Monday, March 26th, 2012
Keorapetse Kgositsile, the poet laureate of South Africa, will read this evening from his work at Miami University today, Monday March 26.
Also, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, most recently the author of Lucky Fish (Tupelo Press, 2011), will read today at the Columbus College of Art and Design as part of the Visiting Writers Series.
Full information on the Kgositsile reading can be found here and full information on the Nezhukumatathil reading can be found here.
-Nick Sturm
Monday, June 6th, 2011
the lake has no saint, Stacey Waite (Tupelo Press, 2010)
Stacey Waite’s loose mosaic of (mostly) prose poems, the lake has no saint, chronicles its speaker’s gradual and variable understanding of self and gender. The title of every poem in the collection begins with the word “when” (i.e. “when praying for gender,” “when in spring the self pity”), so although the poems describe a personal history, they take on a quality of advice gleaned from a specific past but meant for a collective future.
The first half of the chapbook is colored by its hesitant memories of childhood. In “when the chalk of androgyny,” the speaker recounts, “there was always something about the public bathroom doors, always the chalk of androgyny sticking in my throat as i’d walk towards the women’s room with my mother.” The unpleasantness of this sensation—and the speaker’s subsequent inability to urinate—is assuaged by the speaker’s mother singing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” It is a painful story, but it is touching. This formula is characteristic of the chapbook’s most important idea—that humiliation, confusion, and horror can be tempered by love.
The book’s latter half largely abandons childhood memories to gather around the speaker’s unnamed lover. Thematically, Waite still takes interest in the ways some relationships can alleviate the pain of others. Late in the book, the speaker addresses this passage to the lover:
then you say to me it is not your fault that your mother is lonely. it is moving into winter. long highway, your daughter asleep in the backseat. you are driving toward what’s left of ohio’s fields.
We can’t know whether they are driving toward or away from the speaker’s mother, but it’s clear the speaker’s “lover” has been absorbed by the same space in which a mother sang her diuretic rendition of a John Denver song. the lake has no saint pulls most of its strength from relationships, so when Waite’s language gets slippery, or wriggles out of perfect coherence, it is because relationships—even without the speaker’s autonomous piecing together of a gender identity—are slippery, wriggling, incoherent things.
–PJ Gallo
*
Oblivion, More, Brad Liening (H_NGM_N Bks, 2010)
Brad Liening’s oblivion, more opens with a seemingly casual disdain for poetic language (“I can already tell this won’t end well, / struggling in the belly of a whale.”) The words are aggressive, and sometimes too self-possessed, as he writes about robots, all-consuming fire, and the apocalypse. But the opening poems are there to set up the groundwork for a well-composed cycle of poetry. The reader is slowly exposed to the speaker’s doubt and vulnerability; in “Oblivion, More,” he thinks about bravery:
I don’t know
if this means
I don’t understand
what it means
to be brave or
if there’s bigger bravery
we have yet to tap into.
Even though this poem is highly personal, it introduces a broader hope for humanity that is all but crushed out in the opening poems. There are great lines that fit into his “sci-fi is reality” apocalyptic, but also prove an undercurrent of compassion (if you loved Wall-E, you might love the line “The robot turns its face to the sun”). As the poems progress, Liening also moves toward the abstract and creates a distinct sense of unwinding. The crushing images of apocalypse that open that book are too heavy to maintain, and there is a well-directed shift to impressions and a more personal imagery. Compared to the fire and robots that open the book, the poems at the end might even be said to be sweet:
You weren’t supposed to be there
but the moon was so big
and for a second
it was like all those fish
were just waiting there to say hey.
(Poem)
Because of the poet’s heavy hand and heavy brow, it may at first be easy to misjudge this intelligent and human set of poems.
–Matt Soucy
**
Lure, Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman (Poetry Society of America 2009)
The speakers of Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman’s Lure are intimately familiar with the body: how it performs and contorts, how it comes to stand for the self. Lure–Arthur Sze’s selection for the Poetry Society of America’s 2009 Chapbook series–begins as a performance: “The curtain lifts without a sound,” and the speaker asks, “Where should the eyes go first?” In “Strange Hope” and other poems, Lure’s speakers focus on the figures of typically female performers. She is often an artist—dancers Marie Taglioni, her protégée Emma Livry; painter Frida Kahlo—or, as with Patience Mouffett, the subject of art (“Little Miss Muffett”). But she is also another type of performer—a “Patient” whose behavior is detailed by a cold, objective observer, as in the three “Case Study” poems. (Perhaps the patient is actually Patience Mouffett, whose father tried to cure her ailments with various insects thought to have curing properties.)
