Posts Tagged ‘Shearsman Books’

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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NYC: Shearsman Books celebrates 30 years

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Shearsman Books celebrated its 30th anniversary this past Saturday evening at the Bowery Poetry Club. Thirteen Shearsman poets read from their collections: Joseph Bradshaw, Richard Deming, Shira Dentz, George Economou, Anne Gorrick, Michael Heller, Nancy Kuhl, Jill Magi, Maryrose Larkin, Deborah Meadows,  Elena Rivera, Mercedes Roffé, and Mark Weiss.

Shearsman is one of the UK’s most significant poetry publishers, and is noted both in the U.S. and abroad for its large numbers of first-book and experimental American authors of exceptional quality. Producing some 60 books a year, with many titles by American poets and translations in English that give voice to poets writing in Spanish, German, French, Galician, Norwegian, Turkish and more, Shearsman is committed to creating a global audience. This event exemplified the diversity and high quality of recent American titles in the publisher’s catalog.

Shira Dentz introduced the event, and gave homage to Tony Frazer, the editor at Shearsman, as did several other readers. She said that he was not only a consistently refreshing delight of an editor, but also uncommonly unwavering when it comes to his aesthetic vision, or politics.

Explaining the origin of the press’s name, Shira read the first part of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

Stevens’s poem expresses the originality that I heard in each reader’s work and that sums up Shearsman’s sensibility. Some highlights that stood out for me were George Economou’s Greek comedy and tragedy, Shira Dentz’s idiosyncratic and supple poems, Jill Magi’s fresh and witty seriousness, Deborah Meadow’s socio-political engagement, collaborative performances by Joseph Bradshaw et al, Anne Gorrick and echoing partner, Richard Deming’s bold and passionate lyrics, Maryrose Larkin’s lyric metaphysics, Nancy Kuhl’s syntactical play, Michael Heller’s prophetic intensity, Mark Weiss’s harkening of a Ginsbergian bardic tradition, Elena Rivera’s sinuous presence, and Mercedes Roffé’s surreal poems based on Remedios Varo’s surreal paintings.  Speaking of painting, each voice was a vibrant color of its own, and this evening was a feast of colors.

—Yerra Sugarman

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Shearsman Books 30th Anniversary Reading this Saturday

Monday, March 14th, 2011

2011 marks the 30th anniversary of Shearsman Books, one of the UK’s most significant poetry publishers and one of the first post-national presses. To celebrate, the press will hold a 30th Anniversary reading this Saturday, March 19 at Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan featuring 13 Shearsman authors. The event will be emceed by Shira Dentz (pictured).

Producing some 60 books a year, with many titles by American poets and translations in English that give voice to poets writing in Spanish, German, French, Galician, Norwegian, Turkish and more, Shearsman is committed to creating a global audience, and is noted both in the U.S. and abroad for its large numbers of first-book and experimental American authors of exceptional quality. This event exemplifies the diversity and excellence of recent American titles in the publisher’s catalog.

Details:

Shearsman Books’ 30th Anniversary Reading, Sat. March 19, 6– 7:30PM, Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC.

Featured poets are Joseph Bradshaw, Richard Deming, Shira Dentz, George Economou, Anne Gorrick, Michael Heller, Nancy Kuhl, Maryrose Larkin, Jill Magi, Deborah Meadows, Eléna Rivera, Mercedes Roffé, and Mark Weiss.

–from Press Release

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The MS of My Kin

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

by Janet Holmes
Shearsman Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8

Many Mornings

holmes cover

It turns out Emily Dickinson is the best correspondent reporting today from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems she became an expert on asymmetrical warfare when she started sewing those little poetic IEDs and storing them in her trunk. Since she had only her life to give, she found that it was more effective to stockpile homemade bombs made out of paper, ink and thread. Many unsuspecting souls have been wounded by them since.

