Posts Tagged ‘Scott Hightower’

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

Landscape with Silos

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

by Deborah Bogen
Texas Review Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Pitch Perfect

Landscape with Silos is a first book. It garnered the 2005 Texas Review Prize for Deborah Bogen. No wonder. It is a smart, sharp book, brimming with accomplishments.

Landscape is divided into four distinct sections. The first unit, “Learning the Language,” is comprised of poems reflecting the landscape and the aural wonder of childhood. There is at least a horse, an owl, and a cow:

I prefer moonlight,
I like the green to be almost black.
I like a lot of space

with nothing going on.
A few white words
and the rim of the milk pail polished
and fine in my dark.

(“Moving the Moon”)

The particular landscape is North American, somewhere in the Dakotas where the received language of adult quotidian and childhood wonder swirl into the poet’s inner ear. The poet’s youthful observations lead off from the main road to “another eye, another way to see things.” People study foreign languages and may one day go somewhere to use them. The poet will find her way through observation and language, too.

There are strangers in the landscape as well. In some provincial American landscapes, the interlopers would be seasonal deer hunters. But in the Dakotas, the foreigners amid the locals are more carefully pressed and are connected to the Federal government. A myriad of small things differentiate them from the locals. One is that they do not take their meals at home’s table:

One nail sticking up in a pile of boards,
air bladders from fish brought home for supper,
sugar in green glass bowls,
glittering rattlesnakes….

We drank water from old pipes,
picnicked under windbreaks, peach pits,
and eggshells, and in the glove box
roadmaps to the river, to the reservation

to Fargo and Minot.
And later in the same poem:

… But no maps
to the silos where men tended missiles so big
we didn’t even dream about them.
They didn’t scare us, those missiles,

not the men either who rose like bankers,
sat calmly at the counter, starched and pressed.
Keys jingled on their belts.
They ordered root beer and blackbottom pie.

(“Landscape with Silos”)

The second section of the book, “The Poem Ventures Out,” is an ars poetica series. Here are some of the poem titles: “The Poem Takes the GRE,” “The Poem Enters the Talent Show,” “The Poem is Put Under Surveillance,” “The Poem Goes to the Kitchen to Empty the Dishwasher But Ends Up Praying”:

Why can’t you forget the wallpaper
by the bed where you dreamt of the golden girl
feeding her father’s ducks. No one cares
about that. Forget the skate key, and the way
the evening sky invented surgeries,
carving its space in you.

You’ll never enter a darkness as whole
and strange as your mother’s breath after the party
or feel heat like her palm searing you as
she brushed the bangs from your face.
But you love it there, half-light, half-opened door.
And the poem knows that.

(“The Poem as Tease”)

In the third section, “Visitations,” the disturbances of lives move to the center of each poem. Family histories corrupt and eventually slip away. Bodies and minds slide toward disorientation, diagnoses, medications, and therapies. The poet observes individuals experiencing physical and emotional disorder. The poems, like the lives they reflect and like the poetic voice that renders them, stay grounded and independent. Each life is an individual compendium of individual perceptions. There is almost always another order into which things can be assembled. Ordination and authorship emerge as central subjects:

Seismologists say things are stable
but we know different.
Feel the new laws?
They dog the heart like hunger
at the offramp, like drunks
at Union Station,
like rain that chants
no money. No money.
No money.

… Some say hardness of heart can
shake the earth. Some say it’s coming.
It’s coming. It’s coming.

If your house has a candle, light it.
If the baby cries, pick her up.

(“L.A.’s Millennial Love Songs”)

In the last section “Within the Porcelain Theater,” Bogen pushes much further toward the “phantoms the tick-tock brain concocts.” Mystery resides in a theater. The theater could be a human skull or a human institution. Some might even see it as a correlative for a toilet. There are images of walled gardens, prison wards, slanted mirrors, sanitariums, lunacy, and fluid sexuality. And the notion of taking flight from such a state. When the question of Insanity is put to the Poet, the response is clear, but rendered in prose:

In here we write of marshes,lurid dreams, water
flowing out of control. Many of us have translated
Chinese poems full of orchids, drunkenness and
sexual longing.

(“Four Answers to QuestionsAbout Insanity”)

The Poems close with:

What I will not see, sees me.

