Posts Tagged ‘6.5 stars’

Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

by Keith Newton
Cannibal Books 2009
Reviewed by Mathias Svalina

…The Map Will Never Be Made

newton cover

Fragments, in poetry, collude. A lens flare fractures, sunlight knifes from distant windows: together they conspire toward guidance. Fragments tell us that something is waiting around the corner, when there is nothing waiting, & there is no corner. But when we turn the corner no one can see what happens to us.

Keith Newton’s chapbook-length poem Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City is a series of fragments broken into four sections. Most of the stanzas consist of a single line & all but one is a single-sentence. The fragments do not accrete. They don’t form into a stable narrative by the end. Our questions are not answered. Instead, the poem functions in blink-length memories. We find ourselves beneath the poem’s tangly sheets, entwined into memories & ideation.

It is one text, so it may be safe to say that all the memories originate from the same blinker. I blink. Do you blink? Perhaps the poem in fragments is the writer blinking the reader’s eyes.

The poem opens in an estate: “Garden, vestibule, corridor, asylum. / A definite capacity in the black pines.” This estate or house is a center point for the poem, but through its fragmented descriptions it does not exert gravity. It has capacity but no actuality. We pass by the house. We enter it & exit it but we are not drawn back. We learn that it is “A house under a spell. // A word to enter, a former name.” Instead of a blueprint, we are left with a series of doorways & details.

When we are in the poem we are in a city. There is an occupying force. Everyone is in trouble, in danger. There are traitors & agents, but they never quite enact themselves, instead their actions are cut off by syntax:

Suspect of a foreign attachment,
the procedures are autonomous.

…

The questioner and the occupant at the front door.

The poem as an accumulation refuses to remember what befalls the occupant at the hands of the questioner. Corporeal subjects are rarely allowed to complete their actions in this poem. Newton reserves complete sentences for either the hallucinatory, “Against an impasse of the shades, / where the light is blocked, / the fever is the same,” or the simple declarative non sequitur: “The backdrop is missing”; “The focus is adjusted”; “They can pretend if they want.”

I do not know who we are as readers. I know I am not merely an observer. To invest oneself in the fragmented rhetoric of this poem is to blinkingly enter this city. I’m tempted to take the easy way out & say the reader is both the victim & the oppressor combined. No single viewpoint gives us this world. We are, at best, as the poem says, “The surveyor in pursuit of fragments.”

This Happy City has an atmosphere of noir, but lacking the kitsch. No glib speech or cleverness, but retaining the atmosphere of impending, fearful potential – an atmosphere I associate with the threatening fog of Carné’s Port of Shadows. It reads like the scraps of a shredded confession, rich with the imagistic anguish of betrayal. As I read it I keep wondering who has been exiled. Who has been sent forth & by whom?

The controlling agent that keeps the physical subjects from completing actions is, perhaps, the same agent that provides a stable interpretation. So then we’re back to wondering what is intended in the construction of fragments & what can be gained by surveying (ostensibly a controlling map) & what is it to survey in pursuit of fragments. The map will never be made & can only exist in the process of attempting itself. The victim hidden in this shadowy city will always lack motive, means & resolution.

What keeps this potentially alienating poem from pushing me out is the stately grace of its lines’ progression & the regular interruption of the text by a scrawled line drawing that perhaps shows a skyline or a treeline or a series of codes. Newton’s terse yet deliberate sentences balance against oblique sentence fragments such as “At the hollowing of the patrol.” & “Crouched for the harvesting of objects.” The stateliness moves us smoothly through the language, so that no matter how odd the statement is, it arrives with calm. To spend time inside this poem is to be always looking for the hiding place, the tic of the face that reveals the lie.

So much of our daily experience is a filtration of experience & sense. It is lucky that the horrible bulk of our memory does not press down on us. We are lucky that our minds inure us to the constant sensation of being alive. To remain sane & secluded & safe we have to live inside of constructed worlds within the world we live in. What makes a home? Is it a certain smell? The sound of the third stair creaking?

