Posts Tagged ‘5.5 stars’

The Book of Ocean

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

by Maryrose Larkin
i.e. Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

The Book of Books

larkin_bookofocean The themes in Maryrose Larkin’s The Book of Ocean are grand. The book is divided into six sections, each dedicated to a large idea, sometimes abstract, and each titled “The book of [insert profound variable].” She spends significant time with gods like gravity, time, history, and of course, ocean.

It is not surprising then that the opening poem is titled “Brief Gravity” and immediately marries the narrator to the cosmos: “I rhyme with the ground,” a stellar first line, I think, but perhaps what follows is too predictable: “and all at once it falls / apple I am apple.” The biblical/Newtonian contexts are inevitable and yet Larkin pursues them explicitly: “apple severed from the tree / not the snake or the woman…” Gravity is indeed what grounds us, and is easily employed as a grand metaphor for the outcome of original sin and all subsequent disobedience. All of this seems obvious, though Larkin isn’t finished yet. She writes, “to be gravity is to be understood.” She embraces our fallen position and she uses it to her advantage. Even the “red dark unknown,” presumably the unrecognizable afterlife, the vague fear of death, is welcomed by Larkin. She moves full-force into the unknown and into the book: “throw me in the air / but don’t catch.”

The next poem continues in the same vein, discussing the unknown and the possibilities for combating the terror it produces. We can ponder and query, discuss and press on, but part of Larkin’s message seems to be that we cannot, must not, fall silent. If we merely accept the impenetrability of it all, it is then that true fear will set in. Paralysis is the only possible outcome of silence:

the discord
which rises within silence
disorder.

Since only further disorder will arise from silence, it is necessary to communicate, or at least interact, with one’s surroundings. Certainly humans are not the only ones that struggle with the incomprehensible and as Larkin posits, we are not the only to fight it with communication, as even the stars carry on a “dialogue.”

Larkin repeatedly returns to the impasse of silence. For the narrator silence is deadly: “over silence / I cannot pass.” Often silence has positive connotations like thought, concentration or meditation; however, for Larkin if those thoughts are never vocalized, made public, released even, then they are swallowed up by the abyss:

In vacuums a manifest destiny

Essentially, this is the poet’s manifesto, the very reason she values poetry and writing.

Larkin goes beyond abstract ideas in this collection. One of my favorite images comes from a poem called “Noah Variations”—again with the biblical references, though the image of which I’m speaking isn’t an ark. In fact, I can’t be sure what it is, but here are the lines: “rose blood / retina hung high above the sea.” My initial thought is of the sun and I like this comparison to the body, something fleshier perhaps would have also been nice. It establishes an identifiable connection between our own bodies and the body of the universe; we are made of similar parts. Several times Larkin likens portions of the cosmos or atmosphere to earthly or material objects with which we are familiar. As in “Sext”: “because the sky is a strange broken mirror”—a beautiful fragment to open the poem, the notion that what’s below is reflected above and is, in part, our body.

As the universe reflects portions of itself, humans mimic other forms of life. Larkin points out in “Alphabet Walking” the way we’ve constructed our alphabet, letters, and words: “the earliest of insect depictions / curve reflected in spine reflected in mind and on the page.” Strikingly true. Think of a praying mantis, the A-framed wings of a fly. She goes on in this manner in the following poem: “a sentence as a femur.” So letters are formed by small creatures such as insects; it takes a whole femur to indicate a sentence.

All in all, I’m impressed with and softened by Larkin’s beachside conjectures and interrogations. She raises many interesting observations, but I’d like to hear some of her conclusions or at least working answers to these mysteries of life. Larkin attempts closure, but at times fails due to cheesy technique as in “Pulse for Two Voices.” She aims to bookend the poem with two similar yet polar ideas. The poem begins with the phrase “the wait of expansion,” goes on for a while with an odd columnar list of everything from medical terms to tabby cats, and ends with the phrase “the wait of contraction.” No good. Also, it seems she is offering multiple meanings through her choice of preposition “of” versus “for.” Could “wait” also be read as “weight?” Either way…

The visual elements of Larkin’s poems can often be frustrating and seemingly uncalled for. A later poem called “Remedy” produces said effect. Some lines are in italics, some regular type, others appear centered and the indentations are off-set. The appearance of the poem is scattered. Perhaps the intended outcome was “funky”; that’s the only word that comes to mind. Italics offer the possibility of three poems, so again, we have options, but this is hardly a new technique and more interesting things have been done with structure to effectively alter rhythm and meaning.

In the end, what’s best about Larkin’s book is that it echoes many of the cosmic questions most people face over the course of a lifetime; it is constant affirmation that nobody knows, but at least we have ideas and can share them and continue to be lost together.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Maryrose Larkin, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Things Are Disappearing Here

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

by Kate Northrop
Persea Books 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

The Whole Show

In a 1980 interview, Charles Simic addressed the frequent appearance of dogs in his poems: “I don’t want to say I love dogs, but I’ve always been amazed by dogs. Of all animals they seem to resemble humans more than any others; they’re kind of pathetic, melancholy, silly, faithful.” I’ve also heard Simic say to a group of young poets (myself among them) that a dog is at times employed as an unfortunate quick-fix in an aimless poem—a faulty attempt to reroute drivel into the pathetic, melancholy, silly, faithful.

Good dog poems emerge not when the dog is a sentimental band-aid, but when the poet appears to have curiously watched “creature” in a focused, Williams kind of way. Kate Northrop is a competent watcher. “The Dog” that opens her second book is seen with its nose “to the trail of some circling / / missing thing.” The stage is set for a quasi-observational book of poems called Things Are Disappearing Here.

Northrop writes poems that are best described as “publishable”—the kind of stuff that anyone who’s pawed through submissions for a poetry magazine would surely recognize as standouts. They are crisp, clean, chiseled; they are good with animals, and often provide sublime finishes. Here’s the ending to “Night, Museum Garden”:

A few taxis

pass on the avenue, and further

the moon goes by, but again
silently, like a boat rowed over an empty pool.

A healthy mix of the natural and the unexpected. Oft-romantic endings, but romantic endings you can trust. “The Visitor” concludes:

at twilight, I am waiting
without a letter, a ticket, for you,

who by the curve of the woods
and at the lip of the frayed lake, are like twilight:
when leaving, appear there—

It’s “poetic,” but it’s also poetry. Northrop is mostly in control of her romantic impulses, occasionally letting something slip by (“A longing—without clear / definition—pervades” or “I saw you everywhere, / an effervescence”); when this occurs, the care and gravity offered in each line break morph into abstracted melodrama. But her attention to detail makes every poem in the book warrant reading at least once. Worthy, publishable poems in observation of real things: more cleanly, the things that can be accounted for in the absence of everything else.

In “Ghost Crab,” a person is a addressed who creeps towards the sea (as ghost crab might) on account of the ineffable:

but you will not be able to remain, not
in that emptiness: the cool on your arms

is the cool remove of moonlight.

Being at the beach always means being away from the beach a short while later. Boundless metaphorical possibilities, underscored by the notion that to be surrounded by anything is to be enshrouded by what’s not there. Our narrator has the capacity to visualize absence by offering what’s actually there and at times waxing philosophical. Anyone who’s moved from one home to another might recognize the sensations urging forth “Now over the Empty Apartment”:

and that is the window where sky drew back and night came on,

where the planes banked in
scheduled and flashing from the west—

Even amid the stress of packing and hauling, moving from a home always leads to an abundance of “this is where this happened, that is where that happened” nostalgia. Northrop handles it nicely: not at all teary, but with the awareness that to leave the apartment means to leave the entire landscape, which included distant planes whose schedules were determined by something even more distant. Disconnectivity and absence are everywhere.

Some circling missing person comes back now and again throughout the book, as in the beginning of “…Apartment”: “You in the door look back / and are no longer there.” There’s some subtle tip-toeing around the absence of a romantic relationship, but the middle-of-the-road degree of focus might make you scramble for something more deeply broken-hearted and punch-you-in-the-face-fantastic à la Belieu in Black Box. Northrop’s abstract ideas related to absence are more interesting than the narrator’s personal life, and are the greatest subject of interest. Yet I’m left with the sense that at least a handful of these clean, publishable, poems are unrelated (“The Countess,” for example, in which the only “disappearing things” are hundreds of dead young girls murdered by Elizabeth Báthory: a random switch whereby Northrop is suddenly competent historian rather than competent observer.) Still the unrelated poems work more effectively than the half-hearted attempts at bringing in the absence of romantic love.

In a 1972 interview, Simic noted “everybody is a philosopher after a couple of glasses of wine, in my case an optimistic philosopher.” 30 years later he told The New York Times he was a “cheerful pessimist.” Northrop’s mind feels tied up somewhere in that mix. Two great Ashbery lines address the “soul” in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest?” How long in a review for a Kate Northrop book can I swim out and discuss poets like Simic (whose poetry, incidentally, is completely unlike Northrop’s) and still return safely to my Northrop-nest? Am I too distracted; would that be my fault or Northrop’s?—tough to say, but in the end my feeling is that she already has the lyric touch; now the crazed philosophical poet left primping in the dressing room deserves a chance onstage.

Tags: 5.5 stars, John Deming, Kate Northrop, Persea Books
Posted in reviews

Hometown for an Hour

Monday, April 16th, 2007

by Jennifer Rose
Ohio University Press 2006
Reviewed by Sharon

Memory of Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 5.5 stars, Jennifer Rose, Sharon McGill
Posted in reviews

Key Bridge

Monday, March 26th, 2007

by Ken Rumble
Carolina Wren Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

Grinning Like Faith

Key Bridge, which crosses the Potomac and connects Arlington, VA to Washington D.C. (more specifically, to Georgetown), is kind of an underwhelming bridge when compared to, say, the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridges. This adds a peculiar degree of levity to Key Bridge, Ken Rumble’s book-length abstract ode to the U.S. capitol.

When Hart Crane wrote his famous ode to the Brooklyn Bridge, he did so with authority—authority somehow in sync with the illusion of majesty the bridge itself commands—that the city commands, that a country commands. Less than a Ra Ra America poem, Crane’s ode had (has) a way of impressing empowerment from citizen to citizen. In Rumble’s poem there is little command over D.C.; the city, it seems, has its way with him and with everyone else. What Rumble has conceived of is a personal map of Washington D.C., as it pertains to his experiences, his memories, and his contradictions about the city’s contradictions. It’s an attempt to map out his psychic relationship with the city, if only to command some kind of meaning out of it in a time when D.C.’s shining symbolism feels more and more vapid.

The book takes the form of a journal. Each small section is given a date, beginning with 15.May.2000, and taking us (vaguely) through 9/11 and the Malvo sniper attacks. In any journal entry-style book, there are inevitably poems (sub-sections of a book-length poem, whatever) to cut—the trivial, the Poetic, the annoyingly fun, the sweet—and Key Bridge is no exception, though for the most part Rumble’s done his job. On April 1, 2001, he allows himself to be haunted by various ghosts:

Then they emerge all black & white
& glittering & I ignore them as they
stand in front of the TV
kiss me & wish me goodnight. MOVE
I say &
they’re gone.

Rumble, in these poignant lines, presents the conflict all people face when contending with the ghostliness of the dead. There’s more room for reflection in the open form Rumble’s created for himself; he remembers being younger in D.C.:

Summer nights the punks come here
(& me when I was one
on hopes for unannounced Fugazi
shows…

But Rumbles after more than just surface-level reflection on the city. He is, for example, not afraid to tackle the race issue. Mapping the city and cataloging its racial divide seems of the utmost importance to young D.C. poets; I’m thinking specifically of Thomas Sayers Ellis, who organized his first book The Maverick Room according to the city’s quadrants. In Key Bridge D.C. is found

to have the first black majority
in a major U.S. city.
Chocolate city.
D. Chocolate City: the first one.

In addition to the race issue—which he pushes further than you may expect—Rumble’s idiosyncratic language and cut-and-paste abstraction evoke the image of a person astonished by the capitol city and at the same time, frightened by it; how, for example, does one quantify the fact that while America is involved in a dubious overseas war, there are people in the city willing to kill their own? The Malvo sniper attacks are apparently beyond reason and control, and the murderous pair behind them is likened to stars in the sky: “that they could be compared, the man & his boy— / his boy doing all the killing.” It’s all so complex that he’s helpless to avoid reducing it to a simple quandary:

It’s cold there today I know, cold all through
the Potomac like metal.

(I put my thanks in Washington
[D.C.: the ease of it all)

Unfortunately, you will from time to time find yourself distracted from lucid moments like this. Parentheses are slippery little fish and Rumble uses them with such freedom that you can’t help but think, at some point, that enough is enough (you’ll say, “that’s enough,” for example, when they are used to evoke “(d(i(s(t(a(n(c(e(”). Occasionally, especially towards the end, he’s too liberal with the word “love”:

There are places with many roads
to love near places with many trees
to love near many you
to love near many birds
to love near many me
to love near sounds like love
to love.

The point—that you can feel at once overwhelmed by love and confused the contradictions of the person/thing you love—is made too explicit here; instead of the vague, ghosted hints from the book’s better sections, I feel in these “love” lines like I’ve woken up inside an Easter basket. He almost ends the book with the enthralling image of Malvo “hung on the cover of Time” before giving in to the unfortunate impulse to comment again on the nature of love:

You are here

is always true

except in love.

A bit too much for the conclusion of the book; the D.C. obsession is far more interesting than the love obsession, entwined as they may be. Every now and then you’ll also come across a throwaway section as well; for example, when our poet is so hungover he could “eat a live cat.” But a crowd larger than that of the D.C.-philes will find a lot of pleasure in this narrator’s willingness to be aware of confusion, and to engage the capitol with an intelligent and discriminating eye: “Where am I? Where am I now?” And toward the end he does use the bridge and stake enough command over the capitol city to give you a chill:

Key Bridge in D.C. at night:
grey, blue & black—
the piers sweeping from the river
an arch as an afterthought

D.C. at Key Bridge with night:
the old bridge’s abutments grin like faith—
Whitehurst Freeway peels off the bridge early to drop
into Georgetown’s Foggy Bottom

The wordplay—Rumble’s a Steinian at heart—mixed with the domineering image of the less-than-domineering bridge gives you the sense that the poet is willing to control as much as he can while conceding most else to question and chance. The all-important word here is faith; and conflicted as he may be, it could be said that Rumble’s got enough of it to go around.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Carolina Wren Press, John Deming, Ken Rumble
Posted in reviews

Scar Tissue

Monday, December 4th, 2006

by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

On Impending Twilight

Charles Wright is certainly prolific and while many might expect him to recede into redundancy his latest, Scar Tissue, is a testament to his unwillingness and inability to do so. The natural successor to 2004’s Buffalo Yoga (which was the natural successor to A Short History of the Shadow, which was the natural successor to Appalachia, and so on down the line to Black Zodiac), Scar Tissue is yet another gratifying chapter from Wright, whose every collection seems to add an impressive and necessary facet to his life’s work. Scar Tissue—portions of which were collected in a chapbook last year unfortunately titled The Wrong End of the Rainbow—does just that, with a bit less command than the aforementioned collections.

Wright continually mulls over subjects like time, memory, death, genesis, landscape, and love, and manages to chronicle a single consciousness through such impermeable topics. His foci never become burdens; rather they are his avocation. The book begins with a farewell—“Appalachian Farewell”—in which time presents itself as a preoccupation and an obstacle. But the speaker is dominant and matter-of-factly bemoans time’s insistence on passing:

If night is our last address,
This is the place we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive.

He is not intimidated or afraid; he merely is. And so the book begins.

In the following poem Wright offers his mode of reconciling time: “There is no end to the other world…” thus the idea of eternity leaves us with no enemy, nothing to fight but our own memory. “Inland Sea,” one of the finest in the book, inspires one to resist nostalgia, to allow time to pass and to continue moving forward with it. He writes, “Better to stuff your heart with dead moss / …Than to watch those waters rise…” And in a later poem more of the same: “Let go, live your life, the grave has no sunny corners.” The only problem here is that “live your life” is lackluster, used up, too explicitly sentimental.

And unfortunately Wright is, on several occasions, explicit where he should be implicit. One of the greatest living American poets, Wright has consistently succeeded at fusing image with wisdom. Scar Tissue resembles very much his other recent work, but isn’t quite as pristine. As he once wrote in the essay “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” “Each line should be a station of the cross.” At times in Scar Tissue it seems he wants to find quick fixes to skip quickly over the duller stations. He employs sometimes predictable images such as the moon in “Waking Up After the Storm,” and ends with a rather obvious comparison between the moon and an eye. Or as in the second of the book’s title poems, “Scar Tissue II,” when he writes, “the snake’s tail in the snake’s mouth.” Eh.

However, where some images fall short Wright’s language picks up the slack and the resulting sounds become a major transport for meaning. “Images from the Kingdom of Things” contains the line “Night, in its shallow puddles, still liquid and loose in the trees.” The repetition of double letters or letters that come in pairs such as “d” in “puddles” and “l” in “shallow” and “still,” allow all the words to meld together creating the visual effect of “liquid” along with the sounds of the o’s and e’s of “loose” and “trees” which sound like the lapping of water at land. The entire poem is constructed in this manner and becomes a sort of puzzle for the reader.

What is most impressive about Wright’s lyric is its reflection of an acute level of awareness. Wright is perhaps one of the most conscious and consistent minds American poetry has seen. In “Against the American Grain”—recalling his great poem “American Twilight”—he discusses the substance of absence, an incredibly dense and elusive concept to own. And yet, he gives a definable shape to empty space:

The absence the two
horses have left on the bare slope,
The silence that grazes like two shapes where they have been.

In the end, Wright defines Scar Tissue’s confident focus with this uncharacteristic but masterful rhyming couplet: “New skin over old wounds, colorless, numb. / Let the tongue retreat, let the heart be dumb.”

Tags: 5.5 stars, Charles Wright, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

The Burning of Troy

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

by Richard Foerster
BOA Editions 2006
Reviewed by Julia Istomina

Effectual Strangeness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kitchen Heat

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

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

If you can’t stand the title…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar

Friday, September 15th, 2006

by Richard Meier
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Hurry Up, We’ll Be Late for Homeroom

meier cover Though I never actually met Richard Meier, this review has all the makings of long-delayed revenge. I have here two of his poems from Slithy Toves, our high school literary magazine, which he edited more than 20 years ago. I torture him knowing full-well that my own early efforts similarly (but far more embarrassingly) exist; but I’m taking the risk to highlight the positive qualities which persist in Meier’s current book, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. And because I couldn’t resist. “To Rake,” an almost obsessive poem about yardwork, ends:

i smile,
and touch my
hand to my cheek to feel the blood.
i smell myself,
I like my smell,
smell of movement

In the second one, the speaker seems both childlike and very adult in his description of taking a bath:

the drip burns my eye
is sweat
my face has not
broken the skin above the temple
warmth removes the fear from naked

The speaker is grounded in the repetitive physicality of his actions as well as the wonder and surprise of perception. Meier obviously has a much larger bag of tricks now, but his strongest poems still draw from the same source, and mix the same childlike and adult intensity. Speakers in Meier’s current poems are quite aware of their relatedness to the world, but are more discomfited, and more tenuously placed. Take these lines from “Shaken”:

…you
thought I was sleeping because I wasn’t in the room
Bishop Berkeley thought stopped existing when he left it
which is love’s generosity, like the sentence that made it seem
the milk was from the farmers
who needed cows called L 47.

The content shifts line by line from the metaphysical to the absurd, which is great for skewering Berkeley but might make it more difficult for the reader to become emotionally involved. Highly charged images merely float by: “at the end of a long vagina, the constellations / tell their secrets” (“The Schedule”); “we lived in a house/ that expanded like a uterus in space instead of people” (“150 Eyes in My Head”). Admittedly, these images would be hard to sustain as a solemn conceit. They can only proceed like children’s dreams; their “hilarity” remains “unable to climb out of knowing why it happened.” For Meier, the dream, the memory, is not necessarily release. Waking and sleeping provide the same resistance to sense, as if we were constrained to walk in the pool rather than swim. Occasionally the willful oddness of this gets frustrating. Somewhat unfairly, I’ll cite “Post Hoc” though I don’t think it’s bad:

If you think about experience, I didn’t do anything,
or deep seeded unhappiness,
the vernal equinox is on the calendar with the turning of the pages
long since over and long approaching
again is in the form of the dream
about leaving the cave, known by the dump, effluvia,
effluvium, to launch into what’s already another
summer the quartz warhead of the great farm
of the unfenced prairie…

There is a great interest in the turn of each line, since we don’t quite know where the syntax will pick up again. The images relate in a Farmer’s Almanac-meets-Plato fashion, but don’t necessarily add up to more. The descriptions stop short of being detailed enough to convince as mimesis, or lyrical enough to convince as song. Nor are they set free of sense to become “just words.” In this nearly endless sentence, the speaker leaves us only scattered clues as to why we should care. Meier’s syntax retains just enough continuity to sideswipe the pathos of a convincing speaker confronting real events, making us long for a solid character sketch, or a more clearly stated motive.

But whenever Meier hits a ground note and sustains it, beautiful things happen. One appealingly direct poem that combines his earlier, childlike sensuousness and his more adult persona is “I Know You Are But What Am I.” Here, the quick perceptual shifts keep the reader emotionally grounded, and quite literally rooted.

He went outside and a tree fell into his mouth
He became a root. A boy grew out of it.
I died at that point, like I was buying a house…

Though time frames and personas shift, the details are not simply whisked away. Inside and out, tree, mouth, house and boy lend lasting support to each other, even as the title recalls the shaky schoolyard tautology used to ward off insults. The boy seems to insist on the continuity of memory, even to the point of casually willing the death of his older self: “I died at this point.” These memories are a house of cards, but the wonder is that it stands at all:

Acres of water the dam held back,
The brow of shade and light,
the flicker of interest
A mouth like a tent in a rainstorm,
I loved it here and he
was those things, just as he said we were.

But throughout Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, flowing, lyrical lines loudly switch to deliberately clunky passages—perhaps because, unlike the original Surrealists, Meier’s work describes a world dislocated not by war or political repression, but by petty acts of individual or corporate will insinuating their consequences between the lines of his poems: “the body thought the body was taking precedence./ They’re buying it to do a teardown.” It’s as if identity itself bore the cancer of suburban sprawl. Here’s an extended riff from “Evening, Various People”:

when you forced a path between waistband and skin—

space appeared where there had been none,
a hand to occupy it and then the space
became material whether something had been

taken or removed was like a man

This section is also preceded and followed by lines that are deliberately less lyrical and more disjunctive. While I agree that one should not entirely trust lyric or narrative modes, Meier’s mix often reads less like a collage than a willfully awkward series of frames, with the last line bearing the weight of the whole structure by default.