(“Dreams after Jean’s Reading”)

Bogen’s poems are grounded. Adornments are deliberately fundamental, not heroic. The shapes of the poems range widely… but not the quality or the merit. Throughout, Landscape with Silos is at once agile and rigorous:

Grace must be like this sunstreak
on the linoleum,
this unexpected elegance,
a rope of gold up which we pull ourselves
amazed, having thought it gone
that thing which penetrates,
which chooses us,
which illumines one moment
so that the book of hours opens
to a single letter, loved
and labored over,
lavished and extravagantly gilded—say
a mystic vowel embellished in blue,
a hint of scarlet and in the center
nothing,
the white suddenly framed. . .

(“The Poem Goes to the Kitchen to Empty”)

Tags: 7.5 stars, Deborah Bogen, Scott Hightower, Texas Review Press
Posted in reviews

Amigo Warfare

Friday, January 16th, 2009

by Eric Gamalinda
Cherry Grove Collections 2007
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Songs of Fertility and Subversion

One hesitates to say that the poems in Eric Gamalinda’s most recent collection, Amigo Warfare, could be the poems of the love child of Emily Dickinson and César Vallejo…but there, it is said. There are moments in this spell of poems where one might have opted for Dickinson and Rumi—but Vallejo and Dickinson form a distinctively colonial American union. Swimming in the false exactitude of things like calendars and numbers, Gamalinda launches into displacement:

  Like Sitting Bull, may you find America a hard place
  in which to save the soul. …Twelve years ago
  I crossed six time zones, three continents
  half a lifetime. Existence is mathematics:
                                                                (“Plan B”)

Mallarme has already adjured us that the coordinates of reduction for Existence are Poetry and Economics.

                                     …people think
they’re dreaming us but we are really
  dreaming them: we grow tired of resisting
                                          (“False Hopes, True North”)

The “I” in English romantic lyric poetry functions a bit differently than the “I” in a poem by Cesar Vallejo…or Gamalinda. Both Vallejo and Gamalinda are writers working in colonially-received mother tongues, languages in the discomfort of cultural inheritance; both are poets of emigration and self-imposed exile. Gamalinda arcs from the Philippines to the U.S., where Vallejo left Peru to close out his life in Europe, both moving closer to the seat of their inheritance, both technically green-card poets.

Gamalinda has no trouble finding material: Bollywood, Jesus, the Mayan prediction of 2012. He evokes Luis González Palma, another artist (Guatemalan) who, like himself, unwraps social and political realities to expose mysticism and indigenous suffering. In many ways, Palma and Gamalinda bookend one another:

  This is the graveyard of broken watches and discarded
               chandeliers.
  This is the time of the arrival of assassins.
  Sorrow is all stillness, a pool of rainwater.
  Sorrow is a red silk line between the dreamed and the
               disappeared.
  This is what I dreamed last night
  (you can’t see it, because it was just a dream).
            (“Poems of Sorrow, after Luis González Palma”)

But one cannot stay in the dream. One slips back down the red silk line to the broken world.

The collection is divided into three sections. Each opens with the apparatus of an epigraph. The first epigraph quotes Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. The second quotes Argentinan writer Jorge Luis Borges. The third quotes Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky. This is art that is aware that it is art; thoughts stay in the meanings of sentences.

The title poem appears in the second section. “Amigo Warfare” is what the Americans derisively called the Filipino style of resistance [from 1899 to 1904]. The Filipinos were friends during the day or when confronted; but at night or when no one was looking, they were guerrillas.

In the third section Gamalinda unfurls a majestic poem in four movements, each movement shaped like a pendulum or downward pointing arrowhead. “Abell 2218” draw its title from a cluster of galaxies. Gamalinda slides in scale from cosmic to personal. Out again. Back again. The poetics can be dizzying, but there is no doubt about the poet’s ambitious and dazzling vision. One might even evoke another English, mystic poet involved beyond the disquietude of the mortal with the spirit of prophecy, William Blake:

  To begin this small, to know
  one life alone completes the world.

  Until the sun cuts through the waves,
  until the planets dwindle and hold still,
  and love rips us open
  and another million years begin.
                                                (“Yellow Tang”)

Tags: 7.5 stars, Cherry Grove Collections, Eric Gamalinda, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

Notarikon

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

by Catherine Bowman
Four Way Books 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Ghost Dance

bowman cover Catherine Bowman’s first two books, Rock Farm and 1-800 Hot Ribs – which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award – map the poet’s way to her third book, the innovative Notarikon. It is worth going back to those creative and rewarding books. In both, Bowman lays out a vibrant physical and poetic territory. Her third book continues the hearty mapping, but – like a brightly painted Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ icon – its joy is applied to passage through a patch of darker terrain.

