Posts Tagged ‘7.5 stars’

The Talking Day

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

by Michael Klein
Sibling Rivalry Press 2013
Reviewed by Keith Meatto

“Kevin was dead. I was alive.”

Michael Klein’s new poetry collection, The Talking Day, begins with a dedication to the poet Adrienne Rich, who died in 2012; the subsequent poems discuss the death of the poet’s grandmother, mother, twin brother, friend, and beloved dog, as well as the unnamed victims of AIDS and a mass shooting in upstate New York. Along the way, the poet meditates on his own mortality via signs of his physical deterioration: a numbness in his hand, a “sparking pain” in his knee, an unidentified  “clicking thing” that he discovers in his body during a yoga class.

In its preoccupation with life and death, The Talking Day poses simple, yet profound questions. How do we reconcile our past lives with our present life? How do we cope with the inevitable process of aging? How do we go on living after the people we love die? How do we live when we know we are going to die?  And per the book’s two most recurrent phrases: How do we make sense of “the body” and “the world”?

In the title poem, Klein reflects on a mass shooting at an immigration center in upstate New York, where two of his friends live. The titular phase comes from a “talking day” that occurred after the 2007 mass shootings at Virginia Tech. No one quite grasps the reality of the situation, and everyone spends that first day talking about what happened and reliving it as language—not so much to understand the violence, but to make a kind of recording of it: talking about it, letting go of it, putting it down. Read literally, the process should be familiar to millions of Americans who participated in the national “talking days” after the recent Newtown massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing. Read metaphorically, the “talking day” describes the modus operandi of Klein’s poetry.

For Klein, mortality is not a new subject. In 1989, he edited the anthology Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS. His first book of poetry, 1990, also deals with the AIDS crisis; his 2009 book, then, we were still living, reflects on the September 11 terror attacks; his contribution to a 2012 anthology, Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses, honors the late musician Laura Nyro.  “When Laura Nyro died [in 1997],” Klein wrote, “I was teaching people who’d never heard of her or seen her take the stage and walk to a piano in a black prom dress the way I had seen her so many years before at Fillmore East or Carnegie Hall when the world could still give a troubadour a troubadour’s life.” A similar spirit of wistful nostalgia permeates the poems in The Talking Day.

The poems are most poignant when Klein writes about specific people and concrete events. In “Drinking money,” he recounts how he sold his mother’s autographed photograph of Lorenzo Hart—a gift from the composer—to fuel his alcohol addiction, a subject he has addressed in his memoirs. The poem concludes: “In the museum/of saddest things I’ve ever done that could have been the/saddest. It felt like I was making fun of beauty.” Here, the sin is threefold: addiction, filial impiety, and aesthetic disregard. In “The sun in 1949,” he recounts an evening when his 17-year-old mother and 30-something grandmother battle each other for the attention of a teenage boy at a bar on Fire Island. Written in tercets that reinforce the “love” triangle, the poem turns tragic when Klein links the episode to his grandmother’s suicide.  And in one of several poems that refer to his brother’s death, Klein writes: “Kevin was dead. I was alive. When I was a twin, Kevin/was alive.” Such simple and stark lines should resonate with anyone who has ever experienced loss.

Not every aspect of the poetry reaches the same kind of depth. For example, Klein has a fondness cultural references to popular artists (Van Gogh, Matisse), movies (Citizen Kane, Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and poets (Rilke, Yeats), and for a poet that works in deceptive simplicity and sudden insight, these allusions frequently seem like shorthand for ideas he might have explored with more originality.

But for pretty much all of this collection, you will love ruminating with the poet. And while much of the it is elegiac and melancholy, it ends on a note of hope. The final poem (“Image results from the sky”) recounts a bizarre, beautiful beach fantasy dream of sex and poetry in which the poet loses track of his lover; when the poet awakens, his lover declares: “I will always be there, behind the tree looking/out for you.”  The cure for existential dread, it seems, is nothing more—and nothing less—than love.

*

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in reviews


Mother Was a Tragic Girl

Friday, March 29th, 2013

by Sandra Simonds
Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2012
Reviewed by Jay Deshpande

“So this is why I am what I do, twisting the new mouth” 

The characters in Sandra Simonds’s poems frequently struggle with a forced anonymity: instead of having names, they go by a title or function, like “Wife,” “Dog,” “Pediatrician,” “Mother.” At the same time that these identities are constrained, however, the poems speak with forceful, often violent personality, splashing across the page, doubling over on themselves, prizing histrionics and sudden changes of register above the controlled order of a consistent voice. Study of a poem by Wislawa Szymborska can come just lines after “his wife’s band / drugged my husband / with PCP-laced walnut / cookies about ten / years ago in Dallas.” Diction shifts and flips; references dangle; the sensational lurks around every corner.