Throughout Lure, human, insect and animal bodies curl up and arch over (“A mouse curled up inside of me;” “the man with the turtle/posture, each step a careful roll / of the foot”) as much as they fold sharply (“…I can fold myself / into clean origami shapes”; “she folded into herself like an envelope / when touched”). Through such careful attention to images of the body, Casey-Whiteman explores the complicated nature of appeal and attraction or the multiple facets of what it means to lure or be lured, to be a lure and to be alluring. While the poems that open and close the collection effectively entice and reward readers, those in the middle either lilt or teeter in line or language. When the leap is long or the figure ambitious, the presence of banal verbs (“to be” forms particularly) dulls its effect. Readers will prefer the start and end of Lure, where Casey-Whitman’s language is sharp, her poetic leaps as natural as the figures on which they focus.
–Roxanne Banks Malia
***
Monday, September 21st, 2009
by Jennifer Militello
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Dustin Hellberg
One of my teachers from Iowa gave us a good way to beat writer’s block. Take a poem you like and a novel you like. Cut out all the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the poem. Go through the novel and write out all the verbs and nouns and adjectives that strike your fancy. Put them in a hat. Draw them out; insert into appropriate slots and voila, you’ve got a poem.
Too often, Jennifer Militello’s new book, Flinch of Song, reminds me of that exercise. Yes, the modern world is a random cavalcade of images and surfaces, facades and many-faceted gew-gaws. Flinch of Song is so disjunctive and quiet, sometimes, that it’s a sort of white noise on the page. It’s a good distraction for a poem or two, but page by page I hear that same ring, a kind of heavily-worked randomness fenced in by its four sections.
Each of its four sections is titled “Manifestation.” Each section is then sequentially subtitled, “The Museum of Being Born”; “Dark, Godless Reactions”; “Identity Narrative”; and finally “The Burning Room.” Taken in this order, they refer to the life cycle, I’m guessing.
Take a line from the proem “Manifestation”: “The world is the jawbone of where we cannot go.” Taken literally, one gets the sense of earth/heaven and jaw/skull. The earth will eat us, eventually, etc etc. This is a line I might be persuaded to trust were there any more causal relationship in the rest of the poem to further the metaphor. It’s a good line, and seems one that would warrant high praise in a workshop environment.
But therein lies the problem. She goes on in the next line to say, “The snow has the embroider of calm dogs lying,/ has you fallen long like rope among the flowers./ Its briar patch of handmade paper expresses/ the blankness of thousands. Its fire, a hand/ that hungers unlike anything, its bloodstream/ spoken like a torture.” The snow’s hand is fire and it has a bloodstream that speaks like torture. Obviously, one must resist the temptation to read literally, but even a figurative reading clamors for “L’art pour l’art” while lacking the conviction of declaration.
I can hear the workshop class comments about poetry like this: “I like it, but I don’t get it.” “I really liked reading this poem out loud. My cats liked it too.” “This poem has hints of Surrealism and Lorca that careen into mid- to late-twentieth century European poetry via Montale and Bonnefoy, and is sprinkled liberally with Dickinsonian phrasing.” The last of these comments is actually true. The lines feel a little too scoured, and certainly look so. Abstract association and metaphor can lead to fine music; here, the randomness performs a kind of unnatural rigidity – a collage of pefect squares and circles fenced off from one another.
There is much to openly admire in this book. By the third and forth section, you’ll begin to flinch a little; the poems begin to buck, to get more physical; the words become sharper as the tone becomes more insistent. But it only almost constitutes a surreal mapping of what Berryman called “the middle ground between things and the soul.” In the end the culmination of effects and sound and ‘’strange-ing’ doesn’t compute. Should you try to press much past the oft-gentle lilt of the language’s surface, you will not find the depth or breadth of thought that could make this Poetry instead of a collection of poems.
