Archive for September, 2008

Bill’s Formal Complaint

Monday, September 29th, 2008

by Dan Kaplan
The National Poetry Review Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Kill Bill Vol. 2 (see Vol. 1)

kaplan A couple of weeks ago, Matt Soucy reviewed a book called Bill. That book follows an everyman character called Bill, and is written by a man named Bill. The book I’m reviewing, Bill’s Formal Complaint, is also about a Bill. Except it’s written by Dan.

Bill and Bill’s Formal Complaint both sustain a generic character called Bill—so immediately, each book compromises the other’s potential for originality. But the existence of both titles also proves each author’s thesis, in a sense; Bill is common. Says Dan Kaplan in his book’s opening poem: “The question is: who doesn’t know a Bill?”

True. Here’s a Bill:

billclinton

Here’s another Bill:

billcosby

And here’s another Bill:

billmurray

In Kaplan, we develop again the sense that the name Bill, in its commonality, belies any single person’s capacity to possess it. Bill is a stick figure, a flipbook animation—the idea that all humans are related by the simple fact that they live life and have experiences. The notion of the generic everyman is also counterbalanced by the essential fact that an “everyman” doesn’t exist. He is imaginary; the world is made up instead of individuals with individual cells and individual struggles. What would Bill Clinton, Bill Murray, and Bill Cosby talk about if they sat around the dinner table together? They would tell each other great new things, sure. For that matter, throw in Bill Walker, that big aquarium-owner who used to live across the hall from me.

Though he constantly undercuts his “generic Bill” idea (“There’s Pecos Bill, / Big Bill Broonzy, Bill Bixby…”), Kaplan’s Bill is a bit much. For starters, he’s in too many poem titles. There’s “Hammocked, Bill,” “Bill’s Dream,” “Bill Translates Swedish,” “Bill Translates English,” “The Love Life of Bill,” to name a handful. In a number of these, Bill is mentioned only in the title, not in the body of the poem. They don’t need him. The best of these, the book’s namesake, “Bill’s Formal Complaint” begins:

If mother hadn’t fed me with that busted
spoon, I’d be hilarious now. And given
proper chance, I could cleanly shuck
the sharkskin pants off a runway model…

We don’t need “Bill” to intuit it is a cultural universal, or perhaps an American universal, to apply blame when things ain’t right. These lines demonstrate some of Kaplan’s greatest strengths: using outlandish ideas or examples to reinvigorate common concepts. One could easily “blame Mom” in a variety of familiar ways—that boring “my parents screwed me up” argument. But Kaplan’s Bill places value on being “hilarious” and on “shucking” the pants off a model. The sentences are stated simply, the voice of an everyman, but the absurdity also deprecates the principle at hand; blaming others for one’s own unfulfilled ambitions is really just denial—and to commit this kind of denial is the real absurdity.

But again, most of the poems with “Bill” suffer as a result. They are trying to do something, and appear desperate to fulfill a heavy-handed concept. I got sick of reading his name. The concept doesn’t work; I’ve read better books by lesser poets this year. With Bill nowhere in sight, Kaplan shines brightest (the “concept” might imply that Bill is in these poems too; believe me, he’s not). Read gems like “Question #2” and “Today #2” and you’ll see my point. There is something crazed in Kaplan:

Sunlight clamps the grayish buildings,
swells their height. Note to self: tweak wiring
behind the cloudless backdrop, watch
as needled skyline pricks the sun with dark.

He writes poems that stand alone and don’t need a concept, or a name, imposed upon them. I’ve seen too many books lately that rely on one repeated “name” throughout to serve as an everyman, as a metaphor for everything and nothing: Bill, Victor, Roger, even Hitler. The “one great metaphor that encompasses everything” idea is too simple. The heavy-handedness might be “the point,” but even when Kaplan surprises us with his own name (“Dan”) in the final poem, we’re reminded what a boring device everything-and-nothing name repetition is. In fact, the worst poem in the book (titled simply “Bill”) is little more than an attempt to fulfill this concept: Bill this, Bill that, Bill doing this, Bill doing that. The only line that sticks out it is “Bill giving a last over-the-shoulder look.” Goodbye, Bill. Hello, Dan.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Dan Kaplan, John Deming, The National Poetry Review Press
Posted in reviews

This Far From the Source

Friday, September 19th, 2008

by Neil Shepard
Mid-List Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

“skip yourself / to the other side.”

this far from the source Neil Shepard’s third collection of poems is not the razzle-dazzle of a newcomer or the verse of a high-falutin’ sage. This adventure is one of mature poetic focus. No flashy spelling here. Every poem is carefully built on clear substance. Even the notion of Mystery seems clear and concrete:

…Mystery’s
when we turn the other cheek
and offer it, when we become
more than the body’s surviving
codes. Unleash the hungers
beneath the hunger, the dragon-
fly all morning alight on granite
ledge, beside a multitude of bugs,
untouched, simply because sun on stone
feels so near the source, so atavistic,
even a darning needle’s pricked awake.
Even a human on the run must
pause in a field of blue forget-me-not.
Even that swiftest of self-preser-
vationists, Atalanta, stopped
and stooped for three luscious, golden
apples, even if it meant self-
desecration, surrender to
the thing that would devour her.
(“Hunger”)

