Posts Tagged ‘7.5 stars’

chap nook 6: Pritts, Dhompa, Herzer

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

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

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

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

–Rachel Mennies

*

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

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

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

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

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

–Melinda Kaye Wilson

**

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

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

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

–Matt Soucy

***

 

 

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Culture of One

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2011
Reviewed by Diana Arterian

“my smoothing wilderness of righteousness”

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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Cities of Flesh and the Dead

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

by Diann Blakely
Elixir Press 2008
Reviewed by Allston James

“the Mississippi / pulsing beyond”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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Black Seeds on a White Dish

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

by Shira Dentz
Shearsman Books 2010
Reviewed by Cindy Hochman

“glossy oval backs”

Despite the achromics in the title of her book, Shira Dentz utilizes color to paint what mourning looks like: not funereal black, but green. Beginning with two epigraphs (“the appetite//for comfort went looking//inner, tonal//for where the green begins” by Fanny Howe and “a thousand needlesful of green & blue thread” by Francis Ponge), these poems are a study of loss in living color, a valiant attempt to breathe life into a brother who died in childhood.  From the Whitmanesque, but melancholy title of the opening poem, “The Grasses Unload Their Grief,” and throughout the book, the poet unloads a heavy burden; if there is any joy here, it is muted by a profound keening:

A son, a brother.

By the time we slipped back into our bodies, the chain had
shrunk like an umbilical cord.

Instead of words, my mother uttered syllables that fit onto silver
teaspoons whose glossy oval backs flew into the sky.

Instead of words, my father blew cinders.

As if to demonstrate the poet’s lament that “I’d rather play with a ghost than all alone,” she has relegated all of her otherworldly concerns to the shadowy background while the homage to her brother remains sharply focused. To be sure, there is an array of provocative topics (bisexuality, infidelity) in this book, but they are only hinted at, while her spirit brother appears frequently in a panoply of shapes–in glances, in glimpses.  There he is in “the landscape of a shaft of wheat”; here he is singing Beatles lyrics with his sibling; here he stands in a childhood photograph (“a charcoal blue wool hat, the matching scarf with small snowflakes sewn onto his snowsuit, the dresser drawers that were his”)–and, yes, even in the small dots that appear, literally and figuratively, on the page.

I look for him
when we pass boats,
wooden tables, the sign “Wonderland.”

(from “Ribs”)

And again, there is color:

blue your brother
gone, missing, lost, who…

…

Gone, like a cuff link.

Shira Dentz’s work is a compelling hybrid of the literal and lateral, starting off in the living room perhaps, but ending up on the moon. The key to this poet’s logic is in her own declarations that “I will appreciate disconnected bits of form” and “some people like to find unassociated bits of things and put them together.” It is in these “bits of things” that the poet, and ostensibly the reader, can find wholeness.

This poet’s forté is her diversity of form.  Her best poems showcase a wide range of styles, from poems that look like poems, to imaginative prose, to word barrages under quirky titles (“Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad in a Monet painting,”  “The Moon is an Antiseptic in Your Religion”).  She is in top form when free-associating. The award-winning poem “A Thin Green Line” seems not so much written as shot out of a cannon; it is the perfect forum for Dentz’s deft engagement of the senses, and to once again dwell in color (“a green thought in a green shade”):

Dino     pistachio     Osiris     mucus     cumin     cucumber

caterpillar          lilypad              pine          thyme    vine

In the delicate and sensual poem “Chantilly Lace,” the color reverts to various shades of white, but there is more disappointment than purity tucked demurely amidst the Victorian setting and frilly linens:

The end of a love affair has the extravagance
Of a wedding; so much cream,
Fabric, reams and reams.

“Concert” is a breathless dance of confusion and betrayal:

Clamp the wings butting wings butting wild in a jar–bitter white–
She’s on stage in gold satin pants–You in another woman’s bed–me,
Coughing–I dance,           danced with you,           wine in my legs.

