Posts Tagged ‘7.5 stars’

Neighbor

Monday, November 8th, 2010

by Rachel Levitsky
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009
Reviewed by Marjorie Tesser

“completely in my head / all in my head ”

The relationship between neighbors includes both proximity and separation, in and out of balance. More prism than lens, Rachel Levitsky’s gem of a book, Neighbor, explores the subject from several perspectives. Situated in a neighborhood that alternates between benign and sinister, Levitsky’s many-layered work contains varied takes on the self in relation to the other, building on ideas introduced in her prior full-length book of poetry, Under the Sun.

The book is styled as a log, with entries composed over two years. Levitsky sets up an architecture — a neighborhood — with headings for each entry, consisting of a place, or series of places, public, semi-public, or private, (“bed/room/square sky”) and a date (the entries are not in chronological order, but are related by subject matter or tone). Thus the poems are located in time, place and perspective.

At first, the poems appear focused on the author’s apartment building and her urban, diverse, pre-gentrified neighborhood. There are allusions to race, class, gender, and religion, and to public perceptions, suspicion and attempts at conciliation. The neighbor (or neighbors, as both male and female neighbors are referred to as “neighbor”), always unnamed, appears a sinister or unfriendly figure. Levitsky then ups the ante (anti?) by referring to herself as a “United Statesian,” thus locating her “neighborhood” on a grander scale.

An early poem, “Neighbor,” shows the multiplicity of examinations the book assays:

Neighbor is a long page
about the neighbor

why it is called “Confession”
or if it’s called “My Neighbor”

or what, if anything, I am.
I have ideas.

At the time I type this
I’ve been at it for one year

the last six months
completely in my head all in my head

where there are many levels.
The problem is whether they

are connected or if
they are levels

at all. “A level” may connote
a piece in a unified structure,

or unity of disconnected parts
firmly housed. By what?

The State or me
or if I am the State.

I am a collection
of desire

precariously
housed.

While the author condemns the ‘confessional’ as uninteresting, she has no reservations about revealing private mental processes; as she modestly states, “I have ideas.” Her explorations of alienation, detachment, sexuality, philosophy and cognitive theory are profound, fascinating, contradictory and sometimes funny. It becomes clear that the self/other dichotomy is not solely external, as Levitsky ponders the self as both subject and object.

One of the joys of this book is the spirit of inquiry it displays, the shifting perspectives and positing. So many sides are presented that the work is never in danger of becoming doctrinaire or didactic. Yet there is an arc and resolution to this extent: in “Blotter,” a poem near the end of the book, the others are named, are friends. Perhaps innate unease with multiplicity can transmogrify into acceptance.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Marjorie Tesser, Rachel Levitsky, Ugly Duckling Presse
Posted in reviews

Dead Ahead

Monday, November 1st, 2010

by Ben Doller
Fence Books 2010
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“Each thing charged / with ought bends –”

Ben Doller’s new book, Dead Ahead, is, dare I say,…fun. The dedication is “hey Sandra,” and the opening quotation is from a piece of colloquial writing by a seventeenth-century sea captain who explored the Pacific. The opening poem, “What Do You Do,” is a greeting between narrator and narrator. The writing is immediately fanciful and fast-paced:

What do you do.

Well. I tie population
knots in a length
of baling twine
laughing at mister
water & my, well –

(our elation
ship swell) –

Once you are started it is easy to be carried along from sound to sound and poem to poem. There is a vivid coherence of image and thought without the feeling of being brought into some writer’s overly-intense personal world. Doller uses a fair balance of sea-faring images, abstraction and personal interjection. His social commentary is quick and broad enough to apply to more than just current social woes.

What makes Dead Ahead strongest, though, is that concepts and sounds are well run-aground together. Piled internal rhymes and staccato beats keep the reader bouncing over the page:

A weight
A stick of space. A beam. Of zilch.
A swivelhead. Reverse trend
in cellular conglomeration. A cult.
An inner target. An origin disorder.
Send the word
send the word.
Telegram. Missile command.

(from “Pointing Habit”)

For all of feeling and sounding good (and good-sounding tongue-twisters that seem to move off of the page, e.g., “hotwater heater heating water hotter”), Doller also includes lines of a more personal nature that do not break up the central coherence of Dead Ahead:

were I were

steadfast as art

(from “On Vacation”)

but I have no city
an outline plus stains

a map of trade
routes winds & a market

community a target
humanity niche

I get so twitchy
when they call themselves me

(from “No City”)

Even when making serious points, as on the individual and community, Doller does not take himself too seriously. Even though much of the imagery used is reminiscent of pirates and exploration (ships, waves, squabs, holds, galleons, sails, citrus, etc.) his treatment of the images is light but not sarcastic. The strength of the book is in Doller’s obvious joy of words. The crafting is careful but not cumbersome.

The best example of this joy is the final poem, “Each Thing Changed,” where Doller jams sounds and words together to create two (or three) simultaneous poems. Here are the first few lines:

Each thing charged
with ought bends –

breaks light, which
is ought but

part star. Ought
is, I see

in the thick
book, a vulgar corruption.

Someone heard
someone say

an aught when
they said a

naught. Each thing,
charged with a

naught, bends,
breaks light bad.