Shepard is subtle and self-deprecating. Just the right pitch when a poet is going up against Time. In one poem, a father is perceived as eccentric for turning family films into cinematographic evidence of his own reverie. In another, the poet eulogizes a local farmer. One poem even explores cultural Hubris from the vehicle of a small town pep squad cheer. After rallying prouder and louder, the poem turns:

we’re brutes who glorify our towns with home-
town cheers and sneer at creeds or faith

from foreign places.
   (“I’m From Leominster. Couldn’t
      Be Prouder, Can’t Hear Me Now,          I’ll Yell a Little Louder”)

Being one small piece of stone bathed with water not far from the source serves as the collection’s central metaphor. The energies are at once domestic, atavistic, and linguistic. One complete poem in the book “From the Bridge at Taos:”

A thousand feet down, the Rio Grande daily
reinscribes itself on scrolls of sandstone.
Look down, and there’s a recondite text revealed:
earth history that snakes like uro-
boros; beneath it another creature
reified from the obscure. There’s a millennium
instarred in mud, times of plague and pestilence.
And a signature of solfatura,
a few lines of blasphemy. There’s a comet’s
pink penmanship and the blue formation
of heavens, and a black scrawl of beginnings.
And close to the surface the condign
mea culpas of slow-witted creatures
who have just learned to think and are still
wet with rising from the waters, still
crossing over on the first day,
though they believe they have come so far.

The image of the stone in the river is Being and Time. In “History Matters More Than You:”

                                          …like that stunning
               monostone across the stream you saw just now
               and crossed over and found yourself reduced
               by that enormous cliff broken
               from some higher place. Perspective shifts
               when you’re a smaller piece
               of the planet. Let the eye travel upward
               toward that hilltop flat and peaceful with pines,
               and know from some higher precipice once
               a piece of rock broke off
               and land slid down to this brook’s babble
               and lodge here until time without chronicler
               lapped its sides to shiny skipping pebbles
               and what piece was left on shore…

               Ask them where exactly this trickling stream
               issues from, from what higher place the first
               rains gathered and carved their rushing course.
               Ask in vain how you’re a part of it,
               without name or date, and why this brook will shush
               us up who try to ask too much, will lap
               instead at our feet and hands, saying skip
               this stone across the stream or skip yourself
               to the other side.

Tags: 8 stars, Mid-List Press, Neil Shepard, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

Spanish Ballads

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

by W. S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Tradition!

merwin cover 2

In his 1961 introduction to Spanish Ballads, translator W.S. Merwin writes, “The romances were a kind of universal poetry, remembered, repeated, and composed by unlearned and by literate poets alike.” It is for this poetic tradition of “bards and minstrels” that Merwin attempts to revive and preserve these “romances” with this 2008 reissue of his 1961 translations.

The job of the translator is complex, and his priorities must be chosen carefully. Merwin has proven himself a wise and talented translator throughout Spanish Ballads, maintaining some of the form of the romances while opting for content in English rather than the rhyme and assonance of the Spanish. Merwin also notes in the original introduction that he has, wherever possible, retained the verb tense of the Spanish, though he offers little explanation for this choice, saying only that in upholding the verb tense “the translations were brought a shade closer to the Spanish poems.”

Contrary to Merwin’s assessment of the maintenance of tense, on several occasions the English verb tense does cause confusion in the voice of the poems. The time of the events of the poems versus the time of the telling becomes blurred, only partially communicating meaning. However, the poems are largely composed of dialogue, which lends itself to a consistent use of present tense.

Outside of dialogue, the present tense can be difficult to digest. Its use is unsubstantiated. For example, “The Enchanted Princess” is mostly in past tense with the exception of the dialogue until inexplicably the present tense is used near the end of the poem. It seems as though the inconsistent tense may be merely a product of oral error, that is, until we see the effect in the poem to its end. The effect is a disruption of time and a great sense of confusion. While this is frustrating upon a first reading, ultimately the effect is useful for the poem which is filled with anxiety, poor decision-making and finally, death. Inconsistent tense is, interestingly, consistent with the tone and mood of the verse.

So, how is this edition different from its predecessor? The foreword is the only thing that is entirely new to the book; however, Merwin’s focus here seems to be more of the same. In the foreword, he comments on Ezra Pound’s advice to him to try to “get as close to the original as possible” and ends by saying that the original poems contained something that “was worth trying to suggest in English, something that would be worth listening to and remembering.” To print these poems again is to pay tribute, to distribute or make available a dying tradition. Merwin’s careful translations preserve the many significances of these poems, some of which may not feel so dated.

Conservation of these poems is culturally important. The poems are fragments of oral, traditional epics that document “experiences of war, love, captivity.” These are things we can still learn from, and many of these poems are becoming relevant again. Despite the fact that the poems are timeworn, many still hit on vital issues. For instance, the first in the collection, “La Cava Florinda’s Fatal Immodesty,” references an illicit sexual encounter between one young maiden called La Cava Florinda and King Rodrigo. The poem ends:

Florinda lost her flower,
The King suffered his punishment;
She said he forced her to it,
He said she gave full consent.
As for which of those two
Was more blameworthy,
Men will tell you it was La Cava,
And women, Rodrigo.

This is the classical opposition of the sexes, but it is also made new by our modern lens. We are living in a society in which “date rape” and “consensual sex” are common facets of our sexual education and growth, common to our sexual experience. It is evident in this particular poem that both Florinda and Rodrigo were seeking a sort of forbidden pleasure—but when the pleasure is over, there is still the guilt to deal with. We are still searching for a foolproof way to deal with such complex issues; therefore, the poem adds to this debate, continues to inform. Not all poems in the collection are so malleable.

Merwin made some excellent choices regarding the poems he included in this collection, though many of the poems deal with the same issues. Most of the redundancies are dramatic love stories of passion, lust and greed. This is the case in “Fair Melisenda,” wherein the young Melisenda is told by her mother to seek “pleasure” and romance while she is young because if she waits too long, “not a boy will desire” her. The poem’s origins are in a time when women were commodities. Having a woman was like having a horse, only valuable while youthful. It is important that we, especially women, remember these times always.

The battle of the sexes is primary throughout Spanish Ballads, and male chauvinism is prevalent. Again in “Fair Melisenda,” we see an attitude that conveys the believed superiority of men over women when the Count answers Melisenda’s offering of herself and her body:

‘I have made an oath,
I have sworn on a prayer book,
Never to deny my body
To any woman who should demand it,
Except Melisenda
The Emperor’s daughter.’

How noble of him. This is clearly a man that is not afraid of sacrifice. Nevertheless, we should note the cunning and manipulative nature of Melisenda. To ignore her intent in this scheme would be unfair to the poor Count. He has been tricked into sexual intercourse with the very woman he has vowed never to touch. Thinking that he shall have to die for his sin, he visits the Emperor to come clean and to meet his fate; however, contrary to the supposed temperament of the Emperor, he suggests that the Count marry his daughter. The Count is overwhelmed with joy, for he will be privileged enough to marry Melisenda. Perhaps he is so joyful simply because he has avoided death, but it is difficult to understand how the Count can ignore the dangers in spending his life with such an adroit femme fatale. Good for him.

Perhaps one of the sentiments in these poems best able to weather time comes in a poem titled “Constancy.” The speaker lists some of the typical hardships of a human life, but in the end notes their worth. The narrator’s motivation is a woman that he loves, and he says, “…for you, my lady / All must be borne.” If nothing else, the reprinting of these translations reminds us of the things that move us; whatever our individual concerns may be, they are valid because they cause us to act, internally or externally. They may provide us with courage or discipline; they cause us to grow and ideally to grow together.

Tags: 7 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Melinda Wilson, W.S. Merwin
Posted in reviews

Old War

Monday, September 15th, 2008

by Alan Shapiro
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

Clarity Begins at Home

old war In Old War, Alan Shapiro continues to work with a surprisingly simple diction and a stunningly complex prosody. His style here is defined by a kind of lilt or loop—a series of repetitions that work to calibrate his poems between the epic and quotidian, playing with science, history, myth, politics, and family to find the emotional core of his subject. It’s a fundamentally existentialist approach—always finding that one soul to offer a secular salvation though understanding in the midst of the fog that clouds our vision.

Shapiro is a student of classics, which I suspect is where he developed his ability to navigate the large and the small—the social and the personal. After all, the texts he has translated are ones where there is no line between the state and the people who make it. The jacket cover tries to pin down the collection as working around Shapiro’s personal tragedy and triumph of physical collapse and re-marriage (in that order)—that we should recognize the threads of joyful mortality that pull the book forward, but that seems to simplify this book in order make the emotions autobiographically understandable. I found that the book’s poles are less tragedy and triumph than they are microcosm and macrocosm.

Shapiro works with a long line and a short line in this book, and both of them allow him to work through the loop. The short line allows Shapiro to set up syntactic and rhythmic ladders, as here, in the poem “Bower”:

Our bedroom in a small
house in an old
forest where trees
lean down

It’s a very subtle effect—the noun/preposition/article/adjective ending the first two lines cut against the expected order of both the sentence and the line, and allow him to disorient the reader just enough to keep him in a sense of fall. Ending the line with an adjective pushes the reader towards the noun it will describe at the beginning of the next line, while putting a gap in the expected flow of information. He achieves a similar push/pull throughout the poem with other syntactic breaks, as in this passage, where the verbs and prepositions are separated from their objects:

where what comes
to us comes through
what holds it back.