*
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
by Angela Shaw
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies
“The true mystery of the world,” Lord Henry tells us in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is the visible, not the invisible.” Henry, though imagined by Wilde over a century in the past, could have been speaking of the poetry of Angela Shaw—poetry that endeavors to uncover the mysteries of life’s encountered objects. In The Beginning of the Fields, her first book, Shaw writes of wedding gowns, the boudoir ritual, tomatoes and swimsuits and lace, rendering each with its own life and personality against that of her intimate first- and third-person speakers. Tinged with nostalgia, Shaw’s cultivations form a timeline, through memory, of life’s losses and gains, all set tangibly in the realm of the material. Each poem makes its own museum-like, yet pulsating, space on the page.
Anyone familiar with the intricacies of the clothing realm will take particular pleasure in Shaw’s cultivation of the subject. Taking language from the ad copy of a J. Crew catalog for her poems “Garden Party” and “Pin-up,” Shaw lingers over every detail of her described subjects, granting them utility and purpose. “Is that shirt flirting with you across the cotton / lawn?” asks the speaker in “Garden Party,” comfortable in the language of fabric and flirtation: “The man with the seersucker / ease is prone to softly silk-like talk, mellowed / stuff.” Here, the dressings and pinnings-on of what we put on our bodies literally speak volumes. A former retail employee myself, I see none of the flat, frozen faces of catalog models and the staleness of ad copy in Shaw’s reimagining. Instead, the lush luxury of the brand’s fabrics and patterns find shape and breath.
Shaw renders this clothing-centric world most strikingly in “White Picket,” a poem in the series “Five Fences: On Marriage,” where, as a wedding commences, “The gown enters first—dazzling, embattled— / and then its bride on her cloud / of song.” The dress—and all it represents at the nascent pure moments of a marriage ceremony—finds itself in stunning conflict; and as the series continues, the reader cannot help but recall the first “dazzling” vestments of this marriage as Shaw’s study of the union twists and turns through sweetness and strife.
Shaw writes deftly of both sorrow and joy, though it is the collection’s physical particularities that grant its unique perspective. Marked by the oft-noted passage of time, the poems in this collection palpably relate the feeling of each season and its associations—lingering August, “itinerant January,” “clumsy December.” Inside each month, Shaw finds a vignette to match. “Mobile Home,” site of January, captures the month’s chill and languor:
Old, tested wrestling holds: winter’s half-
nelson does in the tin shelter, brought
here from some Lubbock or Saginaw, bought
local. Staked to the yard two once-stray whelps
snarl their chains. Inside, a near-marriage sputters
and flares, left on a low burner.
December, the year’s other bookend, receives language similarly preoccupied with winter’s stasis. In “Bird Nests,” the speaker examines the damage cancer has wrought on a household:
…Some sickness quickens
in you or what the doctors, those wordsmiths,
call growth. Beyond the house our great oak pumps
in the wind like a wild lung. Dumb earth.
Sterile and “dumb,” the December landscape contrasts in this poem with cancer’s quick growth—its urge the reproduce itself. Shaw, as in “Mobile Home,” couples setting and subject with revelatory dexterity.
The Beginning of the Fields’s lyric preoccupation with beauty makes its most stunning observations in moments, such as in “Bird Nests,” where life’s ugliness demands response. Loss suffuses the collection, but never overwhelms. One of the book’s strongest poems, “Miscarriage” renders its subject in a confessional first-person, as the speaker copes by harvesting tomatoes:
I trowel a hole for each loose bundle
of roots, slosh water from my pail, and refill
the gap, my hands gathering at the base of each
fluid stem. I go down where my husband’s long
shadow startles the grass. It is weeks
before we will again come carefully
unsewn, take to each other, hungry and thick-
tongued…
Later in the poem, as the speaker “go[es] down on all fours/ in search of what I lost,” the devastation her loss has caused becomes heartbreakingly clear. Where some things grow, Shaw suggests, others perish; making sense of this harsh truth proves fertile subject matter.
In The Beginning of the Fields, careful study of the physical world takes us far from it, into questions of origin and purpose, time and place. The poems are calm, mild-mannered even, perhaps too much so for readers who tire of placid natural images, or of melancholy and sometimes sentimentality. But Shaw keeps these in check. This book should be read, several times, by any reader wondering how her own world—and her own amassed collection of things—came to be just so.
*
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
by Mark Halliday
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker
Hopefully, it is unquestionable that intelligent people read poetry. Interesting people too. One would have to be far more than a saltine cracker to come to this microcosm. The ever-sentimental medium has faced consistent backlash and change, in the sense that, like human beings ourselves, we are always studying the currents and paddling against them. Keeping up. Originally, I was going to utilize this space to discuss the milieu of prisms that poetry has offered. Instead, I’d rather pose the question: why is there a dividing line (or series of partitions); and, the answer to that question will hopefully manifest via a review of Mark Halliday’s new book, Keep This Forever.
There are a few dozen poetry-writers that seem to speak to an invisible audience who wear regular shoes, of Iowans, corn farmers that might otherwise hate poetry (See: George Bush’s nomination of Ted Kooser for poet laureate). The peddler riding the fence between mainstream, academic, experimental, etc. poetry may be someone like Billy Collins or Charles Simic (though those two do not go together at all). The point is, there will always be a poet that can be elevated to the status of talking head (See also Elizabeth Alexander’s over-willed effort on Inauguration Day 2009). And the talking head is usually a low-bar piece of spoiled fruit or a middle-bar piece of trash.
Mark Halliday is the worser version of the above. His new book, Keep This Forever, is no less than hanging around with your boring uncle that took his undergraduate education barely serious enough to average 8 Genessee cream ales a day and now looks back on it, while drinking bad scotch, with a plasticized, pathetic nostalgia. Halliday, ends his poem “Venus Pandemos” from the award-winning book Little Star, like this: “I wonder if any intelligent feminists / will ever read this poem.” More than likely, “they” don’t and would not need to waste the energy or effort because a Halliday poem, in no way, is a learning experience. Should be a burning experience.
The only redemptive moment of the new book appears at the beginning of the poem “Enchanted Field” when M.H. writes, “I am being given my chance / and I am blowing it.” Symbolism. Symbolism.
Examine this horrific attempt at poetry: “I was a fool! Because the cheese and fruit were finite//whereas you were of infinity.” That just happened. The poem’s title is “Confession to Mary,” starring Tom Hanks and an ugly Audrey Tautou rip-off. The book’s best poem is “Bonnie,” when Halliday decides to get fresh with his white/male privilege and pull off a liberally slanted political comparison poem. But, everything else is a cookie the exact childlike shape of a Christmas tree or a Valentine heart. Nothing here is a sumptuous dessert in the form of a boulder on a man’s shoulders (as it should be since the bulk of the book deals with the death of M.H.’s father). The attempt is spit on a lamp, only to burn up and evaporate by sizzling dust.
Halliday is noted, in the past , for his “unsentimental reminiscence.” This book flips that script: M.H. tries his hardest to break the local Waltham, Massachusetts Hallmark store window. Instead, he goes limp, drops the brick on his foot and gets arrested. If you’re going to be “unsentimental” then do it, balls to the wall, blood on the floor, body parts organized in the freezer. Hell, push someone in front of a bus. Not here, this is lazy unsentimentality.
This brings me to the place I would rather not traverse, especially with Halliday—a place John Ashbery understands when he says he doesn’t think poetry should be all that accessible. When poetry turns into Bob Seger right around his “Like a Rock” phase, maybe that is exactly (under the rock) where it should go and hide. So Chevrolet or the US presidency cannot co-opt it. So its fans stay steady. The dividing line that exists between those of us who nerdily and retroactively read and seek out wonderful poetry and the folks who (maybe) work too damn much to want to get off and read a poem—the dividing line should not exist. Bad poetry is bad no matter if you’re in a New York library or an Iowa corn field. Thank Halliday for making that very clear.