This poem a deep & velvety bag full of ominous trinkets & with each line I dip my hand back in & pull something new & disconcerting out. The fragments we seek in the attempt to survey do not complete the experience & likewise this poem does not end. The closing stanzas are “A flowering city from the decks. // A converted city out of reach.” It focuses itself at the end of the poem, but continues to push us past the cohering function of the text on the page. This is a quietly mysterious work that compels me to continue my mapping.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Cannibal Books, Keith Newton, Mathias Svalina
Posted in reviews

Flying for the Window

Monday, May 25th, 2009

by Charles Coté
Finishing Line Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming and Deiandra Hermosillo

Breaking Through

cote In his first published chapbook, Flying for the Window, Charles Coté chronicles with small, digestible poems his son Charlie’s losing battle with cancer. Coté takes us from the discovery of his son’s disease, to the treatments that don’t work, to Charlie’s premature death (he was only 18) and finally to the mourning and grief of the poet and his wife. With each page, it is near impossible to miss a the poet’s kicked-in-the-gut grief. The death has damaged his marriage, and forces him into an emotional neutrality which begs toward a hopefulness that never quite lands. Yet all the while, the poet is careful to keep the lens on Charlie, not on himself, and the result is earnest celebration of the boy’s brief but meaningful life.

There are things to smile about in Flying for the Window. In the poem “Giving Notice,” Coté remembers the moment when he and his son drank a beer together, a familiar right of passage he knew better than to take for granted:

Yesterday those blossoms, we sat
underneath the cool pink shade.
We sat out back with him and drank
beer, something I’d always hoped we’d do.

Their “first beer” bonding would be predictable if the circumstances weren’t so severe. Sad the beer was not the first of many. This mundane triumph demonstrates a father who has a stake in his fatherhood, and his commitment to his son thickens his grief and adds weight to the book. Yet his grief is soft-spoken, understated; Coté is careful to avoid spelling out the emotional quantities of the experience of losing a son—to avoid squaring his elegies on his own despair. He is not maudlin. He is irreparably damaged, but has the presence of mind to craft a fitting tribute that cares enough not to gush.

The poet’s feelings about his son are beyond pride, closer to admiration. He marvels, for example, at the fact that Charlie was the singer in a high school band, “Fivestar Riot,” and hoped to study music in college. There is an emphasis on the qualities Charlie possessed when he lived; the physical changes that emerged as the cancer took hold are peripheral, and don’t define the poet’s son. For example, in “Sitting in His Empty Room,” the poet remembers the night Charlie was crowned Homecoming King:

Still, he lit up a room with that smile, and dark
brown eyes, eyes like no one else in the family.
Picture a high school gym filled with classmates,
a red carpet, his girlfriend holding his right arm,
black velvet crown on is bald head…

“He lit up a room with that smile” is not an original turn of phrase, and while it’s one of only two or three statement clichés, generally, there’s nothing in this short read that demonstrates particular inventiveness on the poet’s part. But that’s not the point. The book honors a life; the title, for example, came from young Charlie’s journal:

I am the songbirdand I am flying for the window. I know it’s closed but I plan on breaking through.

That he titled the book from his son’s words is another indication that Coté steps beyond himself in Flying for the Window. He is calm and deliberate. The point is that Charlie didn’t need cancer to be special, and that under the weight of his loss, a father knows his son led a life worthy of celebration—the only problem is, he can’t conceive of what to do with himself now that Charlie is gone. Flying for the Window is a good start.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Charles Cote, Deiandra Hermosillo, Finishing Line Press, John Deming
Posted in reviews

Shuffle and Breakdown

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

by Cody Walker
Waywiser Press 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

The Blood Bank

Cody Walker’s debut collection, Shuffle and Breakdown, is a compilation of assorted reflections broken into five well-conceived segments. Walker draws inspiration from a wealth of diverse sources including history, literature, philosophy, social commentary, pop culture, political commentary and world news both major and bizarre. Through his playful use of rhyme and metaphor and his imaginative twists on traditional lullaby, Walker’s poems assert that he is an artist as vivacious as he is talented, and he channels a voice in these poems that is simultaneously aware and appreciative of his influences. Many of Walker’s poems such as “Scripture” and “Our Love and Woe Show” are meticulous, sophisticated practices in form and structure, while others like “Blind Date” and “Near Nude: Two Sketches” are brief fragments of thought which often reveal the inherent comedy of human existence. Shuffle and Breakdown exudes a tremendous accessibility with its wide range of themes and styles.

In “Don’t Let Worries Kill You Let The Church Help” (the title taken from a real church bulletin), Walker explores religion and what it means to be a person of faith. Following two tightly-packed stanzas in which he articulates a prayer with explosive, musical phrases such as “Diviner of Blackjack, of Blowgun” and “Landlord of Long Toms, of scimitars,” Walker demonstrates his unique sensibility with four entertaining, yet profound final lines:

Blessed is the man whose hopes exceed his reach,
Blessed is the woman who mixes gin and bleach,
Blessed is the child who feels that he can fly,
Blessed is the steeple on which the sparrows die.

Marked by a keen attention to rhythm and rhyme, Walker creates an incantatory movement in which the broad spectrum of humanity is celebrated.

“My Mother and Steven Seagal Share the Same Birthday” is another quirky, memorable piece in which Walker makes vivid connections between his own life and that of the actor. By initiating a litany of catch phrases quipped by Seagal throughout his…classic?…Hard to Kill, Walker creates an innovative exchange of consciousness for the reader to witness. After countering each Seagal remark with the notion that he would never catch his mother mimicking such banter, Walker notes:

And my mother
would never suddenly remember that this candidate had years
ago orchestrated a hit on her, had nearly killed her, and probably
thought he had killed her. And my mother’s eyes would never
narrow, and she would not then say (she would never say), I’ll
take you to the bank, Senator–the blood bank.

The “connection” existing between the poet’s mother and Steven Seagal–their shared birthday–lies dormant, but is nonetheless real. Likewise, Walker explores art within art, creating intriguing layers of prosody which examine life with a fresh eye. With other gems in the first four sections such as “Gamesmanship,” “I Tell This With a Shrug,” and “Song for the Song-Maker,” Walker continually displays his vast knowledge of formalism along with a stunning imagination which mutates those traditions to match his own artistic flairs.

The fifth and final section of the book transitions into a heavier tone. Through a series of letters titled after various cities and dates and signed by a narrator named “Caleb,” these nostalgic musings are deeply emotional and leave the reader with yet another avenue of Walker’s versatility. In “Chicago / June 1891” and “Natchez / December 1889,” Walker uses literary history as a vehicle to channel voices from the past and investigate the vastness of their contemporary legacies. “St. Louis / January 1891” comprises a dreary summation of current conditions in post-war America; the speaker closes out the letter: “Zanna and I take our meals on bare carpets. / We eat dust and splinters and drink our own blood. / Saint, vampire, old at twenty-six, / Caleb.” Such serious sentiment is melodramatic, but conceivably serves as a contrast to the lighter verse from earlier in the text; the power of Walker’s paradoxes and juxtaposition of concepts remains promising.

Always attentive and truth-seeking, Walker’s voice is vibrant with musicality and tones of hope. He shuffles between serious play and serious drama, and shows his best stuff when he merges the two; he is as likely to reference Whitman (the book title) as he is to to reference Richard Pryor (the epigraph), always building bridges, always seeing patterns. The world from Walker’s perspective is endearing and poignant, yet humorous and promising. Shuffle and Breakdown exhibits a poet who is not only in tune with what works in contemporary poetics, but who is actively exploring the possibilities of the craft.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Cody Walker, Rick Marlatt, Waywiser Press
Posted in reviews

All Odd and Splendid

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

by Hilda Raz
Wesleyan University Press 2008
Reviewed by Daniel Story

Domestic Deaths

all odd and splendid “A lot of what I thought was magic / is habit,” says the speaker’s son Aaron in the early poem “He Graduates from Clown School.” He gives away both the secret to performance and the secret to this luminous new collection, in which Hilda Raz (Trans, Divine Honors) creates moments of complex beauty from simple, methodical sentences and images.

The book opens with birth, considered from many angles. “Nothing odd about it” says a delivery room nurse in the title poem. But in “Son,”

The problem is birth.
What an opera,
the lights, the dais,
the cast of characters wearing
the same gown.

Here, commonalities in childbirth cause concern instead of reassurance. Raz grapples with her concerns when the discussion of reproduction includes her transgendered son, Aaron Raz Link (co-author of the memoir What Becomes You). Later, Aaron serves as catalyst for meditations and a quiet return to daily life, as in “Suite,” in which he reminds the speaker, “Mom, plants heal.”

Birth gives way to death. Aaron changes from infant to grown daughter and then grown son; suitcases and birdbaths fill and empty. Raz’s verse, reminiscent of Charles Simic’s, “retains” simplicity of language and image as she moves through these moments. In another section of “Suite,” subtitled “Her Dying,” the speaker reflects on a friend:

You will die soon. We all die.
We all go out from our houses.
My house, for example, is Willow Grove.
Your house—you still have one—is Garland Place.
The roofs are yellow, a tile called Cyon Picaresque.

The monosyllabic declarations of the first line lead the reader into the unassuming metaphor of the “house” of the body; then, that figurative house suddenly emerges as real. This shift locates the mystery of death and tragedy of loss in two named, usually comforting places. Thus, the “houses” themselves stand as places we must leave and the attachments to which we cling.

Raz primarily writes in free verse, but finds appropriate places for form. She makes use of the pantoum (“Diaspora” and “Love This”) and villanelle (“Flight”), as well as hexameter quatrains (“Childhood”) and a sestina-like nonce form (“Dante’s Words”). These sometimes-complicated forms succeed with her deceptively uncomplicated language. “Diaspora,” for example, begins and ends with “The gates were closing and the time was late”. The first appearance invokes impending departure, the second impending closure. These instances of form punctuate the collection at intervals and showcase, once more, Raz’s ability to transform something seen before into something new.

All Odd and Splendid offers accessible poems on subjects as domestic as the Fourth of July and as mystical as Norse Gods. Raz, like an illusionist, makes shapely, mysterious spectacles from unassuming objects—objects that, just a moment ago, drew no attention to themselves. She performs these transformations with smooth, almost casual grace, rising out of the realm of tricks into real magic.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Daniel Story, Hilda Raz, Wesleyan University Press
Posted in reviews

The Tangled Line

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

by Tod Marshall
Canarium Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

What More Can I Say

marshall cover

As James Wright struggled towards the loosening of the tight iambics which had brought him to notice in the first place, he seems to have struggled with the difference between emotional honesty and the traditional demands of form. I go back to his classic poem depicting emotional bankruptcy, “Saint Judas,” which culminates in a memorable oxymoronic tableau of Judas recalling Mary in the Pieta, holding a beaten man in his arms: “Flayed, without hope,/ I held the man for nothing in my arms.” The tone is masterful, and perhaps succeeds all too neatly at making failure seem all too easy to redeem. In “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave,” Wright would berate his own iambic mastery: “I croon my tears at 50 cents a line.” How do we find a craft worthy of the depiction of failure? Todd Marshall solves the problem of succeeding too easily by being willing to fail. I’m giving the book a 6.5 not because of lack of craft or ambition, but because his 10 so tightly embraces his 3.

Take the idea of the first poem, “Describe KFC to Icarus.” The pop irony of the title and the cheesy flatness of “Admit the labyrinth, accept / chicken bones / piling up in the kitchen” is undermined by the traditional uplift of the ending: “the climbing with a song towards sun.” No tone is allowed to
predominate. The next poem is a fevered lament “Describe Wildflowers to Ethics” which earned a marginal comment of “GAG!” for its displaced desperation, including the description of his son’s toy “erection,” with the bracelet with “What Would Jesus Do” printed on it, culminating in a remarkably futile listing of botanical names:

…Try again,
write scribbles of smoke against the sky—
fillyum, trilliom birdfoot, violet blueflag,
Try paintbrush, buttercup, try please. Try
fire and tears. Try greeny green green.

Taken separately the initial poems in The Tangled Line present a series of poetic ideas that often function as dead ends, labyrinthine blind alleys, a car crash of tones, themes and forms. The fascination of the first three sections is one of finding the fly in the soup or the feather in the KFC bucket. There are three abortive sequences with pointed titles: “Describe (X) to (Y);” “Admit (X) to (Y);”, and several poems titled “Meanwhile.” In the same abortive vein, any poem titled “The Reader is Urged to Not Read This Poem” is a cheap joke or a deliberate failure until proven otherwise.

We learn that the speaker is describing the fraught territory of his divorce and losing custody of his son in terms of the myth of Icarus, from Daedalus’s point of view, the guilty father lamenting the loss of his son. The cheese factor of a modern-day myth is played up to different degrees in the first two sections. Using myth and history in a deliberately shallow way is a risky business, especially in a poem titled “Describe Turner to MLK.” The apposite Turner is JMW, and the poem describes the famous picture of the slave ship throwing the bodies overboard. Without the command of Robert Hayden, the poem threatens to become a futile undergraduate joke, and given inevitable associations with Nat Turner, there is nothing the speaker can say to MLK that can render the poem a traditional rhetorical success. Marshal braves these waters in an interesting way.