The book ultimately moves through multiple formats and landscapes, moods and methods. What remains consistent is that Dead Ahead sounds good and feels good. Doller will delight you and remind you of poetry’s potential to create with language. Here, language pushes thought, not the other way around.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ben Doller, Fence Books, Matt Soucy
Posted in reviews

Malilenas

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

by Garrett Kalleberg
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“And it all comes crashing down, / or worse, that it, the poem works ”

Few poetry books define their parameters as rigorously as Garrett Kalleberg’s Malilenas, and fewer still find within a system as generative. A slim poetic catalog of weights and measurements, Malilenas examines how we impose order through routine quantifiers—from binary code to cellular biology, from calendars to stock markets, from gender to semiotics—and yet how artistic expression and human connections transcend order. These tight, funny, aphoristic lines search for the hole in the language, the open door through which meaning emerges. Acknowledging the pervasiveness of numbers in the human psyche, Kalleberg questions where true originality and inspiration may arise. Exploring eternal questions of the sequentiality of experience in terms suggested by this country’s recent economic meltdown and military escalation, Malilenas is a book of fiscal existentialism.

Because measuring systems are so frequently binary, the book opens with the notion of refraction, using numbered poems in notebook form throughout. Twinning and mirroring, the self multiplies and expands, but also becomes dilute:

I grow increasingly
bright and dull, alternately
adding up to alternately
taking away (3.)

In this early poem we also get a sense of direct address to both the reader and to a partner, seeding the metaphor of artistic creativity battling language as two people battling circumstances, which is more fully developed later in the book. Using the systems our culture has provided for us, whether that includes actuarial charts, the NASDAQ index, or language, Malelinas posits whether it is possible to escape the assumptions buried within to find true meaning, and if meaning is owned by the individual or by the culture.

“In all things are numbers.” Finding puns and metaphors at virtually every turn, these poems are about how we count. On one hand, to quantify and measure is to separate, make discrete, or reduce. On the other hand, to quantify and measure is to seek essence, being or unity. The invented system that breaks down meaning into units, that divides, is also shared; how much does its operation connect us, and how much does its existence limit discovery? Taking us through various levels of quantifiers, Kalleberg praises the democracy of the cell, and discovers promise in the cycle of creation.

Temporality has long been the province of poetry. How the mind knows and how the self interprets the world is regarded as a sequential experience. Moments come to us one after the other, thoughts come to us in order, and we lay words down in rows. This incremental nature can explain how otherwise smart or good people can do dumb or bad things; being at midpoint in their trajectories, they only have part of the picture, half of the story, on which to base their actions. Poets often aspire to ascend beyond chronology, capturing a fulsome glimpse of eternity, some reassuring sense of pattern, or what the medievals considered God’s knowledge. Unfortunately, human approximations are clumsy tools for handling the divine:

The first garden in the god
wrote the leaves of your letter
perverted by language (11.)

If language itself is sequential, Kalleberg jokes that perhaps “advance penance reverses penury.” Grammar itself can be at odds: a “sentence” is both a unit of thought and a punishment. Meaning comes in at unexpected turns, when language degrades or syntax dissolves, or when poems take off on their own:

A misplaced comma,
an unmatched parenthesis, an error
in spelling, or worse, calling an object
without first instantiating the object.
And it all comes crashing down,
or worse, that it, the poem works

but an incorrect result is produced (12).

Kalleberg questions authority at its most basic level: where does meaning come in? Does it reside in the poet’s original intention or the reader’s perception? Is it weakened or strengthened by the shared systems of language, etymology and syntax? The nature of systems is adherence; play by the rules and we will be rewarded. Ironically, mistakes, slips of the tongue, lead to new insight: “now on one can hour you.” But perhaps the poet is so steeped he gives voice to something larger than himself and his original intention: “I’m asking you, / am I so manipulated / to get it?” The outcome is always unpredictable, and may simply leave “a poet / on the verge of poetastisizing.” Perhaps in desperation, he offers a contract between writer and reader:

                19.

                The diseased hand in the good hand
holds the pen.

               The good hand in the diseased hand
holds the book.

The book holds the bilious inks
in a book called Bile.

It is a good book
and good bile even so
unable to relinquish spleen.

And the ink squishing in the word
unable to discharge of all debts the good
hand that put it there.

Malilenas is itself a product of its era, humorously observing the vicissitudes of the stock market and our conception of money:

34.
The sun moved:
it’s 3:05 PM—money in the bank!
Spent by 3:07 trying to hold on to 3:06.
Thank you for having been there.

Influenced by the past decade’s militaristic parlance of escalation, surge, and reduction, Kalleberg offers funny and biting critique throughout. Taking aim at the obvious faults in the wall, Kalleberg also embraces the productive failures of language and relationships, discovering that beauty may result:

27.
I’m glad we met,
says the joy of fucked-up luck
to a beautiful disaster.

In regards to which beauty, wounded,
remains silent.

Inspiration results from breakdowns and accidents. Love is an ineffable collision of beings, a collusion of motives, just as creativity is some collision of intention and tools, a collusion of artist and culture. The contract between writer and reader is that the process, once finished, starts all over again.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Garrett Kalleberg, James Cihlar, Ugly Duckling Presse
Posted in reviews

Human Chain

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

“So this is what an afterlife can come to?”

In Human Chain, Seamus Heaney explores the innumerable ways in which human experience is more shared than not. Heritage and familial lineage, long motifs in Heaney’s work, are here concerned with aging and generational cycles. In “Album,” the poet evokes memories — “Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life” — that recall his youth and relationship with his father. He details his father’s confused and helpless last days during which the roles were reversed and son had to support father. He calls this physical contact “an embrace in Elysium.”

Heaney also sees human inheritance through a broader lens. He often alludes to classical mythology. This is perhaps to infuse the everyday with the epic, but also to show how human daily life is and always has been sacred and largely universal. Mostly, Heaney focuses on the human experience of work, with particular attention to scholarly labours. “Colum Cille Cecinit” is a translation of an 11^th/12^th-century poem about the 6^th-century scholar/saint Colmcille and demonstrates the eternal sameness of scholarly work: writing utensil ever in hand, “hand cramped from penwork.”

A similar attitude appears in “Hermit Songs,” where Heaney evokes the sensual experience of book-work, remembering with amusement his schoolboy days and the pride and reverence he took in study. Colmcille, or Columba, is a recurring character in this collection. Perhaps Heaney is in some way paying homage to the work this man began some 1,500 years ago near Heaney’s birthplace of County Derry, Northern Ireland.

In Human Chain, Heaney writes mainly in free verse, often in tercets, in poems number-divided by parts. Aurally, it is a masterpiece. Internal rhyme is interspersed. Ever the linguist, Heaney plays, using words like “skire” and “snottery” and others that even the OED can’t account for. While there are often multilingual allusions at play, Heaney never leaves them indecipherable, and the reader often benefits from an enhanced vocabulary. His love affair with language indelibly affords his writing with an almost endless variety, even as he comes back to beloved and heavy words like “lug,” “purchase” and “nib” repeatedly.

Humans are essentially a part of the natural world. Nature is central in many of these poems, often with a mind of its own. Heaney begins the collection with “Had I Not Been Awake,” a poem about a wind that rises over the roof of his house, setting him all “a-patter.” The wind, it seems, is a reminder to be mindful of nature. Nature headlines again in “An Old Refrain,” a nursery rhyme that delights in lush, hungry vegetation and the words that describe it. In “Derry Derry Down,” Heaney uses the sensual experience of picking berries to represent early sexual encounters. In “A Herbal,” which is an adaptation of Guillevic’s “Herbier de Bretagne,” Heaney hears and gives voice to grass and bracken. He presents nature as thriving, irrespective and unconcerned with human existence. Saint Columba saw oak trees and elderberry bushes just as we do today. Heaney reveres nature, presenting it as almost enchanted and certainly with its own agency. Nature’s constant presence and changingness teaches us that our own worries are often ephemeral and trivial.

It is not only the natural world that Heaney views as enchanted. Man’s quotidian experience is magical and important. He evokes this idea in several ways. Through his allusions to the classics, a bus ride becomes a voyage in the river Styx, with the driver playing Charon in “Route 110.,” while a near-death trip in an ambulance becomes a ride with the Charioteer of Delphi in “Chanson d’Aventure.”

Paradoxically, Heaney manages to portray life in its most unflinchingly human terms. By unapologetically engaging the reader’s senses, Heaney takes us into some of his most “up close” memories. In “Eeelworks,” the speaker remembers sitting next to a classmate in summer who reeked of eel oil, as well as his own first experience of skinning an eel, which was “like a silk stocking at a practiced touch.”

Heaney is also concerned with location, particularly Northern Ireland, where he lived until he was a young man. Here it is portrayed as largely bucolic and wild, infused with childhood memories. There is plenty of mention of the troubles that were so destructive to that land. Lorries rev in the distance in “Uncoupled,” which contains allusions to Caithleen ni Houlihan, a figure of Irish folklore. “Wood Road” deals specifically with a road plagued with “militiamen… harassing Mulhollandstown” that the speaker walks down to “the hunger striker’s wake.” The same road for him is forever painted in blood; a young girl is killed after being hit by a “speed-merchant,” or a lorry.

The speaker in “The Baler” pauses to revel in the glory of a dusk “eldorado” only to simultaneously recall a man named Derek Hill saying “he could no longer bear to watch the sun going down.”

The title poem “Human Chain” reveals Heaney’s agenda of “unburdening,” releasing the loads that weigh us down. But the overarching message coming from Heaney’s homeland — a bloody and fractured place — is that we are all more linked than not. And in spite of this heaviness, there is a distinct sentiment of joie de vivre that pervades nearly every poem. Heaney rejoices in the sensory experience of being alive.

Appropriately, aging and death are common themes in this work; Heaney views both as new adventures as in “Chanson d’Aventure” and “In the Attic” in which he likens aging to Jim Hawkins’s adventures in Treasure Island:

A cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable

This voracious fascination with the seemingly mundane is quite typical of the rest of the collection. In what may be my favorite poem of the book, “Wraiths,” Heaney finds himself taken in by Sidhe, or fairy people:

We stood under the hill, out of the day
But faced towards the daylight, holding hands,
Inhaling the excavated bank.

