Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader.  “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush, loudly beating—in each of these image-rich poems.

Pritts engages with other poets in Sentimental Spectacular, including Frost in his poem “Frost at Midmorning”: “…me, a proud honorary / astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained / & immortal beauty but, O, just a chump in love / with the ground…Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, / Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws…” Here, we find a wisp of a reference to Frost’s “Out, Out–”, an arguably unsentimental tale of a young boy’s lost hand, as well as ever-sentimental Whitman, with his exultant and emotional O’s and preoccupations with lovelorn “chumps.”

In the final poem “Inarticulate Bird in Befuddled Blooming Bafflement,” Pritts upends his moment-driven sentimental explorations, challenging memory and nostalgia as stable vehicles of sentimentality. “You can’t bring [this poem],” states the speaker, “to the waterfall you made up, // you can’t show it to the rainbow you see when you / close your eyes.” Where imagination and desire intersect with memory, Pritts shows, sentiment becomes longing, and Sentimental Spectacular veers in an unexpected direction, as startling as it is beautiful. “Some handy flower to dip into,” the speaker calls this shadowy memory, this longing for a past self that did or didn’t exist, “a struggle to remember the sweetness.”

–Rachel Mennies

*

selvage: for country, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Belladonna, 2011)

The title of this chapbook from the Belladonna Chaplet series sets a complex backdrop for the poems within. The word selvage refers to the edge of a woven fabric that keeps the fabric from unraveling. The word selvage also calls to mind the word salvage. A selvage salvages the unity or wholeness of the fabric; it preserves the individuality of something, keeps it from blending in with the rest of the world and becoming invisible in the chaos.

In these poems, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s speaker seems to be struggling to preserve identity, control and hope. For instance, in the first poem, the speaker proposes that “Perhaps it is no longer necessary to hope” and asks, “Does it matter how I feel?” The first poem establishes a general sense of giving oneself over to the powers that be. And all that is left is hope as can be seen at the end of the second poem: “And if I think with all my heart / and if I listen with rituals and codes in place, / maybe it will come to pass.” There exists, within these lines, the possibility for sarcasm, though. The phrase “with all my heart” is clichéd and obvious, suggesting a speaker that is, in fact, no longer hopeful. A sarcastic moment here would indicate that hope does not have the power to revise.

Hope plays a substantial part in these fifteen pages of poetry. A poem on page 13 ends, “everything balances on hope.” Although hope becomes central to these poems, there are multiple forces working against it. The concept of free will also shows up often in Dhompa’s collection, but almost always, it is rejected: “As though / the plants on my kitchen window have free will” and “No point bringing up free will.” Dhompa’s poems expound the internal human struggle to understand and control one’s life.

Some of the poems, however, become too abstracted and limit the reader’s ability to connect with the speaker. Take the following lines for example, “Not error but irony / of displacement gives tyranny / degrees of exception.” The piggybacked prepositional phrases and abstract nouns—“of displacement” and “of exception”—push the reader farther from the poem’s core. But nonetheless, readers are left with a beautifully confusing and hopeful moment: “I leave / today and will / see you yesterday.” Yes, see you then.

–Melinda Kaye Wilson

**

i wanted to be a pirate, Christine Herzer (H_NGM_N, 2010)

By design, Christine Herzer’s chapbook i wanted to be a pirate is an uneven and unpolished read. A visual artist, Herzer has scattered text, handwriting, scribbles, and blacked-out lines highlighting text in white. The poems are more successful in their telling rather showing, but Herzer mitigates that success by trying to maintain a distance from her poems and characters. She has several recurring characters, (‘surfer boy,’ Pan Tau, family members, and more), but none of them move beyond stereotype.  There is very little personal connection here either between the reader and the poems or the speaker and the poems.  Herzer writes, “I remember sister getting lost.” There is no article or possessive pronoun affixed to ‘sister,’ creating a colloquial, dramatic dissociation, which is soon contradicted. Other character-relation instances in the book feel similarly detached, emotional but partially insincere.

Though many whole poems don’t quite connect, there are many stand-out lines within them.  The most simple and direct lines are the strongest: “the party, us arriving together / & leaving together, I liked it,” “where would i go if i had to be there / who would you call before the plane crashes.”  Strong lines frame the poems but the attempted stories/emotions put to those lines are too expected.  For example, the eponymous line, “we have so much love to do” is obscured in the poem, relying  too heavily on butterfly sentiment (“it is a delicate process / branding wings, numbering wings”). While it’s unfair/unreasonable to expect narrative from poetry, “i wanted to be a pirate” is more notable for stand-out lines than its overall direction or impression.

–Matt Soucy

***

“…and shrink with me”

Kate Colby’s The Return of the Native draws several of its poem titles from Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel of same name, which explored gender politics and foiled ambitions at the beginning of the modern era.  The novel’s frank portrayal of a shifting mindset about religion and new ways of thinking about the role of women in English society was ahead of its time.  Hardy’s detailed realism inspired empathy for his female characters especially, without the veil of romance to distract attention from their choices and faults.  Colby, in her work, seems less interested in generating strong feelings for a character than she does in evoking the world that makes a character’s invention possible. Because of this, the relationship between the two texts appears to be more atmospheric than literal.

The two works do intersect in Colby’s intent to represent “a synopsis and historical context” that illuminates the threshold of a changing social landscape. Colby’s aesthetic is wrought from scraps of icons, clichés, advertising slogans, and folklore, which resist the comfort that narrative provides in moments of discord.  These fragments manifest as multiple instances of disconnection that form a “crafty sampler of secretly/discontinuous, tied-off threads.” Many of the poems showcase extended metaphors that, in juxtaposition with other brief allegories, mimic the postmodern experience of constant interruption. Throughout the work, the divergent narrative threads do seem to lean towards each other, if never succumbing to unity.  These intentional disconnections both satisfy and annoy at unexpected moments.

“A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion,” one of the more direct pieces in the book, draws on lines we know. Each one aims to confirm some underlying disappointment: “Home is where/ the head is/ taken”; “now back to the technocolonial/ color of my youth” and “Over title I’d take the chain on my stopper,/ my own corroding string of beads and couplings/ and what goes out with the bathwater.”  Colby’s innovations on clichés provoke good feelings, despite the seriousness expressed by them. Some of the most resonant moments in the work as a whole are meditations on growing smaller. The poem “Through the Moonlight” points to the origins of introversion in the “architecture of the body:

Living in cities,
when you become the space
that the body contains
—feel the physics—
and shrink with me
under my para-
pluie of bent tines.

The speaker’s consciousness is informed by the space under the umbrella, but the desire for smallness also has implications for the intimate relationship. When she invites the reader to “shrink with me,” it is implied that presence is also the manifestation of ego.  The speaker’s desire for smallness is also a desire for greater connection through the compression of the self.

Consider a few lines from the poem “An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated” as another laud of the virtues of being contained, this time in the form of an object or artifact:

To climb inside the vitrine
gather together the glass
flowers I want to break
between my teeth, hear
shatter in my head—

How will it end?
With neither a bang nor a whimper
but a weary,
insistent
banging.

Inside the vitrine, the speaker becomes capable of irrevocable change.  Her expression of desire introduces the question of how one lasts when one is considered precious.  In the end, the weary banging manifests only in the speaker’s mind, but still does not cease.  Every “end” serves as a beginning, an endless set of starting points.  This idea is emphasized in the final image of the poem:

My tiny plot
I hoe and harrow
again and again
to see each time
what I might grow there.

The emotional core of the book is comprised of competing desires: to acknowledge there is no ending to any story and to manufacture a resolution when it is not possible to have one.

An intellectual intensity drives most of the poems in the collection, though the few overtly lyrical moments in the work are striking.  In the poem “Through the Moonlight,” an unexpected turn towards overtly romantic language and a direct plea for longing stun with their sweetness:  “Let us always be about/ to be leaving/ one another for the evening.” Later in the poem, we witness the sticky weight of intoxication in this lovely image: “Sluggish bees in late season/ suckle empty soda cans,” which suggests that when we become like the bee and seek fulfillment from beyond the context of predictable associations, desire appears to be unending.

As the book attempts to map the collision of personal, political and literary accounts that define an individual, we are reminded that whatever we observe is likely to be affected by our own meddling in the “drama”:

a long walk
on a short
fourth wall

Colby offers a smart and provocative counterpoint to “the romance of recorded history” through her confident embrace of the narrative fragment. The Return of the Native orchestrates a dynamic between broad cultural influences and sentiment but with little transparency about who is at the center of these perceptions.  Perhaps Colby does not want us to know.  Or maybe she is making the case that character was never that discrete, singular, or of certifiable provenance.  In either instance, it is not entirely clear how she interprets the relationship between conceptual argument and aesthetic experiment.  Maybe this kind confusion is the inevitable outcome of attempting to blend histories that otherwise would not intersect.

*

“The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

The best folk tales and children’s stories are the dark ones, the ones that hint at the world and human relations as they really are and so continue to haunt our adult dreams, shocking us awake to reel at the true terrors of abandonment, our inevitable decay, heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. The act of parsing out and presenting these adult truths from beneath the veils of children’s fantasy is the project at the heart of Jenny Boully’s masterful new book, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. The book is a brilliant alternate version of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s book Peter and Wendy. Boully adjusts the focus so that Peter Pan is, as his name has come to signify, the type of boy who won’t grow up or settle down, who will seduce and then soon replace you, who’ll forget you in the blink of an eye even as you pine for him and wither with age, who will flitter on to the next replacement Mother to bring home for a while as a briefly-loved plaything as he amuses himself on his island of Lost Boys.

The book is constructed to hold two narratives: the original story of Peter Pan and Wendy that Boully assumes the reader knows, and her own variations. Structurally, she tells us these stories through two prose texts, one sitting on top of the other. The top half of each page holds the longer larger narrative while beneath, separated by a line and entitled The Home Under Ground, she gives us smaller fragmentary moments, shards of stunning images and commentary that serve as both literal and figurative subtext to the story above. When, for example, the top narrative tells us:

He will come to you in the darkest part of the night when you are sleeping…Despite his ability to lose so much, despite his boyish looks, his boyish charms, he can only dress himself with skeletons, with skeleton leaves; he smells of and is made of the loam of decaying roots and branches, the rotting sap and juices of Neverland trees. And what are these? What are these? asks Mrs. Darling, who knows that these leaves, these leaves littering the nursery floor, these leaves, aren’t the leaves of earthbound trees.

The Home Underground section whispers an even darker story, asking:

Would the death boat be made of the feathers of the Never bird? Enclose her within the rib bones of swallows….That gleaming in his eyes isn’t a personal excitement; if ever, if ever I forget you, then.