Sometimes he’s defter at striking a balance. In “Not Dead, Not Dream, Not Poem, Not Faggot” the speaker is suddenly confronted by the memory of Reggie Clark, an eccentric gym and geometry teacher “who wore his knitted hat inside and outside,” and “always late,” climbed into homeroom from the window. He would demonstrate “foul shots all follow through and saying, like a faggot, no tension, knowing nothing, as he put it, what survives of misunderstanding…” In a distant corner of a suburban schoolyard where PC etiquette hasn’t taken hold, we are suddenly grounded by this eccentric character and his tossed-off epithet, and even more by the repeated physical act of practicing the foul shot (no free throw here), a fine touch unforgettably demonstrating that language is both profoundly physical and inextricably bound with memory and painful misunderstanding, even shame. The poem ends with: “contained wrongly but contained into a motion knowing nothing, like all poems, and all poems not written, Reggie Clark and all the not dead my beloveds?”

This poem has a heat that has nothing to do with any reader’s (or reviewer’s) inside knowledge of a particular high school. I wish there were even more like it. When Meier insists on the stubborn persistence of character, of physical reality as well as the slipperiness of perception, he creates indelible moments which no rueful philosophic fall from lyric grace or narrative continuity can dissipate.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Mike McDonough, Richard Meier, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

District & Circle

Friday, September 15th, 2006

by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Work Defines

heaney cover

Though Seamus Heaney wrestles on occasion with the American and global political climate in his new book District and Circle, it is apparent to the reader, or any reader of his older work for that matter, that Heaney comes from a very far off place with little identity in the 2006 United States. There is common ground to be found, however, from individual to individual, especially in relation to timeless human experiences like longing and manual labor. From this come the strengths and weaknesses of this set of poems.

The book opens with Heaney’s acknowledgment of his lost world of labor and personal industry. In ‘The Turnip Snedder,’ the world of “bare hands / and cast iron” is mutilated gorgeously into shining pulp. The ensuing poems read like lamentations that are nearly impossible to relate to unless you’re an elderly Irishman; however, the reader is unwittingly transitioned into recognition of the current condition of war and the sad similarities that mark every era. “The Aerodrome” reflects back on a bygone airstrip where once a son and mother waited for a father to come back from war. The poem concludes:

If self is a location, so is love
Bearing taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.

These lines emphasize the role of the individual and individual pressures in the midst of global chaos. Certain human experiences, it seems, are timeless. “Anything Can Happen” takes this from more of a current-events standpoint, referring to 9/11 while comparing such shocking acts to the unexpected wrath of Jupiter, the Atlantic to the River Styx, and the United States to the ruling classes of 2000 years ago.

As the book progresses there is a feeling of being mired in a past that is beautiful, but is certainly being viewed rather than felt. Unfortunately the poem “District and Circle” gives nothing much better than a great book title. Having ridden on District and Circle, I can report that the Underground experience Heaney describes is accurate. The most attractive poems are about working and labor; although the tools and the means have changed, anyone with the stresses and satisfactions of hard labor in their bones will at least be able to sympathize with them. “Sugan,” for example, isn’t quite Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” but validates in the same way:

The fluster of that soft supply and feed -
Hay being coaxed in handfuls from a ruck,
Paid out to be taken in furl and swivel,
Turned and tightened, rickety-rope, to rope -

District and Circle remains knee-deep in reminiscence until the final 20 pages, which start with “The Tollund Man in Springtime.” This poem is the book’s redemption point. Without explanation, it justifies each poem in the book no matter how distant or obscure. It begins:

Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost

The narrator views himself as a man alive in the wrong time, something he describes with both real humor and feelings of tragedy. He associates himself more with the earth than with modern day society and lets the reader know that if he or she can’t get that, they can piss off.