*
Friday, April 24th, 2009
by Amy England
Tupelo Press 2007
Reviewed by Steven Karl
Have you ever seen the movie, The Saddest Music in the World? When it first hit the big screen in 2003 people either raved about its “magic-realism,” its “odd-ball vaudeville sense of humor,” its “cinephilic allusions,” and its “visual inventiveness,” or they felt that all these “bells and whistles” were a cover-up for a weak script and a lack of clear vision. One particularly vivid scene is when the amputee, Lady Port-Huntly, removes her glass leg and fills it with beer for her lover to drink. By this point in the film, my girlfriend (at the time) became fed up and decided she had better ways to occupy her day. The point is that you either go in for this sort of stuff or you don’t. Unfortunately I feel that Amy England’s book has plenty of bells and whistles, but lacks anything of lasting depth.
Corn wants things that I do not.
We are a dull sort of enemies,
hirsute, tenuous, difficult to see.More counting.
A kind of grass. There are numbers
set in it as spokes.
The section after this poem consists of an essay/poem repeating many key words: corn, snake, dull sort of enemies, hirsute, dent corn, cattle and others. England attempts to build layers or strip away meaning, but she falls short, partly because the images are not compelling. I mean that “We are a dull sort of enemies” does not make me want to know more about the enemies, and I don’t really comprehend how dullness matches up with “hirsute” or “tenuous”—the words are more decorative than applicable, and the book feels like overwrought “project” poetry. Here’s part of another poem entitled, “This Is Built Of Simile,”
phallus as snake
phallus as fish
winnow as arena
hive as seed
“Phallus as snake” is predictable. Intentionally so? A springboard to ostensibly more surprising similes? Either way, “a dull sort.”
England employs poems, prose poems, essays, collage, and creative non-fiction to tackle her immense subject. She has recreated a complex society and tries to articulate it by any means necessary. The book is well-plotted, but the writing never brings to life this society in a way that a reader might attach guts or emotions to. It is too long, with too much scatter and fancy; as a result, it is constricted and stifled. The techniques she begs to push the book onward ultimately strip it of poeticness.
*
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
by G.C. Waldrep
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker
“What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?” Thus spoke G.C. Waldrep when I recently interviewed him. That is also the statement (as he called it) or question he put to the bobble-heads at Tupelo Press as to what the in-betweens and leg-rooms of his new book Archicembalo represent. There is nary a question mark in the entire book, which is the invisible omission of the human beings all the questions are put to – as in the book’s primary poem “Who Is Josquin Des Prez” – as Waldrep skips and sings, “How do you do. How does one do. A snowdrop reminds.”
The poems are prose blocks. Some are sweet and succinct, others are dark and lengthy. All of the titles are questions involving their selves in a tetherball game of poetic call-and-response. Of note is the notion that questions are sentences, which begs the impulse that all that has gone underground or died is to the left of the question word itself – as in, “Who is Benjamin Britten.” might as well be, “Dad, Who is Benjamin Britten?”
In a word, Waldrep is a cantonment; in the very same way he claims that a “hymn” is for “one certain culture.” A “hymn” can also “be heard across the river” and/or is “an obstruction in a winter park.”
In another word, Waldrep is a gamut. A gamut is an entire series of hexachords. Excerpts of the poem “What Is a Hexachord” highlight: “I sing as I walk when I have breath which is not always.”…(and at the end of a page and a half) . . . “And so the music makes me.”
The glass feels tough to break, hammer or not. The wood is dense, full of knots. The brain is thick, unlike a dinosaur’s and rolling on its own intellectual river. The only balance to this lowered teeter-totter plunges itself deep inside the reader’s psyche as utterly lightweight gasping and laughing. Waldrep seems to be laughing at himself, dark enough to slide his body into a dead opera, yet fluorescent enough to go “wicked wicket into the wide wide world” and allow his heart to become a third arm. Ironical enough, Wittgenstein assumed the art is just another limb. Organs are things for production, and what does the heart produce but a reaching.
Humor bounces along like a rubber girl on a lunar hopscotch court. Take the poem, “What Is a Tenor” (one of the few pithy poems): “If astonishment then replica. If porcelain than mourning. If hero then metamorphosis. If abstinence then flight. // Very well thank you. If yucca then savvy then delight.”
