Posts Tagged ‘Houghton Mifflin’

In Search of Small Gods

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

by Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

six

Storied

harrison coverIn Search of Small Gods smells like a book from the Fremont Public Library, but admittedly this has nothing to do with the author or his skills. It’s simply a friendly reminiscence, a nice connotation I have with the book, and perhaps with the Fremont Public Library which was a tiny, one-room schoolhouse type building with a small desk in a dingy corner. The librarian’s name was Mrs. Bassett. Or perhaps she was the third grade teacher at the public school which I went to only for a day. Enough, though.

Jim Harrison’s most recent of around 30 books is packed with melancholy parables and fireside reminiscences. It opens with a translated passage from Antonio Machado’s “Proverbs and Songs #29.” Machado is a Spanish poet of the 20th Century and the passage contains both English and Spanish versions. It depicts a traveler warned by Machado’s speaker that the road is not pre-existent, but rather is created by the act of walking. The passage ends with the following lines, perhaps more beautiful than any in the actual Harrison book: “Walker, there is no road / only foam trails on the sea.” Foam trails disappear, and in other words, there is nothing in human life but that which is crafted. Its meaning is cheesy, yes, but its implications of self-exploration and discovery of the world first through the self are significant and threaded throughout Harrison’s work.

There is a lot of threading in the book, especially with the titular “small gods.” The first poem, whose title comes from the religious notion of faith and belief, ends with the following lines: “the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see / from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling / to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.” We see several themes here. First, there are the gods and faith. Next, there is the walker suffocating the gods “underfoot”—the world is constant grinding and change, is a billion small gods suffocating a billion others. There are social implications, perhaps—we’re a largely disaffected society—but to that end, the poem just throws its punch and runs away.

How else can a list poem end, though? “I Believe” is most certainly a list poem, as are at least five others in this long, laborious collection. There is nothing inherently bad about list poems; every poet writes at least one. But rarely are they capable of conjuring much than the sense that a writer has checked thoughts and images of the metaphysical checklist. Yet another list poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull,” is probably the finest poem in Harrison’s book. The first four lines begin with the word “death,” and the poem proceeds to tell the story of a farm girl with limited mental capabilities who was killed by a bull. The poem is memorable, but spoiled by its final threading: “Death steals everything except our stories.” Harrison’s poem is strong, but smudged by his urge to tell us its “point.”

A finer idea that consistently comes up in Harrison’s book is one that first appears in a poem called “Hard Times.” The idea first presented itself to me through a friend who once told me that after his death, he hopes his ashes will be eaten by birds. Then he (as a part of a larger more complex consciousness) will experience (or fuel) flight, something he will never otherwise experience (see also Mary Oliver’s “Vultures). Harrison’s version reads: “within the bodies / of birds. I’ll be a simple crow / who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.” The entire poem, the man tries to reach the top of this butte, so his perceived ability to reach it at the end is a victory; however, this ability comes through something like reincarnation instead of something rooted in his own human experience. The obsession with birds carries through the ensuing poem, titled “Age Sixty-nine”: “I hope one day to be a spiral / but to the birds I’m a circle.” Harrison reaches out to touch mortality, and finds that it touches back.

Another area of Harrison’s work that consistently impresses is his flare for the natural. In a longer poem, “The Golden Window,” he writes:

I continued west toward the snake den to try to catch
the spirit of the place when it’s asleep, the sheer otherness
of hundreds of rattlesnakes sleeping in a big ball
deep in the rocky earth beneath my feet.

This passage does two things that I admire. It captures the natural world, the rattlesnakes underground, and it discusses a sense of “otherness” that we feel about nature, perhaps the very reason why some hunt. Harrison is able to form a connection with this sensation—an impossible blend of fusion with nature and separation from it—that is often difficult to form on one’s own.

Clichéd ideas and awkward levels of reminiscent melodrama become problems in many of these poems. For instance, in “Hard Times” Harrison writes, “my mind begins to learn / my heart’s language.” Harrison also refers to “a compass without a needle.” Overdone. Reading these poems helped me to develop the “Harrison Test.” I read the poems in a pretentious tone and see what happens. Try it. Here’s the start of a poem from In Search of Small Gods called “Cow Meditation”: “Whenever I’m on the verge of a book tour…” Nevermind.

Finally, I’d like to comment on one other facet of Jim Harrison’s work… “The World’s Fastest White Woman” first appeared in Playboy.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Old War

Monday, September 15th, 2008

by Alan Shapiro
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

7

Clarity Begins at Home

old warIn Old War, Alan Shapiro continues to work with a surprisingly simple diction and a stunningly complex prosody.  His style here is defined by a kind of lilt or loop—a series of repetitions that work to calibrate his poems between the epic and quotidian, playing with science, history, myth, politics, and family to find the emotional core of his subject.  It’s a fundamentally existentialist approach—always finding that one soul to offer a secular salvation though understanding in the midst of the fog that clouds our vision. 

Shapiro is a student of classics, which I suspect is where he developed his ability to navigate the large and the small—the social and the personal. After all, the texts he has translated are ones where there is no line between the state and the people who make it.  The jacket cover tries to pin down the collection as working around Shapiro’s personal tragedy and triumph of physical collapse and re-marriage (in that order)—that we should recognize the threads of joyful mortality that pull the book forward, but that seems to simplify this book in order make the emotions autobiographically understandable.  I found that the book’s poles are less tragedy and triumph than they are microcosm and macrocosm.

Shapiro works with a long line and a short line in this book, and both of them allow him to work through the loop.  The short line allows Shapiro to set up syntactic and rhythmic ladders, as here, in the poem “Bower”:

Our bedroom in a small
house in an old
forest where trees
lean down 

It’s a very subtle effect—the noun/preposition/article/adjective ending the first two lines cut against the expected order of both the sentence and the line, and allow him to disorient the reader just enough to keep him in a sense of fall. Ending the line with an adjective pushes the reader towards the noun it will describe at the beginning of the next line, while putting a gap in the expected flow of information.  He achieves a similar push/pull throughout the poem with other syntactic breaks, as in this passage, where the verbs and prepositions are separated from their objects:

where what comes
to us comes through
what holds it back.

Combine that with the repetition of “comes”—which is pulling back temporally against the forward thrust of the sentence (“comes through” is the same action as “comes to us”)—and you begin to have a sense of Shapiro’s aesthetic.  It’s not that he moves slowly, it’s that he moves through the same action, space, syntax or sound repeatedly.  He shows us the same motion from multiple angles.  If you like the metaphor of the poem “unfolding in time,” think of Shapiro’s poems as origami.  It’s not language poetry—all the poems here are landscapes, narratives or meditations—but he approaches his subjects from multiple angles, creating an almost cubist spin. 

In the longer-lined poems, the rhythms are longer, so they loop on a longer beat, the line containing its own repetitions even as they build up over the longer line.  “How”—a poem that begins in “the bedroom of the afterlife”—ends with the phone from the first line continuing to ring:

…the ringing of the phone that never stops,
and how it rings and rings is how the living call,
and how the dead reply is how it goes on ringing.

The repetitions and loops allow Shapiro to embody the intimacies and alienations that make up his central subject here.  He works to represent the failures of connections, and find the connections within those failures—whether contemplating an unfortunate, overheard couple in a restaurant or the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib.  Shapiro has long been a poet able to find the intimate in the epic and the epic in the intimate.  This book continues that exploration while stitching the current shocks of American events into his tapestry. 

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


A Yes-or-No Answer

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

by Jane Shore
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by Christie Ann Reynolds

2

Worst Title Ever

yes or noIn Jane Shore’s A Yes-Or-No Answer, there are the usual Greek references: (“I saw my girl—Persephone carried off to Hell / who left behind a mash of petals on the trampled soil.”) There are the predictable religious undertones (see: “Gelato, Scrabble in Heaven, Body and Soul”).