A 10-year marriage ends and gives rise to the artistry of Notarikon. The manifold metaphor of the collection’s opening poem is a human heart unfurling like a drowsy snake from a cistern. Bowman is as careful (and revealing) with gender assignment as Elizabeth Bishop. The snake is associated with an ostensibly “female” garden, but the poem’s second movement addresses his actions:

Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn,
… he pulls over not to piss but to blow away
any diamondback unlucky enough to be
on the road between San Antonio and Cotulla.

(“Heart”)

Yes, there is trouble in Paradise. In Notarikon, the palisade fence of Bowman’s marriage garden comes down. She is left asking, “What is the metaphysical sum of the concrete parts when one’s marriage is over?” Similar terrain has been covered artfully in Erin Belieu’s Black Box and in the first half of Anne Marie Macari’s Ivory Cradle. Reading such a book, it is hard not to consider Elizabeth Bishop’s masterful poem of loss “One Art.” Other Bishop poems (“Florida,” “The Monument”) might also float nearby in some of Bowman’s poems:

From the nest of tumbleweed branches
he hung glass marbles and metals,
epaulettes, he said, from a ghost
army of amputees. There were mouthpieces
from musical instruments, strung sailor knots
he called pharaohs’ hearts, old shells,
the nails and combing from a lover’s lost
hair, charms, from a war bride’s necklace,
reliquaries of animal scents, a lacquered
glass he called “mother’s milk.”

(“Tumbleweed Tree”)

The sounds, images and rhythm are fluid, even muscular. Throughout the first half of the book, there are similarly remarkable poems: one comprising a list of kisses (“1000 Kisses”), another springing from Jesus’s feet and another inspired by a transcription error (“I Want To Be Your Shoebox”).

The second half of the book is a thousand-line poem served out in ten-syllable lines, ten lines at a time: a collection of cantos, and a ghost dance to a lush life. There is a pictogram of bed springs (“the four cardinal points of our bed”), a merdog [as in mermaid] (“Our bed, / a wolf that we thought made a good watchdog”), a pair of silver lion-headed ice tongs, and one red sock in love’s drawer. But the emphasis on loss, Bowman notes, is an enterprise not without poetic risk:

Brodsky lectured, ripping the filter off
of a cigarette and pressing his chest —
The elegy has several dangers, he
said, foremost, an excuse to speak about
the self, and the piling up of details,
I admit that I’m guilty on both counts,
and alligators are biting my ass.

(Canto 8, stanza 8 )

Amid the memories of Christmas trees, diamonds, a red velvet cake and a serpentine equinox shadow in Chichen Itza, Bowman’s poems take count… and recount:

You thought sadness just came with the tenure.
Now it’s over. And I’m still listening
at the red door, trying to remember
why – looking for a portent in a bowl
of ten red steaming beets for what vanished.

(Canto 2, stanza 8 )

*

Tags: 8 stars, Catherine Bowman, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

This Far From the Source

Friday, September 19th, 2008

by Neil Shepard
Mid-List Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

“skip yourself / to the other side.”

this far from the source Neil Shepard’s third collection of poems is not the razzle-dazzle of a newcomer or the verse of a high-falutin’ sage. This adventure is one of mature poetic focus. No flashy spelling here. Every poem is carefully built on clear substance. Even the notion of Mystery seems clear and concrete:

…Mystery’s
when we turn the other cheek
and offer it, when we become
more than the body’s surviving
codes. Unleash the hungers
beneath the hunger, the dragon-
fly all morning alight on granite
ledge, beside a multitude of bugs,
untouched, simply because sun on stone
feels so near the source, so atavistic,
even a darning needle’s pricked awake.
Even a human on the run must
pause in a field of blue forget-me-not.
Even that swiftest of self-preser-
vationists, Atalanta, stopped
and stooped for three luscious, golden
apples, even if it meant self-
desecration, surrender to
the thing that would devour her.
(“Hunger”)

Shepard is subtle and self-deprecating. Just the right pitch when a poet is going up against Time. In one poem, a father is perceived as eccentric for turning family films into cinematographic evidence of his own reverie. In another, the poet eulogizes a local farmer. One poem even explores cultural Hubris from the vehicle of a small town pep squad cheer. After rallying prouder and louder, the poem turns:

we’re brutes who glorify our towns with home-
town cheers and sneer at creeds or faith

from foreign places.
   (“I’m From Leominster. Couldn’t
      Be Prouder, Can’t Hear Me Now,          I’ll Yell a Little Louder”)

Being one small piece of stone bathed with water not far from the source serves as the collection’s central metaphor. The energies are at once domestic, atavistic, and linguistic. One complete poem in the book “From the Bridge at Taos:”

A thousand feet down, the Rio Grande daily
reinscribes itself on scrolls of sandstone.
Look down, and there’s a recondite text revealed:
earth history that snakes like uro-
boros; beneath it another creature
reified from the obscure. There’s a millennium
instarred in mud, times of plague and pestilence.
And a signature of solfatura,
a few lines of blasphemy. There’s a comet’s
pink penmanship and the blue formation
of heavens, and a black scrawl of beginnings.
And close to the surface the condign
mea culpas of slow-witted creatures
who have just learned to think and are still
wet with rising from the waters, still
crossing over on the first day,
though they believe they have come so far.

The image of the stone in the river is Being and Time. In “History Matters More Than You:”

                                          …like that stunning
               monostone across the stream you saw just now
               and crossed over and found yourself reduced
               by that enormous cliff broken
               from some higher place. Perspective shifts
               when you’re a smaller piece
               of the planet. Let the eye travel upward
               toward that hilltop flat and peaceful with pines,
               and know from some higher precipice once
               a piece of rock broke off
               and land slid down to this brook’s babble
               and lodge here until time without chronicler
               lapped its sides to shiny skipping pebbles
               and what piece was left on shore…

               Ask them where exactly this trickling stream
               issues from, from what higher place the first
               rains gathered and carved their rushing course.
               Ask in vain how you’re a part of it,
               without name or date, and why this brook will shush
               us up who try to ask too much, will lap
               instead at our feet and hands, saying skip
               this stone across the stream or skip yourself
               to the other side.

Tags: 8 stars, Mid-List Press, Neil Shepard, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

Only the Senses Sleep

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

by Wayne Miller
New Issues 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

…only the senses

On some level, the title of Wayne Miller’s book could point to themes worthy of “Solaris.” Only the senses sleep… while the poetic, imaginative life––the ever turning, mysterious, more fundamental, more volatile life of the poet––floats subliminally on and on into the vast space of the muse. Wayne Miller’s beautiful lyrics have nothing to do with science fiction. They have everything to do with light and dark, with floating below and floating above, with being in and out, with concrete and abstract language wrapping around itself like a barber’s pole… “winding up / the thread of all that names fail to say”:

And now I lift

myself into each day
as if into my body, go to work,

and then at night, my lit room
slips down into the glass.

The factories blow their smoke
up through the snow, the city

lifts our lights a little closer
to the sky….

Somewhere, folks are digging
a well, while elsewhere

the lit needles of gunshots
and fireflies––. I can assure you

that our lives keep fracturing
into notes, I can promise you

that a white fence without light
is like a sail without wind.

(“Dear Sappho,” –– Section I)

Miller’s lyric poems are some of the best this reviewer has read for some years. (And a first book at that.) The book is divided into three sections, each section having one poem addressed to Sappho, the classical lyric poet’s poet herself. But each section begins grounded in the props of a physical life; a world of wrap around porches, golf course sprinklers on timers, Presbyterian bell choirs, salted streets, lovers, lit rooms, books opening and closing like valves, icy basketball hoops hanging like chandeliers. Millers sensibility is complex: literally, a European eye for relationships; aesthetically, a mature love of sense; actually, a post-Enlightenment, optimistic, American assumption of possibility, decency, and fair play. Miller believes in the abstract and the concrete valences of his own reality and in the languages that he recognizes those valences have bestowed on him and in him. Miller believes in poetry.

Miller’s poems have shadows, long shadows. But they are not murderous shadows. Miller’s shadows are interior shadows:

The sunlight comes as if through a phonograph needle––
a robust chord of light that’s somehow thin at the heart
of how it says what it has to say. Still, the walls
are soothed, long shadows stretching westward
from the hanging signs and the squat fireplug,
not-quite-vestigial tails of the street’s unnamed life.

(“Rounding the Corner into ‘Early Sunday Morning’”)

The zone of no-sleep is also on the inside:

sleep is a poor proof of an emptiness
inside us––sleep turns the body into world.