These poems are not without their flaws.  Even allowing for stylistic nuance and the poet’s own desire for disconnection, some of the poems are marred by cliches (“twinkling stars,” “still, as a lake”) and mixed metaphors, and some are crushed under the weight of clunky syntax. For all their bluntness and blatancy, her fragments and subtle clues do not always need to tell the whole story beyond the emotional jarring. Nevertheless, the power of Shira Dentz’s poetry lies in what is left unsaid–the secrets she allows herself to keep. You will find death here, both physical and spiritual.  But there is also ripe fruit (avocado, persimmon), a burgeoning of color, and the hopeful greens of birth and rebirth.

*

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The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit

Monday, June 13th, 2011

by Pattiann Rogers
Trinity University Press 2010
Reviewed by Lucy Bryan Green

“bestowal of meaning”

Does moral reasoning still matter when we see ourselves as specks on a pearl of a planet in an infinitely unfolding cosmos? How might we have a fulfilling spirituality in a universe indifferent to our existence? In The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit, Pattiann Rogers explores in prose many of the questions that propel her eleven books of poetry. Written and recorded over thirty years, these eighteen essays and three interviews wade into moral and scientific waters often left to priests, philosophers, and astronomers. These affirm Rogers’ s claim that creative writers have a unique opportunity to “expose aspects of the universe not yet perceived.”

One of those aspects—humans’ “bestowal of meaning” on the universe—emerges in the book’s spiritual explorations. Raised as a Presbyterian and moved as an adolescent into a fundamentalist Christian church (“Born, Again and Again” revisits her river baptism in this sect), Rogers renounces the “pride and arrogance” of that faith in college. But, unlike many who abandon organized religion and embrace the canons of modern science, she celebrates the presence of divinity in the world, modeling her spirituality after the scientific processes of inquiry and investigation. Her theory: Just as the universe shifts and evolves, so does “the benevolence,” a god who “becomes as we create him” and acts as a source of “beauty and energy and goodness in the universe.” While Rogers’s statements of belief employ the rhythms and language of religious creed, she avoids dogmatism, infusing her writing instead with humility and openness. This refreshing and life-affirming spirituality contrasts with the despair that may result from contemporary revelations about space, time, and the insignificance of human action.

Rogers’s love for humankind, her curiosity about nature, and her exuberance for cosmological science pervade the collection. Although the overlapping thematic content of the essays feels redundant on occasion, her gift for recognizing beauty on scales both small and great enriches every piece. In “Small and Insignificant, Mighty and Glorious,” Rogers maintains that humans need beauty “to be vibrant, healthy, and generous people.” Using vivid and passionate language that testifies to that tenet, she describes “great arcs of glowing gases” in the heavens and a creek “doing its mud-and-fish, worn-rock-and-ruffled-rapids, racing act.” Her poetic sensibilities manifest in her attention to sound and cadence, and her ritual repetition of words, images, and sentence structures enhances the aesthetic appeal of her prose.

Words hold a philosophic value for Rogers, who notes that English has the largest vocabulary of any language, and that every word offers a possible metaphor. She argues that the mercurial nature of language, combined with continually changing information, makes many people “fearful to utter a declarative sentence unless its implications are… narrow and qualified.” Evidently, Rogers does not suffer this fear (or has overcome it), for her definitions of the words nature, art, cosmology, and God serve as contemplative centerpieces in several essays. In “Places within Place,” a piece about the countless roles the poplar tree outside her bedroom window occupies in her life and in the world, she acknowledges: “We define, even knowing our definitions will be never ending, never secured, always changing, constantly resisting themselves, constantly determining themselves. This is our burden, and this is our blessing.” Rather than lamenting the changeability of language, Rogers highlights the ways its multiplicity can illuminate. For example, in “Words in the Age of Stars,” she draws on descriptions of the firmament by Mark Twain, Rainer Maria Rilke, Van Gogh, and Chaucer (among others) to display the broad spectrum of emotions occasioned by stars.