After continued human/nature metaphor and confusion, District and Circle revisits the favored theme of manual labor and the joys and sorrows of lives constricted and defined by work. Finally, it seems that the poet does want to give some credit to the transcendent experience of art and the depth of human life in “The Birch Grove,” “Cavafy,” and the wonderful closer, “The Blackbird of Glanmore.” If the reader is not already familiar with Heaney’s past work, this book will take some effort to love. However, a few close readings and special attention to its half-dozen gems will show the reader a tight, purposeful book of poetry that is as deep as it is sweet.

Tags: 5.5 stars, FSG, Matt Soucy, Seamus Heaney
Posted in reviews

Green Squall

Monday, May 8th, 2006

by Jay Hopler
Yale University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Lizard Becomes a Verb

hopler cover

If one is willing to concede significance to the decimal system, there’s some nostalgia associated with Jay Hopler’s first book: he’s become the 100^th Yale Younger Poet. I’m sure Hopler doesn’t mind being lumped in with that crowd, though the payoff in Green Squall comes from the odd way that he’s suited for solitude. The book’s narrator constantly compensates for isolation by acknowledging there’s solace in an imagined relation with his surroundings—a garden, a beer, grass that is “lizarding.” By the end, imagination is as real as anything else.

In a short poem, “Of Paradise,” he comments on a fisherman drinking a beer. The man is “Small and gigantic/In his white rubber boots,” and “a black fly is drowning” in the beer. At the end of the poem, the fisherman, the fly, and the narrator are linked: “How sick we are, the three of us,/Of Paradise.”

Over the course of the book, Hopler also does a great job painting himself as a tragicomic figure: he loves small things like clouds and grass; he likes being surrounded by strippers and prostitutes; he still lives with his Mom. A Berrymanesque dialogue develops between him and an unidentified “angel” in “The Frustrated Angel”:

He wants to know how often I’ve been mistaken for a shrub.
The Angel says if you beat someone long enough and hard enough,
They will learn to love you for it.
That’s mighty big talk, isn’t it Hopler—coming from a man who
lives with his mother?
Hopler, I’ve had it with all your crying and complaining. If I
wanted to hear whining, I’d kick a dog.

Apart from the narrator, the “mother” is the only human to enter the book. The fact that there are no witnesses allows him to re-imagine things as he likes, and at times, contradict himself. Usually exultant before sky or trees, he shows a far different imaginative state in “Self-Portrait With Whiskey and Pistol”:

How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky—
How disappointing it all is.

But lines like this reaffirm the fact that strong emotion is strong emotion. The apparent 180s offer the reader savvy shifts in mood; and whether full of glory or frustration, Hopler never becomes indifferent. The outstanding “Out of These Wounds, The Moon Will Rise” shows the way that a sense of one’s surroundings is in flux with one’s emotional and imaginative states:

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light
in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new
Way of experiencing the world…

Hopler’s only real failures lie in infrequent “why hast thou forsaken me” theatrics. But there’s uncorrupted satisfaction when someone notes that imagination itself can sustain someone. And Hopler’s place as solitary man in a kingdom of the imagination ultimately makes him more Stevens than he is Berryman (ironically, the book’s worst poem calls upon Stevens by name). The ambitious nine-part “Of Hunger and Human Freedom,” the book’s centerpiece, falls a little short of its aim, but there are some great meditative moments. Freedom, Hopler writes, is not our natural state: “Our bonds define us, after all.”

Hopler’s work is chiseled, perhaps the best example lying the book’s excellent conclusion, “Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus,” when he’s finally buried in his imaginative fusion with his surroundings. The Yale competition was judged by Louise Glück, and to say that such poems are “Glückian” wouldn’t be a stretch, but I suppose that’s natural. It’ll be interesting to see whether he climbs the ranks like many of the 99 before him, or sinks to the bottom of the ocean like many others. I think there’s a good case to be made for the former.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Jay Hopler, John Deming, Yale University Press
Posted in reviews