Tarpaulin Sky Press is listing not merely as Fiction / Poetry and that seems about right. Much like Boully’s previous books (The Body unfolds only as footnotes, [one love affair]* is a chimera of fiction, essay, prose poetry and memoir, and The Book of Beginnings and Endings, is comprised entirely of narrative openings and closings), it exists in the hybrid ground where it is both, either or neither, as the story within is both a children’s story and an analysis of a too common trope in adult relationships, and where Peter is both Peter and the “Betwixt-and-Between” that Boully dubs him.

In both texts, the narrative voice speaks in urgent fragment tones directly to Wendy, explaining the significance of small details and clips of dialogue and telling her story to her both as it happens and as it will happen in the future:

The window hasn’t been left open, and there is another boy sleeping in your bed. The absence of the beloved, the replacement that is easily replaced by Peter’s mother is also easily replaced by Peter himself, who will forget you, who will forget to love you or even to know you

Boully’s voice is hypnotic as she weaves half-remembered source-text stories with newer interpretations and builds a forward rush that detonates as she deploys a sudden fragmentation: for instance, the unexpected “let’s play pretend that I save you right before. We drown.”

Peter’s abandonment of Wendy seems inevitable throughout. This is due in part to his own fickle natue: “I’m a little bird, he says. But he doesn’t say that to just you alone.” It is also due to Wendy’s intensifying abandonment of immaturity, and to the simple fact of the inevitable decay that awaits all of us, particularly Wendy, the lone girl still attached to the human world during her sojourn in Never Land: “We won’t notice that we’ve grown until we’ve grown: that’s Wendy’s predicament.” All of these play out sexually as well; Peter has numerous other dalliances, and an air of darkness and complication permeates Wendy’s exchanges with the menacing, powerful Hook. “Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe,” the narrative voice advises Wendy, and later, half-mockingly reassures her that “If this…storyteller isn’t quite right, why then, another…will shortly come. It’s been known to happen.”

Boully maintains a fluid text but shies away from straightforward narration, providing a modern re-envisioning of a cultural touchstone that is also a commentary on itself. She weaves a gorgeous fever-dream where our half-remembered childhood stories now stand revealed as adult archetypes. Time itself becomes unstuck, as even Peter and the Lost Boys begin to contemplate “how we can continue on here without having to reinvent too much. Or, better yet, let’s…ascertain just what has transpired so that we can make it all new again.”  This moment seems like an embedded ars poetica, as the book itself also continually makes itself new and reinvents its source texts. The text warns Wendy continually that Peter will tire of her, will forget her, will leave her, yet an “I” suddenly speaks near the end, saying “You see, Peter, I too, alone, without you, can have adventures….I can leave you.” The idea of who has left who is suddenly open to new interpretation–was it Peter’s waywardness or Wendy’s ability to mature (something Peter lacks) that is the greater and decisive abandonment? After all, it is Wendy who has controlled the narrative–both by being the cause (the “you” the book speaks to so urgently) and by being identified as a storyteller throughout. At the end, it is Wendy who controls language and meaning, saying to Peter, “My dear, my dear pet wolf: I will tell you the difference between A and Z,” as well as the narrative of passing time, as she is the echo of “the housewife who has grown, has grown, the home is nothing but a hole. The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

*

“my smoothing wilderness of righteousness”

Alice Notley puts forth work of quality at a startling clip – about thirty books in forty years, with each volume of poems markedly different from the previous. She won me over with Descent of Alette (1996), which I happily discovered organically after reading her notes on her late husband Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, then her At Night The States, and finally Coming After: Essays on Poetry, in which she includes her lecture on the feminine epic and what inspired Alette. Like Alette, Culture of One is a book-length poem—“a novel in poems,” as Penguin advertises—with a female protagonist. Visually, the book is dense—multiple poems on each page, four to five long-lined stanzas. With this form, Notley explores the potential narrative of an actual woman, Marie, who resided in the dump near the desert town where Notley grew up.

Notley is known for provoking self-hypnotism, or placing herself in a trance, or simply pressing on her eyelids until phosphenes begin to show themselves, all in order to access something otherworldly for her work. She often channels the resulting visions/voices straight to the page, which is a lot of Culture of One. Her writing is most oblique in the first several pages, with voices shifting within poems without any delineation. Notley moves the perspective from her narrator/self as poet, to self in France (where she currently resides), to Marie, to the personification of Mercy, to the character Eve Love (a local cum junkie rock star whose wonderful “song lyrics” Notley peppers throughout the book: “you’re the one who cares, my glittering eternal self / my smoothing wilderness of righteousness”). In the beginning, it is as if Notley’s having a conversation with these individuals about the undertaking of the book: “This poem is for me, I said, I’m trying to know something.” A lot of the writing is amorphous and difficult to follow in this first ten pages or so; but it all feels like trepidation, if anything, about approaching the character and story of Marie.

After these initial difficult pages, we come upon the book’s namesake poem in which Notley provides such tactile and direct information it’s a bit of a shock: “Marie made things in the gully…she wrote things on paper discarded in the dump and she made figures out of wood and rocks and cord” She tells us of Marie’s art, her many dogs, and her continual rebuilding of her shack after Satanist teenage girls periodically burn it down (along with all her detritus art and writing). The final line of “Culture of One” punctures the crux of the book, when Notley asks Marie, “What are you going to do when they burn up your shack?” Her answer: “I don’t care, it’ll still be great here.” Marie chooses this life, this culture of one, even at so great a cost.