Combine that with the repetition of “comes”—which is pulling back temporally against the forward thrust of the sentence (“comes through” is the same action as “comes to us”)—and you begin to have a sense of Shapiro’s aesthetic. It’s not that he moves slowly, it’s that he moves through the same action, space, syntax or sound repeatedly. He shows us the same motion from multiple angles. If you like the metaphor of the poem “unfolding in time,” think of Shapiro’s poems as origami. It’s not language poetry—all the poems here are landscapes, narratives or meditations—but he approaches his subjects from multiple angles, creating an almost cubist spin.

In the longer-lined poems, the rhythms are longer, so they loop on a longer beat, the line containing its own repetitions even as they build up over the longer line. “How”—a poem that begins in “the bedroom of the afterlife”—ends with the phone from the first line continuing to ring:

…the ringing of the phone that never stops,
and how it rings and rings is how the living call,
and how the dead reply is how it goes on ringing.

The repetitions and loops allow Shapiro to embody the intimacies and alienations that make up his central subject here. He works to represent the failures of connections, and find the connections within those failures—whether contemplating an unfortunate, overheard couple in a restaurant or the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Shapiro has long been a poet able to find the intimate in the epic and the epic in the intimate. This book continues that exploration while stitching the current shocks of American events into his tapestry.

Tags: 7 stars, Alan Shapiro, Houghton Mifflin, Jason Schneiderman
Posted in reviews

God Bless

Friday, September 12th, 2008

by H.L. Hix
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

Voicing

hix god cover Rather than describe his latest collection as mere poetry, H.L. Hix positions God Bless as a “political/poetic discourse,” of which he serves as mediator. Such a context, though tinged with hubris, allows Hix to explore a fascinating question: what if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden engaged in an ongoing public correspondence. Hix melds together an assortment of press releases, executive orders and other public statements into month-specific blocks of fervent, presidential verse. Select lines from the public statements of bin Laden mix with Hix’s own attempts at bin Laden’s stylized form to serve as rebuttals in a series of interleaves.

In execution, the resulting poems are at times smooth-flowing and conversational or disjointed and contrived—sometimes all of the above within a single poem. Hix notes in his brief prologue that “no attempt is made to signal where one quoted passage [of Bush’s] joins another.” This technique yields some rewarding juxtapositions, as in the first poem entitled “January 2001”:

The dogs seem to have adjusted. I worry:
one year, you may test and everything is fine.
I’m going to protect that privilege.
Every child must be taught these principles:
we will build our defenses beyond challenge,
we’ll see how that affects possible arms talks.
In four years, you measure again,
and all of a sudden something isn’t fine.

The capricious range of topics convincingly suggests that Bush has picked up the direct line to the Al Qaeda caves and embarked on a casual conversation with their leader. The resulting effect manages to provoke thought in an unsettling manner without taking itself too seriously. Unfortunately, Hix sheds this carefree approach in later poems, exchanging a successful literary device for hyperfocused propagandizing. In “July 2001,” each stanza ends with the refrain “we’re going to keep the pressure on Iraq,” yielding a disjointed, repetitive verse with a bluntly forced agenda.

Hix further jeopardizes this enterprise in his approach to bin Laden’s responses. The verse from Hix’s own hand often fails to fully engage with the italicized direct quotations used to frame it. While the interleaf following “April 2002” effectively captures the tone of bin Laden’s own speech (“Khaled al-Sa’id, Abd al-Aziz, / Maslah al-Shamrani, Riyadh al-Hajiri: theirs / is the honor the rest of us missed, / to die for following God’s decrees, killing Crusaders.”), others rely upon the quotations as a mere prop, allowing the poet to vent his own political disturbance through a borrowed mouthpiece. The interleaf following “July 2003” particularly falls into this trap, ascribing to bin Laden idioms and ideas that fail to ring true:

But Bush put his own private interests
ahead of American public interest,

paying himself and his administration
with no-bid contracts to Halliburton…

Al-Qaeda spent five hundred thousand on
what cost America five hundred billion;

Bush and his cronies continue to siphon
billions into pointless occupation.

Hix allows his anger to cloud his judgment in these poems, shifting bin Laden’s voice into the voice of a predictable American anti-war activist. Worse, he ignores the premise of this collection, trading a personable dialogue for a didactic diatribe. As the collection progresses, the poems devolve further and further into mishmash of phrases from Bush and unconvincing vitriol from bin Laden.

Despite these flaws, several poems manage to shine. “October 2003” marks a return to thoughtful simplicity and conversational form, noting that “nearly every day / we’re launching swift precision / raids against the enemies of peace.” So too does the interleaf following “November 2001” serve to bolster the collection as a realistic discourse (“Again and again he claims to know our reason, / and tells you we attacked because we hate freedom. / Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden.”) Unfortunately for God Bless, such poems are the exceptions that prove the tremendous lost potential of the concept.

Such concerns are foreign neither to Hix nor the reader, however, because the ending pages of the collection make public the pre-publication dialogue between the poet, publisher and others asked to critique the book. The publication of often scathing criticism and counterargument is a groundbreaking concept and redeems some of the flawed execution of the poet’s other grand experiment. Readers become privy not only to criticism from author Robert Mooney that “worse, though, is not just the sense but the absolute certainty on the part of any given reader that language is being manipulated in God Bless to serve a passionately held pre-scribed idea and ideology,” but also the author’s rejected (and not replaced) preface, which claims that the poetry “needs to be justified because it is transparent.”

While it would be relatively simple to castigate God Bless as a failed experiment, it serves a much more useful purpose as a case study on the expansion of not only the poetic form, but on the idea of a text itself. One wishes not, as Mooney suggested, that Hix had been dissuaded from publishing this collection, but rather that he’d taken to heart the very criticism that he saw fit to publish along with it, transforming a first draft with great potential into the great final draft that it potentially could have become.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Bryan Stokes II, H.L. Hix, Hanging Loose Press
Posted in reviews

Bill

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

by Bill Rector
Proem Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Bill Vol. 1

rector cover Bill Rector’s book, aptly named Bill, follows Bill through contemporary America, focusing on experiences in health care. Bill talks about Bill in the third person; he is alternately doctor and patient, insider and outsider, in a series of poems that speak like prose. Rector does an effective job of forming Bill into an idea that applies poignantly and broadly to the alienation of the American middle class.

Every poem runs into the next, building the character and world of Bill. Readers are first introduced to the emptiness of modern life and modern medicine; in “show room,” Rector makes a smart and direct analogy, using anti-depressants and America’s love of cars:

I guess what Bill is saying
is that there’s something empty

in the way we regulate our moods,
something clunky under the hoods
we drop when we go out.

Our health care system has become another thing to consume, to regulate our happiness as opposed to actually improving our quality of life. In this piece and others, Rector suggests that life has become intrinsically worthless in America because we put a dollar value on it.

Rector is not one-dimensional, though; he also shows moments when medicine fails due to the crushing inevitability of death. In “Her Husband is near…”, Doctor Bill becomes totally insubstantial while waiting with a family for the death of their father:

Her husband is near
death. Bill
changes shape constantly…

… – Bill’s
the snowflake that drifts
past the gray tower,
mind’s eye
he is
the stomach he doesn’t have
for the three sons who dropped everything to fly
in from the East

There are forces we control with economy but there are, and always will be, those forces of nature we cannot control. Poems like “The Anatomy Lesson” display the practice of medicine as little more than macabre theatre. Nearly all of Rector’s takes on health care in America are touched with cynicism, but he offers an intelligent and thoughtful variety of views.

As Bill progresses, the emptiness and insecurity of health care branch out into all corners of American life. Bill is left seeking the most basic communion within himself and between himself and others. There is the feeling that one must come before the other—but which remains a mystery. As Bill wanders without an identity (other than his plainsong moniker), he lacks morality, direction, purpose—maybe even existence. (It’s notable that the poet’s full name doesn’t appear on the book jacket or in the book, except on the copyright page.)

The whole text is straightforward, bordering on inartistic. However, there are moments presented that certainly transcend the everyday undercurrent of shallow, insecure American life. When Bill gets hit in the face with a line drive, Bill, covered in blood, refuses to show pain:

Boys don’t understand

how a man can stand
not to let pain
show. How

the mouth is a scar
that never cries
Never never

even when it can tell
what’s coming
until it’s too late.

Not even the heart bleeds like the face.

Rector references baseball, shooting, fishing, cars, politics, war, farming, and many of the images and ideas associated with the hardworking core of this country. He successfully avoids the pitfall of being blindly critical of such “American” traits. Bill is a curious and willing participant in these scenes.

This is a good book of poetry for non-poetry readers. Although Bill is too obviously Rector’s mouthpiece (Berryman’s Henry he ain’t by a long shot), it’s refreshing to read poetry from the point of view of a common man who deals with real-life value judgments daily. It’s more gestalt than deep delving, but the pace and consistent focus creates increasing intensity and suggestive meaning as the poems roll by.

Tags: 6 stars, Bill Rector, Matt Soucy, Proem Press
Posted in reviews

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

Monday, September 8th, 2008

by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

Horse Whisperer

olstein radio cover Rural, but not pastoral, earthy but not rough-hewn, Lisa Olstein’s Radio Crackling, Radio Gone is a quietly inviting debut. The title is perfectly emblematic of Olstein’s stoic, declarative style (“across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor; / we prepare for almost nothing that might happen”), though a burst of radio static in so hushed a world as hers might be enough to bring the planes down out of the skies. At the very least it would spook the horses, animals which figure prominently in the poet’s imaginary, as well—apparently—as in her everyday life. The horse makes a suitable metaphor for this strong, graceful collection. Sometimes nervous, often restrained, occasionally playful, the energy that pulses in the veins of these poems is always palpable, like the heart’s beat when the breath is held.

Each section of the book bears a Sappho fragment for its epigraph. Olstein relies on Anne Carson’s translations (from If Not, Winter). The double affinity makes sense in light of Radio’s deep longings, subtle humor, and earnest theological engagement. And yet Olstein’s work is not fragmentary. Each poem stands on its own, total and whole: an intricate, delicate little world.

The poems reward re-reading. The most startling images take time to distinguish themselves against a set—horses, fields, flowers and other foliage, birds, and airplanes—that recur so frequently they begin to feel quotidian. This is not to say they are trite, only to warn the reader that as one becomes regularized to their presence, one may be tempted to breeze past them or read them uncarefully, which is to risk missing some of the book’s most profound moments, such as the final stanza of “Steady Now”:

Butterflies, too, pass us on their long relays to and from.
Once in an ice storm not meant for May,
we watched hundreds freeze on night branches.
In the morning they drifted like embers,
bright fragments collecting around the horses’ mouths
whenever they dipped their heads to the ground.

Posted in reviews

Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Monday, September 8th, 2008

by Michael Cirelli
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by Erica Miriam Fabri

To Flatly Refuse to Dumb Down Nothing

cirelli cover In Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Michael Cirelli’s first full-length collection of poetry, the poet has arranged to have the academic order of poetry take on a romantic courtship with the vernacular of hip-hop. In the poem “Dead Ass,” the two genres finally get in bed together:

Fo’ shizzle, crunk, hella: I place in
glass jars like rare moths.

In “Dead Ass,” he not only praises the colorful and rare language that comes from hip-hop culture, but he also bows down to it, just as an archaeologist might bow down to a great artifact; he is humbled by it, as if he will never be able to keep up:

These words make me feel old, and alabaster.
When I hear something new, it’s like I discovered it
for the first time, like I excavated it from the mouth
of a teenager. So I dust it off with my fossil brush
and try to jam it into the keyhole of academia.

One-third of the book is made up of a series of poems which Cirelli has coined “Hip-Hop Sonnets.” However, you should not expect anything too formal; the only formal rule that is followed is that each poem is fourteen lines long. Each poem is a dedication to a different rapper and tells a story from the rapper’s personal life. In most cases, the story is unexpected or uncommon. In the title poem, the infamous father-of-thirteen has brought his entire brood of offspring to a seafood restaurant in Brooklyn. When they sit down to eat, chaos erupts in the dining room:

Dinner rolls bounce off the walls like handballs! Sword fights break out with shrimp skewers, the toddlers wear calamari rings on their fingers like diamonds, and lil’ Rusty does the fake-sneeze-trick that leaves an oyster in his open palm. Ol’ Dirty is ravishing a huge boiled lobster, drawn butter dripping down his chin, as he cracks open the claws with his golden fangs.

The hip-hop artists that Cirelli has chosen to immortalize in sonnet-form are always caught at moments that regular fans wouldn’t normally witness: Talib Kweli expelled from Brooklyn Tech, Pharoahe Monch at a teen poetry slam, Common as a high school basketball star, Phife Dawg in a hospital bed receiving dialysis and Suge Knight using his connections to set up headaches, divorces and pregnancies.

The “Sonnets” are usually witty, but at times become serious. In “Phife Dawg Awaits a Kidney,” Cirelli writes:

…his mother is patient as an olive tree. She understands
the thick accent of dialysis, isn’t fooled by the organ’s rhetoric.
Instead, she marvels at the fluid that scrub’s her son’s blood
clean—
makes metaphors about this science-water.

Interspersed with the “Hip-Hop Sonnets,” another third of the book tells the story of the death and life of poet’s own father. His father also suffered kidney failure in his final days, and the poems that deal with his illness echo eerily:

…he dumped
liquor over his head until his kidney floated up
to his throat.

In dealing with his father’s death, Cirelli revisits memories of the life his father lived and tackles the “myth” and “legend” of who he really was. In poems like “Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” his father begins to resemble the stereotype of the “gangster” lifestyle commonly assumed by hip-hop artists. In the poem, he has driven his son to the local housing projects to make a “delivery.” His descriptions are stark:

…my father walked out with a chest
made of scales and whistled, with two fingers at the corners
of his lips,
to the shadows that responded from a window…

The father character is obsessed with consumption and with being noticed. He buys expensive sneakers, remote-control monster trucks, surfboards and rare puppets to win his son’s love; he eats a plate of veal in seconds and storms out of the shower and onto the street (completely naked) to beat a neighbor to a bloody pulp.

Yet, he is loved by all, including his son. In “The Giver,” the father is:

…surrounded by every
tag-a-long-mooch-kiss-ass
in the neighborhood,
taking big bites (on his dime).

In his glory, he resembles Ol’ Dirty Bastard from the title poem. However, when he falls, he falls hard. After years of drug dealing, he is arrested and while awaiting trial he grows ill and never recovers. In the poem “Framing the Picture,” Cirelli grapples with his father’s mortality and his final moments:

In the hospital, I watched
my father cry out for his mother,
who has a prosthetic leg. The nuns brought in
silver chains with archangels dangling from them,
and they draped the metal like garlands around his neck.

His father returns twice after his earthly death. Once in a dream, in a poem titled “Lives of Astronauts,” where son seeks father at his family’s local bar, expecting him to be in the same place where he had always been before:

…In my dream, I walked through
the smoked glass and my uncle was pouring drinks,

my cousin was sitting in a chair by the green nuts.
I looked around for my father.

