Posts Tagged ‘7 stars’

Panic

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

by Laura McCullough
Alice James Books 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Bara

“…less than half a cigarette’s time”

Shore towns of New Jersey with community pools, splintered boardwalks, and trashy dance clubs provide the setting for Laura McCullough’s searing fourth collection of poems, Panic. McCullough navigates the lives of the shore’s denizens, tracking their responses to a world of shabby artifice and ineluctable danger. For example, “Sun Dog, Moon Ring, Glory” begins:

What is the opposite of decapitation,
a clean-through, laser-like amputation
of a girl’s feet in midair
on a ride at the Sea Bright Pier?

As the sun goes down in the town of Sea Bright, the speaker looks for “mock suns” and “halos,” optical distortions of sun and moon, while also observing the frantic energy of the pier. Within many of McCullough’s poems, single events can shift past like waves between swimmers. In “Bartering and the Myth of Shells,” a toddler “bit[es] into a water toy” and the poem examines the moments that follow. For the child, the experience happens slowly; she dreams as she tongues and tastes the “tiny beads” that fill her mouth “like dessicated blood / or the cracked open egg case of an endangered beetle.” Simultaneously, the mother moves to “scoop the child into the basket of her hips” and splashes “chlorinated water / into her daughter’s gaping mouth.” Finally, the lifeguard’s late “Is she okay?” startles the mother. Mind and body betray her:

The mother thinks the earbuds against his throat
look like shells
she wants to reach out and touch
with the tips of her fingers
suddenly as foreign
as anemones at the ends of her lithe and freckled arms
instead of hands.

By pairing the mother’s impulse to “touch” the lifeguard with the image of a sea anemone’s tentacles, McCullough limns the mother’s curiosity and imagination reminiscent of the child’s. The long sentence broken across seven lines slows perception and strains the moment, skillfully situating the reader within the mother’s body.

Like August Kleinzahler’s Storm Over Hackensack, McCullough’s homage to New Jersey calls attention to the detritus of cigarette butts and pizza boxes as often as seashells and egg cases. McCullough’s exploration of death lends poignancy to both. A grieving mother in “Scattered” asks: “[H]ow could it happen in less than half a cigarette’s time?” As if stretching the instant before realization, McCullough situates loss in ordinary details:

The white tube between her stained fingers leaving her hand,
arcing toward the weeds by the fence—
the landscaping hadn’t been maintained well this year,
a scattering of garbage here and there;
hopefully nothing combustible.

Could she really have thought about that?

The poem dramatizes guilt and shows how it can set in one thought at a time. For the mother, meditation abruptly turns to rage as she contemplates her son’s willful body: “She’d been angry for years / at this jumping, squirming, flailing, rowing away, // and here he’d gone under and away, / and she smoking and jumping in too late.”

While many of her poems enter the minds of mothers, McCullough also engenders the consciousnesses of men, specifically senior citizens, construction workers, and lifeguards. In “Collection Pockets,” she captures a teenager’s fluctuating voice and sense of responsibility, as well as the relationship between two guards, the one who stops by “to get the phone he’d left behind” and the one on-duty who asked him to “Hang there a minute, / so he could go take a piss . . . .” The experience of the off-duty lifeguard, suddenly called upon to give CPR, recalls the earbuds of the earlier poem: “The music inside him ratcheted up as he pressed the white chest / with his crossed palms closing down / against the mother’s cries . . . .” His erratic perception contrasts with the mother’s numbed memory. Poems that follow reveal the way the guard’s failure to save the boy links him to the mother.

McCullough’s reliance on trauma as a central theme can be overwhelming and sometimes theatrical. But by featuring more poems about lifeguards than bereft mothers, Panic moves beyond the motions of grief and loss to contemplate new life. In “Severance,” we learn of a former lifeguard’s pregnant wife. Reaching towards the simplicity of joy, the speaker remarks: “She is growing happier. / Soon they will know the gender, / and his mouth goes dry / at the thought of a son . . . .” McCullough’s poems hinge on a hopeful future. People return to those shimmering pools, observe fireworks from the sea wall in Sea Bright, and the air and water—like the best of these poems—offer a momentary release.

All Reviews

Tags: 7 stars, Alice James Books, Laura McCullough, Rachel Bara
Posted in reviews

Rookery

Monday, March 28th, 2011

by Traci Brimhall
Southern Illinois University Press 2010
Reviewed by C.J. Opperthauser

“it sings for no reason”

Traci Brimhall’s strong debut collection, Rookery, is littered with images of birds. A gorgeous line about a bird or birds or something having to do with birds–a dead chickadee found on a porch, an owl frightened by a person’s nightmare–inevitably finds its way into the fabric of almost every poem. These recurring bird images, though sometimes fleeting and often quite minor, suggest both a connection with nature and a realistic view regarding the flighty, temporary aspects of emotion and love. The birds, then, imply a larger devotion: finding the eternal in the fleeting.

This means a significant amount of focus on tensions that result from love and sex. Brimhall consistently establishes such tension with simple conflict, but also with vivid, precise, often haunting details. The very end of “Chastity Belt Lesson” reads: “He kisses the back of her neck and makes a joke. / She clears her throat, slides her knife through a tomato.” The last line, while a simple image, is powerful in conveying withheld emotions. The guts and ooze and redness of a sliced tomato during a tense moment between two people rattles the senses and the nervous system. There is violence in that seemingly innocent scene. Anger.

Throughout Rookery, Brimhall exposes both a tenderness and dirtiness in sex, as well as the greed and hunger that it can elicit. Here are four lines from “To the Tall Stranger Who Kept His Hands in His Pockets, Fourteen Years Later”:

Maybe you wanted to teach me the wind’s easy reach
of my thighs. Or maybe you needed me to know

you could crush me to the corkscrew hairs
on your chest, if you wanted to, you could hold me.

Sex in these lines is both delicate and animalistic. Key words promote this–needed, crush, corkscrew, hold. Yet the image of wind on skin is soft. It’s compelling, even rational, to think of sex as both of these seemingly incompatible qualities. Sex is both fleeting and eternal–“if you wanted to, you could hold me.” These poems are very carefully crafted to handle competing ideologies.

So Brimhall takes unexpected whacks at God and religious ideation when she has the chance, but also approaches devotion with care and grace; the world can be holy if specific conceptions of God are delusional. In “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” use of the word “Hallelujah” is mostly ironic, but more than a little sincere: “The saguaros swell with rain. / Hallelujah. The mysteciti’s heart is big enough to crawl / through and it sings for no reason, hallelujah.” The poet includes praise for male seahorses carrying their young and for avocados clinging to trees. It is as if Brimhall understands impassioned devotion and wishes to worship, instead, the simple, the overlooked, the soon to depart but eternally real–which is not a new devotion in poetry, but one handled here with deftness and intellect.

Tags: 7 stars, C.J. Opperthauser, Southern Illinois University Press, Traci Brimhall
Posted in reviews

Undoing

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

by James Cihlar
Little Pear Press 2008
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

“How can we live like this?”

The poems in James Cihlar’s first book, Undoing, do not roust or jostle themselves onto the page. They do not screech for the reader’s attention. Undoing is a quiet and clear book that begins in the reflective glow of a dashboard and with granite stones beneath white fence posts:

Start with the granite stones
laid at the base of the white post fence
with grapevines wound through.
Someone had to place them there.

(from “Lincoln Avenue”)

Divided into four sections, the collection takes its footing in the wake of a failed marriage, paternal betrayal and the false starts and “dodge ball” of other people’s lives. But there is more to life than a choice between two houses. A lone boy who lives in the backyard is really

Superman in a blue bath towel
safety-pinned at the neck

the boy who lives in the backyard
has the courage to split an eyebrow
against a table edge as he pretends to fly

the courage to sit on a ten-foot wall
cupping an ocher kitten in his palms,
wearing white shoes and belt for the bleary photo

white adhesive tape over the split eyebrow
always healing, kitten cupped in his palms
always safe over a ten-foot drop.

(from “The Boy Who Lives in the Backyard”)

The poems do not jostle about, yet the lad at their center is surrounded by a catalog of appearances: aunts, sisters and a brother, blood stains on the playground, a variety of domiciles, a kitten, a runaway dachshund, and of course, while laying in bed… “that long, skinny green hand coming up from the heat register.”

In the second section, the Nebraska landscape, among other things, is backdrop for a glide in a sixties Impala. Wheels and the radio take the youth out into a world where there are new beauties, new risks of intimacy, new dangers and “new things to be bitter about”:

the way breath in winter rises
and is trapped in the branches of a linden tree

[...]

I could speak the words linked to this place
if I could trace the feathery pattern
of evergreen past the bough,

past gestures the branch will make in the wind.
The elms have been here longer
and can see farther than I,

past saw-toothed leaves to bare, black horns of winter.

(from “Walking Home”)

Section Three is committed to new beginnings, new findings. There is a scene of a grandmother’s red, scarred chest, a couple nesting in a first rental, the new seat of adventure, Minneapolis, the tedium and economic liberation of the job run, and the unencumbered and immediate gratification of shopping expeditions in second-hand stores, the “sift through the wreckage of unknown neighbors’ past lives” for residuals which will make up the new elements of the new foundation of a new life (“Start with the granite stones / laid at the base of the white post fence… / Someone had to place them there.”) Each person comes to the promise of the new with “self” marked “as is.” Minneapolis proves to be the seat of a new economy (Ethan Allen) along with being the seat of new personal melodramas (bad home-repair work) and community tragedies (AIDS). Cihlar’s artistry is quiet; the thoughtful poems rivet together seamlessly.

Section Four abounds with poems attempting to snap the book, and its assorted griefs, shut. But the genie of domestic happiness is not one easily bottled. It is more like the image of a slinky in one of the opening poems of the book:

refusing to lose its spring
expanding and snapping shut
like a slinky down a staircase

The dualities established earlier in the collection begin to become burdensome: mother/father; past/present; story/lyric flight; old instability/comfort in new order; received frame/achieved frame. In some ways, the poems in the last section—while more mature in their logic—are less poetically revealing. They are more sociologically centered; their shapes more mannered, and as a result, less dynamic. The poet in one particular poem, “Twin Cities,” comes closest to peeling to the quick, presenting a more ambivalent must/may divide. When a damning pamphlet surfaces, the poet asks,

How can we live like this?

Maybe by knowing
I live in a city that is one half
Of a whole,

And by knowing the rule here is change—
Where something is removed,
It must also be returned…

in the places
where I once have received,
I may later give.

Undoing is a poetic journey to reach a state of “always healing.”

Tags: 7 stars, James Cihlar, Little Pear Press, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

New Depths of Deadpan

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

by Michael Gizzi
Burning Deck Press 2009
Reviewed by Craig Santos Perez

“Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.”

The title of Michael Gizzi’s newest collection, New Depths of Deadpan, captures the main tone of these poems. A perfect example is the title poem itself, which begins: “Mane thickness is a response to climate control. / Your therapist, an empiricist, sends you a horseshoe magnet. /A friend of the family offers his duck blind. // Description ends at death.” Throughout the book, there are similar instances of deadpan humor, deadpan lyricism, deadpan profundity.

Most of the poems are composed in prose-like, sentence-driven stanzas or single-sentence stanzas. Without much enjambment, the poems sound and feel quite deadpan. The entirety of “Attention Deficit Flypaper”:

The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.

Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.

Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.

Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.

While the title of this particular poem sets up its comedic undertones, the unit of the sentence delivers the deadpan. In fact, some of the most humorous parts of this collection are the titles: “Prima Donna Dashboard,” “The Laser’s Printer’s Dream,” “At Go Figure Farm,” “The Academy of Scissors,” “Cloistered in an Oyster,” “Shark Infested Custard,” “Erection Ahead” and “Posse of Forks.” Whether or not the title is humorous, the poems always end up surprising with their paratactic twists and turns. From “Posse of Forks”:

Looking to lynch the kid who wrote “Captain Underpants,” vigilantes cover the entire territory on their floating theater seats.

Why must these wonderful things be dusted? Because their upper limit is disappointment?

A damsel mounts a mare to save the heart of her cowboy. Damsel riding, rides up blushing, hands over moneybag with confession (Augustine’s), removes the noose from her lover’s neck. A placard “Partly Cloudy” looms overheard […].

Many of the poems are strange and dreamlike: a deadpan surrealism. The poem “Oscillations in the Ether” ends: “Imagine hitting moonlight and living to tell. / Dreams speak in images speech once was. / If the eye were a tongue…” .

New Depths of Deadpan is an entertaining collection. The deadpan tone and structure is quite hypnotic, pulling the reader in and surprising us with “new depths.” My favorite line from the book reads: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.” Throughout this collection, Gizzi opens an unexpected eye to the strange murmurs of subtitles of our everyday, deadpan lives.

Tags: 7 stars, Burning Deck Press, Craig Santos Perez, Michael Gizzi
Posted in reviews

The Bride of E

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.”

Often in her previous books, Mary Jo Bang used a variety of formal structures to organize metaphysical exploration, including the character pieces of Louise in Love, the ekphrastic verse of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, and, most effectively, her thorough sounding of the poetic tradition of mourning in Elegy. Of course, the latter book also gave expression to her very real grief over the loss of her adult son. A rigorous philosophical workout, Elegy is remarkable for its discipline, focus, and lucidity. Ransacking the familiar sources of consolation and finding them wanting, the poet goes for several punishing rounds before staring down fate, emerging two-fisted and disillusioned. In her latest book, The Bride of E, the organizing principle is the alphabet, and the results, predictably diffuse, nevertheless contain some rewards.

In the spirit of dictionary entries, these poems provide lists, catalogs, of associations that benefit from the implied narrative of sequential order. Often composed of short, declarative sentences, they take sideways turns, resulting in staccato bursts of stories that seem to revise themselves as they progress. The result is a layering of fragments, an overwriting of the surface, as if one is looking at a wall with scraps of wallpaper of successive vintages showing through.

This approach suits Bang’s exploration of the metaphysics of time, as she illustrates in “The Wake Was a Line and We Watched”: “the nature of looking / at the future while married to the moment.” Collaged fragments mimic time’s operation, with one minute overwritten by the next:

Time-like layers

Of the sheerest substance stacked one atop the other
And finally forming a substrate
Never quite solidifying but after the fact forming a z

(“Z Stands for Zero Hour”)

This revisionist nature enhances our perception of the insecurity of the persona, and her honest unreliability:

It’s April again. It’s October,
That’s what I said.
It’s over, like a ghost in the going to go

(“Outnumbered at 0”)

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.” Evoking palimpsests or automatic writing, the fragments of The Bride of E also return to the same obsessive concerns. “Let’s take the wiring apart and see how it works” from “D Is Dying, As One Going in the Dark,” recurs in “For the Final Report” as “I would take the wiring apart / And see how it works.” Bang acknowledges the once-removed aspect of phenomenology: we are capable of examining the history of knowledge, the tropes and conceits that attempt to phrase philosophical concepts, but incapable of coming face to face with those philosophical concepts:

This is the world
When it is reduced down to a moment.

The mind doesn’t halt but goes halfway up
In the elevator and then finds itself stuck.
This is the entirety. Eternity. Made of a material
That is unlikely to change but is forever.

(“F Is for Forgetting”)

The time necessary to understand experience is longer than the experience itself, so the problem must lie in the engine of the human brain, “the gray one” (“For the Final Report”), whose default position is fear:

Terror of being. That mysterious conceptual nothing.
A worn electrical wire connects all the lights.
They go and you say, Good,
That little irritating suspense is over.

The hollowing wait. The stupid puncture of rejection
That, in the moment, wears a human face.

(“O Is in Outside”)

If dialectic is the standard method of philosophical interrogation, the mind’s ability to make distinctions is key. But this leads to separation, alienation, and detachment: “now you’ve divided yourself / From yourself. Now you’re something simple.” (“H Is Here Is a Song, Now Sing”)

What results from division is a gap, the difference between the self and the world, one moment and the next, with the challenge to “negotiate the question of the space / Between the two.” (“P Equals Pie”) This daunting task is perhaps not accomplishable through simple determination applied to a rigorous progressive program. Instead, we encounter meaning through accident, through slips of the tongue: “The sea of the present kept meeting / The vast.” (“Heretofore Having in Mind”) This is true in the prose pieces of the short second section: “I’m tied. I mean tired.”; “And now a scar. Okay, a car.”

Any poetic method is only as good as the lines that result, and in poems such as “W Is for Whatever” and “U Is for United,” we see the rewards:

May I please have a short-term loan
Of agate to build a house against thunder and thirst.
Yes, I know, the gold star is tarnish in the cap
On the coffin lid. An oil-spin iridescence

Catches the dying light. “Sorry,” says Cerberus,
Each mouth moving in unison.

Vestiges of literary and popular culture — Alice in Wonderland, James Joyce, Little Orphan Annie, Six Feet Under, Fargo — mingle with Mao Zedong, Max Beckmann, and Alexis de Tocqueville in The Bride of E. With obvious and slant rhymes at end stops, and consonance and onomatopoeia sprinkled liberally throughout, some poems read as demented nursery rhymes. But the short staccato lines, repetition, and interrupted trajectories create an effect opposite to the expansive ambition of the content itself. In this loose abecedarius, readers might understandably hunger for the open-ended luxuriance of D.A. Powell rather than the insularity of John Ashbery, the latter seeming to influence this volume more. But perhaps most of all, remembering the power and focus of Elegy, with its amazing ability to connect with readers and provide clarity to anguish, we may be disappointed by the occasional solipsism and obfuscation of these lines, resulting in a sense that this volume, an accomplishment in its own right, may appear premature and incomplete when seen in the poet’s oeuvre.

Drawing on personal history, the second section’s prose pieces suggest that a more generative mining of meaning is possible, including this acute description of depression: “Every day would be the same. Waking on the dot to that repeated realization. The crosshairs of a hidden life.” (“G Is for Going”) Revelations also dot the narratives here, increasing their power, including an apparent act of child abuse by an aunt’s boyfriend: “And I’m left with him. I’m six. He says do you want to sit in my car. I never say. We sit side by side on the seat. I look at the dash. I leave myself somewhere else.” (“G Is for Going”) These pieces hint at a new approach to come from this signature poet.

Tags: 7 stars, Graywolf Press, James Cihlar, Mary Jo Bang
Posted in reviews

Slaves To Do These Things

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

by Amy King
BlazeVOX [books] 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

The Earth Mother Talks Back

king slaves cover Louis Zukofsky spoke of the unwritten histories of “a,” “an” and “the,” but today’s installment of “Watch Your Language” concerns that innocent little preposition “of.” My dictionary lists ten definitions of “of,” but I’m confining myself to those hyper-conscious phrases that turn a straightforward descriptive phrase into a metaphor of a metaphor, and threaten an infinite regress.

In a workshop, Paul Violi had us break a page into five columns and write an adjective in column two, a concrete noun in column three and an abstract noun in the last column. Once these words were chosen, we plugged “the” in column one and “of” in column four, thus creating an overwrought phrase such as “the slimy toothbrush of faith” (“The fickle finger of fate,” anyone? anyone? Bueller?). As these phrases piled, up along with the groans, I came up with “the copper bathtub of justice,” which was maybe one of the bearable ones, but I figured out later that the horror wasn’t the overwrought vocabulary as much as what that innocent preposition was being forced to yoke together against its will.

Amy King’s Slaves to Do These Things takes these “of” phrases a step further and turns them into a symbol of a symbol such as “the brick of my revolving heart’s axis,” which resolves in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the brick axis of my revolving heart.” Don’t get me started on the chummy use of the possessive contraction for very abstract terms. These displacements effectively undermine both the concreteness of the brick, and the symbol of “heart’s axis.” They create a glimmering, repelling surface by flipping the normal syntactical spin, and not letting the reader closely contemplate any one of them. It becomes a force field separating you from what is described.

Her long stanzas often make us despair of a resting place, and deny us the childish pleasure of counting. Instead of a freight train passing by (coal, coal, lumber, lumber, fuel, boxcars, snake eyes, “the pure products of America, anyone?”), you get a procession of painted stage sets that come from who knows where to end up buried in our attics. King wants us to see the horror of that multiplication, its artificiality, and lack of purity. For the sake of this endless fluidity, it seems King gives up the possibility of piercing the reader in the heart.