The Tangled Line makes me think of those psychological tests where you have to decide whether the face depicted is expressing laughter, anger or pain. Maybe you’ve had that moment where either you couldn’t tell which was which, or you knew the answer was supposed to be laughter, but looking at a face so unnaturally frozen caused a nearly overwhelming, irresistable feeling of despair, of hopeless emotional bankruptcy. Or you might realize, as Robyn Schiff’s blurb points out, that “here…turning towards anything for comfort, respite, or just because its irresistible is doomed.”

Emotions are often ironic guises, with slight cover provided by deliberately cheesy titles, or presented as too much or too little, futile. The speaker is unmoored in different contexts, and no poem is permitted to rise quite to the redemptive tone of Wright’s “St Judas.” With an emotion fraught beyond self-deprecation, or the boozy companionship of Richard Hugo, Marshall describes his separation from his son. In “What the Age Demanded,” recalling Pound’s scathing “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley,” Marshall writes:

…the boy was a necessary loss
what happens when you fly,
expendable. O Daedalus,
don’t try to hide in a sigh.

Your legacy’s ensured: maze maker,
inventor’s patron, you cad,
No one will mistake you for father,
no one will call you dad.

The reader might not be sure at first that whether Marshall is trying to find that redemptive note and failing, or has chosen to stay safely hidden behind ironic poems quite successful without needing the emotional frame of the speaker’s divorce, such as “Describe Book Blurbs to Nationalism,” Meanwhile, the range of emotional responses piles up impressively. As Robin Schiff’s blurb reads, “Full articulation flies maddeningly towards lamentation as these poems steer between narrative and lyric expression.” I’d change “steer” to “veer,” and define lamentation as the shirt-rending tone found in the biblical Book of Lamentations. The variety of tones from flat to feverish is matched by an impressive array of modern American poetic tropes, such as the all time winner of the “Drunk Dad Takes Son Fishing” category, “Admit Possession to Rent,” with a gruesomely telegraphed payoff which rated the marginal comment “OMFG!” There is an excellent entry in the “Boy Bonds With Fucked up Older Male Relative/ Friend” genre, “No Nightingales in Kansas,” which is balanced by an inspired entry in the ironic “Still-Life With Livestock” genre, as well as an entry in the “Life Lessons of Fishing” category which I’ll quote in its entirety to show you that Marshall’s treatment of these forms is not usually parodic:

HATCH

Mayflies—
tiny white smudges
above blue sky

reflected in the creek
until wings get wet
and useless

except
to flutter recklessly
and attract

the attention of teeth.

Marshall’s command in poems like these and several others assure us that a game is in progress, that he is deliberately taking the reader much farther down formal and tonal dead ends than less confident poets care to go. “Loam” replaces Saint Paul’s well-known homily on love: “Love is patient, love is kind,” with a deliberately clunky, “Love is peasant. Love is find. It lends me, it is unlike toast, it is prow.” The poem searches for a tone it’s not going to find. When the next poem starts with, “You are not lost. I know where you eat and sleep,” we feel we are finally coming close to a solid core where emotional complexities exist as paradoxical, yet emotionally complete wholes. The emotion is adequate to the subject matter and form.

The 10-part final poem, “The Book of Failed Descriptions,” puts all the cards on the table, and attempts to unify all the deliberately overwrought stances and variety of forms, themes, and sequences. The stakes are high, and the father/son relationship as well as the themes of Icarus falling from the sky and the father’s culpability are resolved in a touching , unforced way (“he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real”) which I want to quote in its entirety, but I hate to deprive you of the pleasure of finally getting there yourself. Quoted by itself, it might look a little flat: it takes reading the whole book to get the full effect. In The ABC of Reading Pound wrote, “Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.” The fascination in The Tangled Line is the unlikely, and surprisingly honest way that the emotional check is ultimately made good.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Canarium Books, Mike McDonough, Tod Marshall
Posted in reviews

One Way No Exit

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

by G.C. Waldrep
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Interchanging

waldrep cover The poems in G.C. Waldrep’s One Way No Exit are not poems exactly. They are more like postulations, little logical deductions that prove themselves one cog at a time. An easy way to decipher these postulations would be to declare them ekphrastics, as the pieces in this book are derived from the 1989 exhibition “One Way: Fotografien” by the German photographer Peter Rathmann.