He finds magic at a parking lot bus stop, on his way to the Gaeltacht “between languages” and is reincarnated on the bus. And finally, in the last part, the speaker waits to hear the “learner” of a band:

Making an injured music for us alone,
Early-to-beds, white-night absentees
Open-eared to this day.

Heaney unfailingly leaves his reader open-eared.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Erin Lynn, FSG, Seamus Heaney
Posted in reviews

Flood Songs

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

by Sherwin Bitsui
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Vernon Lallman

“its owner — a leash without a hand — “

Sherwin Bitsui’s collection Flood Songs is the kind of book one carries in a picnic basket to Central Park on a tranquil summer afternoon before beginning to negotiate a seeming balance between the natural world and the human-constructed world. Bitsui is originally from a Navajo reservation in White Pine, Arizona, and his elegant poetry compares and contrasts his native Navajo myths, customs and traditions with urban American life. The poet creates a diverse and rich poetic landscape by interweaving open imagery, time and thought, as in these lines:

You trace deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons
in the grocery line where the Navajo name for Pheiades
is pinched and shredded,
and we dart away thinking: This is escape, it’ll be over soon,
we have never bothered to grieve, over… soon…

(51)

The speaker alludes to the fact that a culture is losing its identity to modern American life. Now the tribe goes to the supermarket to buy “deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons” instead of hunting for it themselves. Yet the grocery line isn’t entirely villainized; the individual is as culpable.

Flood Songs is a series of untitled poems. Each page contains an independent poem. The poems vary from just one to more than 20 lines per page. There are a few blank pages throughout; as Bitui writes: “I bite my eye shut between these songs” (4). Yet the book progresses with the inevitability of the wind and time it depicts. Its iconography ranges from alarm clocks, corn and bluebirds, to red-tail hawks paired with gasoline. In addition, the poet’s use of native language (in this passage, “Dinetah,” the native homeland) contributes to an open, chant-like rhythm:

Dinetah—scratched out
from the eye with juniper bark—
hunches with engine sweat
curling out of its collar,
its owner—a leash without a hand—
bleeds gasoline
when lathered with a blur of red bricks.

(59)

The narrator speaks with much sincerity about the implications of modern life on his culture; however, his imagery — skies, birds, development – is his hopeful origin. He suggets an abstract loyalty in his last line: “The [grocery] line was busy when I picked that ax and chose the first tree to chop down” (71). Generally, his metaphorical birds, open cliffs and broad vision of human destruction leave the reader in a state of serenity.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Sherwin Bitsui, Vernon Lallman
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Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

by Joshua Poteat
University of Georgia Press 2010
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

” the wild / horses / guts spread / across the field “

In 1979, Alice Aycock designed a sculpture that resembles the foundation of a peculiar west coast house, or simply like a boat stuck in time. The sculpture is the size of two apartments—thirty eight feet long, eight feet high—and puts the uncomplicated tool list of steel, wood, pulleys and a revolving drum on display. The Machine That Makes the World floats in the Sheldon Gallery at the University of Nebraska; it is also the title of Joshua Poteat’s newest book, which transmogrifies J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science into poems.

The book opens with an epigraph from Fernando Pessoa: “Science is nothing more than a children’s game at dusk, / a desire to catch the shadows of birds and stop / the shadows of grass in the wind.” A gear right-away leaps into the prologue-esque poem, “Illustrating the Illustrators,” where Poteat’s protagonist (perhaps Heck, perhaps the lyrical poet his self) claims that the “pencil” is “a machine,” as the last line seizes the reader’s shirt with a carcass grip: “We said, If death is like this, then give us more.”

A close spot later, “Illustrating the Seventeenth Century” (interestingly following in the footsteps of the hyper-realist Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal) begins in a day’s residue: “Evening comes, black wig of roots after the storm // Dandelions cataract the ditches, deserted as stars.” Later in the poem, the question “What is suffering?” gets retorted in this way “. . . It just means too much rain / can make a weed drunk with courage [. . . ] Given’s as good as gone.”

Each poem in the primary sections gracefully appraises one of Heck’s “plates,” (illustrations, basically)—black and white shaded diagrams of hand skeletons, open doors, light-ray angles, planetary orbits, bridges, telescopes, et cetera. Some “plates” reappear in facsimile form as an appendix to Poteat’s book. Heck’s quite the wormhole, having no Wikipedia page, while basically being historically evaporated; he thus emerges as an extremely interesting choice for Poteat in the sense that the emotional spectrum Heck’s “plates” conjure are not bright or flowery but perversely ornate, very similar to an Aycock sculpture.

A majority of the “Illustrating . . .” (as almost all are titled) poems reek of the cow-patch where Nietzsche and Emerson possibly stomped and danced together, seldom if at all tiring of the surrounding landscape’s guts. Poteat rarely desists from disgustingly direct truth-telling, posing as a borrower, not a manipulator and putting things back in their heavily original places while subtly juxtaposing them from the changes they’ve endured over time. This kind of licensed pilfering remains an inward act but also shares the American purpose to bastardize the outdoors and, simultaneously, forget that farms are being turned into bleak gray laboratories.