By focusing on material dated from 1861-1862, Janet Holmes’s skilful erasures place our most accomplished literary terrorist right at the onset of the Civil War (America’s greatest oxymoron) while also holding up a mirror to Cheney & Bush’s “War on Terror.” Holmes’s re-settings are often startlingly timeless. As Susan Schultz notes, Dickinson’s poetry is so compressed and gnomic, that it comes to us “nearly pre-erased.” Hewing to this magic, Janet Holmes’s poems rarely feel tortured. I like the open closure Holmes achieves, preserving a sense of Dickinson’s taut rhythm, while the deliberately composed blank spaces help the reader visualize the force field surrounding each of Dickinson’s words. The book is not a flashy gimmick or Emily “through a glass, darkly.” Taking advantage of powerful self-correcting digital optics, Holmes projects a Dickinsonian matrix in wide-screen plasma HDTV without fracturing the original or overly distorting its shape.

The loudest authorial intrusion (other than the book’s awkward title) is in the notes, a pointed litany of specific references and occasional speakers for the poems that I did not necessarily hear. Though Holmes is keenly aware that hers is a willful project, this final litany is the only conspicuous betrayal of Dickinson’s sly, timeless power. The speaker in these erasures is such a consistent presence that it seems more productive to imagine that Dickinson speaks all of them. Dickinson’s poetry puts the architects of war on trial without needing to name names. She is quite able to speak as a terrorist, or Donald Rumsfeld, or a mother who has lost her son to war, because she knows war’s justifications and its cost to the soul. Her extreme verbal compression burns the lie from every rhetorical sentence, leaving only bones. Tom Raworth’s blurb is absolutely right: “war is war and its words are already written.”

The two poets are eager co-conspirators. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic and strategic capitalization slyly assists Holmes’s contemporary torquing. With the help of Holmes’s selective projections, we can see how Dickinson drafts her readers, recruiting sleeper cells of individual souls, “loaded guns” against the apparently omnipotent status quo. Nothing can replace or improve on Dickinson’s work, but happily that isn’t the point. Holmes’s erasures give us a smart take on the experience of reading Dickinson today— an artful eclipse that lets us see the corona of the sun, and a mirror inevitably reflecting that we are the readers of whom she was so provocatively and passionately aware.

 *

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Hard Reds

Monday, October 13th, 2008

by Brandi Homan
Shearsman Books December 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7

The Devil’s Own

homan cover

Despite Brandi Homan’s pop-culture references that I have neither penchant nor patience for (see “Country Songs Always Tell Stories” for Toby Keith and “Scarlett Johansson’s Pink Panties” for Scarlett Johansson and her pink panties), the poems in Hard Reds, Homan’s first full-length collection, skillfully demonstrate her humor, balanced sentimentality and ability to undermine moments of vulnerability.

 

The book is divided into three sections. The second section, “Two Kinds of Arson,” is also the title of Homan’s chapbook from dancing girl press. However, it is the first section, “Like the Devil,” whose narrator is best at being tough when needed and offering submission only when warranted. For example, “Explaining Poetry on a First Date” has a narrator that perfectly exemplifies a comfort in one’s skin, a willingness to be seen for what s/he is. But the poem is more than a confession of what one outside the literary circuit might see as foibles; in fact, in several instances, the narrator looks elitist, proud of her “affliction” and perhaps, glad that she does not have to share. She states, “…All my friends / carry Moleskines. One scrawls homophones on her hand, / another taped a pencil to his headboard. We collect epigraphs, / read out loud in empty rooms.” She likes her life, is proud of her friends, and even when the poem ventures into more serious territory, a satisfied tone remains: “The lights are always low. It’s affliction not religion. / Not once have I thought I could be saved.” What would come of being “saved”? The scraps of a “normal” life as indicated in this poem are concretized into a “red satin / dress with polyester loofah sleeves.” The impression is that the narrator is better off for her characteristics which tend to alienate her from certain crowds.