Notley takes this basic knowledge of Marie, of Buy-Rite manager and pathological liar Leroy, and Eve Love, and weaves the narratives together from otherwise disparate circumstances. Initially, Marie is isolated – she only interacts with Leroy, who provides her with hose water and expired food, and with the local teenagers, who smear shit on her shack and eventually discover more cruel forms of terror. Marie is a conduit for revelation, showing others more about themselves than her personal mysteries. At one point, Leroy convinces himself that Marie has eaten one of her dogs. He asks her about the dog: “What happened to your white dog, Marie? I don’t have a white dog. But Leroy knows she swallowed it, her soul/ She ate it… Don’t tease me, she says. Please./ She takes her stuff and leaves. Leroy’s afraid he’s had a sick/ train of thought.” The teenage girls are waiting outside the Buy-Rite: “She’s looking at me! one screams;/ her dog’s gonna bite me shrieks another. They make a lot of noise and run away.” Marie is a vessel for “sick trains of thought” for the locals. But her emotional livelihood is with her dogs, in pieces of art she creates, in her eventual creation of a codex, as well as her visions, though her visions often touch on a dark memory she knows to be the cause of the lace-like scars on her body, but she cannot fully remember.

Eventually, those who rotate around Marie come into closer orbit; their stories and experiences become more entangled and violent. Significantly, the women in this book—Marie, Eve Love, Mercy, even the ringleader of the teenagers—re-realize themselves through difficult experiences, emerging with a greater sense of purpose. Marie in particular is striking—she is of her own accord and wields a wild agency: “Marie was run over twice, in the 60s, by army jeeps…they didn’t expect to see her walking by the road, with her/ dogs, so they didn’t see her. They ran over her. Twice./ She got back up”.

Marie’s story is also the narrator’s story; the narrator continually collapses herself with Mercy, Eve Love and Marie: “Marie’s scars are lace—/ and mine are poems”. She spins multiple selves into a convoluted whole. As the entire final poem, “Marie Alone in Meaning,” states, “It means that I make perfect sense.”

*

“Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities?”

On her author page on Ahsahta Press’s website, Susan Briante writes, “[T]he lyric is a space of thoughtful speculation, a call for action or witnessing, a place where imagining can become an act of deep sympathy, where we might recognize connections and complicities.” And this is precisely the type of lyric the reader encounters in Briante’s newest collection of poems, Utopia Minus. The title, taken from Robert Smithson’s A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, focuses on a “ruin in reverse” where buildings “don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” And throughout the collection, Briante documents these ruins, the suburbs, and explores what it is like to be alive among such landscapes.

The project is reminiscent of Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum (2003), where Coultas looks at the detritus of a neighborhood in attempt to tell its story, but here Briante is not looking at objects left behind in the street; instead, she turns her eye outward to the constructed landscapes that surround us. The landscapes she engages are largely set in Texas, though she also has poems about New Jersey, where she grew up, and New York, where she once lived. And while specific places are named—for example, “Abandoned Commercial Use Property, 43rd and Ave. B,” “3000 Block Kings Ln—Demolished Apartment Complex,” and “From the Ruined Concrete Foundry West of Airport Blvd between Manor and M.L.K.”—anyone can relate to the environs Briante describes, even if their only recognition is from the oft-documented modern ruins displayed in magazines and on TV. However, Briante does more than just document the ruin—she’s able to detail what it is like to live amongst these ruins, which is a part of the story many news organizations ignore when covering places like Detroit.

Of course, it’s not just the abandoned buildings that are ruins—it’s the strip malls that are ruins, and we, who have grown up into this America, are ruined too. In “Nail Guns in the Morning,” Briante writes:

Storms this afternoon in Dallas
in the parking lot of the Target/Best Buy/Payless Shopping Center,
big chalices of rain, contusioned sky over the east, big yellow bus moving north
toward the dark end of—what?—

this weather, this fiscal year, this end of empire during which I am reading
the circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting
in the highest breath of atmosphere.
It will get us.

Throughout the collection there is a lot of attention given to  nature and the manmade world, but there is often a sense of disconnection or distance—a demonstrated ability to be aware of nature, but to be separate from it, which is perhaps yet another way in which we’re ruined. Human life often feels hollow here—reading the circulars stuck in the screen door—while nature threatens: “It will get us.” There is a great sense of foreboding, dread, and threat in this collection, portraying what it feels like to be alive during a time of endless war. In deft images, Briante is able to capture this mood. In a short poem, “December,” “Pigeons ascend to high voltage cables,” is at once a familiar and an ominous image.

And while much of the book has a sense of darkness, there is humor at times—like when the author laments, “O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!” There is also a deeply personal side to the poems, as Briante explores a developing relationship and all the complications that come with it: “We love each other / and yet and yet and yet / Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities?” she writes in “Abandoned Commercial Use Property, 43rd and Ave. B.”  The penultimate poem in the book, “A Letter to Eileen Myles,” one of several prose poem letters, is about wanting to become a parent despite what seems like impossible situations—age and money:

Once I asked the MacArthur award-winning poet CD Wright about children. CD Wright said: Don’t worry. These days you can buy a baby on eBay. But if we eBayed the baby, Eileen, we would still have to pay $7,500 a year for day care. We’d still have to find money for a down payment, replace our 10-year-old cars, plan our retirement.

In Briante’s first poetry collection Pioneers in the Study of Motion (2007), set in Mexico, she established herself as a strong lyric poet with an unwavering eye. She can subtly move between observation and witness to internal reflection and  meaningful critiques of society. And she further establishes those strengths here. In “Up the Road,” Briante writes:

Bring your daughters to this place
tell them there was something special,
tell them we were something special,
our struggle as too few chroniclers.

Thankfully, Briante is one of the few who has taken on the role of chronicler of struggles.

*

“the Mississippi / pulsing beyond”

Raised in Montgomery, Alabama during the white-heat years of the Civil Rights Movement and living in northern California and New York 30 years hence, I am perplexed when asked, “What was the South like then?” My short answer is, to grow up a white boy in Alabama during that era was to grow up schizophrenic. Westminster Presbyterian Church, where I spent most Sundays, raised hymns on high announcing all men are brothers and then in syncopated breath the congregation voice-voted to keep a black family from joining the church. I recall a birthday party for white kids at a city park where we were denied entry at the gates because officials opted to close the park altogether rather than submit to demands of  “outside agitators.”

Most adults then were terrified either loudly or silently—for themselves, their property values, but mostly for their children. Measuring the depths and shades of prejudice is at best a tricky math. But it always comes up prejudice. A fellow Southern writer once shared that he thought the South is both the “friendliest and most sinister” region of the country. I would add that whereas other regions frame their histories in a rearview mirror, the South’s past mostly rides along right there on the front seat.

To live and die in Dixie. Well, there are all kinds of Dixie and all kinds of dying. Mississippi author Barry Hannah maintained that Southerners started the Civil War not on principle but rather because “they were mostly bored out of their gourds.”

People outside the region also inevitably ask why the South has generated so many significant authors. I come down on the side that claims it is because of the King James Bible more than anything else, the unparalleled language of Shakespeare being a Southerner’s reality—before cable TV—from prenatal murmurings straight through to the grave yard.

Diann Blakely, whose first collection Hurricane Walk was issued in 1992 and cited as one of that year’s ten best poetry books by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has won two Pushcart Awards and served as Antioch Review’s poetry editor for twelve years. A longtime Nashville resident, she now lives with her husband, the author Stanley Booth, on the south Georgia coast. And while it would be an error to call her a “Southern” poet—an enclosure that limits every which way—her sensibilities are undeniably rooted in the region as deeply as those of any poet writing today, sensibilities that ultimately are dialed-in to all compass points. Reading her work, one gets the sense she could derive an honest trilogy of collections simply by trolling her impressions from a stroll down a single city block in any capital in any country. Whether in Harvard Square or the French Quarter, her instincts are keenly alert to matters of the heart and “How it craves love, also deprivation.”

In her latest collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, Blakely continues to range far and wide in her concerns and curiosity. As poet Sarah Kennedy writes in the introduction, her poetry “always promises entrance to a tragic, beautiful world.”  A fair number of these poems deal with popular American culture. Indeed, the opening poem, “Bad Blood”, revisits the Bates Motel.

The actor embodied our worst fears: like dying in the bath—
Or flame, or black winds—
Trusting water like a lover to soothe, to cleanse off the grit
And smudge of ill-spent pasts, to give us new starts . . . .

A poem in a section headed “Family Battles,” recalls an uncle terminally “stuck in WWII, thorazined and crying in the chapel.” Another exposes a perverse Catholic rector, his “chilblained right hand stretched toward my bent shag . . . in confirmation class.”

Blakely’s descriptive power, her ability to lay a scene on stages large and small  echoes Emerson’s admonition that every line of a poem must be a poem. In “Memphis Blues,” a visiting New Englander observes,

“It looks so dirty,” she says, the Mississippi
pulsing beyond like a huge brown muscle . . .

From the outside looking in, our New Englander can not sense the region’s deep musculature, only remark on its veneer. And can it really work any differently for the Alabaman suddenly transplanted to Manhattan? Is this not precisely what poetry is for—to sort out the awful electricity that runs the length of these tension wires? Stylistically, Blakely possesses the formalist’s design and intention, but an intention imbued with the airiness of free association. Venturing beyond her native South, Blakely shines her light on big eastern cities, New York in particular, with incisive outsider clarity: “Again, again,” the siren screams; red lights/Flame the window. I’ll never get used to it.

It is the poems about family—Southern family—that perhaps afford readers the truest measure of Blakely’s strength. There are hard, difficult tales here, of a child’s world gone awry:

“I called home when the social worker asked
How long they’d been married. ‘Near twenty years’,
My mamma sobbed into the phone before
The line clicked. Two lifetimes spent in prison.”

This collection’s catalogue of imagery and motifs resembles a one-off lonely hearts club band: Baudelaire, Antonioni, Hank Williams, Lorca, Brooke Shields, Shakespeare, Warhol, The Who. And, sure, Gone With the Wind.  Springing from Blakely’s imagination, one can easily imagine them meeting regularly for drinks.

The smoky air of the spiritual hovers over these pages, an atmosphere having more to do with hope than evidence that maybe, just maybe, our lives and loves are not in vain. On a visit to London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral:

. . . . I want to kneel:
How is a free life born? ‘Praise Him, all Ye Works
Of the Lord’ arches overhead in Latin.
I ask for blessing in my mother tongue.

“Redemptive” is a much abused catch-all descriptive that can be no less limiting than “regional.”  But the truth is, Cities of Flesh and the Dead affords close readers of Diann Blakely’s transformational poems sure keys to nothing less than personal redemption. It is a redemption that is gained by grasping that current that trembles between regions and races, gods and beliefs. And it is our best poets who guide our hands.

*

“adobe on sky”

Keith Ekiss focuses intently on the American Southwest in Pima Road Notebook. The physical landscape provides an underpinning for poems that move through personal memory, historical research, and commentary on contemporary culture.  In “The Desert,” for example, Ekiss juxtaposes desert images a reader might expect (rattlesnakes, scorpions, saguaros) with a critical vision of modern development.  After describing some of the dangers of the landscape, he concludes: “What threatens will disappear. // Hurry home, the future all fairway and green, / targeted with ribbons and stakes.”