There is also a lyrical scrupulousness throughout, best exemplified in the poem “Illustrating the Thirteen Transits of Mercury in the Nineteenth Century.” This is a long, sequenced split-series prose poem dealing with Heck’s drawing of Mercury’s annual solar angles. One portion of the sequence looks like this:

Mercury asleep under the translator’s wife

I’ve never been alive. I mean fully, as a barn
becomes itself as it burns. I’ve been trying to see
how long I could keep a thing like that forgotten.
It wouldn’t be right to give it away now.

The conceptual framework continually stays in tact, in part because of the primary setup (Heck, Aycock), but also because the alteration of poetic form and content is parcel to what David Wojahn pointed out to be a “Cabinet of Wonders.” That cabinet contains intestines, moths, slugs, footprints, grass blades, gnats, briars, pigs, puffbirds, moorcocks, wrens, fireflies, squirrels, and a “fat ale-wife”. It’s an insane, boiling soup that never seems to violently erupt. One of the better perusals of that cabinet appears in “Illustrating an Answer to a Question Through the Order in Which a Bird Reveals Letters by Eating the Grains Set on Top of Them.”

I do not need muffins. The simple things most please me:
                                    six wrens climb their grass ladders each evening

before gnats gather, the goat rakes out a place to sleep

                among the pines, pink moths chew wool scraps,

and the gypsy boys piss into canoes at the bridge
                                If you are the Lord then we are equally men.

Here, Poteat exhibits a gristled care similar to Larry Levis, Charles Wright, or even Etheridge Knight yet completely separates his self from that vein of conciliatory conscience-analysis and draws attention to the nominal nature that throbs right outside the front room’s window. The surrounding creatures are, for the most part, commonplace organisms that have evolved alongside human beings, and thus, have evolved with the machine. They beg us to concentrate on that very notion.

Poteat does get some things wrong, especially when he tows the perforation of meaning/non-meaning. In that sense, he periodically implements a questionable sentimentality that lazily pours a varnish over clichés. Examples: “for what can one do but let the world happen?” and “Our god then was not the same god now.” and “all I could give, I gave.” and “Always keep the brightest for last.”

Some folks may also find trouble with the variance in form; he moves from indented choreographic tabular line breaks to prose blocks to (it’s true) sparsely spaced erasures. Poteat presents an appendix which acts as the final section of poetry which also erases many of the poems which appeared earlier on in the book. It’s a fascinating experiment that also permits a new reading of the preceding poems while training the normally-prepped reader for a fresh language world. Look here, at “the ebb”:

I              had enough of
                         the evening
the wild
                                               horse’s
                guts            spread
    across the                                      field
        saying,             here,
                                       love ,          here.

The breathing room that the stringing of poems into sections and appendices allows makes reading the entire book in one sitting much simpler, compartmentalized as it may appear. Yet, also, one could read a single section per day. If the entire book were to be in prose block format or set as the above erasures sans segments, it would possess nowhere near the same lively affectations that it does as it is in its full form.

I recently interviewed Joshua Poteat, an incredibly modest man that seemed to see things in a realistically uncomplicated sort of way. He also seemed to treat the non-popularity of poetry with a healthy, gray practicality. The greatest triumph of his book as an objet d’art is its delicate recognition of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “the only horrible thing in the world is ennui.” Perhaps the gnats and the fireflies are full of more crazed existence than most of us.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Joshua Poteat, Ken L. Walker, University of Georgia Press
Posted in reviews

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

by Kay Ryan
Grove Press 2010
Reviewed by David Gruber

“the greenest saddest strongest / kind of hope”

At the beginning of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, Faust, exhausted from his tormented encounter with Gretchen, finds renewal in contemplating the “changing-unchanged arch” (Stuart Atkins’s translation) of a rainbow formed by a mountain waterfall. Reading Kay Ryan’s volume of new and selected poems, The Best of It, offers us a similar experience of change that remains grounded in concrete and specific concerns, both in terms of Ryan’s themes and in the long view that we get of her stylistic evolution over the last sixteen years.

Ryan’s poems as represented in this volume are almost all short, and in many cases presented in a single, highly focused stanza. The natural world, animals and abstractions are her central subjects; we get few poems here about people in anything other than a general sense. The whole body of Ryan’s work reflects an impulse towards aphorism, even in the occasional case where the intention towards meaning of the aphoristic form is subverted by the poet, which may be why her poems are able to pull us away from the frenetic worlds of work, media and society. These poems offer us the opportunity to contemplate the image or thought at their heart without distraction, with the result that, in the best of the poems collected here, we are able to see afresh the fragment of the world that Ryan focuses on and to consider the ways in which the world, in the form of these fragments, shapes us. Take, for example, the poem “Expectations,” selected from The Niagara River:

We expect rain
to animate this
creek: these rocks
to harbor gurgles,
these pebbles to
creep downstream
a little, those leaves
to circle in the
eddy, the stains
and gloss of wet.
The bed is ready
but no rain yet.