Here also lie the predictable mother-father-aunt-and-uncle mourning poems anyone of middle age with a lack of contemporary vibrancy would write.  There are coming-of-age daughter poems (“My Daughter Reads My Old Diary”), and poems that reminisce over a childhood dummy doll.

Every poem is honest and clean, the lines broken deliberately. But what Shore’s latest book lacks is…anything extraordinary. The boom. The spark. In A Yes-Or-No Answer, you might say the lighting rod has been popped from the roof and buried in the backyard.

In an entire book of poems about family and childhood memories, I expected something more astonishing than the only moment I recall vividly:

Aunt Sadie frowned.
“What do you need all that hair for?”
She jumped up, yanked open a drawer,
she lopped off my ponytail
in one big hank, the rubber band
still holding it together.

It lay coiled on the floor.
Mine. Not mine.
She made me pick it up
and throw it in the trash.

The poems are gravestones and recipe cards for a mother and daughter who do not want to forget the commonplace intricacies in anyone’s length of life. But they appear too commonplace. There is nothing to uncover about the speaker that isn’t already understood by the first two poems. You might argue that there’s some maternal wisdom in these poem, but it’s not what I would call the impressive wisdom you see in books like The Shout by Simon Armitage. The opening poem in Armitage’s book involves a childhood friend who committed suicide. The first two stanzas introduce us to the speaker and his playmate and the irony of being a curious child:

  We went out
  in the school yard together, me and the boy
  whose name and face

  I don’t remember. We were testing the range
  of the human voice”
  he had to shout for all he was worth

The last two lines imbue us with a thought-provoking echo:

  He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
  with a gunshot hole
  in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

  Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
  you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

It’s the kind of romantic catharsis that never quite washes up in Shore’s work. For weeks, I’ve been waiting for A Yes-or-No Answer to redeem itself. I’ve read it over and over. I’ve put it away for some time, hoping to coerce some fresh dust to settle favorably in the crevices in my brain. I honestly and truly attempted to like this collection. But I couldn’t help coming to the realization that my grandmother would probably place this book on a shelf under Mitch Albom’s (vastly superior) The Five People You Meet in Heaven. She may make a few recommendations to her coworkers or even suggest that I, as her granddaughter, read it to accumulate some appreciation for the elderly. My grandmother would also smile when Shore writes:

Putting on my socks, I noticed,
on my right foot, an ugly bunion and hammertoes.
How did my mother’s foot
become part of me?

I on the other hand, cringe.

Many young workshop poets use their childhood and the tired angst of their adolescence as fuel. Many poets also use their experiences as ammunition for a few soul-searching combustible poems that leave you aching in the gut. But anyone writing so complacently about him-/herself had better have one damned impressive and odd life, have the capacity to lie well about their life, or have the ability to make the ordinary seem wondrous. David Orr once wrote:

“And in poems, autobiographical information serves the same purpose as references to birch trees or happiness or Subarus—all are simply ways of creating the experiences we desire from lyric poetry. The real question, therefore, isn’t what kind of life we’re being shown in a particular collection, but what kind of writing.”

What I want when I read this kind of writing is to be in AWE—preferably by both content and style. Consequently, any writer lowers the bar when they begin writing about an old address book of their parents’ and surprise, surprise, recall specific entries and where they’ve moved:

  Great-uncles, aunts,
  cousins once removed,
  whose cheeks I kissed,
  whose food I ate,

  are in this book still
  alive, immortal, each
  name accompanied
  by a face:

  Fogel (Rose and Murray)
  474 13th St. Brooklyn,
  moved to a condo
  in Boca Raton:

The Lifetime tv-movie “voiceover” quality is just too much. I wanted to say yes to each poem, and even considered whether or not I was too young to appreciate the kind of nostalgia that resonated here. But after reading with an open mind, I can only say that if asked to speak well of A Yes-or-No Answer, I can only give the appropriate answer of: no.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Magnetic North

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

by Linda Gregerson
Houghton Mifflin 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

six

Sweeter to be the Possum

gregerson cover

It is sweet to be Linda Gregerson at the moment. Her newest collection of poems, Magnetic North, has been nominated for the National Book Award. If the award were for best opening poem in a collection, or perhaps even best poem in a collection, Gregerson would have my vote.

Expectations are high after reading “Sweet.” In the poem, Gregerson splices the narrator’s mother’s solemn reaction to what the reader can only assume are the events of 9/11 with her narrator’s contemplation of the plight of a possum:

   
                      Our possum—she must be hungry or
             she wouldn’t venture out in so

             much daylight—has found
                     a way to maneuver on top of the snow.

 A parallel between an animal’s actions when faced with utter desperation and the actions of a human in equally desperate times is inevitable. The narrator of the poem seems to suggest that we humans would rather wait in the dark, in avoidance of problems that we’re met with than travel into the open or face what awaits us. As true as this may be, it is not the most interesting thing to surface in the poem.

It is clear that the possum sees the cover of darkness as a safety zone, and again, it becomes difficult not to compare the possum’s instinct with that of the human. In many instances, we mistake safety for simply not being seen, an interesting instinct that seems to be in place as a subconscious defense mechanism for both humans and possums.

So, if animals and humans react similarly in times of desperation, it is also possible to assume that they would do so in times of devastation. “There are principles at work,” the poet writes. How then is the possum that loses her young different from the human that loses loved ones in a disaster? Gregerson’s answer, though somewhat obvious, is intriguing:

     beholding a world of harm, the mind

 will apprehend some bringer-of-harm,
             some cause, or course,

             that might have been otherwise, had we possessed
                 the wit to see.

 Or ruthlessness. Or what? Or heart.

 Guilt seems the defining factor here. When faced with tragedy, rather than accepting it for what it is, we seem to want to place blame, and when there is no one person to address, we blame ourselves (despite the interminable time it may take for us to rest upon this notion). What does this say about humans? Do we think so much of ourselves that we truly think we have control over everything? It is sweeter to be the possum, I think.

So…why spend so much time on the first poem? Because it’s great, and because few other poems in this collection come close to it. Gregerson’s human mind-probes are consistently fascinating, and she has certainly done her research; her narrator consistently points out various facts that have been picked up from the multitude of books she has read, which, believe it or not, doesn’t become irritating until late in the collection. But once it occurs to the reader that Gregerson, or her narrator, must read (or hear) a lot of books, it becomes difficult to overlook the (forgive the term) snooty tone that develops. In “Over Easy” particularly, I’m having a great time picturing Gregerson as Mother Possum driving her kittens down an Ohio road, but am annoyed rather quickly by the pretentious under(or over)tones:

                  …My darlings don’t want
                 a book on tape. They want

                  a little indie rock, they want to melt
                         the tweeters, they want
                 mama in the trunk so they can have some un-
                                      remarked-on fun.

 Yeah, maybe I would too. Meanwhile, I’d rather not know what the narrator is pondering instead. She tells me anyway:

                  Fine. I’ve got my window, I can contemplate
                            the flatness of Ohio. I can think

                  about the ghastly things we’ve leached into
                                         the topsoil…

Even if her “darlings” never do consider these more philosophical and environmentally conscious subjects, it doesn’t mean they never will, nor does it mean that their indie rock isn’t worthwhile; is our narrator “above” indie rock? Too smart for it? If she chose to side with her naïve little bumpkins and listen to the music, would it make for a more interesting poem?

When Gregerson’s poems work, they are beautifully crafted, forceful, even magnetic (see: “De Magnete”). When they aren’t, they’re frustrating, one-dimensional, or worse, just kind of boring. You might say she accomplishes the former more than half of the time. The rest of the time, you’ll find it sweeter to be in the poem with the possum, I think. As for the National Book Award, well, who the hell knows.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews