Arranging The Blaze

Arranging The Blaze
by Chad Sweeney
Anhinga Press, 2009

Reviewed by Edythe Haendel Schwartz

Chad Sweeney’s recent collection, Arranging the Blaze, offers a harrowing yet hopeful view of life in the 21st century. With keen perception, seamless shifts in tone, musicality, and figures at once precise and expansive, Sweeney probes the individual’s attempt to structure and sustain a sane and grounded life in a world rife with injustice and hypocrisy. And whether Sweeny addresses history, tradition, work, faith, identity, or concerns about the future of the planet, he does so while exploring the power of language to tell and to heal.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the short lyric “White” which serves as a map for poems to follow. Consider: “The foam of the sea is white // gypsum scowling the hillside, / the sun-bleached bones of crows.” Here we see land ravaged by mining, loss of habitat and life– not a pretty picture, yet the speaker quickly alerts us to the issue’s complexity: “White is neither yes nor no.” Perhaps the speaker intends to calm us, but only briefly, as he soon commands: “Look at the rim of your thumbnail,” suggesting we have had a hand in what has happened to our planet. Finally, “White is not kind. / Look at the cotton opening its seed.” The image recalls the numbing work of slaves, the stubbornness of racism, but also opens the possibility for growth and change.
Many poems in the collection bridge the personal and the universal. The long poem, “Genealogy,” offers not only a fine example, but also a clear sense of Sweeney’s breadth and technique. In the first two tercets, Sweeney grounds us in his experience:

Along the streets
the candelabra
in amber points of sun

reflected,
Car glass, arc-of-roof, antenna.
It is in me.

In line three, the echo of “ America The Beautiful,” foretells the poem’s direction. We soon learn of incidents troubling to the speaker’s family, incidents that impact the speaker still. The incantatory refrain, “It is in me,” works to sweep us into the speaker’s observations. Here, they reflect on faith:
Mother before she was my mother,
Sherryl hung
By her knees from the redbud tree

allowing the white Sunday
dress to flow over her head,
allowing

her hair scented with lye and faith
to comb patterns in the dust,
recording the day upside down.

Upside down, Sherryl sees “the smart white house of Mary’s father, who emerged in his Sabbath “black to cast / a look of such contempt // and hurry his daughters into the car.” She feels shame that stings into adulthood, and the speaker again intones “It is in me.”
In the stanzas that follow, the speaker shifts locale, first to the natural world, where he observes “Color roots spoke to turtle eggs // and asks, “Is it jade? Is it flint? / Did waves grind it / in a mill? It is in me,” then back to family, his grandfather’s death in a tractor accident, his father leaping “down from that tractor / to bury his own // boyhood, eleven years old and Irish, / fatherless, godless, barefooted boy[…,]” and finally to the role of art and language in human history. Celebrating his heritage as a maker, Sweeney recalls “the first hand to blend / pollen and clay against the cave wall, / mother //of Lilith, Harjo and Levertov, / mother of jasmine clutching at cliff ledge. “
Other poems that explore the evolution of humans as makers are “The Welders,” and “The Arc of Intention.” “The Welders” places the reader in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, where the speaker watches welders build a carousel. In tercets built with short lines and startling images, Sweeney creates the sense of physical strain, allows us to taste the grit – the welders, “angular on one knee, atop a ladder, amidst flame and their own private cloud // of dust or smoke.” By placing the enjambment after “cloud,” Sweeney alters the pattern of intonation and stress, thus stretching meaning. The poem’s speaker sees the welders as “magicians” who use their skills to forge connections. The speaker reminds us such connections have sustained us “wherever theory / or bone // needed binding.” Examples follow: “iron / among malachite, / Irish among their dead.” Iron must be extracted from malachite to be useful. People must be rooted in culture to survive and thrive. But there are costs.

scars beneath the breasts
where the coal train crosses.

As in “White,” we observe the scars to land and people. End-stopping the line with “crosses,” intensifies the word and raises the specter of burial, a subtle reminder to care for our land even as we use it, and to care for the people who work it. The speaker continues:
Civilization
depends on this,
this math
at the wrist, at the mouth.

Yes. Civilization depends on problem solving to build connections, be they “math” at the wrist as in welding, or “math” at the mouth, as in language. The cadence of this striking metaphor returns the reader to the welders, “laughing now”/ […] holding the cold beer // against the vein in their neck.” The carousel is built and running. The poem is finished.
In “The Arc of Intention,” the speaker shares insights gleaned from leading a San Francisco poetry workshop for youth from Central America, many of whom have likely known the trauma of war. In a series of melodic couplets built of clipped lines, some with only one word, we join the students in acts of naming, in the joy and challenge of articulating the world in a new tongue. The students write, “fixing the light of their gaze // inward / where the pencil is a scorpion, // a storm, / a glove. ” Again Sweeney contemplates the insubstantiality of language, the way a word has no reality beyond itself, yet insubstantial as it is, the word enables us to name our world. As the poem moves forward, we find the students at the windows observing freighters in the bay, gulls–
[… ] to name
this world with the awkward
words, the borrowed words,

yet they are naming,
and through the windows the city

rises to meet them
fire escape, goldfinch […]

The speaker tells us “they try on the new // syllables like oversized robes, /
some soldier’s lost boot,” as they let go of an old life and prepare themselves to negotiate what lies ahead.
In this way the words are tamed,
even loved, […]

Everywhere in “The Arc of Intention,” we find the joy of language– in the experience shared, and in the poet’s skill to tune and love the word.
“Dolores Park,” a San Francisco landmark, is the setting for one of this collections most complex poems. With diverse poetic strategies -- Whitmanesque anaphora set against one word lines, neologisms, oblique reference to writing, and playful spacing-- Sweeney propels the poem toward hymn. In so doing, he gives voice to the microcosm of the world that is San Francisco:
“Dolores street leaps from its map a living thing
crossed, relined, alert or livid eye,
Leading Tierra del Fuego to New York, barefoot and tired,
Old Man Road–

The poem’s speaker observes people on the grass, the grass itself:

In grass grown soft but not to itself soft
soft only to the woman supine in office clothes mutejoydown
and soft to the lovers lying close and naked despite their clothes
and soft to the carpenter who rests carbuncular in dreamsmile beside
his hammer
and soft to the shadow of clouds without syntax clean and empty of
water[…]

As the speaker moves us through the poem, we find each space reflects on the human

crisis below the image. So too does each word define experience for the people who inhabit “Dolores Park.” The poem continues with the speaker repeating small words as if awestruck:
The palm trees toe their hill
and now and now: and: and: now is: and: and memory tree
and material tree: each of a weight:
and the church tower says forever above the butterflies
and the street erupts from ideal and real equally
and cars grind up the hill against the chains[…]

Under the grinding of the cable cars, the poet-speaker reflects on his world, on the

made thing, and his own place in the cosmos. The final stanza brings us to the close of day:

After work, the hour of dogs:
a beagle hunts the tennis ball with original glee,
all else dim beyond that wet star:
life as composition in drafts, approximations […]

While “Dolores Park,” celebrates the word and the world, the poem closes with a stark image of the risk faced by our planet and its inhabitants. The speaker rests on the grass, observes the city, “in weightless ideal / in line and dome / like history to the safe, / soft as thistledown, / the bombs falling quietly into a summer dusk.” This poem is at once leisurely and urgent, joyous and disquieting, as is this fine collection.
What ultimately makes this book a must read is Sweeney’s ability to make us care about the private and public challenges of our time. And with exacting craftsmanship, Sweeney gives us pleasure as he speaks to our concerns. Both technically and imaginatively, there is nothing cautious about “Arranging The Blaze.” In taking risks to achieve a fusion of form, tone, and meaning, Chad Sweeney gives us a finely wrought analogue for the natural and human world of the 21st century.

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Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) -- as well as the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the journal of poetry and translation, Parthenon West Review. Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, Barrow Street, Runes, Verse, Volt, Passages North, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, the poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

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Edythe Haendel Schwartz ‘s collection, “Exposure,”was published by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown , KY December, 2007, and was nominated for the California Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in journals including Calyx, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Earth’s Daughters, Kaleidoscope, Poet Lore, Pearl, Potomac Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Spillway, JAMA, Runes, Passager, Water-Stone, Natural Bridge and other journals, as well as several anthologies.

Star in the Eye

James Shea
Fence Modern Poet Series 2008--Winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series
Fence Books(Distributed by University Press of New England)
80 pp.
$15.00 Paper, 978-1-934200-14-8

Reviewed by Zach Savich

James Shea’s first book of poems, Star in the Eye, has lots of lines that cross the wires of proverb and punchline. Sometimes, such lines come without context, like the bumper stickers of an odd sect: “Easy to cross the river if you are part river,” says one section of “Dream Trial.” Another: “I am the opposite of a solipsist.”

More often, such announcements accrete, forming coherent scenes from declarative statements that have discrete integrity. The leaps between such statements can be excitingly large—“That’s the remarkable thing about me. / I am not a hawk that can swim” (“Runaway Model”)—but Shea’s voice stays steady, moving through propositions with clipped glibness.

Despite its cleverness, this voice is less cheeky than thorough-going and frank, suited for the poems’ strange and necessary labors. “You are the performance artist / who charges people to leave,” begins “Around the Wind.” In fourteen lines, this poem has the speaker landing a plane on that you’s street, a distance it’d be hard to traverse without Shea’s gift for bursting across surfaces.

Many poems in the collection have similar catapulting starts, jolting forward from an initial scenario or problem: “I just realized my recent error: no space/time” (“The Yellowstone Revolution”); “I dropped my soulish thingy in the parking lot” (“Runaway Model”); “You are not free to enjoy the nostalgia” (“Panopolies”).

Frequently, the sequential statements that follow are stitched together with startling and restrained pathos. “I live once supposedly,” concludes “Mechanical Foliage,” one of many poignant sentiments Shea delivers with the flatness of transcribed song lyrics. In the book’s opening poem, this approach makes cartoonish elements feel harrowing:

They gave me surgery on my mouth.
My eyes were packed with feathers,
and my whole face was painted flat.
An expert told me I was probably a joke.

(“Turning and Running”)

Elsewhere, Shea’s pieces show off their seams more, serving less as translations of pseudo-linear monologues than as compilations of linked utterance. “Storms,” for example, seems written by a language student whose only fluency is phrasal, evoking the book’s frequent themes of language study and travel (“The yukata is beautiful. / These are eggs. Those are eggs. / Who is that girl? This is / my bike.”). In “Haiku,” Shea makes a self-portrait out of potential haiku titles.

Upon Kissing You After You Vomited.
Upon Walking You Home and You Pissing
in Your Pants. Upon Asking a Complete Stranger
about Our Situation. Upon Reading Issa’s
Prescripts “Issa in a State of Illness,”
“At Being Bewildered on Waking” and Realizing
the Haiku Poets Were Not So Laconic and How
Could They Be?

Such conceits are fun, though I’m most impressed by the poems that use accumulating compression to stab with mischievous, imagistic clarity, not just create continuity or collage. The forty-five short poems in “The Riverbed” do this with dazzling range and scope; I wish they were printed on coins.

Italian Riverbed

Gathered along the riverbed,
She walked among us
Like a cameraman
At a wedding.

Riverbed on a Leash

The leash moves
Around the sitting dog.

Origami Riverbed

A child made a riverbed
Out of paper.
Then he laid it
On the river.

Baby Blue

After the movie
About riverbeds,
You said, I wonder
What it would be like
To be married.
I said, Yes!

The humor in Shea’s collection makes you cock your head, not guffaw. Continually starting and stopping, the morsels of this long poem—I’m tempted to quote many more—have a measured pace, highlighting how clipped statements, for Shea, are less quirky sloganeering than expressions of his willingness to be dumbstruck. In mixing reticence and exuberance, his tone is pleasantly odd, but not at odds with tenderness and awe; it conveys an amped-up sense of earnestly “defending everything from everything else” (“Idea of a Mutiny”).

Without such earnestness, it’d be easy for a poet with Shea’s ear and wit to be a sort of solipsist, entertaining us with an off-kilter interior view, but, being the opposite of a solipsist, Shea uses these techniques to express old fashioned emotions in original ways. In “Poem,” for example, we see self-consciousness blossom into self-awareness as Shea considers “how the world protrudes out at one:”

I was sad I was not the young boy
who passed me each day the way

water carries a ship, but I was happy
I saw him and this contradiction

saddened me, but I was pleased with myself
for having noticed it.

The self, in Shea’s poems, is composed as it speaks (“Whoa, I said, you hear everything you say,” concludes “University of Air”). Such composition requires slapdash improvisation but also has high stakes for its language—I love Shea’s subtle mulling of phrasing, such as in a section of “Dream Trial” that says, in its entirety “No, no, it’s alright. // Hey, no—it’s alright,” reminding me of Frost’s experiments with sentence tones. The difference between those two statements is enormous. Attentive to how tones grind against each other, Shea helps us hear it, and stop, but not be stopped by it; his is a minimalism unafraid of wordiness, that doesn’t collapse on itself but folds into an origami boat that floats on to further observations and memorable lines. For many poets, such lines occur only at the beginnings and ends of poems; you wander between them waiting for the rhetorical microwave to ding and say you’re done. Shea constructs an entire book out of them.

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A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, James Shea teaches at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University. His poems have appeared in journals such as jubilat, The Canary, American Letters and Commentary, and Columbia Poetry Review.

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Zach Savich’s first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has recently written reviews for Boston Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Kenyon Review Online.

Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, & Ruth O’Toole, eds.

Ragged Sky Press, Princenton, N.J.

145 pages, paperback

Reviewed by Jane Dobija

Clothes are the poems that we wear. The billowing skirts, sculpted suits, and scruffy t-shirts in which we parade around tell even the slightly attentive observer about our histories, our hang-ups, and our lies. The subject of costume’s power, universal and unchecked, struck the mother lode with Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, and nearly one hundred more accomplished poets, who contributed to a new anthology from Raggedy Sky Press called Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. In their allotted pages, these writers explore the meaning of dress as symbol, history, and personal fate. They do so with a wit and wisdom that makes usually bitter truth telling palatable.

Only the dullards among us read costume literally, as Janis Butler Holm proves in a delightfully humorous piece called “If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry” that reads like this:

Cute.

Shoes.

Me.

Cute shoes.

The rest of us are all disturbed by the dissonance between what clothes promise and what they deliver. “Living in Bodies” by Claire Zoghb reminds us that the hospital gown, with its “… single knot/at the nape” … “was sewn/to survive only so many/washings, so much bleach.” Diane Elayne Dees, for her part, reads the message young girls might not see in designs borrowed from the military. “In my dark visions,” she worries, “pre-teens slog through the desert/in Little Mermaid combat boots,/ … they load theirM-16s.”

Some accessories and undergarments are examined here as pure symbols. The “thin black ribbon/of customary bombazine” is a “badge of ruin” for the husband and wife who sit shiva for their child in Daniel A. Harris’ “Attire.” The double entendre of Mary Langer Thompson’s “My First Pink Slip” suggests that being female might not be unrelated to being laid off.

Other pieces of clothing are symbolic on an historical scale. The “White Cotton T-Shirt” in Margaret Atwood’s poem exposes the disconnect between the costume of The Sixties flower children and its source. “It made its way to us from the war, but we didn’t know that,” she apologizes before admitting how this “vestment of summer” actually “had been washed in blood.” Maria Terrone’s “Unmentionable” recalls tragedy, too. “A frayed label says/Triangle Shirtwaist Company,” the speaker of this poem notices about the antique lingerie that lies in her drawer. It calls forth images of “smoke, locked doors and fiery dives,” as well as a final question: “Did she hang by a thread for days/to die, or survive...?”

A number of poets in this anthology find whole chapters of their lives woven into the clothes that have been left behind. James Richardson’s “Family of Ties” always are “…Listening at the backs of doors, frozen/against the walls of closets.” The silky strands might be remembered as disguises that have been cast off, but then, one is slipped beneath a collar “…and we are dismayed,” notes the narrator, “to find that that they fit. Just when we thought/we had changed….”

In “How It Is,” Maxine Kumin portrays a woman in mourning who uses a piece of clothing to renew contact with a deceased life partner. She dons his jacket, searches the pockets, discovers a hole, a ticket stub. “My skin presses your old outline,” she tells the absent loved one. “It is hot and dry inside.” The notion that she might have saved him occupies one stanza, but finally there is unwilling acceptance of the loss. “I will be years gathering up our words,” she admits from inside “the dumb blue blazer of your death.”

For Maxine Susman’s empty nester, clothes represent both a loss and a rite of passage as she watches her son “Packing for College.” Her ambivalence would ring true with any mother:

Part of me says I’ll do your clothes

Forever if you’ll stay with us. Part says

Here’s your own jug of detergent….

It pains this woman to see that, “What seemed a closetful of everything/squeezes into one bulging duffel.” Susman leaves her in the semi-emptied bedroom to contemplate the loosening of her maternal attachment, “… the come and go between us.”

Dresses of all colors – little black, red, white wedding – frequent this volume’s poems about women. The writers are leery of the power of frocks and gowns to which their female narrators frequently submit. In “The Blue Dress,” Deirdre Brennan considers Henri Matisse’s intention toward a female subject, whom he paints in “voluminous sleeves/and rhapsody of frills….” The writer concludes,

He had to hate her to paint her

Out of existence,

To cancel her out, imprison her

Within great folds of cloth.

Lynn Wagner casts “The Little Black Dress” as a suspicious bitch that takes over one woman’s life. Anthropomorphized, this iconic piece of clothing “goes to cocktail parties” where it “titters and flirts” until “Anyman takes her home/ … in his red sports car.” The next morning, the costume is cast off, and its wearer finds herself calmed by the night out. The little black dress might have been in charge of the evening, but the narrator did not object. The poem leaves her with “voices quiet,” suggesting that, while wearing the sheath, she could act out her fantasies.

The wedding gown is seen as the most insidious of all the clothing culprits. For Lynn Emanuel, “The White Dress” is a “shroud/on a hanger” and “an eczema/of sequins.” Like the little black number, the white one has a plan of its own. It waits, “lonely, locked up/in the closet” to take possession of the “bouquet of a woman’s body.”

In the title poem, “Eating Her Wedding Dress,” Eileen Malone examines this ritual garb through the eyes of a spinster at her baby sister’s nuptial feast. The ceremony is over, and the young woman’s gown rests on a chair where “delicious damp fingerprints” sprout mushrooms on its velvet. The spinster sister devours it:

I release my tongue, lick salt

…

sliding all denial and neglect

like colorless afterbirth

down my slippery throat"

The older woman is conscious of seeming the “old hag” but decides, “—no matter, I no longer fear/I might be what I seem.”

A collection of poems about clothes would not be complete without a tribute to their opposite, nakedness. Billy Collins provides one called “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” in which he meticulously records the disrobement of the author unlucky enough to be bound by 19^th Century fashion. “…I proceeded like a polar explorer/” his narrator reports, “through clips, clasps, and moorings/ … Sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.” The journey leads, naturally, to both sex and danger embodied in the sigh Emily heaves when her last hook is loosened. To make sure we understand the risk the poetess has taken by discarding the feminine uniform of her times, Collins immediately shifts her wonder back to his readers, reminding them that he also has heard them sigh …

… when they realize

that Hope has feathers

…

that life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

But if one can get past the threat, the loss, the personal shame that clothing carries, one might, as Anca Vlasopolos suggests in “Loosed Garments,” find solace in one’s wardrobe. Annoyed by “zippers become perverse/and buttons … out of reach of loop,” her narrator, definitely a mature woman, probes the depths of her closet to find something she might wear. During the search, she discovers things cast off, “an old silk shirt/…shining/like polished silver” and “an outfit you’d forgotten/…sending sparks.” She tries these items on and finds they fit “like skin,” so “your girth now seems/positively svelte.” Comfortable with a somewhat fuller figure that suits her full life, she opts for a flowing outfit and finds that it gives her wings.

The varied takes on clothing in Eating Her Wedding Dress will send many readers scurrying to their own closets to discover what material, for poetry and for life, lies buried there. The truths told in this volume surely will enrich the search.

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Writer and journalist Jane Dobija is best known for her reports for NPR from Warsaw during the last Polish revolution. She is the editor of Corridors Magazine (www.corridorsmagazine.org) and is at work on a novel about Poland called In Solidarity.

The Bitter Withy

Donald Revell
Alice James Books, 2009
$15.95, paperback

Walking Through the Halo: A Review of Donald Revell's "The Bitter Withy"

by Brett DeFries

For a while now, and especially since his 2003 collection "My Mojave," Donald Revell has rarely strayed from what some might call a myopic devotion in his work to God, Heaven, and redemption. Not only that, but his poems are overt enough in their attention to these subjects, that the real miracle might be reading a Revell poem that does not at least reference in some way God, Jesus, Heaven, Prayer, or Eternity. Indeed, his newest collection, "The Bitter Withy," is no exception.

Beyond that, "The Bitter Withy" has exposed a few of Revell's new favorites: rainbows and hummingbirds, which make numerous appearances in this collection:

Just at dawn the full moon
In its coin of rainbow
Called my name.
(TOOLS, p. 3)

The birds knew, and the rainbow too. I was looking.
(MONTEREY, p. 4)

Walking across the ocean,
Walking on flowers nowhere to be seen,
I walk on gold.
So says the hummingbird.
(CAN'T STAND IT, p. 6)

Sovereign of my heart,
I am shouting at nightfall:
Bats above me,
Hummingbirds skittish below the bats,
Almost like dragonflies.
(AGAINST CREATION, p. 44)

What I find remarkable about Revell's work, then, is its ability to keep strange his world of God, heaven, rainbows, and hummingbirds—a world that, in the hands of any other poet, wouldn't be inhabitable even by Hallmark.

Take, for example, the final stanza of AGAINST CREATION:

Adam's fall invented the future.
He tied the bats' wings onto dragonflies.
Nature, even as it dies, abhors imagination.
What men call Extinction,
I call Home.

Here the reader finds a world in which imagination is not only unnecessary, it is abhorrent—an offense to the already strange world the speaker observes. For Revell, the poet's role has less to do with invention than it does with adequately reporting what is already there.

AGAINST CREATION also illustrates Revell's subtlety—a must in a book of such obsessive thematic recurrence. Removed from their context in the poem, the final two lines might read as a lament regarding death's ever-present shadow. Within the context of this poem and the collection as a whole, however, these lines point to Heaven—or "Home," as the poem puts it. What keeps this closing from becoming saccharin, though, is the presence of such unexpected words as bats, abhors, and Extinction—all in the final four lines.

While all of Revell's recent work deals openly with his Christian faith, "The Bitter Withy" is interested in how such a faith alters how we confront our mortality. The approach of Death and the promise of Heaven hover over each and every one of these poems, but here are a couple of my favorites

FOR LUCIE

That would be bread.
That would be a table.
This would be death, but it moves
Only one way;
And so the bread escapes,
And the table along with it,
Easily—as easily
As water spilling from a cup
All over the ground.

Now that I come to it,
Why agree to it?
Every quarter of the wind is bread.
Every blade of grass is a table.
We are walking beside deer through a halo.

AFTER ROUSSEAU

The mountains are nude
But not cold.

I shiver.
I believe in death
Now that death believes in me.

What I find both moving and fresh about this collection is that it handles its subject matter with a simultaneous severity and lightness. It is quite clear in this collection that poetry, for Revell, if not prayer itself, is certainly composed of the same stuff. That being said, we never perceive even the slightest hint of didacticism, nor does Revell take hiimself too seriously in these poems. This balance keeps the work buoyant despite its deep subject matter. Also working in Revell's favor is the fact that he is as concerned with joy and the blessing of providence as he is with shame and those "dark nights of the soul"—inevitable for any serious Christian. Says Revell:

As with eternal life and the love of God,
What makes actual human happiness
Nearly unbearable is its reality,
Its mass.
(A PAINTING OF CEZANNE'S, p. 36)

If anything can convince us of this, it's "The Bitter Withy."

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Poet, translator and critic Donald Revell has authored ten previous collections of poetry. Winner of a 2008 NEA Translation Award, the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Revell has also received fellowships from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is Poetry Editor of the Colorado Review.

Brett DeFries’ work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Laurel Review, Memorious, Diagram, Phoebe, and West Branch and elsewhere.

Reading Novalis in Montana

Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny

Published by Milkweed, 2009

96 pp., U.S.$16.00

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

An Intuitive Measure of Nature

In-between re-reading the last few poems and embarking upon this review, adjectives such as “erudite,” “sensitive,” “distilled” and “deft” keep recurring to me as approximate words for rightfully describing Melissa Kwasny’s third and latest collection of poems, Reading Novalis in Montana. The title poem, which opens the book, is a well-envisioned summation of the experiences that Kwasny will evoke throughout the book. Embedding fictional voices with real thoughts and dialogues, the poet inserts brief quotes in a light yet welcoming manner that directly illuminates her intimate correspondence between scholarly interests, an inner world, and the nature that surrounds her in western Montana:

The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.

Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.

Then, the brutal intervention of sound.

All that we experience is a message, he wrote.

I would like to know what it means

If first one bird swims the channel

Across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.

In the end, the modernists must have meant,

It is the human world we are weary of,

our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.

(“Reading Novalis in Montana,” p. 3)

.

A later poem that echoes this is “Reading a Biography of Ezra Pound in the Garden.” Also inspired by the literature she was engaging in at that point in time, Kwasny keeps her eyes fully attentive on delicate details of life, which spring out spontaneously in her immediate world. Nature’s fragility, coupled with tenacity, touched her as she mused philosophically about her seemingly trivial quotidian life:

Wet, limp, as if just born, the five petals unstick

from each other. I have blundered always,

said Ezra Pound. The hot winds of Venice

blow past my bare ankles, a cat sprawls on its side

across the lawn. I don’t know how humanity stands it,

the heat he might mean, too much going on

and much of it boring. He writes: I am homesick

after mine own kind. The zucchini, everyone

knows, is prolific. While my guests come and go,

pilfering my time, it offers one green fruit a day,

and these flowers like lap cloths unfolded.

(“Reading a Biography of Ezra Pound in the Garden,” p. 24)

Interestingly, after concluding the first part of her book on this note, Kwasny delves into a 12-sectioned long poem entitled, “The Waterfall.” This lends a different weight to the general structure of her work and gives a new color to its entire narrative arc. Mythic metaphors and references from the indigenous culture are many and recurrent; they are subtle but evident. On the other hand, line energy also builds itself up until it reaches the eighth segment (“The giveaway dance”) in which speed and intensity syncopate in a drumming and organic oral appeal:

(…)

Here is a jar of wild chokecherry jam

Here is a pouch of Old Red Man Lucky Strike

Here is a dollar bill for each of your fifteen grandchildren

see how they dance with empty hands

Here is the fish tank the rest of the bannock

toilet paper army jacket a Pendleton blanket

Here in the old days grandpa gave away the car and the furniture

and finally he gave away the house

Here in the trailer house on the reservation

Here where the ragged last of the tribe come with ribbons

Here where the medicine man hangs them in the bundle

and sets the bundle swinging with a stick

Now since the black spades of aspen have hit the ground

Now because the drumbeat has not changed and has not stopped

We hold the gifts behind our backs and the snow field darkens

(“From “The Waterfall, VIII: The giveaway dance,” p. 37)

As if to sustain the rhythmic rigor and lyrical density, the poet continues into the third part of the corpus, presenting yet another major work, “The Directions.” Sequenced in a lucid coherence, each of the twelve segments has a straightforward title, which in turn furnishes a direct key to its central landscape or theme: “Creator,” “Soul,” “The Ceremonial,” “The Old Ones,” “Animals,” “Shooting Star,” “The Poles,” “Light,” “Rock,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “Herbs.” In a similar vein, the book ends on a textured tonality, for Kwasny has chosen yet another sequenced poem, this time, a 9-sectioned prose piece: “The Under World.” Darker, it evokes several losses and contains lingering traces of solitude, isolation as well as uncertainty. Questions and doubts hang in mid-air —

Up in the air. A peculiar phrase. What does it mean that nothing’s landed? (…)

Seed by seed, the working up through the soil. But is time really accomplished

without us? The dark bud unclasping? The stirring of air? The sex-cluck of the

robins at the butter dish?

(From “The Under World, VII,” p. 75)

All in all, Reading Novalis in Montana is a positive and delicious read. It represents Melissa Kwasny’s consistency and conscientiousness in creating layered yet intricate lyrical poetry. She dedicates herself to expanding beyond a mere descriptive depiction of episodes and energies to a wider world. Living side by side with nature plays a vital role in molding a quiet, meditative quality in her distinct poetic voice. With this, she thus strikes a balance with robustness by constantly pushing each line breath, experimenting with form and scope.

***

Born in Indiana, Melissa Kwasny is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Archival Birds and Thistle, winner of the Idaho Prize. She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, and has authored two novels, Trees Call For What They Need and Modern Daughters of the Outlaw West. She lives in western Montana.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is an editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). Her book of poetry, Water the Moon is forthcoming from Marick Press in Fall 2009. She lives in Paris, France and New York City.

Orpheus on the Red Line

By Theodore Deppe

Tupelo Press, 2009

Dorset, VT

www.tupelopress.org

ISBN: 978-1932195750

paperback, 96 pages

Reviewed by Mike Walker

There seems to be something about working in health care that turns people into writers. A number of poets and journalists come to mind who have been nurses, doctors, or researchers in the biomedical sciences, with William Carlos Williams being probably the best-known of those who were poets. For Williams and other poets perhaps being a physician (in William’s case) or other careers in health care offer both the secure paycheck that poetry lacks plus a wellspring of inspiration via seeing people at the crossroads of life and death, the junctures of disease and health. The healing arts, in turn, have noticed the benefits of the literary arts for professionals and patients alike and a number of hopsital-based arts in medicine programs make extensive use of writing as a form of therapy. Moreover, a number of journals exist that cater to publishing the creative writing of health care professionals and patients.

Theodore Deppe has had a long career as both a poet and a nurse, and his new collection of poems, ”Orpheus on the Red Line” speaks to his experience as both. To any cynic who would imagine the poetry of a nurse to only be filled with tales of suffering, Deppe’s work is a refreshing change of mind as he explores the nuances of human experience in a variety of ways. Like all but the youngest of poets, Deppe deals with age and the passing of time in his work, but often in a novel yet very realistic way:

.

Out-of-date almanacs, boxes

we never unpacked from the last move,

reminders to see a dentist who

died five years ago—

.

begins his poem, ”On the Natural History of Possessions”, which continues with a variety of historical, literary, and personal references. Yet in that first introduction of unpacked boxes, Deppe has us hooked: the ”dentist who died five years ago” reminds us of the paperchase that connects us in modern society with those insurance agents, doctors and dentists, kid’s teachers, and others who in one way or another play needed roles in our lives. How many notices from the dentist, the veterinarian, the physician have we all found in our mailboxes and how many are packed away or lost for whatever reason? These are communications given to a proper life in a small, finite, span of time but Deppe demonstrates how they take on a further life of their own until finally the silverfish eat away at their paper and they become dusts. Much of Deppe’s writing in ”Orpheus” is along such lines, reminding the reader of the variants of means of communication and connection in our lives. When Deppe writes in the poem above that ”for half a year, I walked around Ireland with a small rucksack” he makes clear the choices involved in living life, the sense of mobility versus the sense of possession.

Unlike the Graveyard Poets and many contemporary poets also, Deppe is not concerned simply with mortality and tangible humanity, but is more concerned with the ways that human experience demonstrates itself in memories, dreams, and communication. He spices his poems with references to communication via song, birds also singing their songs, random distant sounds, letters and conversations. In my mind though, his greatest poem about communication and probably of the whole book is ”Misremembering the Classics” where Deppe details his efforts to calm down a violent adolescent patient in a psychiatric ward. I won’t quote this poem here, for it’s best served to read it in full, and however powerful a quote might seem it would only slight the depth of Deppe’s work in this instance. While it is not surprising that Deppe brings his combative young patient to try writing poetry himself over the course of the day following his outburst, the details of this journey and the honesty found therein are what make the poem powerful. No complete ending nor promise that this patient will make better of himself, but the thread of hope that he in fact may is all Deppe provides. In one poem we are given a rare glimpse into both what it must be to work with the mentally ill and what it must be like to actually be such a pateint. The poem is not all-emcompassing nor pretends towards such, but it carries a gravitas often missing in even the best writing about clinical experiences with patients.

Having worked myself in both lab-based and clinical medical research, I know that we encounter in health care things seldom seen elsewhere in life and many of these experiences can translate to powerful writing, however, too often such writing comes across as trite due to the same emotions and even the same situations being brought up time and again. Deppe has masterfully avoided this when he writes of patients, as in the poem ”Misremembering the Classics” and brings us instead writing so fresh it made me feel, even as someone who has experienced similar things in real life and then tried to write of them, that I was ecountering something truly novel and unique. Never does Deppe write lugubriously or in a way that tries to ground the poem in emotion alone: in his poem ”Sebald” we travel from Poland to China and then back to California all while following the leitmotif of the sparrow, but in this case sparrow not as metaphor but as real bird affected by the whims of human thought and human action. Deppe tells us of a man feeding sparrows and another, Chairman Mao, determined to kill them (Mao mistakenly thought that sparrows were consuming a great deal of grain and thus ruining the crop of wheat for starving Chinese). The tales of humans and their actions, for better or worse, are obviously enough fuel for writing and Deppe allows the human to be human and the sparrow to be sparrow.

In his poem ”Orla”, Deppe addresses head-on his topic of a woman who is in the hospital, without overtones or metaphor. This stark approach tempered with touching details provides a portrait as clear as a good photograph. What is most essential in writing about a patient and their plight? To make them seem human (which they of course are), to make them seem ill (which they are, also)? Or to allow latent details and masterfully-crafted words turn these moments of their lives into real and honest views? I would take the latter, and the latter Deppe provides. Like his previous book of poems, ”Cape Clear”, Deppe works with human emotions in a manner that is both deep and refreshing. His poems, while short in length, read long: The sheer amount of detail and the feeling of true travel comes across as he shares even simple narratives. It is rare to see such a strong ”narrative” approach in poetry that neither aspires to be epic nor bending towards the arena of fiction.

Of books of poetry I’ve read thus far this year (and I’ve read my share) Deppe’s ”Orpheus” is one of the most original and his voice is clearly unique. I suggest it highly to all interested in contemporary American poetry and poets and also to those interested in writing by health care professionals. While the lion’s share of the book is not directly concerned with health care, those poems that thus enter Deppe’s other career are to be valued for their voice and insight. A truly impressive book.

.

***

.

Ted Deppe was born in Minnesota, and grew up in Indiana. He worked for many years as a coronary-care and psychiatric nurse and has taught creative writing in high schools, universities, and graduate programs in the United States, England, and Ireland. His previous books include Children of the Air and The Wanderer King (Alice James, 1990 and 1996), and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2003). He currently teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland, where he now lives with his wife, poet Annie Deppe.

.

***

.

Mike Walker is a writer, journalist, and poet. His original research and other academic work has been published in: AirMed, Goldenseal, EcoFlorida, BrightLights Quarterly, the ATA Chronicle, Multilingual Computing and Technology and other journals. His journalism in: The Florida Times-Union, The North Florida News Daily, Satellite Magazine, Twisted Ear, and other publications. His poetry in: Meanie, the Church Wellesley Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

.

Self-Portrait with Crayon

By Allison Benis White

Cleveland State U Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781880834831

Paperback, 63 pages

Reviewed by Kathryn Stevenson

Above all, Allison Benis White’s collection of poems Self-Portrait with Crayon teaches us the simple, unforgettable maxim: pain is reach.

The collection begins with what is gone: “The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother’s skirts and shoes, where the legs should be” (5). Without a body, clothes outline lack, their shapes marking boundaries between body and disembodiment: “The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress” (5). The image of the mind reduced to a hook does not speak of pain, but we get it.

Here, the thing gestures toward an idea, a non-thing, one cannot otherwise hold. In this sense, the thing—a closet, a dress, a hanger—allows connection, a sudden narrative snap: “People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon” (5). This reach—the move to connect loss to a moment, a kitchen, the smell of a pink-bodied fish—rises from the compulsion to anchor ourselves in the material world, ground ourselves in the sediment of objects, and attach to some small, real thing before we are capable of consolation: “I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address. It is common to know very little, if anything” (5).

A salmon dinner, a birthday card, a wrong address—these are the cold, hard things that punch, punctuating our otherwise amorphous and mass-less despair. Yet they are the details that allow us to articulate and imagine—here, though, sketch—what is otherwise unspeakable and unimaginable. White knows grief calls on us to represent loss in the details, to perceive boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary, to sketch rather than bullet, to reject chronology, to begin in the middle, and, yet to tell anyway, to narrate and discern and forge universals out of abstraction, to find yet another thing that might, finally, point at what to do next or what to avoid or what, simply, to accept: “People exist for as long as possible until it is too difficult to matter” (5).

On its own, the collection’s first poem “From Degas’ Sketchbook” offers the image of how difficult it is for a girl hidden in her mother’s closet to matter to someone gone and, simultaneously, how difficult for a mother “to matter”—both in the sense of being worthy or recognized worthy and in the sense of materializing, coming into being to embody the articles that, to a closeted, crouched child represent lack. Somehow, at once, a mother mothers as long as she can, and a daughter recalls her until it is too painful or too cumbersome even to conjure her in images, to bring back someone gone. Here, grief is a central interior impulse that reaches out, like the motion of a hand drawn to touch something untouchable before it retracts, repelled.

Together, the poems in Self-Portrait with Crayon are a study in mourning and melancholia, a grammatology of sadness—one which outlines the features of despair, the rules of mourning, and the shape of our efforts to live through it.

Despair, White understands, opens eyes to the things before us with an urgency that shackles us to images that might have otherwise been fleeting, like a cruel time machine in which there is no travel, only the unending awareness of time and an acute sense that past, present, and future are tidy, irrelevant categories that mislead, distract, and relieve those not mourning. Like this: “If I press my hand against the window, no one will die sooner or reverse directions” (8). Or this: “Before I was born, my dog buried a plastic frog in the side yard when one of her female puppies died—she needed somewhere” (9). We are not safe from what already came or what has yet to come; any minute we might feel every loss all at once—and not just our own, but through ours, we’ll feel the loss of others as well. And so we must attach loss, freeze it, give it “somewhere.”

From White’s poems, readers can glean recognizable, patterned responses to loss; mourning forces our focus on the particulars, for instance—which is to say that people mourning know what is not nothing: “I want to reach things I can keep” (54). Like wounded dogs, they need objects—to attach, to express themselves, to project meaning onto, to represent—as if to re-imagine or retool or redesign the shape of the interior, driving, unsettled mind.

People mourning outline impressions even as they suffer imprint: “When there is nothing left, everything is possible” (26). Or, perhaps it is that they deal with imprint by outlining impressions, as if to cast imprint off. In “Interior of the Rape,” for instance, White’s cutting characterization of human bonding is so sharply resonant it is, one moment, beautiful: “I will not let you sleep follows the pattern of most affection”; a step later, though, she tugs at the pattern’s brutality instead: “This is the feeling of a leash at the base of your neck” (25).

People mourning grasp for universals among the particulars: “We will live as long as we have someone to tell” (26). The reach for human patterns is the effort to seek solace in the omnipresence of pain, to find dull, pain-diffusing, trauma-abating normalcy in suffering—like this: “It is common to rock the sick in your arms. It is common to rearrange the body into a comfortable position” (23). And this: “It would be unnatural to place the arms at the sides, torso unprotected” (23).

Understanding fear overcomes us, White sometimes offers the patterns as instruction: “when you enter someone else’s room, it is important to whisper her name before you touch her, so she knows you are approaching, and does not become alarmed” and “If someone breaks into your house at night, my father advised, pretend you are dead” (28; 24). Here, advice exposes everyone—those who might break in, those who fear them, those who cannot do more than recommend we play dead. Readers sense White does not endorse an action more than she scorns our resignation to fear—ambivalently, though, while representing the lives of people who live by it.

People mourning consider what will be gone soon: “Whether we miss less what we know will disappear, I am tired of seeing” and “A sponge attached to a hand which is attached to an arm. Which is crucial. Anxiety thrives on the unknown. If her hand took the sponge away, there would be a cool empty spot on the child’s neck” (41). The move to reflect on what is here now but soon might not be is an exercise in taking the part away from the whole so that one might imagine another scenario and thus come to know the unknown—to treat anxiety with anticipation, essentially. Lives marked by a history of hard times know leaning on the cool-headed expectation that the worst is coming makes life better now. Because it means we will be less anxious and more prepared.

In “Horse with Jockey,” someone points “to an X-ray of his chest,” saying, “The human heart is an apple,” and someone else asks, “But what shape or comfort can I make with my mind?” Self-Portrait with Crayon is one.

**

Allison Benis White's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is currently at work on a second poetry manuscript, "Small Porcelain Head," which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Literary Award for a work in progress from the San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. See more at www.allisonbeniswhite.com.

**

Kathryn K. Stevenson earned her doctorate in English from the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches writing classes. She is obsessed with, and writes academic essays about, "adherence," or the bonds forged between peoples under duress--a theme that appears, magnified, in her fiction, non-fiction, and songs, which can be found at myspace.com/radiochord.

Struggling Times: Poems

by Louis Simpson

BOA Editions, Rochester, NY

2009, 88 pages

ISBN: 978-1934414194

Reviewed by Mike Walker

 Louis Simpson, no stranger to poetry with a long career as a working poet, professor, and noted translator returns to the stage with a sweeping book of poetry focused on the current sociopolitical status of America via a very personal gaze. Simpson, an aged man who fought in World War Two, darts back and forth from his own childhood and years of youth to the present day offering small illustrations and demostrations of human experience in their various manifestations. Simpson is a man my great-uncle’s age, a person from another time in a certain sense and his ability to duck back to experiences such as his wargames with a model ship as a child is impressive in its sincere ability to put life itself in rough context and to allow Simpson to also write poems such as ”Astronomers in Arizona” where he explains, starting off with a quote from a news report:

”Astronomers in Arizona

are racing to build the biggest

telescope ever”

Why are they racing?

What do they hope to find?

There are no other worlds . . .

From a poet lacking Simpson’s experience—as both a poet and a man—such would seem not only cynical but an overly coy attempt to be funny with a piece of news-writing which at worst is simply overwrought. From Simpson, however, and in the larger context of a book that contains direct commentary on contemporary world events, the economy, and other complex issues but also notes how the author has left a pot on the stove and smells it burning as he absent-mindedly leafs through his newspaper, this approach works. How ironic that scientists who study the very span, depth, and scope of our universe should rush to complete the construction of their instrument! When Simpson begins another poem with the words ”he first fell in love when he was sixteen” it doesn’t seem trite nor when he references the uniform of a French officer in describing someone does it seem odd or a great stretch, but simply one observation in a collection of many. Simpson brings a wealth of varied experiences to his writing and does so in such a humble manner that he encourages us to consider the small things in life, such as when he waits for a man to come and collect old clothing from his house (one assumes for the poor or some charity) and the man is slow in showing up: here the poet takes up an everyday domestic chore and one, at that, which really depends on someone else. When Simpson devotes another poem to war as imagined in the guise of Grant’s position in the Civil War, it doesn’t seem over-reaching and Simpson’s imagined Grant is a character you encounter with ample empathy, wondering if this is also perhaps an example of someone waiting for others to complete vast chore.

Thus much of the strength of Simpson’s work here is that he provides some immediate examples of how he views our current times, never with heavy-handed commentary but via astute demonstration and he grounds these obersvations with tales from life experiences and insight into other times. Nothing is isolated but everything is personal. His poem ”Suddenly” is perfect example of this; in fact, it is the poem presented on the back cover of the book and rightfully so as it’s easily one of the finest stand-alone pieces in the entire book:

The truck came at me,

I swerved

but I got a dent.

The car insurance woman

informs me that my policy

has been cancelled.

I say, ”You can’t do that.”

She gives me a little smile

and goes back to her nails.

From this mundane start out of the box, Simpson provides a wealth of introspection into the place where we stand still for a moment in time and the fact that despite our overall riches and technological progress, we are in fact in the midst of ”struggling times”. Perhaps as darkly as anything, even as we lack a world war (at least a tangible one) now, we also lack the agency for poets to be concerned with the type of writing that Hart Crane or T.S. Eliot brought forth; instead, we are driven to concern with smaller things—but out of very necessary pragmatism. Our constant media communication of world events has sent the poet scampering away from the very large to the very small and leaving, perhaps, those large things for the astronomers and their ”biggest telescopes ever”.

Then there are poems such as ”In Old New Orleans” where the reader cannot be certain whether Simpson is talking about a current event (Hurricane Katrina in example) or not. The poem could have been written since 2005, or before, as it mentions modern times yet when is modern? What is modern? In ”Tall Girl Running” when Simpson compliments a girl with long legs out for a jog, we can’t be sure whether it’s a teenage Simpson speaking or Simpson in his current age: often in this collection Simpson runs back and forth through time, covering such a span that his words can be taken in various meanings. If we had, in this poem, a teenage Simpson (probably) he hardly was thinking of genes and their role in determining the phenotype when the girl shouts back ”from my father” when Simpson asks where she got her nice long legs; however, by opening this poem with a quote from biologist Richard Dawkins, Simpson makes the observation of the pretty girl more about science than sexual attraction.

Not all of Simpson’s poems though hit their mark: In his short poem ”The Constant Reader” he celebrates reading in a way that is neither new nor especially meaningful. A comment by Susan Sontag, though not a poem at all, about how she was jealous of a friend who broke her leg and was thus confined to days spent inside reading speaks more about the bookworm’s plight than Simpson’s effort:

I do not see the plays

and miss all the operas.

Let those who must love.

As Chaucer says, ”What sholde

I bye it on my flesh so deere?”

The truth is, I prefer

to read.

This poem is also odd in that it feels a rather poor fit for the rest of Simpson’s collection as most of the other poems in fact speak of the wealth of experience Simpson has had, and much of such experience is very run-of-the-mill, daily, things we can all relate to and the joy is in seeing what grace Simpson offers in describing the mundane. He doesn’t come across as someone tied to literature at all in these poems, someone very intelligent, yes, but also someone who is much a man of the people with his finger on the pulse of life. In other poems, such as ”The Omen” which deals with the author Alexander Puskin’s fatal duel with his wife’s lover, Simpson writes of literature and history but in a way that makes it seem as if these were instead events he’d witnessed, or perhaps Puskin was an old friend. In the poem ”A Spot on the Kitchen Floor” Simpson writes about finding a bug wandering across his kitchen and picking it up with a piece of cardboard, and he writes of this in such a touching way that it really illustrates what a masterful poet he is, showing what triumph can be located in the smallest of incidents.

In other cases, it is large incidents that are provided the gravity they request as in this example:

You have to be careful

what you hear or see.

In Afghanistan I saw

the man and the woman

who were caught in adultery

buried up to their heads.

Their children were brought

and told to throw stones.

I can still see the heads

twisting on the ground.

The poor devil in Papillon

with his head in the guillotine . . .

but Goya’s half-buried dog

looking up at the sky

I think was the worst of all.

Even so, as powerful as these images are, one cannot tell if this is current-day Afghanistan or not, nor perhaps does it even matter. Simpson is working very much as a poet, even as his sparse and simple wording often could remove his writing to the pages of the journalist. Lacking any real background on where Simpson experienced some of these situations nor having more of an extended trajectory of their meaning both allows them to shine as small examples of large and important moments while removing them from the extended dialog they could have presented. In fairness, such a dialog may not even be what Simpson desires though.

In all though, Simpson has presented an impressive collection of poems in this slim book. He has refined his craft to a high degree and it is obvious in the quality and immediate focus of his work. At times, I longed for further details and also wished that, as BOA Editions’ press release had indicated, Simpson’s work was more about these current ”struggling times”. Only a handful of the poems really touch on the socioeconomic woes the world is now experiencing and from a poet of such experience as Simpson I could imagine a really powerful set of poems on this topic, but ”Stuggling Times” feels more like your average collection of poems written over the past couple years than a complete and focused effort. Still, it is a collection much worth having on one’s bookshelf.

Cerise Press - www.cerisepress.com

Blue Door Dream, by Josie Gray

"Cerise Press, an online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Sally Molini, and Karen Rigby in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience."

One of the editors, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is a frequent contributor to CutBank Reviews - read up on some of her accomplishments below.

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN (Greta Aart) writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. Her collection of poetry, Water the Moon, is forthcoming (November 2009) from Marick Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry International, Alimentum, Caesura, Ellipsis and other journals. Non-fiction includes Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (Contours, 2007) and Critical Issues on Interculturalism (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004). Also a zheng concertist and theatre artist, she lives in Paris, France. Her website is

fionasze.com.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is joined by Karen Rigby, an occasional contributor to Cutbank, and Sally Molini.

Rarer and More Wonderful

Scrambler Books, 2009

Reviewed by Michael Roberson

In the first of four serial poems that make up Trevor Calvert’s Rarer and More Wonderful, the poet begins by tricking the reader.  After a netherworld portrait (one anticipated by the gnashing black wings on the cover) of some winged and clandestine “She,” who quotes Paul Virilio, the reader must confront an abrupt apostrophic address:

Pull your arms about you, tighter

you will not like what comes

next.  We ask you to trust.

We ask that you find identity

with us.  We will be

your apologue.

To read on is to be implicated in every plural pronoun: to assume responsibility for a burning house, to be the voice of reason, to be the voice of chastisement, to be an advocate for robo-eroticism.  But, taking Virilio as a hint, perhaps Calvert uses the trickery, the oddness, the disorientation in order to implement frictional moments where poetry operates in resistance to the speed of modern living.  Nonetheless, finding oneself in what the poet calls a “Struck Landscape,” the reader learns quickly that orientation requires acquiescing to the cryptic, uncanny and haunting personae that inhabit this realm—part Underworld, part Nietzschean prison house. 

Imagine a city as a sigil, an alphabet, and

then a language.

I walked throughout the city and watched

as raccoons dived past grates and plants

uncurled in their gardens.  I swept the city

into myself and began to read.

Allegories of tunnels and leaf-blown asides.  Everything in its place:  a city

full of metaphor and order.  Unraveling the city, I did

not notice something, too, folding into me. 

Following the poet’s “I” as a protean “You” the reader must navigate both the poetic landscape on the page and an imaginary landscape made of language.  The result is a kind of schizoid chronotope induced by a pathology of reading, where even the poet worries “that poetics were not enough” to enable a safe return to the role of passive reader.  But nevermind a safe return, read on.     

While the first series enacts a kind of ventriloquism in which the reader is subsumed in the personae, in the second, aptly titled “The Morality of Puppets,” Calvert introduces Punch and Judy, the puppet faces of diabolical domesticity.  And if the reader has learned anything from the previous series it is to appreciate the slyness of the crafted poems, and to be on guard, even in moments of embedded reflexivity:

There is always a trick to language that invokes

secrecy, but inevitably evokes a sense of

artistry.

In “The Morality of Puppets,” Calvert offers meditations and portrayals of Punch as the ultimate anti-metaphysician (again Nietzsche, plus Artaud):

He does deign

arm-wrestling

with ubermenschen.

*

His is one of

anti-this,

anti-that.

He refuses

vitamins;

refuses his

interpretations.

*

His red hat

steeped in threats

thrusts upward

accusingly

and his audience

laughs every time

a murder

is made.

*

Lungs full

of god

knows what

is what is

fulfilling Punch’s

introspection.

Calvert’s line-breaks work well and cleverly, precise in their reiteration of detail.  Precision also characterizes the inimitable, dark humour.  In one poem Punch plays Hamlet’s father.  Upon  misplacing his hat, Punch asks the guards where it is and decidedly

[…] pulls

the beanie right

from the guard’s

head, but forgets

to take the

head out!

Like a “pop”

Punch plucks

the head,

replaces it

with his

own.

“Now

my hat

is red

again,

hooray!”

As the poet Graham Foust notes in his blurb, these poems are “aptly named.”  In the deceptively clipped lines and faceted stanzas, Calvert has shaped poems from fresh and unusual sources:  Continental philosophy and literature, Ancient Greek literature, Christian apocrypha, Japanese fashion, popular culture, cyberpunk aesthetics, New Age rhetoric, and Punch and Judy theatrics.  Such an eclectic mix leaves no shortness of surprises.  

Like the previous two series, the third, “Probability Map,” offers no assurances.  Relying on a “Probability Map” is like believing that facts are truths—a point made thematic throughout this series.  Origins, systems, structures, worlds are all suspect and subject to the poet’s reconsiderations.

Cosmology, when observed, is likely

a poetics of relation and space.

A proper booster shot of postmodern thinking can fend off the symptoms of anti-foundationalism in these poems, but what disconcerts and pleasures equally are the moments of nonchalant syntaxes clicking against the erudite punnings.  In a poem called “Parabasis” the poet riddles

let’s move back to causes, a posteriori

pneumatic arrangement of limbs.

He follows with

“Let’s meet for lunch, say noonish?”

Inevitably the juxtaposition of quips and the rich syntactics suggest a thorough schooling in the humour, craft and philosophical edge of Language poetics. 

In the final series, Calvert offers “An Approach to Ending”—a coda, not an actual end.  In this—the shortest of the serials—readers will be keen to reading the secrets of how Rarer and More Wonderful is constructed:  poems that

hid

something fierce and terrible and patient,

an idea we could not quite grasp. 

In the opening poem of the sequence, the poet acknowledges the reader’s persistent experience of feeling on the verge of meaning, so often distracted by other, curious vectors:

some sense of determination

and exploration and how does

one begin to approach an end

to something when her only

compass is a feeling of lightness

sometimes at the base of the skull?

The experience of reading these poems resembles either intoxication or inoculation by some nepenthean elixir, what the poet calls a “tincture of an event.”  Sometimes the lines drop quickly in columns shaped like a syringe or sometimes they break like the brim of a good tumbler. One cannot simply read this book once, drawn back to it by the allure one might associate with an absinthe cocktail.  In fact, a kind of esoteric romance haunts these poems—edgy, dangerous, complex.  Being that this is Calvert’s first published full-length collection, and the first book by California’s Scrambler Books, readers have much to look forward to from the future of both.

**

Trevor Calvert is a writer, bookseller, and recent library school graduate living in Oakland, California. His poetry and reviews have been published in various journals and magazines, including Omnidawn Blog. His interests include puppets, vocabulary design, and martial arts.

**

Michael Roberson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Calgary, where he also edits dandelion magazine.  His dissertation examines the role of ethics in post-Language poetry. 

Something Has to Happen Next

                     

 

& Full Catastrophe Living    

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Reviewed by John Findura 

A teaspoonful of the matter that makes up a black hole would weigh more than the visible universe, and may weigh more than the un-visible universe as well. Black holes have little in common with contemporary American poetry, except for the fact that for most people, both are invisible. Some poets, however, have something in common with the phenomena: they are able to take a little bit from here, a little from there, and compress these bits into poems of few words that still carries the weight of something much larger. Andrew Michael Roberts’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning “book of small poems” (as he has called it) Something Has To Happen Next certainly contains poems short on words but big on the necessities of life — humor, liveliness, emotion, and profundity. Though this first effort at times feels ethereal, it quickly gains weight as the pages advance.

The opening poem of the book’s first section, “dear wild abandon,” brings notice of what’s to come:

            you little

            time

            bomb.

The white space between “time” and “bomb” acts as a buffer, slowing the countdown to the “bomb” going off:

            if I bite

            and swallow, would you

            explode in me?

The sexual allusion may or may not be there, but there is no escaping the fact that yes, there will be an explosion.

Other poems in the collection do not need the fireworks. An example is “the moon,” which in its entirety reads:

            all the other moons

            get their own names.

The obvious information here is reinforced by these two short sentences floating isolated against the white page. Roberts makes good use of the white space to create aesthetically pleasing poems. Not only is each line break perfectly placed, but the pacing is sure. Take for instance the next little poem in the collection “what i know of the moon”:

            i am only half myself.

            the other side’s

            a dark idea

            i like to believe in.

What is most interesting here is Roberts’s notion of the beauty of the dark side of the moon, the “dark idea” he likes “to believe in”. It brings to mind the duality of man, the need of that dark side to keep us whole. Striking too is the fact that the poem preceding it, also about the moon, is only half its size. It’s almost as if this half-moon has doubled its size to four lines and now is not just a reflection of the moon, but has become inward looking and no longer in need of a label in order to exist.

While Roberts is busy distilling the universe, the other 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize winner, Zach Savich, is carving out his poems from solid earth in Full Catastrophe Living. The “toothy stars” of Something Has To Happen Next are replaced by scrapings on exposed strata and the “smell of black walnuts crushed on the road” (“Black Walnut Adoration”). Like that smell, these poems are full and rich with a deep flavor of earthiness.

Savich likes to stretch out in poems like “Don Quixote,” “Fool,” and “Poem for My Wife If We Are Married” but it is in “Serenade " where this lengthening of line is most effective. While it is certainly not surprising to find Degas or Caravaggio turning up in poems, it is refreshing to find:

            My friend the trumpet player emptied his spit valve onto pigeons.

            He watched a woman climb onto her fire escape, nude,

            her husband cursing form the window. I gave up on

            the biography. I left the rave. Ann held her head.

Ann holding her head reflects nicely on the beginning of the poem, where indeed

            In the painting by Degas, the dancer is not

            on a cell phone, but holding her head. I left the museum.

            Ann was sick.

Does this count as art- reflecting-life-imitating-art? Regardless, the final two lines clear everything up by leading us from a darkened room to one where everything is still obscured: “I put on some shoes I found on the bridge, then left the bridge. / Ann bruised. Her mom showed up. It was July.”

Throughout Full Catastrophe Living, Savich intersperses shorter poems and sonnets, nicely breaking up the denser texts. The short poems, however, never reach the level of the longer pieces. Perhaps it is the sustainment of image and metaphor in the longer pieces that works so much in their favor. Certainly, shorter poems like “Federal Case” are never given the chance to develop. Compared to Andrew Michael Roberts’ shorter pieces, and in relation to his own longer works, Savich’s shorter poems don’t hold up as well, don’t carry the same weight, and ultimately add little to the collection.

Both Roberts and Savich have put together volumes that are worthy enough to be read and may even require multiple readings. It is no surprise that both are issued through the University of Iowa Press — the Iowa Poetry Prize has definitely been showcasing exceptional work. If you happen to be the type of person who prefers to keep your feet on the ground while craning your neck to see the stars, it would be a wise decision to pick up both books. If you’re not that type of person, it would still be wise to track these down.

**

John Findura holds an MFA from the New School. A Pushcart Nominee, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives and teaches in northern New Jersey.

**

Andrew Michael Roberts is the author of Dear Wild Abandon, selected for a 2007 PSA National Chapbook Award, and Give Up. His poems can be found in journals such as Tin House, the Iowa Review, LIT, the Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast.

**

Zach Savich received a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he is currently in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a teaching assistant. His poems and essays have appeared in such venues as the Colorado Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, and the anthology Best New Poets 2008. He is an editor at Thermos Magazine.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

BOA Editions, 2008

Reviewed by Karen Rigby

Money is not evil. It is the love of money, or so the proverb goes—the pursuit among the hustlers and rainmakers, the hunger that inspired alchemists to try turning lead to gold—that leads to tragedy in so many stories. In Katy Lederer’s newest collection, the desire to distance oneself from the financial world is a recurrent theme. With its legendary robber barons and tumultuous history, the New York of these poems would set the perfect stage for an energetic series: panoramic in its breadth, sexy, and even damning, presenting glittering vices, a high-rolling playfulness, or a satirical critique.

Lederer, however, has chosen an unexpected and much quieter approach. Money isn’t turned into a grand idea. It is a means for describing the private exchanges in the speaker’s life—that bartering between “The brain pumped up with longing” and the soul.

These forty-five poems employ mostly linear, sonnet-like forms. They rely on a reflective, first-person voice. The images are simple and concrete, spaced throughout the book rather than forming densely woven patterns—they include “cups of breakfast blend,” “dark, expensive chocolates,” a “vial of Botox,” “emerald-green flow,” and a cello, among other objects. Many of the titles derive from the opening or closing line, or from a phrase contained within the poem. These plainer titles are in keeping with the poet’s sensibilities; there’s a strong sense that the message is often more essential than the manner of its expression, and that the poems, however cool in their atmosphere, are meant to reach the average reader.

One of the notable threads in this book is the difference between office workers and poets:

Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pristine light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash.
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they’ll be remembered after
death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.

The speaker is aloof, but does not spare herself from criticism. She doesn’t belong in these hallways and may even possess a small envy of those “unoriginals” who are free to write. Poets reappear in “A Nietzschean Revival”:

These poets speak of capital as if they had the least idea.
I ask you: what do poets know of capital?
Across this harp, their fingers play a Nietzschean revival.
I envy them their will to power.

And again in “The Dead-Level”:

The poets standing, one by one.
I lie here, shaking, all alone, the cosmetician in the hall.
Lord, let it cover me, this sheet.
Immaculate particulate.
I hide here in your cleanliness.
The poets standing, one by one.
What shall I make of them, beneath this light?
Their hair is white, their eyes are white, their skin is porcelain white.

A complaint is being registered about the nature of white-collar brainwork. In another poem, "Brainworker," the speaker writes: “To learn to keep distance./To learn to keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal/mind (19)."

The distinction between two modes of thinking could prove puzzling or even artificial for some readers: why doesn’t the speaker appear to entertain the possibility of disparate halves (logic + rationality / spontaneity + creativity) working in conjunction with each other rather than in opposition to each other? Later, the speaker expresses “this wish to be penniless, free.” Being“penniless” is almost a romantic hyperbole for a more poetic lifestyle. As the book progresses, the speaker says, “I am waiting, like an animal,/for poetry.” What was once viewed as the providence of those “unoriginals” has become vital. What seemed incomprehensible has become alluring. The transformation is critical to understanding The Heaven-Sent Leaf. Money may have served as the hook, but self-discovery and the pain involved in any difficult moment of transition emerges as the salient theme. An uneasy, ambivalent peace is finally reached between the spirit, mind, and heart in “A Triumvirate”: “Dilapidation of the spirit as the heart gives in, the mind gives in./These three, a triumvirate, laughing./This bitterness breaks me.”

Writing about office drudgery can sometimes result in a flatness to the language, or run the risk of reinforcing familiar views. While this series doesn’t entirely escape such problems, the ambition is nevertheless admirable and the topic is prescient. The title would appeal most to readers seeking affirmation of what it’s like to be trapped in the “pristine white hallways,” or for readers already familiar with the author’s previous work.

* *

Katy Lederer’s books include Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), included in the Publishers Weekly list of Best Books of the Year 2003. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner) and Isn’t it Romantic (Verse Press), among others. Educated at UC Berkeley and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble.

* *

Karen Rigby’s recent work appears in Meridian, Quarterly West, Canteen, and other journals. She is one of the editors at Cerise Press.

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

Coffee House Press, 2008
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling

Recently selected by John Yau for inclusion in the National Poetry Series, Donna Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan presents a vision of travel that encompasses an exploration of one's surroundings as well as the discovery of new terrain within one's self. Written as ornate prose poem sequences in which quotes from other texts are often embedded, the works in this volume use their hybrid form to document the emotional and intellectual states that are evoked by place. Just as the miniature travelogues are structured around newly unearthed insights, Stonecipher's poems gracefully depict one's inner life as governing the ways one inhabits the world.  

In conveying these themes, Stonecipher's use of such diverse texts as Franz Kafka's The Trial, Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to illuminate her own work proves striking. Frequently presenting the reader with memorable quotes arrived at through various author's literary allusions, the poems offer their speakers' small epiphanies as literary journeys in themselves. A poem entitled "Inlay 2 (Elaine Scarry)," which uses text from Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, exemplifies this trend:

If only our troubles were those of the town planner. Our freshly prepared grid, where to position the park, the town hall, the elementary school, the bored housewife fucking the plumber? The town is a given. The town waits like a fate for the town planner, who slowly reveals it with a blue pencil.

'Daydreaming originates in the volitional' (15).

In this passage, the poet presents Elaine Scarry's statement as an insight arrived at through a journey of intellectual inquiry, suggesting that travel remains a dialogue between oneself and the literary and cultural texts evoked by a given place. As the piece unfolds, this travelogue of consciousness ultimately obscures the reader's ability to definitively locate the speaker, privileging one's ability to trace oneself emotionally and intellectually.

Likewise, other works in The Cosmopolitan question the extent to which one can journey through the world without unearthing an undiscovered aspect of self. In this respect, the poet establishes reciprocity between one's inner life and surroundings. She writes, for example, in "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell),"

The group of students touring Chartres was told by the bespectacled guide that the stained glass pictures were not merely pretty, but actually scripture for the illiterate. Years later, one of the students would remember this while reading at a desk facing a window and think: What beauty isn't born out of the missionary position? (29)

Here Stonecipher forges unexpected connections between the character's memory of the cathedral and the manner in which he or she perceives future works of art. In many ways, the poet suggests that the character's past experience of Chartres enables and validates later insights about beauty and artifice. Like other works in the collection, "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell)" depicts one's experience of place as complicating one's experience of self, suggesting that the two remain, in some respects, inextricable.

Moreover, Stonecipher uses this complex relationship between oneself and one's surroundings to offer incisive cultural commentary, highlighting the dissonance between one's inner life and the exterior world. Frequently juxtaposing the narrator's intellectual journeys with an increasingly commercialized travel culture, the poet often hints that a lucrative industry resides behind many individual's desire for such introspection and self discovery. She explains, for instance, in "Inlay 12 (Owen Jones),"

One loved; one did not love; goods changed hands. She was looking for the seed pearl dropped off the scale in the middle of the vast outdoor market. At the airport, he reached into his bag for his cyanometer — which of the fifty different kinds of blue was this particular sky? (50)

In this selection, just as the character in the poem attempts to empirically determine "which of the fifty different kinds of blue" that the sky is that day, characters recur throughout The Cosmopolitan who treat the world as a "conquerable entity," which can be subjugated through travel. Although acknowledging the prevailing (and frequently consumerist) approach to exploring one's surroundings, Stonecipher depicts her narrator as still "looking for the seed pearl" that has been lost amidst the commercial fanfare, striking an optimistic chord with the reader.

All points considered, Donna Stonecipher's new book is a meditative, philosophical read. The Cosmopolitan refashions the time-honored form of the prose poem while raising fascinating questions about travel and self-discovery. Highly recommended.

**

Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poetry: The Reservoir (Georgia, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance, 2007), and The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House, 2008). She also translates poetry and prose from French and German.

**

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVOX Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Kristina has also written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

The Halo Rule by Teresa Leo

Elixir Press, 2008
Reviewed by Amy Schrader

Given the lush stained-glass art on the cover of this volume of poems, I was relieved to learn in an opening epigraph that The Halo Rule is not a new age directive for living, but rather a sports term. The title poem tells us that the halo rule “intends to protect/ a return man by two yards.” Indeed, this rule—in effect from 1983-2003 in NCAA football games—gave a two-yard circle of protection to punt returners. The idea was to save the returner—who must look up in order to catch the ball—from a jarring full-speed tackle. Leo’s poignant observation follows:

Not so
elsewhere. For us, it’s

sideswipe, no berth, the
deference of play to hurt,
rough lust. (19)

Indeed, in this collection, Teresa Leo writes not about the spiritual, but the physical — the violence that “rough lust” enacts on our bodies and minds, and the ways that our biological urges can (and will) destroy us without hesitation or warning. Desire is the primary concern of The Halo Rule, and appears in most of the poems in some way, even if only to mark its absence or its transmutation into a closely allied urge or feeling such as despair. Recurring tropes here are addiction, possession, hunger, and the color red — all common metaphors for sexual desire. Incendiary images are numerous:

The kiss, if not gasoline, then turpentine, // or two red peonies in a cardboard tube… (4)

I won’t say I’m fire and in it… (4)

“…Come find me at night // and we’ll go up in flames.” (37)

…you said my hair was a creature
unto itself, a dark and dangerous thing
that could set the world on fire. (42)

Leo divides her book into four sections, each of which examines a particular phase of a sexual relationship. The narrative arc of the book begins with the end, and the first poem we encounter is entitled “P.S.”

The end is not near. We’ve passed the end, and it’s so far back
it’s like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a field…

Not only are we already at the end, we’re long past it! Appropriately enough, Section I deals with the final throes of a turbulent relationship: “We’re flatlined, sandblasted, / pummeled, untoward (12).” We meet two lovers, each seized in some way by sexual addiction and violence. There are glasses thrown against the wall, punches, jabs, chokeholds, “come-heres and fisticuffs (6).”

Section II takes us back to the beginning of this relationship with a series of poems about a modern Narcissus, poems exploring the chase, seduction, the art of wooing, and, of course, self-love. Yet even as the two lovers are meeting for the first time, Leo calls out a warning: “The woman // stood and turned. He was already thinking/ of the beautiful and various ways he could leave her (21).”

In Section III, we see the two lovers in the middle of their relationship, and their dynamic is clearly about sex and not much else:

After we fuck, he comes to himself,
back from a scattering of parts and phrases,

pulled from a starkness too violent to remember
(though fragments jostle in the back of the eyes

in a furious attempt to make it)
and says, “I can’t do more than this.” (41)

Finally, Section IV brings us back to where we started, forcing the reader to experience for a second time the couple’s goodbyes and leavings. The last poem in the book, “Aubade”, is a fitting end, bringing us full circle to dawn—a signal that the lovers must now part.

As I read the book, I found myself wondering if Leo strove for such unwavering thematic content; it feels more as if she happened on it incidentally, organically. As a poet, I understand the drive to write our obsessions again and again. By the end, however, I had more of a reader’s-eye view of how consistency can become slightly tedious over the course of an entire book. Pair that consistency with Leo’s fairly uniform (albeit very well-crafted) poetic style/approach, and there could very well be a little bit of reader-fatigue by the end of the collection.

That said, even if I occasionally found myself wanting a poem that looked or sounded just a little different than the others, Leo’s obsessions happen to mirror my own, so I was more than happy to immerse myself in the dark minutiae of this unraveling sexual relationship. The strength of the book lies in the strength of the individual poems. They are well-crafted, and Leo clearly delights in language and well-turned phrases. One of her techniques is to simultaneously present two conflicting realities:

...the way I didn’t see the curve ball coming,
the one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. (3)

…the long, slow torso of a woman bent back, seeing / and not being seen. (6)

Thus, the reader must consider both x and not-x; they are somehow both equally true. This is what good poetry should be able to do, to look at the many facets of a complicated situation and recognize the truth of them all. Similarly, Leo is interested in adjacencies, which strikes me as an interest in metaphor.

…How, if at all,
does adjacency fit in, the militant but not mindful,

his four: lust, luster, lash, then less and less…
my four: drugged, deranged, demonized, damaged. (27)

This type of sound-association also shows up in the book as near-rhymes separated by slashes, which is a sort of violent, unvarnished way of making comparisons. Without putting the words into a full sentence, Leo mushes two words together, puts them on equal footing, and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions from their proximity. One of the poems describes this method as “the bereft/theft rhyme of desire and seizure” (26). Throughout the book, Leo also gives us baroque/throat (22), read/delete (24), famine/feminine (28), and

the estranged/deranged
call and response,

off-key, off-kilter,
an intersection of streets

where Wood meets Division,
Hope meets Power,

the mute improvisations
of a love-sick blood. (68)

Since this collection had the occasional tendency toward repetition and the “expected” view, I particularly enjoyed the off-key notes in The Halo Rule. Ultimately, the poems’ physical presence and honesty allows us to appreciate the collection for what it is:

…Just a book of poems

in a stark white envelope, little disclosures
that sway into oblivion the way bamboo floor boards
give suddenly under the body, its weight. (28)

**

Teresa Leo's poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has received fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She currently works at the University of Pennsylvania.

**

Amy Schrader received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, and Filter. She lives in Seattle.

Superfecta by Clay Matthews

Ghost Road Press, 2008

Reviewed by Joshua Robbins

Every so often one comes across a first book of poems that radically shirks off the normative first book formula which says, “This profound stuff happened to me and I’m going to tell you what it means.” More often than not, the product of the first book equation is a poetry that meets our expectations (however low they may be), but fails to address the urgency of our times. Thankfully we have Clay Matthews’s first full-length collection, Superfecta, to prod and admonish us, to remind us that poetry can have something to say in the face of American vulnerability, mortality, late capitalism, ubiquitous pop-culture clutter, and urban sprawl. And for readers willing to risk betting even just a little time and effort, the payoff they receive will far exceed their meager investment.

For Matthews, who has previously published two chapbooks, Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books), the concept of a payoff is integral to the arc of his book, the title of which is derived from the world of parimutuel horse race betting. When betting the superfecta, the bettor must successfully predict the order of the first four finishers in a race. Picking a successful superfecta involves complex combinations and sequences at long odds. The winnings, though, are correspondingly much higher. The same goes for our experience of these poems.

For an epigraph, Matthews quotes from Emily Dickinson’s #254:

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

While hope is certainly a theme for Matthews, reading poems like “Poem with a Forecast at Either End,” “Self Help for the Lost and Found,” and “The Prayer Mechanism” among others, one recalls Dickinson’s other famous words, “Poetry dwells in possibility.” Sometimes these poems harness the potential of narrative and the saving grace of memory. Sometimes it’s landscape and place. Other times these poems express what feels like a renewed religious faith struggling with what remains of doubt. Consider these closing lines from “Eternia”:

I'm lonesome sometimes
again. I've been coughing up the evils of the universe
in the sink and watched once more the other night that movie
about He-Man. Look at that name. What a strange film
there is covering the window. It looks like everything
outside is blanketed with the saddest glass in the world.

In the phrase “the saddest glass in the world,” there are faint echoes of Biblical scripture and the Apostle Paul’s statement, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” Matthews’s spirit seems equally sanguine and forward-looking — though doused with a heavyheartedness as he surveys the world.

Matthews’s poems possess a unique melancholy in which the trappings of America’s tradition of optimism are juxtaposed with imagery from America’s cultural clutter. This is a place where the individual’s voice becomes “nothing more / than a warm little praying machine” (“The Prayer Mechanism”). It is the place where video game arcades and “Two-hundred Pac-Man machines / with hundreds of three-letter initials” call into question “the essence of [the] subjective self” (Self-Portrait in a Chewing Gum Wrapper”), and even the DeLorean from the film Back to the Future compels us to wonder if we should “try to save the world or just try / to save ourselves” (“Self-Portrait in a Hollywood Car”).

Referencing pop-culture icons and even brand names has become a fairly fashionable tool in recent years for poets seeking to rough-up their listless imagery or to inject an ironic sensibility into their lyric. Very often these poems feel contrived. What enables Matthews to avoid sounding like a phony is that his allusions to pop-culture are connected to more pressing existential concerns. Here is the opening of “Mercy Mild”:

At the supercenter we were waiting
for the big televisions to go on sale,
which is to say we were waiting
for a larger version of The Price is Right,
in full color and spread across the screen
the way Antarctica stretches across
the bottom of the globe like a pair
of tight white underwear, the kind
my father used to wear in the bathroom
when he shaved his face each morning
and banged the razor rhythmically
on the side of the porcelain bowl.

In these opening twelve lines, we encounter several things we don’t normally expect to come across in poems: the supercenter, The Price is Right, Antarctica, a man’s tighty-whities. Also, it should be noted that we hear a nearly regular accentual beat. Aside from his highly crafted line, Matthews’s progression from the supercenter into memory is not necessarily poetically surprising in its movement. It does, however, allow him to tackle the bigger issues, to call into question the relationship between the self and commerce, the self and memory, the self and place, because “In the supercenter there are three versions of reality” and supercenters themselves “are no version / of reality, [they are] only an image of reality.”

Matthews’s work is refreshing because of its honest voice and his willingness to confess simple facts: that we all hope for “another day of absolutely nothing better to do” (“Self-Portrait as an Aging Human Type”); that in something as simple as a pickle jar “you see / every greed you have ever possessed / or been possessed by” (“Regarding My Sentimentality and Love of Hole-in-the-Walls”); that any kind of bet “is just another structure tugging away at our sad existence” because

Asking the American
middle class not to gamble is like asking us
not to breathe, to place our small, tired hands
over our hearts as some young girl in white sequins
over-sings the national anthem to which at least one
old man in the crowd will weep.
(“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”)

Many of the poems in Superfecta stayed with me, their images reverberating in my consciousness long after I’d set the book down. With their complex tones and the mixture of pop-culture, the honesty of Matthews’s voice, his attention to the details of the everyday, the poems in Superfecta oblige us “To bet on what we believe won't happen, / but hope for / nonetheless” (“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”). Clay Matthews is certainly a poet to put some money on.

***

Clay Matthews is the author of Superfecta and two chapbooks: Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books). He currently lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. Visit his blog at http://claymatthews.blogspot.com.

***

Joshua Robbins received his MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a doctoral student and lecturer at the University of Tennessee where he serves as Poetry Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. A winner of the James Wright Poetry Award, his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New South, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, the anthology Writing By Ear, and elsewhere. Visit his blog at http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com.

NOW AVAILABLE: CutBank 70, Winter 2009

Featuring fiction by Ingrid Satelmajer, Justin Quarry, and Daniel Doehr.

Creative nonfiction by Rebekah Beall.

Poetry by Carlos Villacorta, Olivie Clare, Chloe Garcia-Roberts, Haines Eason, Michael Levan, Christopher DeWeese, Michael Peterson, Trey Moody, Cara Benson, and Ashley Seitz Kramer.

Photographs by Aimee Lewis.

Copies are available here.

Surviving in the Flickering Lights of a Spiritual Quest:

Things On Which I've Stumbled

New Directions Books, 2008

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Making the desert empty. Bloom, purging soil. As though it needed a little
more room. All the toil, come from countries: “Waste not, want not” once
its pride. Now its eyes for the world are wide. And nothing it does upsets
us. There’s no apartheid in its midst. There’s no lie, we need the fence….
Wandering though the land like Christ. Take that village along the ridge.
Who on earth could bring it help? Ethnic cleansing, Scripture says. Slowly
but surely. Staying strong is hardly wrong; our forces do what must be
done. Nothing that they do is fun. Living along this seam. Where is, in fact
is what it seems. If you will it, said the prophet. It is not a dream.
(From “What Has Been Prepared, Part III: What Intimation Is There,” 80)

Reading Peter Cole’s memorable poetry volume, Things On Which I’ve Stumbled, with the assault on Gaza raging, is an emotionally charged and revealing experience. Dense, coherent, confessional, and prophetic, his writings explore an archeology of mystical fragments, from poetry manuscripts unearthed in an old Egyptian synagogue to uncensored personal thoughts and observations about the political plight of modern Jerusalem. Even the arresting book cover — a Joel Shapiro woodcut of a disjointed black swastika — is in itself a telling political commentary. Indeed, writing about the identity of a nation and people in the context of Jerusalem and Palestine is both sacred and political, as demonstrated in this concise poem now oft cited and remembered:

Israel is he, or she, who wrestles
with God — call him what you will,

not some goon (with a rabbi and gun)
in a pre-fab home on a biblical hill.

(From “Israel Is,” 50)

Most of the poems in this collection are allegorical and meditative. Often, the titles are illustrative. Consider these: “The Ghazal of What He Sees,” “Proverbial Drawing: How Far, A Right Angle Supports Us Here, The Line, It’s True, The House The Cloud, The Wrong Angle Righted,” “The Ghazal of What Hurt.” From open-form lyrics and sestinas to ghazals, lineated prose, and prose-poems, the variety of forms and modes in this collection is both refined and rich. Cole has boldly incorporated an Arabic cadence into his well-composed English syntax, sometimes seeking more of a musical cadence than a strict adherence to metric feet in his prosodic eloquence. Much of the twenty-three-page title poem, “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled,” for instance, contains a visible architectural elegance and clarity that renders an incantatory touch to parallel words and refrains, as well as illuminating blank but breathing spaces:

These are things I could not fathom,

………. your sons
……………. your ways
……………………..your …….

Plunders of a people
………. in darkness (24)

how what is smallest could loom so large,
how what is best could miss what is finest
….

and how what is fine
and wine

could be crushed by a blindness

Tell me, what is man
If not dirt and a worm,

his life is only vapor…

caused by a brightness

Tell me what man is
but flesh and blood that’s warm,

reaching the margins

of what it is

whose life is only vapor… (28)

Despite their experimental forms, all of the poems are clear and accessible in their messages, paying close attention to linguistic nuances and techniques. Cole creates a range of lyrical episodes, either expressing a single narrative voice or a multivocality in which voices from different time periods intersect. I found many lines irresistibly ludic yet resonating, despite their seeming simplicity:

No! It’s all in the picture,
which this one echoes:

“I want, I want,” said Blake.
“I can’t, I can’t,” said the fake.

(From “Proverbial Drawing, Part I: How Far,” 51)

In the poem “Why Does the World Out There Seem,” the poet states, “Poems, as Williams wrote, are machines.” Peter Cole joins the ranks of poets such as Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg and Bei Dao who articulate serious questions about the place of poetry in a darkened and dubious world. Things On Which I’ve Stumbled asserts a union between language and meaning in the context of a specific culture. What stands out clear to me is that one cannot read this volume without acknowledging its moral seriousness, its historical and cultural references. While savoring their many and layered musics, I have also enjoyed the verses as a combination of Cole’s emotional and intellectual responses, whether as poet or translator.

**

An acclaimed translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, Peter Cole’s previous volumes of poems are compiled in What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998. His several translations from the Hebrew and Arabic include poetry by Taha Muhammad Ali, Aharon Shabtai, Yoel Hoffmann, and others. Awards and fellowships include a PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, a TLS Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Jerusalem, and is co-editor of Ibis Editions.

**

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) publishes poetry and non-fiction under her nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Her forthcoming poems can be found in Broken Plate, Caesura, Santa Clara Review, River Oak Review, Istanbul Literary Review, etc. Also a harp concertist, she lives in Paris, France.