In fact, the witty and drolling poems that Waldrep conjures later conceal any presupposition that he is an Amish man. You forget you are dealing with a professor, a man who possesses strange talents that none of us would even consider, a man who has an alternative poetic background. While these poems would ideally be fun to sip a scotch around and hear your friends read out loud, they are difficult to puncture without a Wikipedia or (as old-school as it might seem) an actual encyclopedia at hand. Yet, Archicembalo slides and skills enough to be its own Google-fun search. And do not forget that even a piano, to Mr. Waldrep, is a prism inhabited by a small bird, a wren, maybe.
Captivatingly, in our interview, Waldrep listed Arvo Part as one of his top five favorite recording artists. Part composed a minimal piece titled “Spiegel Im Spiegel” (“Mirror In the Mirror” in German) in 1978 about departure. The piece sounds like it’s mourning, yet like it is gripping two eye-droppers of hope. This is Archicembalo’s methodology as well – that the opera of life is death and joy.
*
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
by Joumana Haddad
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo
With hefty pinches of pleasure and sin, Lebanese poet Joumana Haddad begs her audience to notice the abundant sexuality in her newly translated selection, Invitation to a Secret Feast. The selection is thickly overlaid with the standard ingredients of poeticized sex, and even those poems which purposefully skirt the subject cannot avoid a bodily subtext that arrives more or less at the foyer of an idealized but forbidden sexuality. In his introduction, editor and partial-translator Khaled Mattawa touts that Haddad’s “ferocious and almost tactile femaleness [...] is grounded within a contradictory genderless desire to create space for creativity, original thought, and experiences,” and while this is a wonderful and valid criterion for any selection, its premise is inaccurate. Haddad is ferocious (and often outright violent), but the paradoxical “genderless desire” that Mattawa cites does not exist.
Haddad has a tendency to treat the body as a kind of weathervane, receiving interpretable information but necessarily leaving interpretation a bit to the wayside, and her dualistic approach is most often made possible through thinly-veiled encounters and painterly description. Her speakers are women who have a sexual existence but keep its details under layers of breathy concealment. Thus, a resulting separation from their men and each other becomes the primary way her speakers approach their own sexuality limiting Haddad’s poems to the realm of reaction: instead of stemming naturally from a woman’s bold, parthenogenic lust, her poems react to a perceived lustlessness in others and a desire to undermine that lustlessness. She addresses this directly in one stanza of one of the best and longest poems in the selection, “Your Homeland is this Burning Night”:
Lust sates your parched body
like a desert drunk with the thirst of its sands.
Your narrow land is wider than a lover’s chest.
One drop of your nakedness
and the moon falls apart.
Haddad makes her motives evident by the potential for destruction she grants “nakedness,” and her work cannot be read without its quiet but strong feminist implications. She imposes lust on the experiences of her speakers, whose ownership of sex and their bodies is meant as a literal manifestation of the power their sexualized bodies hold. In this fundamental way, her speakers parallel the women of Lysistrata, but where Lysistrata and her counterparts use their power toward a distinct political goal, Haddad’s speakers remain motiveless, merely acknowledging their power before fading back into passivity. Take the first two stanzas of “Slow Down,” a poem that characteristically endows men with both sexual motivation and action:
Slow down, impetuous man.
Don’t rush,
slowly mend your nets.
Slow down,
coming and going are the same.
The water’s journey starts from below, rising.
And my body—
trust me—when the time comes
will not escape your deluge.
Of course, Haddad is not always so passive. The poems in the first section of the book, a selection from Haddad’s 2004 collection Lilith’s Return, are its most “ferocious,” and its most interesting. In them, Haddad reaches beyond her cursorily political sex poems for something that escapes social reaction and moves closer toward poetic subtlety. Each of the poems imagines the mythological Lilith in all her creative and destructive fury, and while speakers sprinkled throughout the book are awarded similar powers, none are as lushly celebratory and fully imagined as those in this first section. Take the disparity between her two approaches to nakedness. Where nakedness destroys the moon in “Your Homeland is a Burning Night,” in “Lilith’s Return,” the title poem of the first section, Haddad writes, “I am the naked / who gives nudity the flower of its meaning,” conferring appropriate creativity to the female body and throwing in some wonder and mystery to boot.