The language is delicate and slow and a reader feels as if every character in the book has suffered a sort of small death themselves. Then, someone at the bar finally speaks:

Your father is dead. I asked my cousin if it was true.
He pulled up his sleeve and showed me a memorial tattoo.

The father returns again in the last poem of the book. This time, he is speaking from heaven, asking that his son write more poems about him. The final couplet is a haunting moment: a ghost’s request that this very book be written:

Meanwhile, dad is not satisfied with the poem he got. He wants
14 more lines,
one final couplet that paints him in that soft, forgiving light.

No hip-hop inspired book would be complete without the bravado and thrill of romance, sexuality and lust. The final third of the book is made up of poems that are Cirelli’s dedication to none other than: the ladies. And, to follow suit, he has made certain to have no shortage of “ass” references. “Culture” is an ode to hip-hop fashion:

…the diamonds in the teeth
make the ladies squint—these same ladies in their too-tight jeans
showing off ass, for the fellas
in their too-loose jeans showing off ass.

In “Girls, Girls, Girls” (borrowed from the Jay-Z song of same name) a piece that offers a detailed list of the colorful array of women that adorn New York City’s streets, Cirelli writes:

…I love how the ass moves up and down when they walk
like two fat kids on a see-saw.

The poem does not hold back. It is pack-filled with metaphor after metaphor:

…I love the high-heels that hoist the rump into
a half-heart silhouette. I love them pushing strollers,
with tattoos of ships on their shoulders.
…………………………………………………………
…I love them in headwrap, in floss, in sari, in cliché
t-shirts on Houston, on Bowery, with braids that wind
like DNA…

Through it all, Cirelli manages to make “rare moths” out of the intricacies of hip-hop and to merge them with the intricacies of his own life without forgetting who he is: a white, middle class guy from the suburbs. He briefly mentions the step-father who raised him, who was “out earning the roof for us,” while a young Cirelli waits at the window for a Saturday visit with his “deadbeat”/“dopehead” birth father, who never shows. He also includes a heartfelt poem about his mother that again highlights Cirelli’s fascination with the language and influence of hip-hop idiom (his mother misunderstands a rap song’s lyrics “Buy you a drank” to mean “Buy you a train”), while also displaying his admiration and love for the woman who raised “…the son / she carried down three flights of stairs / on Leah St. with no car and nowhere / to go…”

In “Losing Creativity,” Cirelli writes of the frustration of a struggling poet trying to get his point across:

I used to rub on these letters for hours
until they shined like patent leather shoes.

The poems in Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard stand powerfully on their own as precise and complete pieces of writing. As a collection, they weave a complex and fascinating story that is equal parts witty and poignant, and at every moment compelling.

Tags: 9 stars, Erica Miriam Fabri, Hanging Loose Press, Michael Cirelli
Posted in reviews

Rogue Hemlocks

Friday, September 5th, 2008

by Carl R. Martin
Fence Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Essential Jellyfish

Each of the poems in Carl R. Martin’s Rogue Hemlocks is miraculous and leads to a broad spectrum of meaning and possibility. Here is a poem called “Pumping Station One”:

Holy jellyfish
making innocent the insouciant curve of the hip
male or female.
Petrol in the beak, the pellucid orb
reigning slipshod in the air
of extant Being
as it bubbles afresh from this watery dissolve.
So you dispute this comic version,
laugh at those plaster statues of sheep,
shout your seminal baa of sequined mirth?
I too laugh at the clear proximity of her skin,
her see through toga adrift
in this briny pool love poisons with flammable
liquids.

Like “Pumping Station One,” the other poems in Rogue Hemlocks encourage a holistic reading; you could probably dissect a “Holy jellyfish,” but it’s better to watch it swim “in this briny pool love poisons with flammable liquids.” Martin’s poems are tenuous and whimsical while affirming the essentialness of their constituent parts and the material of which they are made. In a sense, they embody qualities of beingness one finds in living organism–or at least, an indelible sense of thingness displayed by inanimate objects.

It’s difficult to associate Martin with a school or predecessor. The protean consistency of style throughout Rogue Hemlocks is reminiscent of John Ashbery. Other poems, like “Mime Song,” reflect the crystalline imagery of the protosurrealist Pierre Reverdy:

When in the suborned world
fear of death strums
the blue xylophone, space
is clear and tense
as gloved hands gripping nowhere:
mime without meaning, or girder wheeled around in air
before its fall,
and the face slips into place.

For the most part, however, Martin’s syntax and diction, his wacky music, his sense of history and pop-culture are idiosyncratic. Each of his poems is a singular disturbance in the matrix of contemporary poetry.

If there is any weakness in Martin’s writing it is that this sense of wonder it invokes can be intimidating. The generousness and sublimity of the poems in Rogue Hemlocks may not be for everyone, but everyone should seek them out and be challenged by them:

We know, we imagine vulnerable colors, skimpy legs,
watching the noodles slither from chopsticks.
We hear sonic explosions, the pure lake’s concentric beauty.
Individually or as one we abandon the mistakes.