The three interviews at the end of the collection further elucidate Rogers’s conceptions of the cosmos, human cruelty, and spirituality. They also give insights into her poetic craft. Her description of writing poetry echoes her depiction, in the book’s first essay, of a photograph of the earth taken by the Voyager I spacecraft: “Maybe what all the origins of my poems have in common is that each triggers a new perspective for me, a perspective in which I see myself, and human life, differently, from afar, as if I had backed away from myself somehow.” The Grand Array will reward curious and open-minded readers with a similarly expanded perspective—one filled with as much reverence for the complicated, contradictory nature of human existence as for the unfathomable sweep of the night sky.

*

 

 

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Approaching Ice

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

by Elizabeth Bradfield
Persea Books 2010
Reviewed by Natalie Storey

“I want ice to be my mending”

In Approaching Ice, Elizabeth Bradfield conjures a stunning polar world and invites readers to contemplate familiar narratives of exploration, physical hardship and climate change. Bradfield, a naturalist and the author of the previous collection Interpretive Work, populates her new book of ice-themed poems with famous explorers and animals who struggle to survive in the world’s harshest regions.

The eccentric characters who dare traverse the polar landscape emerge in a series of narrative poems, titled after the names of the explorers. Throughout the collection, Bradfield intersperses lively prose poems that resemble dictionary definitions, providing brief breaks from the longer poems. The narrative poems tell the stories of figures like Douglas Mawson, among the first to reach the South Magnetic Pole, Capt. John Cleves Symmes who, once at home in Cincinnati, finds the plenty of the poles still haunts him, and Robert Falcon Scott, who “cried more easily than any man I have ever known.” Lesser known explorers also appear in the collection, including the female explorer Louise Arner Boyd, Frank Hurley, a photographer, and a cow named Lady, the last of a rare breed of shorthorn cattle on Enderby Island. Bradfield extracts the motives of early polar travelers in each of the narrative poems. Most push on for fame and recognition, like Scott, who thinks of his wife on his fruitless march. “Ah Kathleen,/ he thought to his own slogged pace,/ you’d be proud.”

While many of the poems deal in the history of polar exploration, Bradfield also takes up a more recent phenomenon: polar tourism. Awareness of global warming has made guided expeditions to the poles more popular, and comforts of modern of travel make the trip accessible to those who would have been unsuited in earlier times. The poet regards these contemporary travelers critically, addressing an absent lover who guides expeditions. She writes:

Enough, think of the historic hardships.
Cold, tired, fruit a distant memory –
and the body’s envelope loosens, skin sloughing
from the face’s planes.

Unaware of the history and hardship of surviving on the land, the tourists lack a true understanding of the polar terrain. Their efforts to capture the experience fail. Bradfield writes, “Of course no film can translate the cold, light,/ or bone-deep sense of supervised terror.” In stunning language, Bradfield hints at a modern lust for adventure taken to an extreme, a lust unlike previous expeditions because the experience has been diluted.

In the poems Bradfield does not glorify the polar terrain or its exploration. Great men fail here more than they triumph; birds leave droppings everywhere, and travelers eat their dead ponies. The air “is constantly aluminum with snow.” The explorers who populate a series of narrative poems stink of unwashed flesh, and their teeth rot from malnutrition. In “Polar Explorer Richard Evelyn Byrd (1933)” Bradfield writes, “Some trials seem contrived/ for the weight of accolades they’ll bring.” Such lines will leave readers pondering the motivations behind our explorations.

Seven prose poems, written as dictionary entries for ice-related terms, provide interludes among the lineated pieces in the collection. Bradfield’s melancholy wit infuses each of these passages. For the term “ice atlas” she writes, “A publication containing a series of ice charts showing geographic distribution of ice, usually by seasons or months. Not a bad idea. Can they make one for the climate of the heart?” Bradfield juxtaposes a practical object with the slippery terrain of human emotion, evoking loneliness and numbness.