In some ways her earlier speakers’ acquiescence can be seen as a perfect antithesis to both active sexual pursuit and active sexual aversion in the same way indifference can oppose both love and hate. But it is difficult to escape that the underlying obligation her speakers feel voids the positions of authority they are afforded as the poem’s speakers and as the apparent keepers of sex. Many of Haddad’s women seem to have accepted the idea that they will be romantically and sexually pursued, and they believe their universal and unanimous approval is a way to pretend participation. This implicit and embraced helplessness is presented most perceptibly in “I Am a Woman,” where Haddad attempts to undermine an acknowledged power structure with this strange reversal:
I am a woman.
They think they own my freedom.
So, I let them,
and I happen.
The lines stand together as one of the more provocative and fascinating moments in the book, but it often difficult to ignore that she sounds a bit like a child on a playground who, when tagged, proclaims they wanted to be “it” anyway.
*
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
by Cecilia Woloch
Tupelo Press 2008
Cecilia Woloch’s chapbook Narcissus is divided into two sections. The first of these is introduced by a quote from “Narcissus” by Patricia Hooper: “Didn’t I stand there once? / Didn’t I choose to go back?” The inclusion of this makes me think that the author found more inspiration from Hooper than from the rather conspicuous Greek myth (thankfully). True to form, the poems in this section highlight the selfsame nostalgia and wistfulness of Hooper’s quote; there’s reminiscence, desire, sentimentality in “Anniversary”:
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?
Interspersed between lyric poems like “Anniversary” and “Greed” are prose poems written as postcards: “Postcard to Kim from the Café Les Philosophes,” and so on. These missives catalogue the narrator’s emotional and physical peregrinations through her dreams, the Lower Carpathians and Paris. My favorite is “Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea.” Desire and sentimentality take a back seat in this poem, which depicts dream and dream images with startling immediacy:
“…Then our lost mothers hushed us. A halo of bees. I was dreaming as hard as I could dream. It was fast, how the apples fattened and fell. The country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror. The gold hook gleamed.”
The poem aims to say, not to convince, and its wealth of images speak compellingly for themselves. Whether the speaker is a Naricissus, is in love with a Naricissus, are gratifyingly beside the point.
Mirrors, coins, glass, fire, water, hook glisten in Woloch’s poems. These points of light might allude to Narcissus, but I’m not quite convinced. The speaker in “Greed” is not obsessed with her own image; she is fixated on what the “he” in the poem affirms of her:
I was his, everything was his—
even my sleep belonged to him.
And later in the poem:
Sun tossed like coins across the bed,
and the glittering of birdsong, breeze
the cool blue of his eyes. Even the mirrorwhere a woman, shining, turned
to kiss, be kissed. Even the shallow, silvered glass
in which I dressed, undressed, was his.
The woman is again at the mercy of the spectacular male figure in “Return,” a poem in the second section:
moving near, and then more near, a shape I knew,
and when he stood before me, finally, I stepped, too,
toward the sky of it, the night around us, warm,
and let my head fall to his chest, and made no bones
about my joy.
The second section is primarily composed of what can only be described as quasi-“love” odes which are effusive in their glorification of the past; almost every poem features a poignant confluence between a younger self and a more experienced, more sagacious self, which peers admiringly and longingly at the girl she once was—or was to her male idol, who never vanishes from the scene. Whose vanity trumps whose becomes the question.
It is easy to see why Woloch’s poems would be included Billy Collin’s Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. They are poised to touch and inspire the same indistinct but apparently broad audience. Her poems shine like teacups—“And he grew ravenous, enraged, / and all the spilt world poured / into the cup from which he drank.”
*
Friday, June 20th, 2008
by Emily Galvin
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II
Expectations run high for a debut book of poems; critics and readers alike search for the intangible that merited this particular manuscript’s salvation from the slush pile. Even higher expectations await the progeny of famous writers who must prevail over the assumption that they have achieved publication by connections, rather than merit. In her first collection of poetry, Emily Galvin – daughter of renowned poets Jorie Graham and James Galvin – sets the bar higher still by employing a wide array of complex and challenging interdisciplinary devices. Do the Math spirals out of the mathematical foundations of Fibonacci and Euclid, at times risking clarity, readability and meaning in search of new literary ground.
The collection opens with a wholly unnecessary and unintentionally patronizing introduction by Barry Mazur, a Harvard mathematics professor. While Mazur makes an earnest attempt to explicate the inner workings of Galvin’s mathematical verse structures, the very presence of such an introduction undermines the idea of the poems as viable creative works. An introduction should, at its essence, argue before the reader that turning the page will prove worthwhile. It should not supplant the ability of the reader to discern the meaning of a poem or interpret its structure independently. Galvin’s reliance on a mini-mathematics lecture to prepare the reader to view the poems in a certain light is troubling.
Introductory transgressions aside, Galvin immediately redeems her literary efforts with the first poem, “Spiral,” a challenging and rewarding simulacrum of a word search puzzle. Without spaces between words, and without a guide to navigating the maze of words, the reader must fail many times before ultimately finding the method to the poet’s madness. The poem ultimately consists of several smaller poems, seemingly unrelated but equally confessional, one consisting of only a single word – “Insidious.” Yet, even in this brilliant reformation of the traditional poem, Galvin is challenged with a pervasive detachedness – the poem often seems disjointed and unconnected, crystalline forms without rhyme or reason.
What follows “Spiral” pushes the limits of poetry further, as Galvin introduces elements of drama into her verse. The aptly-named “Premise” sets the stage for performances yet to come, creating the sort of detail-obsessed theater set that might be demanded of an overbearing director. Yet, strangely, the performance itself exists solely for performance’s sake, as “at the moment, there is no audience but the chairs. Bolted-down chairs with folding seats, rounded tops and metal backs, upholstered in coarse red cloth.” As the crescendo of details and descriptions builds, what was once a theater set transcends the stage and becomes a distinctive moment in time. Galvin calls for “winter afternoon light, the light that hits an Iowa cornfield at about 3:00 pm on a sunny day in February.” These intense stage directions set the scene for the next set of poems far better than any introduction might.
What Galvin does next redeems many qualms that a reader might have with this collection, as she develops her setting into a series of dramatic vignettes, sparse interactions between two characters. The building patterns of conversation between simply named characters – First and Second, A and B, Greater and Lesser – provide an engaging insight into interpersonal relationships and dialogue. In the seventh stanza of “Euclid’s Algorithm,” Galvin creates an entire scene without words. Simple and repetitive, yet powerful, movements supplant the need for language without denying the poetic essence in each line:
(B. looks at the ceiling. B. looks at A.
B. moves hand towards A. B moves slightly
towards A.)
(A. looks at B. B. freezes. B. brings feet
together. (Add) A. opens mouth.)
Without words, A and B transform their conversation into an elaborate dance, bringing the literal rhythm of their movements into the meter and pattern of the poetry.
Near the middle of the collection, with the poem “Rhinestone Hair Clip,” the novelty of Galvin’s conversational poetics begins to wear thin. The fascinating form fails to overshadow a lack of fresh and engaging content. In this poem in particular, the two characters, Ann and Ben, search for Ann’s new rhinestone barrette to no avail. Ann evokes a potent anger and desperation for this inconsequential and seemingly vapid object. An eventual revelation that Ben possessed the hairclip all along serves not as catharsis, but as a source of infuriation for the reader.
Galvin abandons the binary conversations for a more traditional sort of poetry later in the collection, adding a much-needed sense of balance. “Light Warning” makes excellent use of Galvin’s well-honed ability to capture the essence of a scene in compact, three-dimensional verse. “You know how / The air feels after everything / Has been carried out, doors and windows closed?” These more conventional forms challenge her playwright’s voice and yield fascinating verse and witty interludes (“I think when you ask for advice, you really want accomplices”).
If Galvin wishes for this collection to demonstrate her mathematical prowess, then her highly regulated and patterned dichromatic conversation poems serve this end admirably. In serving as her debut as a poet, however, the mathematical forms risk creating a false difficulty, obfuscating meaning and form under layers of algorithms and fractals. While it is fascinating to read Galvin’s “Notes” section and learn of the mathematical secrets lurking in her syllabic arrangements and line numbering, it is imperative that the poems of this collection be allowed to stand on their own. Do the Math is a promising start from a brilliant poet, but it can only be hoped that her next collection will throw off the scaffolding and present the caliber of lyrical verse that she affords only glimpses of here.
*
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