Yet, sometimes I’m stunned by the light
of the fridge when I finally open my eyes;

(“Dear Sappho,” –– Section II)

The interior space of no sleep does not mean interior emptiness. It is the landscape of the interplay of interior light and dark, of interior pause and sound. Fundamentally, while not as harrowing (one could even evoke Dante here), Miller is Blakian; the Spirit of Prophecy dwells on the inside:

we are in this continuousness––our lives
dissolved in the channels of written lines––
every word I’ve read was in me before I read it.

They’re pulled from me like seconds
from the cistern of an unfinished life. Love’s
endless weathering moves the body

of our words: we read to understand
we’re not alone in it––we carry one another,
assuredly––
though we do this alone.

(“Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night)

Miller’s book, it should be noted, begins with an epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” a poem about the metaphysics of knowledge being drawn from the physical experience of the senses.

In “Only the Senses Sleep,” Miller’s ambition is artfully actualized at every turn. And a huge ambition it is. This is not the ambition of noble, inflated lyrics, but the ambition of striking into the bedrock of the fundamental, essence of poetry itself. Miller finds the systolic and diastolic pulses of poetic belief:

At any one point in time, half the world’s
rocking in the other half’s shadow,

as we are now. Each soul’s wrapped
in a name’s slick membrane, each image
enters through the liquid coating our eyes.

Each moment’s a bailed teaspoon of water.
Nonetheless, the city’s deadbolts
wind and unwind the gears of our living watch,
the books open and close like valves.

My neighbors’ breathing holds me
because it continues to move. Unwavering

light under the door like a sheet of paper––
thinning now, as the city’s tesserae
take the day’s first pale sips,

as the street presses its bell to the window,
as our shared water begins dividing
across our dream-cold bodies.

What remains for us has always been
what’s arriving. We know this,

dearest belief––we know you each second,
only the senses sleep.

(“Sunrise Study”)

Tags: 9 stars, New Issues, Scott Hightower, Wayne Miller
Posted in reviews

Ox

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

by Christopher Patton
Vehicule Press 2007
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

The Willed Form of a Steady New Voice

Unlike many souped-up books where the language of the poems is over-modified for higher performance, Christopher Patton’s new book Ox is artful, intelligent and substantial. It is a refreshing and generous first book from a very steady-eyed, steady-handed, steady-minded new poet.

Though decorously undecorated, Patton’s poetry is carefully constructed. He begins with heaps of interesting, carefully selected images of the usual physical world. He then segues out into the realm of a zenful consideration. But the point of view here is substantial to the poems, not a mere stylistic decoration.

Poetry is the domain of transformation. In one valence, the Concrete world gets shifted into images and into the vowels and consonants of human speech. In one of Patton’s poems, red maple leaves become the residual red paper confetti of an inauguration; a weeping willow becomes anthropomorphized into a disheveled queen searching haltingly through her sorrows to tell her tale to her chastened, emerging buds.

In another valence, the Abstract world also gets shifted into the human abstraction of language.

Both the valences (the Concrete and the Abstract) undulating, separating, and braiding together make up poetry, a reflection of the broadband of human Reality. Patton does it very well:

                                          Guarding
                     the dull green bud
         that comes, father blares
blood-red alarms, though his war
            is over. Rose, a cousin,
            visits, but not often.
         After she has cleaned and cooked
for them, she spreads a lurid whorl,
         then full, seeding hips; when he invokes
            a military rationale,
            she slams her farewell.

                              …the heart
            that was hurt, will hurt.
                                                      (from “Hawthorne”)

Patton circles and hovers over the existential profundity of human passion. Abstract human emotions like Grief and Love exist in the moment, like the poison of a bee sting or the yellow streak of newly minted pollen. Abstract and concrete gestures are assembled; and, through thought and language, disassembled. The reverse is also true.

A singular bee is not merely gifted with venom as a defense mechanism.

In another scale, a bee is a poison-loaded predator who hurts and gathers game that her hive’s hexagons might be filled and the offspring there flourish. In time, her being, too, will be another desiccated corpse impassionately cleaned from the hive:

         A bee moves with a lone soul’s
ease: like a pendulum unhinged undulates
back to the hive. And it will hurt, as
         a flame hurts the edge of a chart
         of shoals, when one who was apart
            comes to fill his prison’s
            paper hexagons
                  with nectar the cells
                  will hold, though it kills.
                                          (from “Poisoned”)

The imprisonment (by paper, by geometry, by received forms), the burning hurt, the chart of shoals is rife ground for Zenful, poetic mediation.

Patton also visits the zen tropes of worms and oxen; lambs, lions, and eagles; gardens, fields, seeds, and weeds; wine; rivers; journeys, fences, and gates; flags and bells. In this sample, a spade striking a rock forms the bell:

      Death-knell in a hole-wall. Rang the spade bell, two,
      three, chring of rock in soil. Treeplanting.
      Levered load up and bore
      a bit to left; turned, heft fell.
      Knelt to sleuth for a lost self. No self. A worm-
      half laughed. Felt-soft burns in the leaf-halls. A form
      falls away in a spall
      of lame or will––I follow halting to––see it through––

(#21, “Weed, Flower, Mind”)

Ox is a first-rate first book from a steady-voiced, capable new poet.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Christopher Patton, Scott Hightower, Vehicule Press
Posted in reviews

Azaleas

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

by Kim Sowŏl (translated by David R. McCann)
Columbia University Press 2007
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Born as White Bugs

Azaleas is a beautiful and historically celebrated book of poetry written in Korean and first published in 1925.

Setting out to faithfully translate an organic and complete Korean collection of poems into a coherent book of English verse is not an enterprise for the faint of heart; setting out to translate from Korean and into English, one faces immeasurable difficulties. Consider that the Korean language does not necessarily give every verb a defined subject and that Korean poetry as a genre is often rendered more “poetic” by the use of suspended clauses and broken grammatical structures.¹

Besides the primary complexity, there is the added complexity of historical timing. Politically, consider that modern Korean literature was not liberated from Japanese rule (officially annexed in 1910) until 1945. Under Japanese domination, the Korean language was severely limited, at times forbidden, and “deeply lined with the Korean resistance to Japanese cultural domination and the struggle for independence.”² David R. McCann, an expert on modern Korean poetry, adeptly maintains Sowŏl’s elemental-ness, immediacy and richness without reducing the work to its simplest components.

Chongsik Kim was known by the sobriquet Sowŏl [White Moon]. Sowol’s life is a journey encapsulated into a single book and marked by a premature and untimely death. He was born in 1902. By 1934 the journey was over, azalea blossoms––white, pink, or purple––strewn in his wake. Also consider that the journey trailed from favored fortune to a diminished financial promise, and from provincial (Korean) remoteness to imperial centrality (Japan, to study at a college of commerce) then back to remoteness: Oh, the fickle circularity of fortune! Thirty-two years is not a very long life. In poet’s years, that is risk, but can be enough!

Sowŏl’s poems are generally praised for having some connection to the folk songs of the poet’s generative language… much like the connection of Garcia-Lorca’s poetry to the cante jondo [deep song] in southern Spain. On some level, some of Sowŏl’s valences parallel the lyrics of tunes sung by Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. The poems are short reveries of wonder, longing and living beyond loss—of life’s inevitabilities.

But in his short life, Sowŏl himself did not like being classified as a “folk-song poet.” One can just as easily evoke parallels to the poetry of Sappho, John Keats, or Robert Frost. There are also a host of affinities with French symbolist poets:

…the one who always stayed hidden,
in my dreams, deep asleep, she came again.
…and just like that she rises up,
the sound of chickens fluttering their wings.
Wide awake in the brightness of day,
I go on mistaking
anyone on the roadside for her.

(“One Who Came in a Dream”)

The poems in Azaleas are arranged in sixteen discreet sections: thematic arrangements that concurrently depict the plot of a physical and emotional journey. The emotional tone and range of images of the work are consistent, though soliloquies are apt to shift in their sources. I’ll close with the opening three stanzas of “Song of the Stream.”

The stream is inconstant and mystically immutable at the same time…. In the opening stanza, the stream would have clothes over a waiting body. In the third, the two enjoined subjects of the poem would “tumble” into the sea. The stanzas set up for a fourth stanza’s ending of the “body” of the stream flowing into the beloved’s heart, then mixing and “burning” there to ash and dissipation:

If you had been born as a wind!
In the middle of an empty field by the stream at moonrise
you would blow loose all the ties of my clothes.

Or if we had been born as wriggling white bugs!
We would try dreaming that foolish dream
of a rainy black night at the foot of some hill.

If only you had been born as a rock on a cliff
where the sea comes to its end,
The two of us would embrace and tumble in.

Let my body be the spirit of fire
burning in your heart the night through,
the two of us burn to ash and vanish.