The collection reaches a stirring pitch in the two-stanza “Against Solitude,” a searing look at two men who bed together in defense against the cold. “Don’t speak,” Bradfield ventriloquizes. “Your hair has grown long in our march, soft as my wife’s.” Bradfield delivers fervid intimacy. “Hush. How long has it been since my mouth has held anything/ other than ice and pemmican?” Here Bradfield nudges her readers into unexpected voyeurism, once again cracking commonly held notions of great exploration.

The narrative rifts allow readers to peer at the pronounced ache at the heart of the book – an unquenched desire for fruit, fame, warmth and human emotion. Bradfield illuminates the struggle to reclaim what lies frozen in pain and memory. Affecting and crucial, Bradfield’s poems succeed at capturing longing and the way it can numb, like frostbite. “I want ice to be my mending,” she writes. “I want cold to stitch me.”

*

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Mister Skylight

Monday, March 7th, 2011

by Ed Skoog
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“You think time flies? It falls to earth.”

skoog cover

Ed Skoog’s Mister Skylight opens with “During the War,” which reads like a brief history of Skoog and America.  It is a clear introduction to a collection of poems that is anything but.  On the back cover, the point is made that Skoog worked for years in the basement of a museum. That is how most of his poems feel: image after image, one top of another, all with significance but not always with direct relation to one another. However, with close attention, there is something significant to be taken away from each poem, and the collection as a whole maintains a deep unity through consistency of voice.

There are places where Skoog’s imagery extends beyond rational comprehension, but where the tone remains consistent enough to keep us moving and experiencing.  Lines emerge occasionally from the mass of images to deliver clear, unexpected messages.  For example, in “Party at the Dump,” Skoog writes after almost 30 lines, “Life must be worth something / for the loss of it to hurt so much,” before diving back into another page and a half of conversational, erratic, and sometimes violent imagery:

Take the foreign policy of weather,
palmetto bugs caravanning up the lime tree.
Winds crater power lines, and from these,
an empty and alone beauty busters down,
bullies the shotgun house, keeps a body
up late. Dogs know, the wild ones…

It’s surprising how quickly the writing can come out of the disjointed onslaught of images to brief moments of clarity that extend even to the ‘meta-moment’ of writing a piece of poetry. Take these examples from “Memory Loss”:

When I write “I forgot my silencer”
I mean I have forgotten my silence,
and would like to be thought of
as a dangerous person,
as someone who is intriguing

…

                                                                                 My
fever should have been a prose poem, an entity separated out
and managed in its own tradition rather than asking to find a
place here. They almost reach me. I look up and see blue gels
from theater lights fluttering, caught in cottonwood branches.

The massed images surely have the “museum basement” effect, but each individual poem is also weighed with personal and public history.  In “Ruler of My Heart,” the songs played on a jukebox are secret reminiscences of the long absent; the jukebox itself is fixed and unchanging with its limited playlist.  “The Kansas River, Also Called Kaw” draws out the idea of childhood hopes and promises gone unfulfilled amid the violence of memory. Moreover, the amusements that occupied us as children would never suffice into adulthood.

The closing poems, “Mister Skylight,” and “Postscript: Autobiographical” are dynamic shows of the inevitability of progession.  History is oppressive, weakness is awareness, power is close attention.  Everything is fixed in a mire, overseen by Mr. Skylight (“You think time flies?  It falls to earth”).  This is an excellent collection of poems riding the line between personal expression and public, physical connection.

*

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Everything is Quiet

Monday, February 14th, 2011

by Kendra Grant Malone
Scrambler Books 2011
Reviewed by Morgan Myers

“about how things could be / better”

Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet comes on a bit rough at first. There’s a lot of unfiltered emotion and uncapitalized letters, a lot of embarrassing confessions and idle chatter. Then you start to pick up the subtly controlled movements that underlie the artless surface, the way wildly divergent emotions are allowed to shade into and resolve one another—or not—without disturbing the poet’s eerie calm. And then you hit a title like “Don’t Misunderstand Me, Honey,” and suddenly you don’t misunderstand her—this little Irish hipster is singing the blues.