This poem focuses our attention onto not only the creekbed and the creek’s absence, but also onto the assumptions about the natural world that our minds operate within without questioning. After all, if the creek is a dry bed, is it still a creek? What makes it such except our ability to image the soil changed by its encounter with water, whether the water is present at this moment or not? Ryan works on and against our expectations and assumptions about the world throughout this book, exploring the tension between changing and unchanged. Much of the time her handling of this tension is masterful, and productive of a pathos that leaves us, like Faust, refreshed. In a book of over 260 pages, the majority of the poems are satisfying in this way, and choosing examples is almost merely a matter of opening the book.

However, there is a surprisingly substantial minority of poems here that are not satisfying, and which strike me as a little too clever, such as a new poem “Bitter Pill”:

A bitter pill
doesn’t need
to be swallowed
to work. Just
reading your name
on the bottle
does the trick.
As though there
were some anti-
placebo effect.
As though the
self were eager
to be wrecked.

This poem, and others like it, feel too light for the emotional weight that Ryan asks them to carry in their conclusions. The title and the phrase “anti-placebo effect” gesture towards a feeling or an observation that deserves to be expressed with more than a cliché or a cliché turned on its head. Poems like this suggest a desire to score points with the reader by producing wry laughter at the connection between title and poem, but unlike “Expectations,” “Bitter Pill” doesn’t give us enough reason to be “wrecked” by the poem’s final lines. The aphoristic impulse that runs through all of her poetry in this instance gets stuck in the realm of observational humor, and also subverts the power of her more genuinely humorous poems.

A more consistent pleasure in this book is in seeing the evolution of Ryan’s “changing-unchanged” poetic style. The selected poems in this book are drawn from four previous collections stretching back to 1994, and while the earliest and latest poems share much in the way of poetic effect, primarily enjambment used to shift meaning from line to line, and a gentle scheme of occasional rhyme, the language of Ryan’s poetry has transformed from the supple and rich long(er) lines of Flamingo Watching (as in these from “A Certain Kind of Eden”:

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope”)

to the two- or three-word lines of Niagara River and the new poems. Reading through this collection, we see the longer lines of the earlier poems start to give ground, and eventually recede entirely, in the face of the narrow lines of Ryan’s most recent work. At times we can see this even in a single poem, where short lines give way to long or vice versa, particularly in selections from 1996’s Elephant Rocks.

And yet, despite these changes, there is an unchanged quality to Ryan’s language. All of her poems exhibit a confidence in word choice and a spare, necessary quality, in which each word develops the themes and ideas of the poem. Ryan has no use for tangent or wordplay for the sake of tangent or wordplay alone, and even the genuinely funny poems (and even those which feel to me too clever) present themselves as important, which underscores the value of humor in the work of poetry.

This collection offers an interesting overview of Ryan’s career, and the effect of the poetry, taken individually or in short bursts, is to help us look at the world as if it were new. I’m not sure, however, that I enjoyed her work as much as I might if there had been less of it – at times I found the sheer number of poems presented in this collection to be overwhelming, and such a presentation grates against the contemplative mood that the individual poems seem to call for. Nevertheless, there is a great beauty in almost all of Ryan’s work, and The Best of It would make a valuable addition to the collection where Ryan is yet unrepresented.

Tags: 7.5 stars, David Gruber, Grove Press, Kay Ryan
Posted in reviews

The Bodyfeel Lexicon

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

by Jessica Bozek
Switchback Books 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

“the rounding up / of self, the animal coiling.”

Although most poems in Jessica Bozek’s debut are phantoms that evade unambigious comprehension, Bozek creates a tangibly pensive and doleful mood that saturates. The Bodyfeel Lexicon’s concept provides a semi-stable framework for readers. In “The Peary Assemblage: On the Remnant Correspondence and Ephemera of an Unidentified Wolf and Leon Szklar” – a ficticious editor’s note to the collection – we learn that “Wolf” and “Leon” (also referred to as “Leo,” “Szklar,” “Leopard Szklar”) are the primary speakers in the poems. The note explains that the correspondence between Wolf and Leon Szklar, two lovers, was found in a wolf den by a third party – the narrator of the editor’s note. The letters and other fragments, we’re told, were concealed in the skin of a caribou.

The subject of much of the letters and fragments can be labeled transformation. Human beings are in a constant state of becoming, and this fact is implicit in and central to these poems. The series of letters begins with childhood memories. In one of the first epistolary poems in the collection – a letter from Wolf to Leo – Wolf confesses a deep need for a protector, though whatever she requires protection from seems largely imagined. Wolf notes that when she was a child, a “bag lady lived in the space between the wall & [her] bed.” She feared the bag lady. Her fear is the product of a typical youngster’s developing imagination. Like so many children that sleep with the protection of stuffed animals, Wolf finds comfort and safety with her lion pillow. Wolf says of the lion on her pillow, “ If ever [the bag lady] tried to crawl up from that narrow space, then he would raise his head from the pillow, lift it high through the opening & roar.” Part of growing up is learning one’s limitations, identifying fears and gathering forces or defenses against that which may harm.

Throughout these letters, Wolf and Leon share fears and childhood memories; however, the letters often don’t seem to speak directly to one another. Each speaker gets lost in his or her own preoccupations. Both Leo and Wolf are portrayed as solitary and isolated. Their letters are their only true connection to one another, to another human being. While they address each other in their letters, each seems to be speaking to his or herself rather than the other. In fact, Wolf especially seems to be willfully extracting herself from society or any kind of human community. In one letter she implores Leo to “Divide with [her].” In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry learns that Voldemort has stored parts of himself (his soul, his essence, his core) in other people and objects. These objects are referred to as horcruxes. In a similar way, Wolf and Leon seem to be storing parts of their consciousness in these letters and eventually in each other. It’s a form of protection. By dividing one’s self into many parts and hiding these parts in people and objects outside of the self, one can remain safely detached.

But even detachment has boundaries. Wolf desires further transformation – animal transformation. In a letter to Leo, she expresses the desire to metamorphose: “In the winter my tail will keep me warm. Ingenious, the rounding up / of self, the animal coiling.” She gathers herself as an animal would do to keep itself warm, but for humans the act might be more indicative of the need for protection – safety rather than body heat. Because Wolf has no human contact beyond her correspondence with Leo, her animalism is exaggerated.

Leo undergoes his own transformation and transformations of understanding. He states:

I
should have recognized that life would always be topography built up
to be leveled. The reconstructions were similar. Sometimes a ceiling
fan stood in for an air conditioner, but my poorly shaven Adam’s
apple remained. My strong fingernails tore still at the binds. My
fading shoulder freckles kept right on fading.

When my spots come in, come to me.

Bozek’s poems often comment on the body’s landscape and language. Leo regrets his inability to recognize life’s develutionary qualities. The final line of the poem/letter is an admittance of the transformation that is taking place. It is something he shares with Wolf, something that despite their changing natures, they have in common.

In a section of the book called “The Transports,” the theme of transformation continues. There are many passages we must traverse in the becoming of ourselves, and the communications between Wolf and Leo suggest that without some form of human contact we wither, become extremely insular. In “The Leopard’s Prayer,” Leo remembers attempting to form these human relationships or connections: “I kissed / her on the mouth. Ungracefully but long. Eyes glutted shut with / embarassment, I bore down so that she couldn’t protest.” While Leo and Wolf may understand the importance of connecting to others, they don’t appear equipped with the skills to form the connections. In fact, their respective isolation binds them more than anything else. Bozek ends the poem, “I gave up my body / in ever-renewing bits.” We spend our entire lives in constant isolation and transformation, and if we don’t adapt or are unwilling to become, we dissolve.

The peculiar “plot” demands attention from the reader, and the poet could probably be accused of being too top-heavy with her concept. While interesting and romantic, the poems themselves would function more fully without some of the heavy-handed details provided in the editor’s note. The poems reveal themselves in threads that can be followed throughout the correspondence, and the note imposes too much form, too much explanation. But Bozek, if indulgent, is incredibly original. At their best, these poems evoke an atmosphere more than a story – a familiar coldness so strange, it perhaps can only be accessed through strongarmed strangeness.

“The Leopard Transport” ends: “Tell me if you are still you – not physically. Voraciously.” It is important to keep moving forward, or at least to try to keep moving forward, even if we are running stationary. The relationships we rely so heavily on will change over time, and if we don’t adapt, don’t keep up, they will be lost, and we will all become the bag lady exiled to the space between the bed and the wall, alive only in imagination, only in fear.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Jessica Bozek, Melinda Wilson, Switchback Books
Posted in reviews

Wild Goods

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

by Denise Newman
Apogee Press 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“Open all the doors and drawers.”

What makes a poem wild? Is it a structure forgone, an inattention (perhaps deliberate) paid to the confines of the page? How about its subject — do we see the wild in an untrammeled speaker, or a setting overflowing with color and noise? In Denise Newman’s Wild Goods, the wild finds its way into both the domestic and the spiritual. Newman makes use of an experimental, unpunctuated free verse to un-civilize her speakers and subjects. Here, we find titles without poems (“This is Only a Beginning of Perfection”), and poems that leave stanzas behind in order to couple with the next page’s verse.

In addition to her structural experimentation, Newman proves her wildness through dense, tactile, hyper-sensory images; her poetry, associative and lyric, brings forth a world that intermingles the earthly and the divine — and the successes and failures left in the wake of this mixing. “How easily,” remarks the speaker in “Serious Faults,” “the fabric of goodness is disorganized.” The titles for the collection’s second section, “The Beginning of Perfection,” come from a guide to monasticism dating fifteen centuries in the past. They mark poetry far from abstinent or penitent, but instead lines that exalt: “Open all the doors and drawers / undo all the knots // let order be broken with water.” Newman recalls Whitman — “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” — echoing his search for a union of spirit and flesh.

While Newman eschews structure and form within each poem, the book itself is a piece of carefully-designed architecture. The sections vary in length and concern, but all take up their myriad subjects with the same voracious exploration, the same freedom from punctuation — all are wild. The speaker of “Three Cants,” the first section of Wild Goods, describes the dizzying freneticism of new motherhood, imagining that it demands a sort of spiritual switch into the body of another:

she’s sandwichtime
climbing up over world to nurse their silent agreement
will eventually eat container too
mustn’t resist transmogrification though cranky
from resistance imagines being jeered at:
almost worthless—meaning, something there to whack—
worse than worthless

The speaker’s hunger threatens to consume her whole, and to send her towards transmogrification — here, a metaphor for motherhood, where the speaker gives up a part of herself in order to parent. Other moments in “Three Cants” speak more explicitly to this sacrifice: “she knows she’ll have to marry baby whom she calls / her inner life.”

One of Wild Goods’ most wild moves comes in “The Beginning of Perfection.” In this section, discerning the end of one poem and the beginning of another is barely possible; while poem headings are bolded and enlarged, open clauses and sparse end-stopping suggest a continuity of reading that defies this suggestive typesetting. This makes for a meandering, flowing reading, one that challenges the typically cordoned-off, demarcated structure of individual poems within a collection. This “melding” happens early in the section, with the poems “The Sleeping Arrangements” and “Mutual Obedience:”

…To spare the angels, Lot offers the mob
his virgin daughters and in the rubble
they wine him then explode Lot’s seed into life
Driving the copies on the wide road
face down in

Mutual Obedience

He remembers nothing—so it is written
it’ll happen again…

Typographic conventions tell us that a poem has ended, and that another has been named and begun. However, in this wrapped style, it’s impossible not to read through the typeface, making the words on the page inevitably a part of the same work. This is a risky move, and one that certainly has the potential to confuse or alienate a reader. It raises questions about the speaker — for example, do we read the “he” of “Mutual Obedience” as Lot? — as well as concerns about the usefulness of this sort of spatial ambiguity. I’d argue, though, that a poem — especially a wild one, a good one — should raise these sorts of questions. And the lushness of Newman’s images, the memory-rich and liturgical nature of these poems, make us want to keep reading, even if it means reading through.

“I could’ve been God if I was one,” asserts the speaker of “The Soft Answer,” a poem in three parts. Newman mines the spiritual throughout Wild Goods, and her images incorporate the body with God in a manner as probing as it is deeply pensive. “The Soft Answer” takes up spiritual concerns most explicitly, with the poem’s speaker questioning her position in this realm throughout. “One has always gone above the horizon,” she notes, “to talk to God the light is better / Some light in relief with the mind’s / dark question: what does the body know?” The body here is fragile, imperiled; the mind is always aware: “What can the mind do but hover over / with its dimming question: can I trust this leaky boat?” And while answers don’t come easily to ponderings of mortality, in this poem we find a modicum of peace. “Eyes look and read,” the speaker answers, “ a thousand expressions of yes.”

Wildness can be dangerous — it can move with an unbridled violence, and leave unpredictability in its wake. Here, wildness is exultant, celebratory. Newman makes an interior space rich with this instability and thrives on the variables that life in a body presents.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Apogee Press, Denise Newman, Rachel Mennies
Posted in reviews

Song of a Living Room

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

by Brigitte Byrd
Ahsahta Press 2009
Reviewed by Franklin Winslow

“She folded her mouth in her / pocket…”

This is how a room might describe a party: “Where were the rodeos of inventive couture in this Southern desolation.” Here’s how that same room might describe a moment in a relationship: “Little of it made / sense until they shut the door.” It’s hard to tell which is anguish and which is elation.

So goes Brigitte Byrd’s Song of a Living Room. Two characters, “she” and “he,” write poems and make music (respectively) while they “muse,” “crack,” “despair” and love one another. Moments of acuity, “She waited in vain for an explosion of faith,” are enriched by moments of complication: “suspend emergency.” But they’re also often confounded with incomprehensibility: “Once he tackled her neck after she had searched his eyebrows for clues to overcome the gap in her confusion.”

Byrd’s method makes sense. This is the logic of daily life, of association, a leap from phrase to phrase, from line to line, a poem seeking Icarus’s pleasures. But in Byrd’s Living Room, there’s pressure on the reader, not the poem, to transform the invisible into the visible, pressure for the reader to transfigure association into sense rather than be transformed by it. Byrd risks keeping the reader distant from the emotional give-and-take between the main characters. Impression is the most important currency here, since parsing often leaves the reader’s mind a pretzel. For example, “She folded her mouth in her / pocket and paled under the weight of the attachment.”

This is also a work of collage and appropriation; for example, she borrows these lines from Durs Grünbein’s poem “Variation on No Theme”: “What else is it but magic, that chasm / between things and their names?” The word “chasm” here is telling. Byrd uses theory as technique, and the result is a kind of gap between sense and meaning. “Chasm” also describes the nature of a relationship not settled enough to be called a “relationship,” but perplexing enough to be deemed magic. The courtship here feels poached from life and reshaped in language, the struggle of a couple to own and to abandon not only one another but also their ambitions and their environment. Serious problems and melodramatic ones, their relief, moments of recklessness, all strike as genuinely felt, if sometimes oblique. That’s impressive for a book that traffics in circumvention as a means of accessing clarity.

But it’s not always clear what’s living in Byrd’s book. Do these walls have ears? Are these loves so aware of their narrative that they shape themselves to a page? Or is it neither? Is it that an empty room will always hold what filled it, regardless of real or imagined, regardless of fulfillment? At its most impenetrable, Brigitte Byrd’s Song of a Living Room comes across as guarded and cryptic. At its most generous, it is full of — centered on — wit and curiosity.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ahsahta Press, Brigitte Byrd, Franklin Winslow
Posted in reviews