Homan’s narrator accepts herself. Her aplomb is seductive, as is evident in the “Red Dress Cento”s (of which there are three) and perhaps even more so in “On the Quite Contrary.” The latter begins, “Call me Magdalene.” The narrator is obviously in control here; she is dominant and unabashed. She speaks of herself as of a disease—“it’s me you’ve contracted”—but she is unapologetic. The final lines again embrace her entirety: “…demons excised, but oh, / the ones that were left.” The narrator takes pleasure in her evils; she does not want to give them up. She speaks of them as one might speak of the precarious yet endearing indiscretions of her past.

It is not always the inveigling and forceful moments that are most prominent in these poems, however. Homan’s balance of sincerity and wit is stunning in poems like “Country Songs Always Tell Stories.” The narrator of this poem is slightly affected, somehow solemn. She compares “loving you” to “living / in a Toby Keith album.” Whether or not this is a positive thing is at first unclear, particularly for those folks that don’t give a crap about Toby Keith, until the narrator states, “for the first time / in a long time (which is what I would name / my own country song), I believe / you are a bull in a china shop.” By this point in the book, the fierce, siren narrator is most customary; however, it is a relief to see the calmer and more nuanced narrator step in. She is not all stone, and she is careful and deliberate regarding her susceptibility to emotional injury. Homan’s narrator is unassuming here, and it is the weaknesses that are made available amidst stronger, more commanding instances that make the poems relatable. To say that someone is a “bull in a china shop” is an implicit admission of having been wounded, but as in other poems, the narrator is not ashamed. Her humor regarding a title for her country song allows the confession to be made but the ego to escape relatively unscathed.

Nearing the end of the collection, the ego is stronger than ever, but for once it is in an undesirable way. Many poets have sought to extend advice to the next generation of aspiring literati; however, too few allow their work to speak for itself, to inform of its own power. They force feed.  This is the case with “On Hearing a Poem by a 12-Year-Old Girl.” The poem fails to escape the warranted elitist tone of previous poems. It begins, “How brave children are. Half- / lings who can’t see the bottom.” While 12-year-old poets may often emulate the poetics of Hallmark (which it seems that this young poet has done based on Homan’s lines “As if identity lies in picnics, / potato salad. Love is no / game of fetch…”), it is best to allow the young writer to work through the clichés and light-hearted amusements to find her voice among the tragedy that sooner or later makes itself known to all lives. Homan’s message for the girl is unclear, and what is most frustrating is the last line: “Baby, good for you.” All verse is embarrassing, when the author remembers who wrote it.

*

 

 

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Holiday

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

by Jennifer Firestone
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

6stars_7

Going Places

firestone cover             To Travel!
             To Change Countries

             To travel! To change countries!
             To be forever someone else,
             With a soul that has no roots,
                                  Living only off what it sees!

                            To belong not even to me!
                            To go forward, to follow after
                            The absence of any goal
                            And any desire to achieve it!

                            This is what I call travel.
                            But there’s nothing in it of me
                            Besides my dream of the journey.
                            The rest is just land and sky.

                                                                         –Fernando Pessoa

Depending on how you read the above poem, travel could sound like an illuminating experience, accentuated by actual exclamations and Buddha-like certainness: nothing ever belongs to the self, the self forever becomes someone new. In a sense this sounds appealing to me, as it also does to many others who seek to organize their lives by some tired but true maxims. Who could deny the allure of living without deadlines and responsibilities, without waking up every morning to roughly the same routine of coffee and packed lunch? It seems though, that there is a deeper psychology at work. On second look, the exclamations in the Pessoa poem read frightfully, “The absence of any goal / And any desire to achieve it!” Read in this way it sounds like the lament of someone who is stuck in the bell-jar. Perhaps the speaker who reflects that travel has “nothing in it of me” realizes something that most Carnival cruise guests don’t: the moral quandary of ourselves as empty vessels, humping further and further away to exotic places where some type of fulfillment will be beheld. Travel inherently poses existential questions to those self-conscious enough to notice.