What makes this blues, rather than a lot of entitled millennial whining? For one thing, there’s the fact that Malone makes little claim for the validity or value of her feelings, or for her right to feel anything better. “Since i’ve left you / i’ve been feeling / depressed,” she might tell us, or “i like drinking / until i cannot see,” but there’s no apparent plea for sympathy or claim to victimhood. Depression or debauchery, loneliness or self-involvement, boredom or desperation, they’re all just there, for you to relate to or not.

Then there’s the fact that so much of the book is less about the poet herself than about the damaged people around her—an abused mother, a disabled brother, seemingly dozens of emotionally wounded friends and lovers—and about longing for her relationships with those people to be as sure and enduring as the feelings behind them. Moments of harrowing, helpless concern help to validate the moments of self-pity, and sometimes they’re the same moment—like in the emotional climax of “Spick,” a sequence of short poems worrying for the poet’s mentally ill adopted brother:

i’m not sure
how many more years
i can go on with this
being the only
the only
apparently the only
the only
the only one who loves
my dear brother

For all their emotionally charged content, these poems have a slightness and delicacy that might fill out seventeen syllables more easily than twelve bars. Malone can hide emotional landmines inside seemingly offhanded titles like “Little Used Up Tea Bags Cannot Sing, No, That Is a Silly Idea” or “I Suppose This Is Alright for the Time Being”—both of which become devastating in the context of their attached poems. These kinds of subterranean effects are easy to swamp, so Malone wisely restricts herself to one major gesture per poem, and thanks to that judicious minimalism they show through with something almost like elegance.

But the book is warmer, messier, and more welcoming than such restraint might suggest. Each poem feels like a struggle to make an honest connection with the reader, just like the struggles to connect that go on within the poems, so that the book’s publication expands Malone’s circle of sympathetic sufferers to include us as well. Whatever the song, Malone isn’t singing to break hearts so much as to console. “I will just keep seeing you all,” she promises, “and listening to your stories / about how things could be / better.”

*

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By the Numbers

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

by James Richardson
Copper Canyon Press 2010
Reviewed by John Deming

7.5

“…that not to think is to think everything, which is what the universe excels at”

James Richardson seems very interested in the interplay of macro and micro. He is one of few contemporary poets who actively pursues the art of aphorism, an art that is about saying something large in a small space. An aphorism is always an oversimplification, but in piling dozens of them on top of each other, Richardson at once delights and raises questions about the human capacity for knowledge and wisdom. His oversimplifications serve as a natural counterpoint to his dense, lyric explorations of a limited, yet potentially infinite universe. We find in the end that no matter how thorough or exhausting an investigation – be it lyric, scientific, or otherwise – one always return to the limits of personal experience, and to a generalized, sometimes caustic, sometimes ecstatic unknowing.

Richardson churns out aphorisms with surprising regularity. Two previous books, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays and Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms, are also full of them. The 170 collected in By the Numbers are a conscious extension of his previous work, and form the long centerpiece of the book, which is titled “Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays.” They range from charming to wise to clever to agitating, and recall constantly the human need to sum up the universe with an easy, blunt understanding. By piling so much “wisdom” on top of itself, Richardson reminds that a final understanding of what something is immediately exposes what that understanding is not.

You will feel like you have read some of these before: “When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks,” “Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals,” “Too much apology doubles the offense,” “The will has a will of its own,” “My best critic is me, too late.”

Some of the more limited in scope seem like they come straight from the wall of the dentist’s office: “Work is required play,” “Nothing important comes with instructions,” “Build bottom up, clean top down.”