___________

¹An Sonjae [Brother Anthony] published “Translating Korean Poetry,” an excellent short text detailing those difficulties, and others in the review “Modern Poetry in Translation,” Vol. 13, 1998 (and can be accessed on the web: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Azaleas.htm).

²Again, quoting An Sonjae, but from a different essay: “A Well-Kept Secret: Korean Literature in Translation,” published in “Pictorial Korea” (and accessed on the web: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/klt/Secret.htm).

Tags: 8 stars, Columbia University Press, David R. McCann, Kim Sowol, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews

Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

by Rigoberto González
Tupelo Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Relationships with Death

gonzalez cover

Rigoberto González’s first book of poems, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, was selected for the 1998 National Poetry Series. Since 1998, there have been offerings in other genres: a novel, children’s books, newspaper columns on Latino literature, a memoir — all of them prize-winning or noteworthy. Now González’s second collection of poems, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, has surfaced in the accumulation of work by this writer, still aptly noted for his “exacting focus.” Before reading this book, I had only read of it in an Amazon review: “difficult as it may be to imagine work as kaleidoscopically brutal and political as it is delicate and insightful.”

While studying at Columbia some years ago, I acquired a copy of Letter to a Stranger, a then-out of print book by a young poet who had died leaving only the single collection. But, as I had already read Garcia-Lorca, the language of the dark Thomas James poems did not move me as I had led myself to think it might. James appears twice in González’s new book, and the intriguing five word title is also taken from James.

This year, at a Poets House event in Manhattan, I heard Edward Hirsch — a poet who has given some thought to guides of Eros and Thanatos – speak briefly in a question-and-answer period about Sylvia Plath and Garcia-Lorca and their relationships with death. Basically his thesis was that while both poets were fascinated with Death, Plath was a bit “in love” with it, where Garcia-Lorca was driven reverently through his work by his deep fear of it.

González too has a profound and metaphorical relationship with death; in addition to death, his metaphors are drawn from an erotic attraction to the Stranger. In Gulliver’s Travels (Gulliver being perhaps the greatest Stranger of classical literature), when the giant moves his bowels in the land of the Lilliputians, Swift evokes “urgency” and “shame.” González turns the notion of social assignment on his head: “I’m not ashamed of my naked body, my naked body is ashamed of me” (“Neurotic Double”). González is frequently aesthetically dangerous:

“A vision called to me:
on your face the beauty
of a knife slit haunted
me, so I carved it free.”
(“Scar”)

Often, he is aesthetically demur and dangerous at the same time:

I unmourn the murdered sissy of my youth,
the sack of discarded pigtails and puckered lips that
burst like an appendix. I hold my scar for the man
who’ll split it open with his gorgeous thumbs, who with his
teeth will liberate the pin-pierced mariposa of my tongue.”
(“Of Despots and Deities”)

Always, González artfully braids together the valences of Love and Death to poetically portray human pathos—or as González says, he watches as “the hearts implode, / shriveling down to the plum pit origins of lust”:

Neck against neck, two voices dance
through the madness of the Venus’s-fly-trap, the rattle
in the hinges of its blade is not
death, but the cry of love––what the narcissistic
moon hums to the sea that mirrors it.
(“In Praise of the Mouth”)

Such poetic displays are breathtaking. Things split themselves, new architectures are declared, passion snaps around like lovemaking in a lightning storm. González keeps everything artfully contained in images:

… Muscle pleats.
say fraction, say rhomboid

suitecase––magician’s box
that opens at the jaw.

Inside the heart keeps pumping
like an anxious rabbit.
(“Vanishing Act”)

and

When I extract a heart, turnip-stiff, shame

will overwhelm me. Only an ingrate would deny this find
its beauty.
(“Transference”)

Sometimes, he is the battered fugitive; other times, he is the battering stranger.