The Usable Field by Jane Mead

Alice James Books, 2008

Reviewed by Dora Malech

In Jane Mead’s latest collection of poems, The Usable Field, the field in question is not theoretical (not “open” nor “unified”) but physical and actual, a living and tangible landscape made of “vines and poppies,” “the dust and the grasses,” “grit on the wind,” “yellow thistle,” and “the far shore/and the cliffs beyond it.” This is as much a literal place on earth as it is a metaphorical one. The poems don’t concern themselves so much with theory, but with a more private kind of discourse, wrestling with selfhood, the dead, and the natural world that binds past and present generations together where “the vineyard/and the grave are one.” The poems in The Usable Field ground themselves in a particular landscape, a place that takes on a life of its own as it bears witness to the human cycles of loss and grief (with brief flashes of joy and agency) that occur within it. The poem “Sister Harvest Brother Blues” declares:

The main force is the usable field
or sun on the useless bunchgrass,—

alchemy that spells and spells us
just as the weather spells us
and the good earth field. . . .

If the book is engaging in a public conversation at all, it is simply finding a voice in the centuries-old conversation about the quiet, self-effacing power of the lyric poem (“I do not know much/about beauty,” the speaker says, “though//its consequences/are clearly great”) reaffirming the ways in which faithful meditations on the particular have the capacity to echo into the universe, the universal. These are “personal” poems, but they never rely on effusive sentimentality or voyeur-friendly “confessional” narrative. It is the language itself that feels personal, even hermetic, in the most positive—and physical—sense of the word. To me these poems build themselves around the reader in the act of reading, using language to create enclosures—but not defensive walls, by any means—in which to meditate on their beauties and burdens. This is a book that one must visit again and again, each time becoming more a part of the “us” that the alchemy and weather “spells and spells” throughout this quietly extraordinary collection.

The Usable Field is haunted, though the poet presents the dead as so much a part of the place that they seem like natural phenomena (as opposed to supernatural). In the first poem of the collection “The Dead, Leaning (in the Grasses and Beyond the Trenches,—Like Oaks)” Mead begins:

In the high and mighty grasses
the dead lean on the living
like nobody’s business,—

they think we are their mission.
Thus the rain, whereby they say
Now wash your eyes and pray.

Pray for anything but forgiveness.

Again and again, the dead appear; the speaker tends to them as she tends to the land itself, and to her poems. This burden seems to inform the making of stanzas and lines throughout the book, as “form” and “content” (for lack of better words) feel exhilaratingly inseparable. There is an intuitive sense of cadence and composition throughout, not “form” per se, but a definite formality, calling to mind Dickinson’s “formal feeling” that follows “great pain.” The repetitions and shifts of the natural world (wind, water, seasons) appear as anaphora and incantation, point and counterpoint, caesura and enjambment paired to ensure a reader’s careful navigation of syntactic possibility. The poem “Three Candles and a Bowerbird” seems to speak to the necessity of this kind of “intuitive formality”:

I do not know why
the three candles must sit
before this oval mirror,

but they must.—

In this poem, and indeed throughout the collection, Mead uses precise images as touchstones to explore the ineffable; even the most revelatory endings have an elliptical or gnomic quality as in “The Dead, Leaning (in the Grasses and Beyond the Trenches,—Like Oaks)” which ends with the lines: “if there is death between you/and the oak, there is no oak.” These koan-like endings feel like anchors; in their mystery they moor the reader with their declarative and definitive cadence, often pentameter and often iambic, though sometimes folded over two lines. The poem “We Take the Circus to Another Level—” ends “The odds, by definition, can’t conspire”; the poem “Three Candles and a Bowerbird” ends “And in the mirror/also, there is joy”; the poem “Point and Counterpoint in All Things” ends “. . . there is/a single blossom—called commence.”

Although death and grief seem to bind these poems to the land, the land also seems to provide the possibility of release, or at least a coming to terms. The collection ends with the declaration “Also, I am here of my own choosing” — the paradox of finding agency through tending and committing to a place of inherited sadness. The precision and vitality of language and image and thought and feeling throughout these poems reacquaints us with one of the age-old paradoxes of the lyric: the pleasure it gives a reader to linger in and return to a solitary and grievous place made of uncertainty.

**

Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, A Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California and teaches occasionally.

**

Dora Malech's poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently a Teaching-Writing Fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Retrospective: Disclamor by G.C. Waldrep

BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007
Reviewed by Michael Levan

In G.C. Waldrep’s remarkable second collection, we are asked to deal with what comes after war — the troubled peace that can leave us disillusioned. Waldrep forces us to examine how it is that we cope with these reminders, which so often result in us losing connections to each other. Waldrep’s skill, though, is in mitigating the harshness of the world we inhabit, as well as finding ways to remind us that we can and must do better, especially for our descendants. He “craves the aftersilence” (“Cloud of Witnesses”) and feels a duty to give us hope or, at the very least, some assurance that we can still hope, even after being confronted with the tragedies war brings.  

The desire for consolation plays a large role in the book, especially throughout the “The Batteries,” a nine-poem sequence inspired by sea-coast fortifications along the northern California coast. The first, “Battery Rathbone-McIndoe,” reveals how hesitant Waldrep is, how awkward he feels being at one of these decommissioned gun emplacements. There are “so many ways [he] could begin,” but his perspective has not yet taken shape, he has not yet made up his mind to celebrate the fact that these sites have been turned into tourist attractions, or to lament that they were ever needed in the first place. This wavering keeps cropping up in the poem: “Can you believe I once stood for war? / (Can you believe I once stood against it?)” And when he describes a lone sailboat far out in the Pacific, we can’t help but notice the parallels:

  

It moves slowly, from left to right,
                             as if trying to say something
                                          very precise,
                             and then again, from right to left,
                                          as if erasing.

And yet, all this indecision fades when Waldrep recognizes:

I walked here, there were
                        no guns, no gates, now
                                   everything is permitted.
            No one had sold the sand in my shoes.
            No one has yet tasted his death
                                                              on my tongue,
                        this is before
                                       as there must always be before
             (just as what comes next
                                                              is after—)

Though Waldrep may have free reign in visiting the armaments, he still has a responsibility in capturing this scene in order to not let us forget how things could have gone differently. He serves as witness, then, and must speak, a sentiment played out at the end of “Candlemas, Vermont”: “Lear said / nothing comes of nothing. Speak again.”

Speech is what will spur action and, even more importantly, memories — both good and bad. This act of not allowing us to forget will hopefully save us because, as Waldrep notes when he sees the graffiti covering the walls in “Battery O’Rorke”:

 

What is written here fades quickly.
                     Faces drawn in chalk,
                                    names,
                                                                        the idea
                     of defense, of a beach
                                                ripe for landing.

         West, east, the longitudes of war.
                        This is no place for monuments.

The poet takes responsibility for making sure “what is written here,” this place’s ugly history, is recorded and examined before these mistakes are repeated. In a moment of doubt, Waldrep considers himself to be a “very minor poet,” which does not do himself or his work justice. He is much more than minor; he is “a poet of broken things” (“Batter Bravo, (first)”), a writer who can treat what is broken with both compassion — “They are trying to believe / something they have forgotten. / Or to make us believe it” (“Many of Us Identify with Animals”) — and deadpan humor:

AND THE GOD OF USA DECLARED
            I SHALL INCORPORATE WEAPONS
                               OF MASS DESTRUCTION
           INTO MY NATIONAL PARKS.

— This is not quite right. The weapons came first,
            mass, the destruction; then
                         picnic tables. (“Battery Wallace”)

The poems surrounding, or supporting, “The Batteries” show a different side of the poet. Whereas other poems in the collection rely on a collage of graffiti, personal observations, facts and figures, and research into Miwok tribal lore, these poems require close, slow reading in order to appreciate the quirky and oddly beautiful images:

What I never know is
when my life will change, or when the rain will stop
or at least assume a more congenial vector.
(from “Cosmologies of Zinniae”)

Currydawn dustworry. A blue tuning as from the south pond in colder
weather. Side to side to side to side to side. Like that. We are pleased.
As with the scalp of that other, spider-thin.
(from “Milton Highway”)

But “The Batteries” is where Disclamor truly shines and where the book ends: “I am not afraid of the story you ask me to tell. / (In any case it is no longer / my story.)” In fact, it has become our story, a mutual agreement that in reporting all that he has seen, imagined, and felt, Waldrep accepts us and makes us accountable as well. We must learn from and pass on the story of what comes after because we are witnesses now, too.

**

G.C. Waldrep received a BA from Harvard University in American History in 1990 and a Ph.D. in American History from Duke University in 1996. His first poetry collection, Goldbeater's Skin (Center for Literary Publishing), won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, and other journals. Waldrep spent 2003-05 at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2005-06 he was visiting professor of the humanities and social sciences at Deep Springs College in California. He currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Bucknell University.

**

Michael Levan received his MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Tennessee, where he serves as assistant poetry editor of Grist: The Journal for Writers. His poems and reviews can be found in upcoming issues of Nimrod, Third Coast, and CutBank. He lives in Knoxville with his wife, Molly.

Unwieldy Seriousness or Spiky Humor? Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy

Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.

             (from “I’m Over the Moon,” 5)

Brenda Shaughnessy’s new book, Human Dark with Sugar, opens with rather sensual language — smart, suggestive and provocative — mixed occasionally with dark humor and philosophical musings.

The title of her work derives from a question raised in the second poem, “Why is the Color of Snow?”: “Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?” Intriguing and original, this line offers us an imaginative lens through which to playfully explore human existence and its various emotional states (rage, sadness, hunger, jubilation, etc.) And when set against the title of her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy, whether intentional or accidental, the title signals a continuation of a certain structure and style.

Shaughnessy sprinkles rhetorical twists throughout Human Dark with Sugar, most of which are neatly arranged and deliberately crafted. Self-reflective questions such as “How long do I try to get water from a stone,” “Why do we only get two/years in exchange for three summers,” or “Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?” hint at more metaphysical or abstract concerns, even though the poet seems to take most of her subject matter from her own everyday life. For instance, the poem “Parthenogenesis” is in fact a disguised, surprise ode to weight gain, a concern that seems banal though at the same time real:

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating
and sometimes easy’s the thing.

To be double-me, half the trouble
but not lonely.

                    (from “Parthenogenesis,” 11)

The female body and its eroticism is indeed a theme that Shaughnessy explores in various poems. “Breasted Landscape,” “Vagile,” and “Me in Paradise” all contain subtle yet direct references to female anatomy. The strongest allusion appears in “This Loved Body,” a long prose-poem made up of twenty short sections:

This belly is hardly what I call a belly. Could there be less belly in
it? I am accustomed to women’s bellies, of which there is usually
some. You seem like a machine here, hairless and olive. But when
you bend you are as human as can be, literally within an inch of
your life. Because the machinery is in plain view, you have no secret
stash, nothing for winter, nothing to lose. In an emergency, this
would be an emergency. I am horrified, my thinlet, and won’t ever
let you be hungry.

                                             (from “This Loved Body,” 47)

In general, Shaughnessy writes with an acute self-awareness, a trait that, if left completely unchecked, could be considered an endangerment to the spirit of writing itself. Though this overly self-aware style of writing seems to be a trend in American poetics today, Shaughnessy seeks to balance this impulse with various attentive and figurative voices, articulating images that are at once edgy and unpredictable. I have read her poems with much curiosity, interested to understand how each imaginative leap leads to the next, how each poetic form shapes itself and attempts to weave a dialogue with the poems surrounding it. That said, I would also like to believe that there bristles some optimism, authenticity, and sincerity in Brenda Shaughnessy’s writings, as she makes a bold step closer towards simple love beyond the self, a complex appreciation for common goodness in this, our so confusing world.

**

Raised in California, Brenda Shaughnessy now lives in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, and is currently the poetry editor of Tin House magazine. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College of the New School.

**

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) writes under the nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. She is currently Poetry and Non-fiction editor of Emprise Review. She lives in France.