Throughout the book, Ekiss writes about southwestern housing developments with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness, obsessed with their newness and transient qualities.  While occasionally repetitive, the many poems about “Unfinished Houses” in which “Plywood and stucco weren’t permanent” make a convincing argument for the desert as a more powerful force than the buildings. In “Petrified Forest,” the speaker describes “[his] favorite color: / adobe on sky.  The human trail ends.”  The scale of human activity against the vast desert colors the book’s depiction of physical spaces of home as well as emotional relationships within the speaker’s family.

While several poems explore the history of the Sonora Desert and the Pima people who lived there before European settlement, more of them explore the speaker’s family history.  In the first of five poems with the title “Pima Road Notebook,” the speaker talks about his childhood, merging images of people with images of the desert.  The poem opens, “My mother’s voice echoed me nearer toward home. / Sad quail in the brush, searching for her children,” and ends, “Coyotes gathered and chattered in guttural moans. / All night she thought the howls were only dogs.”  If the mother figure appears “sad,” even deluded, the father flashes violently in and out of focus.  He “takes a chainsaw to the limbs” of a cactus in the backyard in “Landscape with Saguaros”; in other poems he appears “self-made” or “clean-shaven” and receives blame for bringing his family to the desert or getting them stranded in a storm on Lake Powell.  The speaker’s general comments on fathers assume an even more critical tone: “Fathers just leave—isn’t that what fathers do?” (in the third “Pima Road Notebook”) and “No one trusts other fathers” (in “Pictures of Houses”). Throughout the sometimes labored book, the isolation of the desert effectively mirrors the speaker’s emotional isolation.

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Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (The Physiocrats 2011)

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner ponders whether any emotional response to art or religion is purely an affectation or desperate insistence on more than the “actual.” This chapbook is an excerpt from the poet’s novel of same name, published this year by Coffee House Press. Any overlap between real and fictive is beside the point, but it is worth noting that both Lerner and his narrator Adam received Fulbrights to work and study in Spain, and both grew up in Kansas. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam does what we might imagine a real Fulbright poet does: gives readings, has conversations, smokes spliffs, visits museums. He lets us observe one particular morning ritual:

I was usually standing before [Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross] within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium.

One morning, his routine is interrupted because another man is standing at the painting. The man weeps, and proceeds from painting to painting, sobbing at each and garnering the attention of museum guards. What is a museum guard to do, our narrator wonders, when “on the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting valuable materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes” and “on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears.”

Lerner’s narrator is skeptical of “profound experience[s] of art.” He also wants to avoid the pitfalls of pure pragmatism—after all, he is in Spain because he “claim[s] to be a poet.” But he questions his own actions in every circumstance, revealing a vulnerability when encountering Maria Jose from the foundation (“I had been convinced…that my fraudulence was completely apparent to her”) and when kissing people hello, as per the local customs (“when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could easily slip up and the catch the corner of the mouth”). But the machinations of the mind and the things of the world are too mysterious to allow for final interpretation, and to doubt the value of heightened spiritual awareness even hints that such awareness has value. Lerner reminds us that total understanding is always a myth. His spirituality, if you can call it that, is based on curiosity pursued, never on the presumption that humans have the capacity to find a coherent answer. The novel is excellent, but this chapbook excerpt features a wonderful excerpt and is ideal for anyone who doesn’t have the time or attention span for the full novel.

–John Deming

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Laked, Fielded, Blanked, Brooklyn Copeland (alice blue books, 2010)

This lovely, wee book from alice blue books is a miniature museum draped in Thai handmade paper. If you go inside, tune in. Sound counts most in Copeland’s “Laked, Fielded, Blanked.” The poet also relies on observation to get from spot to spot. Her poems explore the geography and geology of Morse Lake Marina, where “The Big/ creek meets/ the Little creek” and “Hammers break open geodes: scalene/ jig-jags.”

Copeland mixes natural observation with (perhaps) confessional verse about a relationship between the speaker and the “you” that suddenly appears—and then dominates—the experience. This relationship, though suggestive through layers of metaphor, is less compelling than the precise, intricate beauty of her descriptions. In that sense, Copeland recalls the influence of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and their progeny:

Someone’s anemone
Unelaborate runtbud
Muscling through
Woodwork

The wordplay, even letterplay, of “someone’s anemone” is part of a complex score that spans the entire chapbook. The poet also reveals a gift for negotiating tight spaces with apokoinu and other enjambment techniques (“from the word/ go we’ve/ done as one, laid/low”).

I close with one of my favorite stanzas, as it shows the work at its best—lyrical and clever:

Rotted out boat
Bottom—
the boat
will stay afloat

as long as you pretend to
row

–Gregory Murray

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Dendrochronology, Greta Goetz (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

The cover of Greta Goetz’s Dendrochronology reveals both the immediate and cumulative effects of the collection: cluttered, impossibly large for its square-shaped cover to hold.  Similarly, Goetz’s twenty-eight poems (the first twenty-six of which are not titled but numbered), with their exceptionally long sentences jammed into square forms, turn quickly and forcefully, from recollection to reflection, down the page.  These techniques coupled with the omission of punctuation at the end of many poems create an urgent voice from a speaker whose thought or search has not finished despite the fact that the poem has.

Dendrochronology is the study of a tree’s rings to understand both its age and its history of environmental conditions.  Thus, Dendrochronology is a study of a self—its history and growth as well as the changing tenors of its experience.  Goetz’s poetic forms, particularly at the sentence level, mimic the growth rings–their overall shape, the tree’s trunk.  In this, they effectively contain their subject, especially in the poems where a contrast of concrete image and abstraction creates brilliant tension propelled by her driving syntax:

…me, the stranger or accent ague,
a sign more than a well-peopled phrase, the accent not concrete
enough to be riveting, just there at the edge of everyone
else’s interests, homeless, alone, a mark, a reminder
of the primordial need to speak yet unable to promise
in the recognized code, there where the horses gallop
from cave walls into eternity…

There are few grammatical signposts or pauses for readers. This is only a problem in Dendrochronology when the poet lays in too many cumbersome conceptualizing (“it is easy to react in the face of carelessness belonging to/ adolescence, viewed through hindsight or clarified by regret”; “the privilege that is history and upbringing, which despite compassion creates a blindness that cannot be broken without humility”) and clumsy or obvious language (“this is how/ I spell discouragement; a feeling of being unanswered”; “I am a traveler in all of/ the senses of the word that I know”).  But perhaps this is Goetz’s point, as stated in the first poem: “Talking mouths block the exit/ entrapped in frustrated good will/ like a dense city,” for its effect is certainly similar.

At their finest, Goetz’s poems refrain from confession and indulge instead in what emotions—particularly questions and doubts—arise amid particular human experience. Too often, however, Goetz creates an exhausting read; amid the dead wood, there is little space for a reader to breathe. Or bother.

–Roxanne Banks Malia

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“…my tongue and brain at a low wage”

Minnie Bruce Pratt, winner of the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize for her collection Crime Against Nature, continues her engagement with American political discourse in her tenth book, Inside the Money Machine. With this collection, Pratt takes a firm stance on minority rights and generally tackles the enormous political reality of American capitalism. She takes on a rich source, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which shapes the arc of the book.

By viewing American capitalism through a Marxist lens, Pratt questions the monotony of labor—tasks repeated day after day in a mailroom, or a tollbooth, or a salon—inviting the reader to rethink the tenets of capitalism. Readers will empathize with workers who are trying to make enough money to survive. To thematically center these poems, Pratt frames each section of the book around questions and phrases such as “Are You Ready, Willing, Able to Work?”  The dependent clause “If We Jump Up Now” asks the reader to take direct action in response to the poems. Each section builds as a call to action, similar to Marx’s call for new political and economic systems to shape the future.

Shaping her poems around Marx’s words, Pratt critiques capitalism in a distinctive voice. “Getting Money at the ATM” examines the intersection of convenience and labor. When the speaker goes to the ATM, the “screen blinks and promises me any time, any where,” and the money “dispense[s] quick as candy.” This poem drives to the heart of the book, revealing the illusory promise of access and the convenience of paper bills.

Pratt’s economic focus produces poems of narrative strength and reflection. In “Getting a Pink Slip,” the narrator receives one, then watches others who “lean into each other, staggered by catastrophe.” They mourn the loss of “My job, my other self.” While waiting in line at “The Unemployment Office,” the narrator boldly claims:

No machine can do my job, the torque of my words
in someone’s ear, but I cost money, the benefits package,
subsistence, flesh. Still, I’m not dead labor yet, a profit edge
to be made, my tongue and brain at a low enough wage.

Pratt uses the bureaucratic language of a human resources department to make her critique. In these poems, people become interchangeable, valued as dollars; they add up to cost, time, and labor, rather than more traditionally “human” qualities. Through her portrayal of a mechanized and reductive world, Pratt shows that the human soul still survives within a struggling global and national economy.

Each poem depicts a clear, particular picture of the present state of the American economy (visible and invisible) through the lives and experiences of individuals. The power behind these poems accumulates. People slowly grind down like cogs even though they survive as flesh and blood. For example, the woman telemarketer in “Making Another Phone Call” claims that “every day pulls her chest open and looks / at a ruined life. The heart all bloody.” Humanity shines through in “Distribution.” A tollbooth attendant, on the phone with her distressed daughter, attempts to comfort her while stuck in the booth, an “island wedged between the cars / flowing up the Bayonne bridge.” The narrator in “All That Work No One Knows” speaks about the energy her body spends during her two pregnancies. In the narrator’s mind, uncountable labor, the labor of the mother caring for her children, remains invisible and irrelevant in capitalism, counting for nothing. Our speaker demands a radical change: acknowledge all labor.

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“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President” in Blackbird and Wolf, sometimes occasional, as in “The Annulment” in The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, Cole’s verse finds meaning in the luminous skin of the world.

Cole’s lightness and delicacy, his reserve and restraint, also unify his work. Situated on the branch of modernism that extends from Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Stafford, Henri Cole operates a poem through the senses, figures out the world through imagery. His lines are “tempered and formalized,” like the “Poppies” of Blackbird. His elegy for his father in Middle Earth, “Radiant Ivory,” shows humble objects doing heavy lifting in service of the poem:

After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery.

Underneath the hood of these pristine poems roars a combustion engine, “memory, the motor of everything,” as Cole describes it in “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” in Blackbird. In “Chiffon Morning” from The Visible Man, he could be describing the sustaining act of writing when he says, “the mind replays what nurtures it.”  Blackbird’s “American Kestrel” offers an ars poetica:

…This is my home:
Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate within one poem, as “the essence of self emerges / shuttling between parents” (“Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono,” Middle Earth), and “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s” (“Apollo,” The Visible Man). With each new book, the poet reveals more of the violence of his childhood. But these seeds were planted in the beginning, including “The family squabble, the bruised cranium” of “Ascension on Fire Island” in Zoo Wheel.