(from “Duties of a Paper Hat”)

Tags: 8 stars, Ben Mirov, Carl R. Martin, Fence Books
Posted in reviews

What Love Comes To

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

by Ruth Stone
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Joe Ahearn

Negative Ressurection

What Love Comes To is Ruth Stone’s thirteenth book of poems and the second “new and selected” she has published since her 1959 Harcourt-Brace debut, In an Iridescent Time. Stone is now 93 years old, a mother and grandmother and, if this book is any evidence, certainly still writing her relentless, bleak and occasionally hilarious poems at her rustic home retreat in Vermont. She seems remarkably vigorous for a poet in her 90s. The selection of new poems in What Love Comes To, dated 2008, contains 68 poems, some (”All in Time,” “Eta Carinae,” “The Fig Tree”) as good as anything she has written. And although she writes many poems on subjects we would expect any grandmother to write about–furniture, birds, the weather, the healing power of children–she is possessed of a fierce, even brutal vision, and, even at an age when many of us would be dozing by the fire, is still capable of writing a poem that stuns.

Look at “Eta Carinae.” The poem begins, as perhaps too many of our poems do, with descriptions of the birds and weather. But Stone perceives more than many of our merely gardeny poets. Noticing not just a relentless snowstorm, but the sunlight that falls through the snow, Stone does not settle for the usual pastoral or rustic scene. Instead, she widens the frame to astronomical scale, to show us the sun “wobbling and coughing / along the dust belt,” and then, Eta Carinae, our galactic neighbor, a hypergiant, intensely luminous blue star that seems well on its way to exploding into a supernova. A supernova, Stone says, that like Christ, will “come to illuminate the ignorant / who can only swallow one another.” In Stone’s poems, we are all of us among the ignorant, and our disasters, our propensities to destroy one another, are merely the foreshadowing of the larger, cosmic disaster we are born into.

These austerities are not recent inventions. Stone’s poetry is filled, almost from the beginning, with accounts of desolate suffering, with depictions of the miserably poor, with scenes and memories from her own desolate, poor, often miserable life. She is a poet of the coldest eye, one who nearly always refuses not only sentimentality but often, it seems, even a reasonable optimism. She sees a terrible, almost Russian, tragedy in even the simplest and most apparently innocent scene. Look at “Winter,” a poem written at least twenty years before “Eta Carinae.” The plot is simple: A woman looks out the window of a train stopped amid the “drab misery” of the station, noticing the crowds and concrete and the general junk and trash of our public spaces. Then, suddenly, she remembers how in her youth, her husband, now dead many years, ran alongside another train, waving goodbye. “The train,” Stone writes, “passes a station; / fresh people standing at the platform, / their faces expecting something. / I feel their entire histories ravish me.” Suffering, for Stone, is not only the key to poetry, but her vantage point into the lives of others and the ground of her sense of community.

It is impossible, of course, to summarize a life’s work, a thick book of poems written over a period of fifty years, in a short review. Stone’s work is more various than these examples may indicate. One notices in Stone’s work not just her harshness and astringency, but also her tenderness, her humor. One also notices, especially in these days of hyperkinetic post-everything poems with their sleights and trickery and dazzle, the unvarying plainness and simplicity of her poems. She says (and she is right, if it is to her work that she refers), “the song is a monotone.” After abandoning her sometimes awkward metrical exercises in the late Fifties, Stone settled into a signature style of simple, sometimes primitive, diction, flat tone, and a medium-length, frequently end-stopped, line. She is neither the poet of Whitman’s onflowing exuberance nor the poet of Dickinson’s gnomic, symbolic and heavily textured abbreviations. She uses the standard line of mainstream American poetry in the Sixties and the Seventies and one learns to expect few, if any, innovations in prosody or technique from her.

It is fair to say, though, that even if Stone’s poems do not dazzle with ingenuity, they often succeed by slicing their way deep into the reader’s consciousness. Stone’s poetry is, at its best, a poetry that wounds, a poetry that hurts us into feeling more, seeing more. Many of her poems live a long time in memory, even after a single reading. And her poems of widowhood (I am thinking here particularly of the poems selected from the book Who is the Widow’s Muse?) are the fullest and deepest examination of the widow’s life available in contemporary poetry. Stone is often a poet of memory (”Time,” she says, “is absurd. It flows backwards”) and her poems remembering her late husband, Walter Stone, are grave and beautiful and terribly sad.

What Love Comes To, it should be noted, is a beautifully made book. One wishes, though, that Copper Canyon Press had elected to include an index of titles and first lines to aid the reader who wants to find a particular poem without flipping through the Table of Contents. Even better would have been also to include standard bibliographic information regarding the nine books from which Stone chose poems, to help the reader who may want to search out Stone’s earlier books, many of which are now, regrettably, out-of-print.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Joe Ahearn, Ruth Stone
Posted in reviews