Many of them simply invert or reframe received aphorisms – “Do unto others and eye for an eye have the same payment plan” – while others read like quips from stand-up comedy routines: “Office supplies stores are cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Take them home and they will do it for you.”

Yet many of them are undeniably lyric – “It is the empty seats that listen most raptly,” “All those days that changed the world forever! Yet here it is.” – and the final two provide a payoff that winks at the blend of limit and liberation in the physical universe: “That one thing in Life I’m meant to do?—well, I have to finish this first,” “Closing a door very gently, you pull with one hand, push with the other.”

All of these aphorisms have the potential to be “true,” but only if given context. As the goal of an aphorism might be to succinctly sum up the universe in a way that leads to moral action, we learn through this onslaught that any stated truth says as much about our need for truth as it does about whatever idea, example or metaphor is at play.

But Richardson doesn’t limit this idea to the realm of aphorism. To him, it seems, even the densest physical equation is, from a perspective of total knowledge, nothing but an oversimplification. The best poem in the book is a long poem, “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home.” The poet dwells on parallel universes and the range of possibilities they create; he dwells on cosmology, and our fruitless attempts to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe:

…it’s a big empty universe, averaging only five atoms per cubic meter,
though wherever we are is by definition very crowded. I think of walking
          out in the snow
which would then be very, very crowded, for though the air seems
          clear, glassy with silence,

odds say in every breath there’s at least one atom of the breath of everyone
          who ever lived
and if to breathe them is to hold them all in mind,
which I hope is true…but surely this feeling of a thought being too big
          to think

is the accelerating expansion of the universe, which means I should try less
          and less
to think it, and be still like a tree letting stars and snow stream through
          its branches,
for scientists agree that not to think is to think everything, which is what
          the universe excels at…

The poet is dazzled by the physical universe and by its study. But every answer leads to greater questions, and human wisdom, it seems, exists only to satisfy a human need.

Richardson tests the limits of cleverness in this book, and those turned off by “wit” or even “charm” might find little use for some portions, including shorter poems that read like aphorisms broken into lines. Here is the three line poem “Birds in Rain”:

Studious silence in the trees.
Later they will tunefully dispute
whether the drops came down in twos or threes.

One could read a range of metaphors into this if asked to, but his knowingly absurd idea –that birdsongs following rain are actually a dispute about how the rain fell – is a willful imposition reminiscent of some of his weaker aphorisms, perhaps cheapened in its singsong rhythm and rhyme.

But generally, poems like this are in lock step with Richardson’s projection that even though the human need for understanding can never be completely satisfied, we need not be unpleasant about it. He broods, but never excessively. The book becomes a feast in its variety; there is a range of forums wherein our narrator finds himself haunted and perplexed by his own disappearing life, by his own memories and losses. He tries to shape them into something like meaning. But in the end, he does not so much seek wisdom, but finds himself charmed by the idea of wisdom. He is compelled by human need. By the Numbers is a book of incredible sympathy.

*

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The Eternal City

Sunday, November 14th, 2010

by Kathleen Graber
Princeton University Press 2010
Reviewed by John Deming

7.5

“Loneliness, our one defendable Empire.”

Kathleen Graber is an incredibly serious, intelligent and technically-gifted poet. She moves forward into the lonely present by associating deeply into the serious past, and finding how much of human endeavor has been predicated upon Imaginative need. “Our sacrament,” she writes, is “to chase what has vanished &, finally, to vanish / ourselves.” We live in the physical world, and we live in our imaginations, and our brains are physical too, and we wish desperately to link all of this:

                                                                          …The Eternal City,
Brodsky writes, is like a gigantic old brain, one that’s grown
a little weary of the world.