In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores. Touch is divided into three sections, moving from the poet’s mother’s death to a troubled relationship with a younger man addicted to drugs. The volume begins with “Asleep in Jesus at Rest,” a poem of long lines laid out in overlapping caesuras, a looser and more expansive form than what we’ve come to expect from Cole. He repeats this form later in “Legend,” a bit further into the volume. And he includes “Grebe,” a poem that he translated from the French with the author, Claire Malroux. Although he continues his familiar syllabics, Cole includes more experimental pieces in Touch, such as the free verse collage of “By the Name of God, The Most Merciful and Gracious,” which gives voice to a victim of torture. If Blackbird’s “For the Forty-third President” signaled a more engagé stance, Touch does not disappoint, with additional anti-war poems such as “Quai Aux Fleurs” and “Sleeping Soldiers.”

Like his seniors—Glück, Gilbert, and others—and like his contemporaries—Frost, Powell, and others—Cole explores aging, loss, maturity, and mortality. If self, identity, and body have been enduring concerns throughout his work, then in “Myself Departing,” he treats the issue of age humorously:

My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping.
It sauntered along the avenue asking, “Why
should I commit myself to him? I have a personality
of my own.” Then my good stiff prick went, too.
It opened the window and climbed down the escape,
complaining, “I want to be with someone younger.”

This is in stark contrast to the stunning pathos of the first section of Touch, which is devoted to the poet’s mother’s illness and death and his affectionate care (as well as guilt and melancholy). Read Touch if only to appreciate the powerful poem “Shrike” in its full context. Cole begins by watching a bird capture a cricket, and then through association makes a poetic leap worthy of a trapeze artist. The cricket

. . . holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” It pleaded from the hell mouth.

In our inured age, we have ready clichés to describe abuse in families. Repetition has numbed their impact. Through understated elegance and direct simplicity, Cole makes this image indelible. In this section, Cole accurately captures the complexities of grieving, elaborating on the simple human truth he had first presented in “Paper Dolls” from The Look of Things: “goodbye / in a scene / at first holy, / then lurid.”

As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally. An unlikely subject, such as a “Taxidermied Fawn,” leads to the discovery of a resonant truth:

A minor smear on the white spots is the only
evidence of a violent passage from bridal innocence
to the whiteness of death, which is the absence
of everything, and, in the end, all there really is.

After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech, as in the poem “Ulro”: “Cigarettes, love, work, liquor, brooding, despair— / one thing not controlled can destroy a life.”

More of the poet’s dexterity is on display in “Mechanical Soft,” which doubles and triples imagery, twisting the strand, while describing a son feeding his mother in hospice:

I am not
a typical son, I suppose, valuing happiness,
even while spooning mechanically soft pears—
like light vanishing—into the body whose tissue
once dissolved to create breast milk for me.

Cole’s Touch justifies the poetic obsession with childhood. As we age, circumstances call forward past experiences. We are never done remembering, or for that matter, discovering, as in “Dolphins”: “Recently, among Mother’s things, I found this: / ‘I am afraid of him. He need psychiatric care. He lead me / to believe strange things. He ignores me, threats me.’”

The dynamic tension of opposite forces evident in Cole’s previous books acquires deeper significance in Touch. The image of his mother’s hands in “Broom”—“hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair”—underscores how we know tenderness through cruelty. Other poems help extrapolate: we know peace through war, age through youth, closeness through isolation. But these are not simple binaries, as Cole explains in “Hens”:

There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Through the accumulation of images of “the push-pull thing, the polarity stuff” (“Ulro”), we perceive the balancing act of walking a web of connections, the risks and rewards, pains and pleasures, and every subtle variation in between, tied to each step. Cole’s menagerie of poems grows with several more additions besides “Hens,” including “Pig,” “Hairy Spider,” Bats,” and more, in Touch. Animals tend to be more humane than humans and humans more bestial than beasts in Cole’s cosmology.

The tradition of story and storytelling encourages us to assume that those who suffer in youth find happiness—or at least escape—in age, like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk. The poems in the last third of Touch help subvert those expectations. In “Passion,” Cole begins with the ending: “Our love has ended. / We only have a little time, darling. Let’s read / swim, and sleep in one another’s arms.” Ending and beginning run simultaneously, as do pleasure and pain. If “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s,” then here we see a mature son engaged in a troubled relationship: “I watch you emerge from the bathroom, / having breathed your fix” (“Laughing Monster”). Cole may be the first poet to incorporate a partner’s texts: “‘Loser old man u r a cheap cunt,’ he wrote, ‘I need coke. Unless ur buying, answer is no’” (“Resistance”).

Cole’s elaboration of two additional themes from his previous work—gender identity and language—helps broaden the focus of Touch. The last poem in the book, “Swimming Hole, Buck Creek, Springfield, Ohio,” takes forward the questioning of masculinity and femininity that Cole started in such early poems as “The Marble Queen” and “My Father’s Jewelry Box.” Or the exploration of language and writing in “Apollo” from The Visible Man resurfaces in Touch, with the poet’s reassurance that “writing this now, / sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought, / I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.” No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole’s spare, masterfully controlled poems are a sustaining activity, a necessary function to help keep the poet, and the reader, safely positioned in the world.

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