… I am the keystone held intact by the arc
of his arms, I am the texture that exists at the command of

his touch, the scent of pressed carnations dead
until it comes alive beneath his nose.
(“Papi Love”)

In “Danza Macabre,” the final poem of the collection, González at last plants a cosmology in which each human gesture ends ascending from the coffin of the body that engendered it—a kind of “cosmos of karma” in which “even the prodigal kick leaps up to the bone.” Death and the living body find a kind of stasis with each other:

…At long last, when my body
also dims to gray, we’ll be equals, companion corpses, gracefully
retired like a pair of ballet slippers, predator indistinguishable from
prey. Let the rosaries murmur that lovers make peace in their graves.
Let the sun search for spectral kisses. Let the moon bless the padlock

as the living leave and shut the gate. No fugitives permitted…

Tags: 8.5 stars, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Scott Hightower, Tupelo Press
Posted in reviews

The Errant Thread

Monday, April 9th, 2007

by Elline Lipkin
Kore Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

Fury Presses Intelligence

lipkin cover

Elline Lipkin has just come forward with her first book. It is a beautiful book, artfully honed; Lipkin, poetically speaking, is a class act. The poems are elegant in their style while restrained in their deployment. A rare balance of said, enough said, and taste. But before moving into specific features of The Errant Thread, allow me a couple of brief asides.

Literature is crowded with figures of anger. Most are fiery and self-righteously reactionary. Many a poem is a rant and vent. Many are full of irony and half-baked “Saturday Night Live” humor and artless wit. In many, sensationalism becomes a strategy. Fury is a dish—not often, but in many developmental cases—best served cold.

Literature is also crowded with figures of the instinctive journeys of children from obedience to equality and self-reliance. Often disobedience, or at least a balk, if not an outright refusal, is a part of the story. A child—no matter the degree of privilege or disenfranchisement—must find its way beyond the covenant of childhood to the promises of a more mature life. False starts, epiphanies, harsh moments of self-awareness, harsh measures of others, obvious parallels, betrayals and affirmations are all a part of the process—are all the stuff of experience. Blake is pretty good—and merciless—on the subject: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

In poetry it is not unusual to find a first book positioning the speaker of the work in the romantic position of meditating through the formalization of the poet’s own self. Sometimes disguised. Sometimes not so disguised. The real guise being that of the journey into the art form itself.

Among other things, The Errant Thread is a book positioned on refusal, expressing anger and wonder. It is more specifically the prayers of a daughter. The theme is Fury, but the poems themselves are deployed apollonically; the level of restraint and artfulness is high. The poet, unapologetic.

Lipkin steers her poems clear of flash and edge and fashionable displays of irony. Instead, her poems root and risk themselves in meaning and relationships. The poems locate themselves in France, Belgium, Rwanda, the United States. Philomela, Hebe, Athena, Thumbelina, Grimm’s The Maiden Without Hands, Snow White, the gift of an Elgin watch, caged birds, Miss Havisham and Estella all put in brief appearances.

The poems also locate themselves in the terrain of Will and Compliance, not as high in profile as perhaps a Thell, Antigone, or Catherine Holly (“Suddenly Last Summer”), three figures, daughters, involved with earthing and unearthing the truth of their situations. Recall how Catherine Holly confesses her inability to express the thread of poetry?

Of the three, only Blake’s Thell recoils to a state of “Perverted” innocence. Lipkin’s voice too is impelled through poetry to find her way forward. The first poem of the collection––peppered with ”spinsters” and “thread,” punctuated with “pattern” and “history”––opens entitled: “My Parents Meet at La Grande Place.“ The title indicates “parents,” but it is the father who foregrounds the poem:

Shop windows line the square, decorated
with endless patterns of ancient lace.
Spinsters working at their spools,
‘the last of a dying breed,’ he thinks,
their longing patterned into an intricacy
that unravels if only the smallest thread is pulled.

The second poem, one of this reviewer’s favorites in the book, features the parents’ union and foregrounds the mother. It is a prose poem, descriptive and clear. The last sentence of the poem is as artful as it is indicting in the revelation of will and motive, all the more poignant as it is framed in a clause coming from the mother herself:

Forty years later, looking at photographs and remembering what she clutched, my mother will say sweet asylum I called it all of these years.

(“Sweet Asylum”)

“Wife” and “daughter” are perhaps intrinsically places of “asylum.” Perhaps likewise are the notions of “father” and “son.” One might argue so also are the notions of sonnet, epithalamion, and ars poeticas made out of lines by Dickinson.

In the collection, there are also: a lament (for a friend’s wedding), ekphrastic poems, responses, an elegy, an ode to Limoncello, a concluding envoi. In the envoi, with the body’s back to a cathedral copula, the voice concludes by soaring with identity:

To the west, the sky drops its cape

straight into the sea. A ship sews
itself into the gold lining, the horizon
a seam. You divine a new route, vow
to circumference, ply each longing
like a thread pulled through.

*

Tags: 8 stars, Elline Lipkin, Kore Press, Scott Hightower
Posted in reviews