This seems like a sensible thing to do on some levels. It can help one come to terms with what is ultimately difficult, theory-driven writing. Their relationship could most easily be called impenetrable and of little consequence (the photographer is, incidentally, very obscure, the majority of his work difficult to find, even on the internet or in the NYU library). Whatever its impetus, this is writing that attempts to achieve its own specific ends.

While it would be wrong to say that these poems don’t revolve around the first person, as they are most certainly based on and around the subject’s “real” life, their scope is terrifyingly ambitious. I say terrifying because their ambition is realized by taking things as they come (i.e. the photos in the exhibition that you will never see) and being “realized consistently in one direction” (i.e. One Way), as Waldrep declares in his prologue. The brief prologue introduces some ideas behind not only Rathmann’s aesthetics, which Waldrep borrowed from the exhibition’s catalog, but some ideas about Waldrep’s own aesthetics, and theories about the way places and their people happen repetitively, happen “consistently in one direction.”

The place he means is America. The people he means are Americans. America’s interchangeability is what we as readers come to understand about these unseeable photos; it is their inherent nature to be interchangeable. The titles of the Rathmann photos are all in the form of “City, State, Year.” Example: “XXII. Snow Hill, Maryland, 1989,” “XXIII. Charleston, South Carolina, 1989,” etc. In sum, banal. At one point I found myself writing in the book: “am barely reading the titles anymore.” But this wasn’t exactly true. I was interested in the years, the way they made me recall the look of places I inhabited looked during those years. I imagined Waldrep did this as well.

The imagined places differ only slightly. If someone came by and switched the titles on any of these pieces, I wouldn’t have noticed. Though the individual pieces do in some sense serve as representations of the absent photos (“more wall, more lines, more curbs, driving on the left,” in “XXVI. Dorchester, 1984”), I imagine that they are mostly imaginings by Waldrep. Exaggerations of what the photos succeeded in capturing, the way these bland photos of the American landscape by a non-American end up declaring Americanism, the way they lend themselves to Waldrep’s postulations.

In “VI. Daytona Beach, Florida, 1987,” consider “An American photo would avoid boredom the way popcorn avoids hot oil. / An American photo would draw [sic] in inaccurate map in the sand. / An American photo would not suggest the possibility of an electromagnetic front, / which this photo does. This is not an American photo.” Waldrep “consistently and in one direction” questions and redefines America. It is sometimes a place, sometimes a people, sometimes a habit. Its ubiquitousness lends its definitions to the landscapes, lends itself to the Buick, the car which serves as the automobile-elect in these photos and poems. It is 1987 after all. There are many such metaphorical layers throughout the book and I suppose it would be foolish for me to believe that relaying them all here would be possible, or sensible.

What I can tell you is this: The prologue states: “The surprisingly uncomplicated nature of Americans is apparent in their trivial architecture.” Though physical architecture is assumed, it results in more than that. We create an architecture by living in each other’s proximity; an architecture develops as a result of people living close together for long stretches of time. The photos and the writing concern themselves with “the ‘relentless banality’ of America’s small towns,” and the idea that “to be American is to believe in exits.” Believe in them, even if they aren’t there; Waldrep is able to strengthen his point in “XIII. Monterey, California, 1988” by saying “An exit is an uncomplicated avoidance of the necessity of the collective. / An exit is a form of worship if approached consistently and in one direction”–so says the chorus of the book again and again.

Waldrep philosophizes the classic suburban nightmare; think Revolutionary Road. What one thinks to be a release or an exit ends up not being so, ends up in fact fating those in constant search to a life of repetitive circles. To be American is defined over and over again; he employs new metaphors each time, lessening the possibility of escape each time. Things are further complicated by the fact constantly obsessing about defining what it means to be an “American” is very…American.

Much of this book is beautiful for its grace alone; these pieces have wonderful moments which are akin to, as the poet describes in “XVI. Long Beach, NY, 1989,” “grass growing up from between the seams of a concrete patio.” There is unexpected beauty peppered through out the already interesting and intelligent landscape of these poems. In certain pieces, “the air tastes of nickel” or certain photos are described as having “swallowed a sweater.” There is a confident beauty to reduction, to imagining someone imagining something that someone else said yes to—someone else said, “I pick this here landscape and this here time, under this here sun to take home with me.” And though this is an exercise for Waldrep to better understand Rathmann’s aesthetics, it is also an exercise in tangentials for the reader. What is ancillary to what is provided. We makes sense of things by giving them names and seeing how they relate. Waldrep does this with Rathmann’s photos. We do this with Waldrep’s poems. Then we draw conclusions.

Tags: 6.5 stars, G.C. Waldrep, Jackie Clark, Tarpaulin Sky Press
Posted in reviews

The Halo Rule

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

by Teresa Leo
Elixir Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

It’s Good!

leo_cover It would be a peculiar endeavor to think of a punt returner as hermetic. But in the sense of airtight alchemy, it’s not that distant a metaphoric evaluation: in a football-only universe he is, however briefly or strangely, quarantined. Sealing things airtight may not let even the slightest, chattered molecule out—but it does offer a presentation of the fastenings the alchemist makes.

Teresa Leo fastens hermetic jars in her debut collection, The Halo Rule. We only find out what exactly she means from her representative (the punt returner). The opening epigraph, by Ivan Maisel of Sports Illustrated, gives the book’s overarching stratum: “The halo rule is the two-yard circle of life given to punt returners. Any defender who encroaches upon that circle is guilty of interference. . .”

This is the sort-of Hegelian dichotomy Leo sets up for us from the kickoff. And the poetry is the synthesis of returner-defender. And this may, in fact, play into her unruffled notion that love – as contact sport – is slyer than passive love or love-as-chess or love as pom-poms. This may also be the reason for the hermetic nature and vicariousness of some of the pieces. In “To The Next In Line,” we get “the not-quite-there of the not-quite-thereness behind you,” and in “Bellissimo,” letting go is “the opposite of exile, that other life.” In “Lingual” (the collection’s strongest poem), an undefined He “closes in then,/folds between synapse and seizure/to squeeze out the narration but not the story:”

Where Leo gets every cranny correct is her layers – she’s making a sweet, sweet cake out of the contents of all these alchemy jars; we get to drink the saccharine emotion that battered, kicked and bruised. We are parcel witnesses to: fucking, NASCAR, poppy fields, sex addicts, “coffee without kryptonite,” gearheads, buzz saws and phantoms. Leo has done an amazing thing of making everyday romantic/anti-romantic interactions into contact sports while also traumatizing them with her subtle brand of feminism, and conquering mythological gods to nearly become a deity herself – a deity that traps itself in a gorgeous stained-glass jar.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Elixir Press, Ken L. Walker, Teresa Leo
Posted in reviews

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

The Horse Whisperer

olstein cover

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

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

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

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

Tags: 6.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Justin Taylor, Lisa Olstein
Posted in reviews

Sixty Poems

Monday, October 6th, 2008

by Charles Simic
Harcourt 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

“…These backdoor movie houses in seedy neighborhoods / Still showing grainy films of my life.”

With Charles Simic’s term as U.S. Poet Laureate drawn to a close, is Sixty Poems relevant? It was published in January 2008 as a result of the laureateship, and there’s nothing substantive in it that fans don’t get in The Voice at 3 a.m.: New and Selected Poems, unless you consider 2005’s My Noiseless Entourage substantive, which isn’t unreasonable.

As an overview of Simic, Sixty Poems can’t give the whole picture in the same way that The Voice at 3 a.m. couldn’t; 1990′s The World Doesn’t End floats peculiarly parallel to the last two decades of Simic. I interviewed the poet for the University of New Hampshire paper when he received a 2003 National Book Award nomination for The Voice at 3 a.m.: New and Selected. I asked why he didn’t include anything from The World Doesn’t End.

To fans of this startling little book (winner of the Pulitzer Prize, built almost exclusively of rich, concise prose poems), the answer would have been evident even without Simic’s comment that “that book was such a unit, so self-contained.” It was and is, and he’s written nothing quite like it since. His “verse” poems aren’t entirely different in mood, but The World Doesn’t End presents a uniform mystery, sound bytes that prop each other up, exist in a world all their own. It makes sense that The Voice at 3 a.m. and Sixty Poems keep their hands off.

Alternately, “uniformity” is a criticism I’ve heard of his other work, that he’s done a familiar thing for a while, with peaks and valleys: tightly controlled, often symmetrical poems. Metaphorical, thick with imagery transmitting a bleak, rhetorical mysticism. Maybe. Anyone so prolific will impel readers to pick favorites. Sixty Poems represents, at turns, the best of this Simic. Some poems are noticeably absent (“The Gods”), others cheerfully resurrected (“Crazy About Her Shrimp,” “Country Fair”), others pace-keepers for the poetry workshop crowd (“An Address With Exclamation Points”), and a select few (“The Devils,” “Late September”) representing some of the best poetry written in the last five decades.

But this Simic is better represented in The Voice at 3 a.m.: controlled, concise Simic, elusive, mysterious–usually suspicious of mankind. In the introduction to The Best American Poetry 1992, Simic writes, “There’s the history of human vileness to contend with…”. There is powerlessness in Simic; “the secret wish of poetry,” he observes in the same essay, “is to stop time.” Sixty Poems doesn’t provide enough from any individual collection to make that collection seem distinctive. It swaps some of the time-stoppers for a few of his more patterned or easily-digestible poems, but it’s a perfect bulk-buy for poetry workshops and book clubs, an attractive paperback lesson in controlling what will never be controlled.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Charles Simic, Harcourt, John Deming
Posted in reviews

Descartes’ Loneliness

Monday, August 25th, 2008

by Allen Grossman
New Directions 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Lens Crafter

grossman cover

In his new book Descartes’ Loneliness, Allen Grossman subtly displays the affects of a life of thought: the knife-edge between intellect and passion. As the first and titular poem shows, when Grossman strives for pure intellect, he comes face to face with the realities of being a subjective human: “But in fact, toward evening, I am not / convinced there is any other except myself.” This line encapsulates the strongest images in the book: the poet himself, the mind, and the passage of time as seen through light. It also capably establishes the poet’s major themes: objectivism vs. subjectivism, perspective vs. reality, and truth vs. experience. Overall, the book is an interesting read for anyone dedicating his/her life to Liberal Arts academia.

Intermittently, Grossman inserts bold, imagistic poems such as “A Day’s Work” and “Timor Mortis, Inc., A Switchboard Memory.” Each of these poems revolves around the mother figure, who serves as a counterpoint to the character of Descartes. In “A Day’s Work” he writes:

Bobbed hair conceals
ears. Starched white shirt (Sleeves
rolled up with fierce intent.)
Hands in pockets of a straight skirt
of heavy material. She is looking
at the ground.

There are a few moments like this throughout the work that impact the reader both directly and broadly. The poet’s mother represents all things vague and human. These are the poems that seem most honest and effortless for Grossman. The intellectual connection here is vague, but not invisible.

The majority of Descartes’ Loneliness is focused, obviously, on Descartes, although it is not as readily apparent as the title indicates. Two of the poet’s greatest notions come when considering Descartes. First, he indicates that a profound given is a type of ownership. And isn’t that true? That first person who truly blew your mind will forever occupy a piece of your life that you cannot extract. As Grossman puts it in, “A Kiss for You,”: “Take this kiss. / You are mine forever.”

Second, Grossman makes the self-important claim that truth in science, or direct scrutiny, cannot be ascertained, but can be detected through the lens of poetry. In, “Caedmon,” “Invention of Night,” and “A Long Romance,” Grossman does achieve moments of great poetry, exposing the truth of the Descartes mind that can only be understood, through metaphor: “You Will be Wrapped in Silk.”

The book is at its weakest when Grossman falls into explaining, which he does through direct address and, too often, exclamation. This is partially forgivable, as Grossman sometimes assumes the identity of Descartes in his letters to Princess Elizabeth. However, within the poems, the exclamations draw the reader out of the moment and put too strong a Grossman stamp on the poem.

There is a balance to be had. In the final poem, “Votre Altresse,” the reader sees a thinkers’ sympathy between Grossman and Descartes. Descartes’ final days are spent in a foreign court where he is beleaguered and misunderstood. He will die as a showpiece, a novelty, in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Grossman sets a high intellectual bar with his new book, and he touches that bar, I think. But I did not detect anything novel in the conversations of philosophy or poetry. Although he does a nice job of framing the classic dilemmas of Descartes, he does not add anything new.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Allen Grossman, Matt Soucy, New Directions
Posted in reviews