution in the mystery game Clue:

The vote was split. I said aye and Zorba nay. We cannot
expect you. About half as much. The bone should be no shock,
the crew raise no brow, and the terminal degree a full plow.

In summation.

The power the speaker displays by taking the role of crime-solver is intriguing simply because she is investigating her own murder. By splitting the vote between the “I” and Zorba, the decision to separate has finally been made. The poems that follow this sequence lend to the speaker’s choice to let go of the fragmented self and live alone.

The final poem, “Sweets,” is delivered in two parts. By the end of each, the speaker defends herself and causes harm to Zorba. Part one concludes, “I’d like an ice with that. To ice you.” Subtler, the second section (the book’s final scene) calls for a birthing speech with “extra care in applying makeup,” a tender sign of appreciation of one’s own body. Suddenly she’s on her own: “I haven’t a coffee spoon, marmalade, / a clue.”

Pafunda addresses you indirectly; she relies on shocked fragments, on jagged rhythms and imagery. A glued mirror can’t hide its fragmentation. Pafunda relies on your ability to intuit a whole, not your ability to apportion its parts. There are times when you won’t know what the speaker is getting at just yet. Mirrors reflect the most insignificant details right beside the ostensibly significant. Does this require too much imagining on our part? Is it worth the leap? Lay your cash on the table beside her hairbrush and hatchet; this isn’t a disappointing gamble.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews