Posts Tagged ‘Cindy Hochman’

Black Seeds on a White Dish

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

by Shira Dentz
Shearsman Books 2010
Reviewed by Cindy Hochman

“glossy oval backs”

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

A son, a brother.

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

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

Instead of words, my father blew cinders.

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

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

(from “Ribs”)

And again, there is color:

blue your brother
gone, missing, lost, who…

…

Gone, like a cuff link.

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

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

Dino     pistachio     Osiris     mucus     cumin     cucumber

caterpillar          lilypad              pine          thyme    vine

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

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

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

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

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

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The Best American Poetry 2009

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Guest Editor David Wagoner / Series Editor David Lehman
Scribner 2009
Reviewed by Cindy Sostchen-Hochman

8

Existential, Ohio

bap 2009Begun in 1988, the annual Best American Poetry series turns 21 this year, and thus attains legal status. A toast is in order.

The series is the brainchild of David Lehman, a poet/critic/anthologist who is deft at opening up contemporary poetry and making it seem digestible. BAP tends to blend contemporary knowns and unknowns in a way that has prompted a curious cross-pollination with as general a reading public as there is in contemporary American poetry.

The popularity of the series has garnered it some critics over the years, and somehow, Lehman and crew can’t seem to shake a reductive debate over what is intended by the word “best.” But critics might remember that the series, by its nature, does not profess to engender the 75 greatest poems published that year – only 75 of the best. Each edition offers a new guest editor, meaning some measure of diversity from year to year, and resulting, over the long haul, in as honestly imperfect and interesting a method of cataloging journal-published poetry as we could have asked for.

In his annual forward, Lehman turns to criticism itself, assessing the corrosive nature and deleterious effect of acid-tongued critics through the ages, citing their patent disregard for the genius of poets from Keats to Hart Crane. Interestingly, and as if to buttress his point, Mr. Lehman’s commentary, while passionate, is even-tempered and conciliatory. Conceding that “every critic knows it is easier (and more fun) to write a ruthless review rather than a measured one,” Mr. Lehman cautions that “if you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you’ll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.” He points out that critics who replace close reading and fully-enumerated points with ferocious snap and bite have, in the end, entertained, but said nothing.

This year, the guest editor is another David, the acclaimed poet and novelist David Wagoner. Wagoner, the former editor of Poetry Northwest, shares in his introduction some genial and welcoming personal anecdotes. Many of Wagoner’s own poems, and many of the poems in this anthology, could be described as doing the same. As a whole, the poems that Mr. Wagoner has chosen do not reek of sameness, though an observant reader may find plenty of connective threads; Sartre once wrote that  existentialism is a philosophy for the priveleged — for those who can the afford the luxury of taking time to sit and to contemplate — and here we are reminded that one is in many ways lucky to be born in America. The book is heavy on reflection and contemplation; its best thinkers arrive at music.

There are literal and figurative roadmaps; Mark Bibbins offers a knowing and ludicrous journey across (and away from) the states, John Ashbery a concise chart of human desire built entirely of movie titles (“They came to blow up America. / They came to rob Las Vegas.”) The Father of Psychobabble makes two appearances, the first in the James Cummins sestina “Freud” (“Come to think of it, I never speak of Mom much now, though I go on and on about Dad”), the second in Douglas Goetsch’s “First Time Reading Freud.”

Aging is also a dilemma in this anthology. The finely-drawn, skin-and-bone details in Marianne Boruch’s poem “The Doctor” make my own over-50 body creak in iambic pentameter (Ms. Boruch compares her body to “a city suddenly built so badly” – oh, Marianne, I’ve been to that city!). Sharon Olds’s “Self-Exam” (“dense, cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards / of a cell”) is not much of a departure for Olds, but is a useful guide to female self-acceptance in spite of a woman’s ever-changing topography. 

Walt Whitman thought he could “turn and live with the animals,” and maybe some of these poets could too, judging by the reverence with which they approach our winged and four-legged friends.  Witness the sparse but beautiful narrative “Red” by the often-read but under-appreciated Mary Oliver; in the poem, the violent death of two gray foxes is no less tragic than a human death (“He showed me / how he could ripple / how he could bleed”). Terrance Hayes’s mea culpa, “A House is Not a Home,” goes to the heart of the human animal and its need to redeem itself from temptation and weakness:

It was the night I embraced Ron’s wife a bit too long
because he’d refused to kiss me goodbye
that I realized the essential nature of sound.
When she slapped me across one ear,
and he punched me in the other, I recalled,
almost instantly, the purr of liquor sliding
along the neck of the bottle a few hours earlier
as the three of us took turns imitating the croon
of the recently-deceased Luther Vandross. 

Many poems present the American day-to-day — how lives and relationships can veer from status quo, how small epiphanies slip in and slip past. Fleda Brown’s narrator has roofers on her roof in “Roofers,” and hears in them “…great rolls of thunder, the roof / of heaven cluttered with Gods.” In the end our narrator is filled “with tenderness for the little world I had going on / inside, my grief that it was not the world.”

Amidst the lonely roads of America (real or imagined), and with the constant need to acknowledge our own mortality, BAP 2009 offers a sense of unity, a testament to the wonders and contradictions of each day. As Lehman points out, “we need to remember that poetry springs from joy as often as from sorrow.” So let the critics and curmudgeons continue their quibbling ad nauseum regarding the efficacy of the word “best”; to my mind, the words “good,” “memorable,” “valuable,” – and in a couple of cases, “essential” – are just as accurate.

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