Jennifer Firestone’s book Holiday acts as a travelogue documenting more than just the sights and sounds of far away places, as Firestone pays little homage to any place in particular. The book is divided into six sections, all without titles. Judging from the context and description of some poems, I understand when she is writing about a specific place, but without reference to mainstream tourist destinations, which Firestone more or less leaves out, it is hard to determine which small city she is wandering around in.

These poems make use of spacing instead of punctuation in most places and in turn offer no clear determination as to how they should be read. Each poem relays something different: a definite location full of references to Michelangelo, an imagined history of what may have taken place on the very street on which the speaker currently stands, overheard conversations of other travelers—there is almost no end to the differences captured in these vignettes. But regardless of this difference there is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.

The voice in Holiday wavers back and forth between the silly exaggeration of “vacation[ing] the hell / out of things” and the very real disappointment in the way “other images / felt visited / always something letting you down: / at the artifact breath held / you whistles it out / assuming there was more / you were missing.” The conceit of the book manifests toward the end when a woman touring the same historic building is overheard as saying “Is it worth / going down these steps / are the bottom rooms worth it?” Such a question embodies the real tension of vacationing, or taking a “holiday” as the book is aptly titled, and the true sense of traveling as an existential experience. Is it true that traveling means the soul has no home? Or is it rather that the soul is open to developing into something that it would not have been able to had it just stayed put in one place? I’m not suggesting the book pretends to answer this, only that the poems in the book as savvy enough to recognize this moral ambiguity and that the poet thinks enough of herself and her experience to make record. The last poem in section 5 begins by saying “I can’t lose my body. I’m membered by its attachments,” reminding us that no matter where you are you are always there. Ultimately this is a lesson that everyone (traveler or not) comes to realize. Try as best you can but there will always be something of you in it, whatever that it may be.

*

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Forget Reading

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

by Anthony Hawley
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

6_5stars_6

Broken/Beautiful

hawley coverAnthony Hawley’s second book Forget Reading is an insightful, relevant collection of poems that exist in and around the sonnet form. Though many of the poems are conspicuously labeled sonnets, their distance from traditional sonnet form speaks to the overall project of Forget Reading. Many of the “sonnets” even exceed fourteen lines. The poems in the final section, “Productive Suffix,” have a great deal of space between lines, making them feel exploded. Poems from other sections, especially “P(r)etty Sonnets,” have short choppy lines giving the feeling that the other half of the poem has been deliberately torn away, leaving only the left side. Most of the poems in Forget Reading feel like sonnets in a state of disrepair.

As the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets“ suggests, imperfection and beauty are integral to each other in Hawley’s new collection. The interjecting “(r)” turns the word “petty” into “pretty,” so that both words seem to exist interdependently. While the parenthetic “r” creates the simultaneous meaning, it also creates a rupture within the word “petty” that is both artificial and disruptive. Many of the poems in Forget Reading try to achieve a similar effect. Take for example these lines from the poem on page twenty-seven from the section “Apple Silence”:

      atomized margin

      drip of glass

      stone wall reduction

      heather heather

      that obscure object

      of the flicker

The opening lines of the poem from “atomized margin” to “heather heather” contain images that maintain their identity via transitory physical states. An “atomized margin” is neither a margin, nor a collection of disparate particles, but a baffling oxymoronic combination of the two. The following line, “drip of glass,” conjures both the image of molten glass, as well as a drip of water that appears to be glass in the moment of our imagining it. And what is “heather heather,” but a girl named Heather that is simultaneously a flower? All of these images are representations of “that obscure object / of the flicker.” Like the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets,” they maintain their character through their contradictory qualities.

This collection is about more than Hawley’s unique imagery. The oxymoronic images, and the (dis)function of the sonnet form both point towards Hawley’s desire to create a collection of poems that is as elusive as it is perpetual. As the directive title suggests, these poems are meant to maintain their mysterious, contradictory qualities in order to be read again and again. Even if this is a quality most of us seek out instinctively in the poems we read, Hawley’s aim is as admirable as his book is rewarding.

*

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