Mother Was a Tragic Girl challenges the notion of a fixed identity for the persona in a poem, using a fluid, high-voltage language to disrupt the orderly notion of a speaking self. We change from moment to moment, so why shouldn’t the “person” behind the poem alter from line to line, even as s/he accumulates? The result is a compelling vision of the self as a thing in flux, grappling with responsibility, desire, and social and historical context.

Simonds favors the long sentence, often matched with a short line to accelerate the reader through as many registers as possible. And she is dogged in her insistence that the speaker not settle into a stable identity, as in “Skyhook,” which begins in the voice of a pregnant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who reveals that “my real name is Geraldine Ferraro / and that is the name of the woman who / got me pregnant.” The poem justifies its own method in it nears its conclusion:

FYI, Edgar Allen Poe wrote an excellent
short story on a case of mistaken
identity where the ego creates
and projects itself onto the basket-
ball court which mirrors the political
arena where Ms. Ferraro spent most
of her formative years

But even here, Simonds still manages to subvert any claims of agency by attributing this reveal to Poe, not to herself.

At the center of the collection is “Strays: A Love Story,” a ranging narrative poem of domestic struggle. Even as the characters remain anonymous, the developing story of loss and longing gives them shape and texture. Simonds interrogates the domestic sphere, pointing to the anonymity and mute functionality of figures like mother and wife, even as we see them in the intimacies of their own particular lives. Although the line meanders all over the page here, an order girds the whole: Each of the 17 sections of the poem is an acrostic, built on quotes from William Blake or George Oppen. These powerful influences make Simonds’ work all the more impressive for the fact that her voice picks up so little resonance from either ancestor. 

The later poems in Mother have more of a clear and sustained attention and focus on identity in both the personal and global spheres: what passes from one generation to the next, the problems and responsibilities of pregnancy and motherhood, and how we fit individually into a history that silences its victims. This is beautifully executed in “DuckRabbit,” which focuses on an Auschwitz survivor who “wrote his biography on / a torn label of a can of con- / densed milk.” Simonds unveils this text “landed on the other / side of history” through a translation within the poem, which proves to be as sonorous and strange as anything in her diction:

                                                  It is full of sun, this slit into the out
                                          there. Duckrabbit
                      duckrabbit duckrabbit. Into is so bright it will make
                      you vomit. I am the figure, a screwed
figment, a reckoning shade, life’s filaments, spare
         time’s one statement called ‘once upon.’

No sooner has Simonds presented this utterance than she contests it—“Can you believe that’s his whole life story?”—and then twists it further, retranslating it into a new strangeness, doubly removed from the original experience, where the bizarre idea of a duckrabbit—the ambiguous image used in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—becomes the elusory centerpiece, the one thing that stays.

All of the poems are framed by Simonds’s brash and sometimes-violent voice, which becomes the jagged vehicle for intense examinations of the self in the world. She treats individual characters with brutality and is willing to display herself unflinchingly. But under the noise and chaos, Simonds investigates identity with real conceptual grit. Simonds is ever-watchful of her own poeticizing: “anyone who even attempts to write / a serious poem reveals him or herself to be / completely anti-intellectual,” she writes at the outset of the book. In place of seriousness, these poems pick up and recast scraps of speech, creating and destroying with a “cyclonic energy” that delivers a strange and electric voice.

*

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in reviews


Notes from Irrelevance

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

by Anselm Berrigan
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nick Sturm

“the hope / that we may remain / deeply unknowable / to one another…”

Anselm Berrigan’s book-length poem Notes From Irrelevance is a 65-page stanza with lines between two and seven words in length, the result of which is a continual column of language. Berrigan’s short lines, often built of long, tangential sentences, are crafted to be as colloquial as they are rigorous. Continually enjambed, these sentences are intricate machines of grammatical, intellectual, and emotional force. For instance, Notes From Irrelevance begins with a sentence 18 lines long. The subject and verb of that sentence, “I came,” do not appear until line 18:

Armed with an early
termination fee, a
delusion with regard
to neither denying
nor being of the past,
a lazy fly to center,
a transcription of
a stain on the soul
of the off-looker…
armless, disregarding
the mediated affect
of trees and their
privileged iterations
of objective fallacy in
the face of impassive
pregame nihilisms
tuned to talk’s vanishing
outline, I came.
Having received visual
evidence of the life
I was meant to lead (1-2)

This periodic sentence serves, rather appropriately, as the equivalent of pulling a “return to start” card. Berrigan makes clear from the beginning that he’s not interested in entertaining a passive reader. The flux between the languages of consumerism (“termination fee”), popular culture (“a lazy fly to center”), and an altered literary theory (“objective fallacy” echos “affective fallacy”), all colored in a quasi-heroic tone of spiritual transformation and historical renewal, creates a cultural and emotional texture that absorbs attention as much as it immediately reverberates back through the book’s title, making one just as aware of the book in their hands as the neo-capitalist culture it is a product of and reaction to. But in this flux a valenced clarity emerges in which the speaker, plagued by tension between internal and external demands, is frustrated with his inability to act despite his resolve (he is both “armed” and “armless”), and some vision, some cumulative moment, has revealed “evidence of the life / I was meant to lead.”

Berrigan’s manipulation of sentence structure and the poem’s barrages of erratic lyricism mixed with direct statement make this book a welcome challenge. It can be read casually, and the book provides enough anchors to do so, but for the reader who wants to truly meet Berrigan in this book, one needs to be physically, intellectually, and vocally active. I did not feel like I was living up to the potential this book engenders until I read it out loud, alone, walking around my house, from start to finish. Notes From Irrelevance is an experience in, or at the very least an approximation of, occupying Berrigan’s head, a space that instills a sense of profound artistic and political urgency as well as uncompromising personal judgment. The poem flows seamlessly between extended threads of thought on what it means to be a poet, father, husband, and citizen, into narrative digressions, recognition of paradox, moments of brave confession, and the rupture of skillfully constructed rants, all propelled by the belief that “I do not trust / the sanity of my vessel, / nor that of metaphor.” Berrigan is not attempting to unite the world around him–an impossible task–but rather to acknowledge the ontological fissures that plague and define his always moving “I”:

…I can
admire a kind of
comparison at times,
the kind that ultimately
collapses under the
weight of difference’s
brilliance and the hope
that we may remain
deeply unknowable
to one another… (40)

Here, Berrigan recognizes metaphor for what it is: a sophisticated kind of error, an incomplete, synthetic allegiance created to mask the unspeakable diversity of experience, a concept expressed more straight-forwardly in the lines “Blank is blank / is blank is blank” (11). Arguing, rather, for mystery and the reassessment of the value of meaning, Berrigan asks us to passionately interrogate ourselves and our reactions to a world in which delusion is the vehicle of ideology. In keeping with these aesthetic principles, Notes acknowledges the process of its own making and its own fallible, complex structure, its “frameworks of / brutal delicacy” (31). Swept up in the constantly turning voice of Notes, one feels simultaneously charmed and invigorated as Berrigan’s “I” expands beyond the self into a larger consciousness struggling for agency amidst the hollowness of contemporary America.

…I yell on
occasion to reestablish
presence, to push my
voice back into a quiver
of no control… (39)

With the voice as last defense, the poet’s outbursts become the articulation and defeat of his own irrelevance, both as poet and human being. Indeed, packed into a tight scroll of language that continually rebels against its own form, one could effectively describe the whole of Notes as “a quiver / of no control” (32). But the thing is that Berrigan is always in control–of the line, of the sentence, of the digressions–all in attempt to show that poetry is not a space for tidy representation, but a sprawling performance of thought and experience, a body of vocabularies.

Reveling in the mundane and the personal, and choosing not to secede the political and the cultural from the self, Notes is a call to arms for our ability as individuals and as a heterogonous community to reimagine how we live, and to boldly believe in that life:

…What is most
ordinary every day is
defeating the desire to
harden into respectable
indifference. (60)

Even in the midst of such rhetorical intensity, Berrigan is wise enough, and empathetic enough, to show us that although being kind to the world means, at times, not being kind to oneself, that we are capable of great tenderness: “I sometimes still put my / shoes on the wrong feet / not to mention Sylvie’s” (50). In such moments, and Notes From Irrelevance does not shy from them, Berrigan shows us that nothing is more subversive, or more necessary, than tenderness.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


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

***

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.”

*

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.

*

 

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.”

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


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.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


« Older Entries