(from “The Eternal City”)

The Eternal City is a city in the clouds, your head in the clouds, leaping into imagined memories and plans, stitching them to the caricature of their realizations. In his long prose poem “The System,” John Ashbery points to what could be considered the Great Flaw of fundamentalist religion:

The great fright has turned their gaze upwards, to the stars, to the heavens; they see nothing of the disarray around them, their ears are closed to the cries of their fellow passengers; they can think only of themselves when all the time they believe that they are thinking of nothing but God. Yet in their innermost minds they know too that all is not well; that if it were there would not be this rigidity, with the eye and the mind focused on a nonexistent center, a fixed point, when the common sense of even an idiot would be enough to make him realize that nothing has stopped, that we and everything around us are moving forward continually, and that we are being modified constantly… … so that merely to think of ourselves as having arrived at some final resting place is a contradiction of fundamental logic…

He goes on from there, essentially pointing to the common delusion that things can only be one way, and that chosen humans can comprehend one specific, unalterable truth. Graber’s poems often allude to the obvious risk inherent in this kind of certainty: sometimes, people are willing to kill or die for it, are willing to suppress the freedoms of ‘non-believers’ in its name. So dutifully they fight to protect the Kingdom of the Imagined Specific, because without it, what is life? What is death?

Graber does not look to Christian history, or to the many thinkers that she cites (there are many), for a fixed point or absolutely explicable end result. Instead, she sees the history of human thought, and its correspondence with human action, as patchwork — a work in progress at best. For her title poem, she summons Philosopher King Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180, “was in love / with Wisdom.” But Wisdom “married him off to Duty instead.”

Aurelius is important because he embodies the fantasy of the leader-philosopher, one who, looking down upon his civilization from the height of meaningful power and success, finds “that all of this has been for nothing.” A leader who realizes his nation’s struggles and loyalties and beheadings take place in the name of sinister fictions. Would that he could contemplate all the day long, and arrive at powerful ideas that would buttress meaningful legislation and create a freer and more tolerant world. But alas, he has an Empire to defend, to expand, to cater to.

The title poem consists of twelve short “Books,” each with an epigraph from Aurelius. Her narrator is an associative philosopher, matching epochs-old philosophy and history with day-to-day autobiography. She doesn’t try to justify the present, or make it seem too cute a resting place; nor does she speak of it with suicidal gravity. She is both austere and conversational:

How slowly time seems to pass when we’re waiting.
When we return from a walk, my dog begins immediately
to wait for the next. If you are waiting, Reader, I can tell you only
that somewhere it is still summer. That there are a dozen books
in Aurelius’s Meditations, written in his old age, in his tents
on foreign battlefields as he waited through the last decade
of his life to die. Do you know Jack Gilbert’s poem about a man
carrying a box in his arms? He balances his burden, shifts it,
so he will never need to set it down. My cellar is full of boxes.

(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)

Graber is engaging in measured association. She sees in her present not ends, but opportunities for association and metaphor: openness and change. Her book presents a relentless need to prove the whole that unexpected and disparate parts can constitute. She seeks and finds patterns. The same section concludes:

                            …Archimedes gave numbers to the spiral
of the sailor’s coiled rope, but the nautilus waited centuries
for Descartes to decode its elegant equiangular whorls.
Without shells, the cycloid arc, Christopher Wren concluded,
the spire would not be possible. The dog stares at the door & sighs.
We carry our waiting & our calcium carbonate cage.
We wait for the future to divine for us the past. I think of Aurelius
who thought of Epictetus: Thou are a little soul bearing a corpse.

(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)

The narrator is a researcher or reporter. She threads the thinking of a variety of heads and establishes them in the abstract as somehow present in the room with her and her dog. Her poem follows a format used to great effect by Natasha Trethewey in her long poem “Native Guard” — each separately titled section opens with the line that closed the previous section. As a result, she is able to constitute new associations, find further metaphor. “Book Seven” concludes with a quote from Aurelius:

                 …Aurelius, opening another day: Nature will soon change
all things which thou seest…in order that the world may be ever new.

The succeeding book, “Book Eight,” begins:

In order that the world may be ever new, my brother & his wife
are going to have a baby. Earlier this month they heard
the tiny heart: out of the whorl of the mother’s organs, suddenly,
a galloping, celerity, hooves. And yesterday, they saw their child
somersaulting in the unlit paddock of the womb. It turns
its animal face to the camera it cannot possibly imagine,
raises its arms as if to wave. Gibbon traces the beginning
of the end to Aurelius’s brutal son. Aurelius, who turned his back
on the blood of the Coliseum, has sired the Secutor, who straps tight
his helmet & buckler to kill naked, unarmed men before the crowd.

In order that everything be questioned, Graber develops an interplay between her family life and the life of Aurelius and his son. It works, because the analogy is not literal; surely, she is not presupposing that a new nephew will bring about the fall of the Roman Empire, or whatever the equivalent. Aurelius is her subject, and so is life and human action, and she is open to the innumerable patterns that relate things to each other. Her very style presents an honest and open-ended conception of meaning. Everything is connected. Everything is separate. Contradictions must be permitted.

In his book The Condition of Man, Lewis Mumford diagnoses the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.

A fear of change from the status quo — from an established idea, loyalty or conception of God — can lead to obsessive, and in due time, sloppy security. A Roman Empire yields a British Empire, a British Empire an American Empire. And the whole while, the need for security or fixed point sameness has makes it hard for any potential meditative philosopher king to do the work of the future. Strict loyalism and fundamentalism (be they a devotion to a God, to a person, to any belief) are aimed at eliminating surprise, change and newness. They mean a devotion to security and meekly “holding on.” Change comes anyway. As Graber states, “We fill our hands when they are / empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.” Not with a bang, but a whimper.

A fair criticism could be made that Graber relies too heavily on complex ideas developed by other individuals, and that she only really adds to them the specific nuances of her narrator’s life. A few of these meditations become labored, lack surprise, or simply work to reaffirm the concept forwarded by whichever philosopher supplies the epigraph. The poem “The Magic Kingdom” concludes with an image of children at play:

                          …They turned each other into princesses
& super-girls & then, they pretended to change back.
Oh, no. You forgot to say forever! they took turns repeating
with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,
their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.

The poem is otherwise quite serious, and includes a cancer scare; as a result, this conclusion lands with undue dramatic force. The fact that these girls cannot stay princesses forever is treated as the tragedy that it is not. Nevertheless, the poem raises appropriate questions about human Imagination – how an imaginary excuse-making that begins in childhood too easily follows one into adulthood. And how it might be there to distract from the fact of how little we are truly able to control.

Graber’s book concludes with the exceptional short poem “The Festival at Nikko.” It is a meditation rooted soundly in time that is passing, and in undying curiosity and wonder:

Would I like things to be better? Yes.
But what does it matter? Intent seems so small
a part. And will. I have come a long way
to stand before this window in a harsh light
above a tap of undrinkable water. I pass daily
through the town’s old gardens to see the peacock
in its cage. In the cold, it turns its back
to the opening. It holds its magnificence close
to its sides. And whatever this resembles—
shyness or restraint, greediness even—it is not.

Fetishized Christianity is probably mostly about loneliness. Graber’s system of worship, if I am to limit it, would best be defined as Pantheistic, or a worship of Nature. Nature is seen as adaptive to circumstance, self-contained but always changing. In these lines, the peacock hides its feathers. An onlooker might see this, and upon acquiring a resounding urge for metaphor, determine for certain that all such peacocks are greedy, and ought to be punished.

Probably not – but a lot of contemporary fundamentalist thinking reaches that level of absurdity. The Eternal City demonstrates that humanity’s religious fictions have led to moments of astonishing philosophical clarity, but more often, to a meek protectionism rooted in undying fear. Yet in stitching history, ideas and experience, Graber demonstrates the power of the imagination. To that end, she seems most staunchly an advocate of what might be termed honest imagination: open-ended imagination that hints at liberation, but only insofar as we don’t allow the imagined to become a literal certainty that must be defended at all costs.

*

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