Early in his career, at his most doctrinaire, Borges wrote an essay decrying the infinite regress of describing a metaphor in terms of a metaphor. He wrote “The defenders of this verbal doubling may argue that the act of perceiving something—the much frequented moon, shall we say—is no less complicated than its metaphors, because memory and suggestion intervene; I would retort with Occam’s restrictive principle: We should not multiply entities uselessly.” For Borges, the tragedy of these multiplied entities is that they make the cosmos a house of mirrors; like the scholastic complications of enumerating the hundreds of angels needed to move the celestial spheres, they serve only to show us what insignificant creatures we are! In contrast, once you’ve read Robert Hayden on the Middle Passage, you take the word “slavery” in its most physical, literal sense. The word becomes a rock, a prison, a wound. Though we break, we bear the weight of the world like Atlas.

For King, Borges’s argument against is an argument for. She constantly uses this self-conscious, regressive syntactic displacement to create what she describes in one poem as a “false encounter.” The defense for the metaphor of a metaphor is that it describes the insularity of the thought process, and shows us the ways that we are forcefully separated from our world. Freed from describing any historical condition of involuntary servitude, and quickly pushed off stage by her ever shifting sentences, fraught phrases such as “gusts of slaves” float between the abstract and the concrete like a layer of smog. Her poems create a world that never quite has a floor.

Another “of” phrase I circled in an advanced state of despair was “the taste of memory’s slag” (which might resolve in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the tasty slag (or slaggy taste) of memory”). As I tried to analyze my discomfort with King’s language, I wanted to change this line to something like, “I taste coal, slag, memory,” which is certainly more egocentric and omnivorous (“poet, be like god”). But when I asked why this construction should be “better” than King’s, I realized, as Graham Robb points out in his biography of Rimbaud, that all these years I had taken to heart the stanza quoted by Olson in “The Kingfishers:”

If I have any taste at all,
It is only for earth and stones.
Dinn Dinn Dinn! Let’s eat the air
The rock, the coals, the iron

without considering the answering stanza:

Enough of these landscapes.
What’s drunkenness, friends?

I’d just as soon, in fact I’d rather
Lie rotting in the pond
Beneath the horrible cream
By the floating woods.

Amy King lives compassionately in that soberly answering stanza, trying hard to look her (and our) spiritual alcoholism in the face. Like Walter Benjamin, she wants the reader to confront “the forever project of waking up.” Her finely mocking metonymies “The philosopher, a pompadour, / speaks without moving his lips” question the metaphysical evasions of philosophy and poetry. Sometimes, her speaker sounds like an earth mother figure mocking the ecstasies of men:

Shadowed by the nagging
hope is that we women
will prepare the canal
for you to slip back through & into.
Such is the plight of the dodo
staring down the barrel,
demanding life to speak.

Sometimes the earth mother is more forgiving, and the body and the soul get along, and our artificial memoirs become a natural process like digestion:

The body’s prospects turn proteins
into peptides and bacterium
to carbon. We cleanse the other like
the moon is replete in her remembrance pool:
our memoirs in broken lines
of the people she is
and the people she sweetens

For King, though, we suffer from growing up more than being male or female. The philosophers she mocks are not exclusively male, and both genders suffer from being in their bodies. In these poems, the vulnerability of a girl is not very different from the vulnerability of a boy when both are “pressured by an adult perspective.” The book cover then becomes an apt illustration of inaptness: The soul builds donkeys and birds of wood, the spiritual generality longs for the physical particular as if language were yearning for its speakers and trying to create them. And though we know our encounters are false, that our donkeys are wooden, this is where King’s over-multiplications shine as a deliberate strategy, by embracing the artificial, the childishness of the play, until our wooden birds actually fly:

when I die,
play the boy on the soul
of that death and use
my memory’s mud
to make gods of us from the dust.

Robert Duncan wrote “Soul is the body’s dream of its continuity in eternity—a wraith of mind. Poetry is the very life of the soul: the body’s discovery that it can dream. And perish into its own imagination.” Amy King approaches the same territory from another direction. Instead of resting in either the urbane or acerbic irony which she displays throughout the book, instead of the magic alchemy of art, of ecstasy turning stone into living flesh, King ultimately tells us that:

… I am still feeling
the walks between steps
drowning in part,
footed forever with this
forever project of waking up.

By embracing our inadequacies, our postmodern lack of certainty, Slaves to Do These Things is a smart, compassionate take on contemporary anxiety and longing— which is what you get when you talk about “the soul that suffered from being its body,” and take the idea as seriously as Amy King does here. And to think that all this drama hinges on the tiny word “of.”

Tags: 7 stars, Amy King, BlazeVOX Books, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Sleepers’ Republic

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

by David Gruber
Astrophil Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

The World Outside

gruber cover No matter how deliberately we arrange language, certain states of mind defy our attempts to freeze them into poems. David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic is a book of tightly composed, rhythmic dreams, and like all dreams, they are undermined by their translation into English. They shift through geography and time as dreams do. They turn suddenly forbidding where they were once joyous. They slip into and out of coherence. But necessarily, the words his speakers choose are the words used to describe a dream, not the dream itself, and the best poems in Sleepers’ Republic faintly acknowledge that even a dream world is limited by language. In the first stanza of “Approved Methods,” Gruber reveals one of the ways he will attempt to recreate the experience of dreaming:

Strange wedding music, savage
echo against the brass door
a coughing
an interruption
that slid through the water
where we hung.

Here, Gruber presents a set of disconnected images that seem uniquely compatible with one another. It is hard to place why “wedding music” and “brass door” make such an appropriate pair, but together they become a foundation for the tiny universe of the poem. The poems are held together with a recognizable Lynchian logic, though even in his most acclaimed and recognizable dream sequences, David Lynch can only capture the spirit of dreaming. While Gruber’s poems are less superficially provocative than Lynch’s sequences, like Lynch, Gruber is restricted to conjuring the spirit of dreaming. Interestingly though, he discloses the impossibility of such perfection. Sometimes this acknowledgement is explicit, as in “No vocabulary is enough / to catalogue your geography,” and sometimes it is subtle. The first several stanzas of “Prelude in a Time of War” dither over where to begin:

In the queen’s closet, with no mirror:
lavender soap, open window, the scent
of oranges and sky beginning to blue.

Or: a broken pane of glass
held together with masking tape.
Bacon frying down below.
Photographs pinned to the wall.

Or: the worm tunnels through our guts,
the moth settles in our nostrils.

Gruber’s speaker cannot decide which image is best, and when he makes broad, cinematic cuts from image to image to image, he admits the failure of all three. None is a perfect beginning, and the failure of language begets the failure of dreaming.

Though his poems arise out of a sleepers’ republic, they are a way for Gruber to reckon with the real world’s troubles. His speakers’ inability to effectively construct their dream-like existence becomes their failure to effectively contend with real sociological, political, emotional and intellectual concerns. In one moment of such concern, Gruber imagines a glossing-over of agriculture, a deeply necessary pursuit, with media-induced artificiality:

There are field and dreams about wild herd. Once the clover is gathered the hay is baled and rolled. There are cartoons of these things: the soiled colors that overtake knowledge and replace the organs under flesh with a composite of image and speculation. Every eye an iris, all the leaves dampened by snow dissolve in their cinema.

In moments like this, it becomes clear that Gruber’s speakers are not hiding behind dream logic, but that they have been forced behind it. The “cartooning” of the landscape is the speaker’s way of reaching out from behind the veil of the dreaming and into a world where “cartoons” have specific implications. Of course all language has specific implications, and the world of the dream, rooted in the subconscious of real people, is a negative image of the world outside the dream. Through a process of reverse-engineering (i.e. reading), the stilted goings-on of the poems’ dreams appear increasingly representative of the real world, and the speaker’s prohibition from proactively responding to a very real, very important reality depict a common, contemporary feeling of individual helplessness.

If dreaming is an apt half-metaphor for contemporary life, any confrontation of the world’s violence (as made unconfrontable by distance or time) is restricted to waking and describing the dream. If the dream is indescribable, the world eludes consequential influence from the individual. In “Lisbon,” Gruber writes, “Once the softest word made the world tremble / […] but it came that we wrote loud / large on land and sky.” The speaker here is privy to the ineffectuality of language because, unlike in the past, language has little manifest effect on the world outside the poem. The speaker is caged by the way the world demands certain things from language. One poem, “Film: Butterfly Oeuvre,” is stuck pretending to be a film. Another, “Instructions for Antigone,” is stuck pretending to be stage directions. Even the emotional realities of many of Gruber’s poems cannot avoid infiltration by the bits of premade language that float overbearingly around in contemporary speech. In “Ingathering of the Exiles,” Gruber writes “Satellite passes you to me again, a plea from / outside my service area.” That the emotional reality of the poem is supported by the phrase “service area” makes great sense, as if amid many attempts to cut through language toward truth, Gruber takes language back and stabs deeply and momentarily at those things that keep us contained in our dreams. Even where no art is perfectly accurate, we still continue to try, and when the world becomes “like a magazine forgotten / on a chair, then reupholstered,” it is not only forgotten, but also noticed again.

Tags: 7 stars, Astrophil Press, David Gruber, PJ Gallo
Posted in reviews

Lost Alphabet

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

“by the sound of their wings”

olstein alphabet cover Lisa Olstein flirts with moths and cliché in this fascinating and mystifying collection of short prose poems. Let me set the stage: Olstein’s speaker arrives in a village very unfamiliar, at least to the reader. She studies moths. A woman named Ilya begins staying with her, helping her to pin wings and document species. The speaker also battles an illness that is described as being similar to having chronic migraines, but with lasting impact. But mostly, Olstein’s speaker engages with the moths, forms bonds that seem impossible to form with such small creatures.

Early in the book, the vibe is very Apocalypse Now. The speaker moves into an unknown village filled by people with alien customs and habits, “music played with a dull spoon on the side of a pig,” but quickly gets acquainted with her new surroundings. The second poem in the book, “[sometimes they worship fire]”, is a wonderful surprise. It suggests the cliché “like a moth to a flame,” but the poem deals with the people of the village and their customs, their sayings: “No bad news tonight. Save it for morning, or never.”

“[the small brain is very old]” is another poem that, upon first read, seems to fall victim to the chestnut; however, it replaces cliché with truism: “The space at the center of the flame fools them; they turn and seek the middle darkness.” There is a sense of hiding and seeking in this book that, though often portrayed through the moths, applies very clearly to the speaker and her kind.

Many poems in the book are in the vein of Woolf’s “Death of a Moth”—an obsessed intrigue with the life and death of another creature as a way to inform the speaker about the process of her own life. For instance, in “[if you are here you have already come too far]”, Olstein’s language is reminiscent of a moth wing fluttering against the skin of one’s wrist: “I find myself caring for people I know almost nothing about except the way they move their eyes across my face, their eyes across their fields…” But the poem is in fact commenting on the human ability to form relationships without much context except for the common human experience. At times, the absence of communication or language forges a deeper emotional bond because it forces an understanding to be reached only through action and a willingness to understand.

However, it is often difficult to escape the feeling that certain poems would function better outside of the context of Olstein’s project, that a disconnect is exactly what the poems need in order to form valuable connections. Many of the poems feel confined and spurious in the language of Olstein’s fictional lepidopterist. Olstein’s work is most effectual when it is based in imagery rather than storyline. Her imagery carries intense feeling without stating what that feeling is. Take the following lines: “This morning all the crows returned as one darkly shimmering field.” The literal meaning of these lines is quite obvious, but what is implied – however abstract – runs deep.

Olstein is very skilled at realizing the scientific poem, the poem that relies heavily on facts and lets implication form on its own, without any additional commentary. She plainly reports on dissecting a specimen: “Sometimes, once opened, everything in the body moves forward. There’s no predicting this and nothing to be done except to let the contents spill or to quickly cinch the cut with pins. In some cases, the pressure subsides.” Human sentiment materializes.

Whether it is through dissection and study of moths, non-communicative relationships to the people of the village, or a conversation with Ilya, Olstein’s speaker attempts to better understand life. She listens and observes closely in order to piece together a mystery that will never be fully comprehended. She is passionate about her work and seeks an understanding that is anything but easy. She notes that “Ilya says our dark universe is really the belly of some beast,” and after this statement (another attempt at mutating a cliché), the speaker confesses that she harbors disdain for Ilya, whom she sees as a version of her “former” self. The admission suggests that the speaker believes she has progressed in some way, though the ways in which she may have progressed remain unclear.

The book proceeds along a steady plane; there is little, if any, arc, and it ends rather abruptly. The speaker has been collecting and living amongst the moths in her hut. They flutter about and cling to the walls. She provides care for those with disabled wings. She does everything in her power to transform her environment into one the moths will desire and be comfortable in. The speaker is an outsider in her own home, yet she seems to connect with the moths in a way that she does not with any human in the book. She seems more and more to take on qualities of the moth, and for a long while, she seems to be preparing for something.

In the penultimate poem, “[the weather in here],” Olstein writes, “—when I take down the window and the door, I want for them to stay.” The speaker has come to rely on the moths in a strange way; she needs their presence in order to function, feels devoid of meaning without them. Her deep connection to the moths is interesting; it even moves the reader to feel somehow vaguely emotional over their death or leaving, but it is never quite clear the purpose of the speaker’s study, her insistence upon “training [herself] to identify species solely by the sound of their wings.”

Tags: 7 stars, Lisa Olstein, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

The Beginning of the Fields

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

by Angela Shaw
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

Things as Things Just So

shaw cover

“The true mystery of the world,” Lord Henry tells us in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is the visible, not the invisible.” Henry, though imagined by Wilde over a century in the past, could have been speaking of the poetry of Angela Shaw—poetry that endeavors to uncover the mysteries of life’s encountered objects. In The Beginning of the Fields, her first book, Shaw writes of wedding gowns, the boudoir ritual, tomatoes and swimsuits and lace, rendering each with its own life and personality against that of her intimate first- and third-person speakers. Tinged with nostalgia, Shaw’s cultivations form a timeline, through memory, of life’s losses and gains, all set tangibly in the realm of the material. Each poem makes its own museum-like, yet pulsating, space on the page.

Anyone familiar with the intricacies of the clothing realm will take particular pleasure in Shaw’s cultivation of the subject. Taking language from the ad copy of a J. Crew catalog for her poems “Garden Party” and “Pin-up,” Shaw lingers over every detail of her described subjects, granting them utility and purpose. “Is that shirt flirting with you across the cotton / lawn?” asks the speaker in “Garden Party,” comfortable in the language of fabric and flirtation: “The man with the seersucker / ease is prone to softly silk-like talk, mellowed / stuff.” Here, the dressings and pinnings-on of what we put on our bodies literally speak volumes. A former retail employee myself, I see none of the flat, frozen faces of catalog models and the staleness of ad copy in Shaw’s reimagining. Instead, the lush luxury of the brand’s fabrics and patterns find shape and breath.

Shaw renders this clothing-centric world most strikingly in “White Picket,” a poem in the series “Five Fences: On Marriage,” where, as a wedding commences, “The gown enters first—dazzling, embattled— / and then its bride on her cloud / of song.” The dress—and all it represents at the nascent pure moments of a marriage ceremony—finds itself in stunning conflict; and as the series continues, the reader cannot help but recall the first “dazzling” vestments of this marriage as Shaw’s study of the union twists and turns through sweetness and strife.

Shaw writes deftly of both sorrow and joy, though it is the collection’s physical particularities that grant its unique perspective. Marked by the oft-noted passage of time, the poems in this collection palpably relate the feeling of each season and its associations—lingering August, “itinerant January,” “clumsy December.” Inside each month, Shaw finds a vignette to match. “Mobile Home,” site of January, captures the month’s chill and languor:

Old, tested wrestling holds: winter’s half-
nelson does in the tin shelter, brought
here from some Lubbock or Saginaw, bought
local. Staked to the yard two once-stray whelps
snarl their chains. Inside, a near-marriage sputters
and flares, left on a low burner.

December, the year’s other bookend, receives language similarly preoccupied with winter’s stasis. In “Bird Nests,” the speaker examines the damage cancer has wrought on a household:

…Some sickness quickens
in you or what the doctors, those wordsmiths,
call growth. Beyond the house our great oak pumps
in the wind like a wild lung. Dumb earth.

Sterile and “dumb,” the December landscape contrasts in this poem with cancer’s quick growth—its urge the reproduce itself. Shaw, as in “Mobile Home,” couples setting and subject with revelatory dexterity.

The Beginning of the Fields’s lyric preoccupation with beauty makes its most stunning observations in moments, such as in “Bird Nests,” where life’s ugliness demands response. Loss suffuses the collection, but never overwhelms. One of the book’s strongest poems, “Miscarriage” renders its subject in a confessional first-person, as the speaker copes by harvesting tomatoes:

I trowel a hole for each loose bundle
of roots, slosh water from my pail, and refill
the gap, my hands gathering at the base of each
fluid stem. I go down where my husband’s long
shadow startles the grass. It is weeks
before we will again come carefully
unsewn, take to each other, hungry and thick-
tongued…

Later in the poem, as the speaker “go[es] down on all fours/ in search of what I lost,” the devastation her loss has caused becomes heartbreakingly clear. Where some things grow, Shaw suggests, others perish; making sense of this harsh truth proves fertile subject matter.

In The Beginning of the Fields, careful study of the physical world takes us far from it, into questions of origin and purpose, time and place. The poems are calm, mild-mannered even, perhaps too much so for readers who tire of placid natural images, or of melancholy and sometimes sentimentality. But Shaw keeps these in check. This book should be read, several times, by any reader wondering how her own world—and her own amassed collection of things—came to be just so.

Tags: 7 stars, Angela Shaw, Rachel Mennies, Tupelo Press
Posted in reviews

String Parade

Friday, August 28th, 2009

by Jordan Stempleman
BlazeVOX [books] 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

American Progressions

stempleman cover Anchored by unique reflections on the vast, diverse American landscape and a lengthy, seven-part series of couplets, “The Day of Nicholas,” Jordan Stempleman’s String Parade thoroughly demonstrates the poet’s eclectic, yet accessible style while presenting a procession of instances and abstractions in contemporary American life and poetics. String Parade’s poems are like tiny mysteries that unlock secrets to a multitude of inner mysteries; they help define and unify the humanity in all of us.

In “Similarities,” Stempleman likens the stomach muscle’s perpetual process of intake and digestion with the multiple “takes” required to complete a car advertisement. The poem begins, “the stomach has a grossness to act, to clean up after itself / and say nothing of the dishes that pile up and go crusty / along the counter.” (42) Stempleman is deft at relating things that are ostensibly unrelated. Here, he migrates from the anatomy of the stomach in search of the equivalent to digestion: “when some car / is driven recklessly around some tight curve, and the slick / road sending out mist like some poor description / of an upbringing, is wasted take, after take, after take.” (42)

Stempleman’s associative abstractions, and the ubiquitous level of metaphor they might imply, are familiar—better poets have tread this ground—but benefit from an openness that leaves them wide and far reaching. He often omits nouns, leaving only the adjective, and he also changes nouns into their verb forms. His central subject often changes multiple times within the same poem, making unanimous interpretation frequently elusive and ambiguous. This elusiveness, however, is surprisingly accessible, inspired by everyday people and occurrences, using everyday language. Stempleman seems to be aiming for personality, but also for an artistic and societal reconciliation in his work, for seamless transitions between the horrendous and the beautiful as they rend the contemporary American sublime.

This sublimity is demonstrated in poems that bend reality, melding the worlds of movie set and everyday, questioning the differences of the two by nonchalantly exploring their similarities. “A Little Ambitious” demonstrates this dramatic phenomenon perfectly: “we live between the first sex scene and the last.”(70) “Claim of the Cyclist” begins with visual imagery which sparks his reflections, whereas “Order from the Menu That Which has the Ability to Cut Itself” is initiated by his imaginative reflections which direct the poem into a culmination of acute, remarkable imagery. “Style if Not” explores Stempleman’s own philosophy of poetics as exemplified in his work:

There’s the slant again, it sounds sincere, doesn’t chew
the furniture or skip the gudgeon
as safety would account. It tends to its attitude, even
when it leaks and runs and makes a mess
across the meadow. (33)

Jordan Stempleman comes at us from an inverted angle, and hints at an artist with original, evocative style and accord.

Tags: 7 stars, BlazeVOX Books, Jordan Stempleman, Rick Marlatt
Posted in reviews