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WINTERGREEN by CHARLES BENNETT
Headland Publications, 2002
Published in Galatea Resurrects, Spring 2006
In my hand I hold a slim green volume of poetry. On the cover is an amazingly ethereal painting by Giovanni Segantini entitled “The Punishment of Lus...more
WINTERGREEN by CHARLES BENNETT
Headland Publications, 2002
Published in Galatea Resurrects, Spring 2006
In my hand I hold a slim green volume of poetry. On the cover is an amazingly ethereal painting by Giovanni Segantini entitled “The Punishment of Lust” in which we see bare-breasted women floating through an icy channel against a backdrop of snow covered mountains. It is titled Wintergreen, by Dr. Charles Bennett.
Dr. Bennett lives and works in and about the U.K. where he runs the Ledbury Poetry Festival, “the best poetry festival in the country” according to Andrew Motion. Several years ago I was lucky enough to hear him read during Writers Week at the University of California, Riverside, near my home.
Throughout this debut, a collection of startlingly fresh lyric poems, Dr. Bennett employs language that is evocative, revelatory, and steeped in folklore that acts as mythical sinew, connecting these poems to the bone of a narrative structure that draws us through a landscape bristling with the mystery of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The title poem evokes the bright flavor of wintergreen with crisp imagery, then seamlessly turns from the literal to the metaphorical beginning at the fourth couplet, ending the poem with:
Somewhere close at hand
you are hiding until I find you:
a remedy for solitude
a prickle of white in the wood.
These poems, saturated with a longing the reader can almost taste, seek to satiate that longing with searching. Most are oblique love poems, addressed to an un-named “you” as though letting us in on a private conversation. In “The Unicorn Diaries” the speaker claims:
I have put you together from pentagrams of sugar
and salt, from the bones of eleven mice
This invokes, in this reader’s mind, not just a snippet of pagan ritual, but the desire to create that which cannot easily be obtained. When the speaker says:
I wondered if the smell was viburnum
or phosphorus, if the feathers
were swans or doves, if the dimpled sheets
of your bed were the toad’s pale underbelly ,
or fallen hawthorn blossom,
the text seems imbued with a glow, a sweetness; a softness. The swans and doves and hawthorn blossoms, symbolic of monogamy and fidelity, are countered in the penultimate couplet by the unicorn’s slow dismembering of a wedding dress. She then runs off, leaving a bath full of milk, a trail of hoof-prints in the snow.
In another poem, “The Mermaid Room,” written in the voice of a mermaid, the speaker states:
I am the voyage you will make alone
in a small, unstable, open boat
for the rest of your life...
further reenforcing one of the major themes of this work: the deeply human quest for all that eludes us. We find ourselves adrift, almost floating from one page to the next, until we reach the final section: a series of linked poems titled “Lost.” Here, on a Wednesday night, we find the speaker wanting to learn how to spell abracadabra -- a conundrum, of course, because as he is spelling out this desire, he is spelling out the word.
This is the trick that is played as we read these simple and elegant and mysterious poems: in searching out a remedy for our own solitude, we find that we’ve had it in our hands all along.(less)
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LANDSCAPE WITH SILOS
by Deborah Bogen
Published in Rattle, Summer 2006
Texas Review Press
English Department
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX 77341-2146
ISBN 1-881515-93-1
71 pp, 2007 $12.95
Winner of the X.J. Kenedy Prize
www.tamu.edu/upress
In Debo...more
LANDSCAPE WITH SILOS
by Deborah Bogen
Published in Rattle, Summer 2006
Texas Review Press
English Department
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX 77341-2146
ISBN 1-881515-93-1
71 pp, 2007 $12.95
Winner of the X.J. Kenedy Prize
www.tamu.edu/upress
In Deborah Bogen's debut collection, Landscape with Silos, the surfaces of things often conceal their inherent danger. Fitting, considering that in an interview with Belinda Subraman, Bogen tells us that the serene North Dakota countryside she so often turns to in her poetry was once considered the most heavily armed geographical spot on the planet. The region is laced with silos--agricultural above, missile below. This dichotomy of perceived safety and latent peril is a trope that is carried throughout.
The collection is divided into four titled sections: Learning the Language, The Poem Ventures Out, Visitations, and Within the Porcelain Theater.
The opening poem presents the speaker (and the reader) with a parade of images, all from "an old landscape, / one I've hidden from myself / because it's stupid." This concealment of loaded memories mirrors the concealment of the deadly weaponry below the fields. In image after image we are presented with the potential for danger:
a nail sticking up in a pile of boards
air bladders from fish brought home for supper
sugar in green glass bowls
glittering rattlesnakes
Bogen's style is plainspoken but shimmering in its description of men, women and children rising daily to lives that bristle with the shock of living, and with the undeniable truth that this living is only temporary.
Interested in exploration rather than excavation, we are given a window through which we may peer at what has been buried without fully uncovering it. In Living by the Children's Cemetery, originally published in her ByLine Press Competition-winning chapbook of the same name, the speaker asks:
How do we accept the soil
that fills their mouths?
How do we ever go inside again?
Coming as it does, as the last lines of the poem, we are offered no room for answers. Instead, what the poem offers is a meditation on a particular form of grief.
In Learning the Language, the last poem of the first section, Bogen uses evocative phrases that you can almost taste:
There was a pile of words out by the shed,
another spit from the combine's teeth
and words that Ethel said would fuel the nation
in its fight for something large and metal.
Aunt Trini whispered voodoo words as silent
John backed down the drive, and Gram
knew words as bright as rhubarb jam
and brown wet words awash in the Missouri.
Kids heard barge words, baseball words,
the strangled words of wet sheets groaning
through the ringer. There were stately Sunday
words swinging from steeples like flags
in a thunderstorm, but they were lost mostly
among the snickers of the school boys,
their pussywords, those ritual recitations
meant to conjure what was missing.
Bogen enlivens the landscape with words that emit a sort of kinetic energy, driving us through. The section titled The Poem Ventures Out intrigues the reader with titles like The Poem Listens to Its President on TV, which is political without being preachy:
O, it wants to be beautiful,
to be naked and necessary, it
gestures toward sparrows,
hums under its breath, but
the poem's picking up brutish
habits, bared teeth in the bathroom
mirror, a vaguely Caliginous grin.
Using the persona of The Poem, Bogen explores the various ways The Poem infiltrates The Poet, the poem sneaking in and asserting itself at inopportune times. A segue into the denser, more emotionally rich material that follows, this section provides some levity in what is otherwise a fairly serious collection.
The section Visitations begins with the epigraph: "My father took me as far as he could that summer". Bogen journeys past that point to show us that even the flattest of landscapes harbor depths.(less)
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Review of Fear of Moving Water
Cati Porter
Published in Smartish Pace, Winter 2009
Wind Publications 2009 15
Alex Grant’s Fear of Moving Water is structured in four sections, and while there is no listing for this in the table of contents, each is preced...more
Review of Fear of Moving Water
Cati Porter
Published in Smartish Pace, Winter 2009
Wind Publications 2009 15
Alex Grant’s Fear of Moving Water is structured in four sections, and while there is no listing for this in the table of contents, each is preceded by a brief prose poem that serves as an introduction to the section. The collection moves deftly between the serious, the sublime, and the silly, sometimes melding all three into something shining and whole. Take, for example, this passage, which serves as an epigraph to the first section of poems, titled Bones & Confetti:
So we come here, to this haberdashery of words, apothecary for the faintly damaged. Well,
Wounded Elk, walk this way -- follow the voice leading you toward something, anything other
than that damned catechism of caterwauling you’ve suffered through the shrinking years of
bones and confetti -- The lights will go down and the yellow spotlight of the moon will pull
your body upward from the slow riptide of the world.
Bones and confetti are two words you do not ordinarily find in the same sentence, but it is an astute observation that directly references both the solemn and the celebratory components of our lives. In this poem, the bone as a structural object, as a remnant of the body, takes on a figurative significance that speaks to the transitory nature of our lives. The confetti also speaks to this state, in that the bright bits become more than simple scraps of paper, symbolic not just of life’s celebrations but also of the traces we leave behind after the party is over. But Grant is not without a sense of humor. There is of course the pun -- the “shrinking years” that immediately precedes the word “bones”; and the tone, which is slightly cheeky, a tad over-confident, welcoming us in where we will be dressed in words and given a tonic to lift us out of our own skin and into another’s.
Grant is a skillful story teller. His poems draw the reader in through the particulars of the image, then through those particulars we are given a glimpse of something larger in a sort of microscope/telescope effect. In many of these poems he directs our gaze toward an object, then draws us up and out of the poem to contemplate the implications of history on our understanding of that object. Here is his poem “The Gardens of Pompeii”:
The Gardens of Pompeii
In the gardens of Pompeii, where fields of asphodel
once dropped white petals and the grass grinds
beneath your feet, where glass trees clink in the wind
and winter never comes, the streets where children
ran with barking dogs are empty -- the clacking
cobblestones wrapped in centuries of ash --
like black olives petrified in withered vine-leaves.
Here Grant has excavated a world that no longer exists, resurrected the fields of asphodel, the barking dogs, and the children . . . . Through his imagery Grant is able to insert us into a history that is no longer visible on the surface. The lightness of the asphodel, the clinking of the glass, juxtaposed against that last solemn line, lend this poem gravitas.
Grant seems to know his history and revels in the retelling, but is not one to shy away from the absurd when it suits him, in much the same way one might use humor to deflect terror. In “Captain Scott’s Lost Diary” we are presented with a few passages from this “lost diary” in which we learn a lot about Captain Scott, as well as (the very obviously fictionalized) Captain Oates. For those not familiar with the story, Captain Scott led an expedition to the South Pole. Captain Oates allegedly died in an honorable suicide by stepping out into a blizzard when it became obvious that his ill health threatened to compromise the health of the others on the expedition. Grant, however, posits an alternative reason for Oates’ departure:
Six weeks in this tent, and we are all close
to breaking-point. Captain Oates masturbates
constantly - even during dinner – he claims
it’s simply a mechanism to keep his body temperature
up - though we all have our doubts. I no longer feel
comfortable shaking hands with him, and last night
he told me that he wants me to have his babies.
..................................................................................
...............The wind is unrelenting, the cold
bites at every nerve, and Oates has threatened
that if we don’t go to dinner soon, he’ll go alone -
and that he may be gone for quite some time.
Grant’s use of personae in poems is admirable. He uses these masks to great effect, allowing the reader into a frame that would otherwise be un-enterable. To quote Grant, speaking on his use of personae:
. . . [T]he use of persona in a poem frees the poet to inhabit a world outside of the individual
personality – I imagine it’s a little like wearing a chinese mask – it allows the writer to take on
a foreign personality, to say something that might otherwise sound inauthentic or affected if it
were spoken directly. It also allows me to repeatedly make staggering, unauthenticated
claims of fact – a very appealing notion!
There is certainly something appealing in stepping out of one’s skin. It hints at a drama that can only be enacted by allowing oneself to step away from one’s self. But of course one can never truly do that; one is, at all times, writing from a point within.
Alex Grant is an accomplished poet, the recipient of numerous awards including the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, the Oscar Arnold Young Award, the Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets Prize, and far too many finalist and semi-finalist nods to name here, but most notably The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Prizes, Tupelo Press’ Dorset Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, Discovery/The Nation, and The Arts & Letters Poetry Prize. Despite that fact, it is surprising to realize that Fear of Moving Water is his first full-length collection.
Fear of Moving Water could almost serve as an Alex Grant retrospective, as a kind of “selected works”, because, of the thirty-nine poems included here, at least twenty-two of these appear in either of his two previous chapbook-length collections. But rather than stitch these prior collections together at the seams, Grant has ripped them apart, reconfigured them, and through bones and confetti, bodies and water, chains and mirrors, Grant has painstakingly curated a representative selection of his finest work to date, work that is both cocked and benedictive, perpetually at the ready, offering an invocation of divine blessing for all who pass through.(less)
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Review of CHAINS & MIRRORS
by Alex Grant
Published in Rattle, 2006
Harperprints
North Carolina Writers' Network
ISBN: 1-883314-19-4
25 pp., $6.95
www.mainstreetrag.com
Alex Grant is a native Scot currently living in North Carolina. His manuscript, Chains...more
Review of CHAINS & MIRRORS
by Alex Grant
Published in Rattle, 2006
Harperprints
North Carolina Writers' Network
ISBN: 1-883314-19-4
25 pp., $6.95
www.mainstreetrag.com
Alex Grant is a native Scot currently living in North Carolina. His manuscript, Chains & Mirrors, won the 2006 Randell Jarrell/Harperprints poetry contest and was recently awarded the Oscar Arnold Young Award by the Poetry Council of North Carolina for most outstanding book of poetry published that year. He has been the recipient of a Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, first place winner of the 2006 Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, and was selected for inclusion in this year's Best New Poets Anthology (University of Virginia Press).
A slender, perfect-bound volume containing twenty-one poems, two thirds of the poems collected here were either finalists or honorable mentions for some noteworthy poetry awards such as the Discovery/The Nation (2005 and 2006), Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize (2005), and the Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize (2006).
Chains & Mirrors takes as its epigraph a stanza from the Robert Penn Warren poem, Tell Me a Story. It reads:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
In the acknowledgments Grant thanks Warren for this "posthumous thunderbolt," for this is the thread upon which the book is constructed. Each of the poems here tell a story, drawing inspiration primarily from historical and religious subjects. Included among them are poems about Jesus, Neruda, Emperor Qinshihuang, Gilles de la Tourette, Li Po, and Lillian Gish. Though varying in approach from poem to poem, the collection is unified by a consistent tone, a developed voice that is even and measured, clean, precise diction, and lines that are not padded with unnecessary words.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines doggerel as "crudely or irregularly fashioned verse". Far from being crude or irregular, these poems are meticulously crafted: lean, sturdy, and interesting, and at times mysterious, almost mystical.
The book is divided into two sections: Bones & Confetti and Bodies & Water. The first opens with the poem Black Moon:
I watch him drag the boat across
the scree, over the dry doggerel
of mackerel scales and filament
of a season ended, to the water.
The sand flays the last flakes
of paint from the boat's hull,
splash and crack at the confluence
of stone and water, and he is out
beyond the waves, where fishbones
glint like small suns in a black mirror,
and the splay of the Pelican's wing
stitches the sea to the sky. Brine-
bleached hands haul the sodden creel
above the gunwales, and there again
is the gaping child-shaped hole,
sawn by the snapping-turtle's teeth,
ragged-cut and impossible to mend.
Did I say that the turtle is guided
by ambient moonlight? So, the wolf
howls. The waves gnaw at the shore.
Bones and light are mixed with water.
Bones and light mixed with water. This is the heart of the collection: the appropriation of artifacts, their reconstitution into poetic form, the result being the illumination of the present through resurrection of the past.
Grant writes poetry that is rhythmically astute, equally at ease hammering along an iambic line or in free verse. Additionally, he displays an interest in the work of the Haiku Masters. In His Holiness the Abbot is Shitting in the Withered Fields, he incorporates Haiku both by including it as the title--after Haiku by Buson--and by inserting Haiku into the body of the poem:
So, 7 days bereaved, Issa made his father's
death poem: "A bath when you're born,
a bath when you die--how stupid."
Ekphrastic works are also included in the collection, but because of Grant's penchant for history they transcend mere description. In one, an ekphrasis after the 1936 photograph by Brassai, The Steps of Montmartre, Grant weaves a dozen or so references that locate the photograph in proper historical context:
.... Through the tunnel
formed by the parting trees,
battalions of lamp-posts advance
and retreat in the morning mizzle
clamp chain-link handrails hard
into sunwashed cobbles. In less
than a year, the corpseless heads
on Nanking's walls will coalesce
with Guernica's ruined heart, mal
du siecle will become Weltschmerz,
and the irresistible symmetry
of a million clacking bootheels
will deafen half a continent.
The red brush never dries -
The majority of the poems in Chains & Mirrors are indeed chained to, and mirroring, the past. But the present is not without representation here, as exampled by the amusing, satirical Poetry Final, which takes aim at academic workshop culture in a series of faux writing prompts.
Part five of this poem asks that the poet:
Establish a seamless association between
the following: an executioner's birthday party,
fractal geometry, attention deficit disorder.
Result must be tacitly non-judgmental,
and be suitable for a sixth grade audience.
The poem culminates in a bonus section that requests that you "substantiate your findings".
Though this collection is indeed chapbook length, it is not insubstantial. Image-rich, leavened with parceled out wit, these poems have been carefully chosen to form a cohesive whole rather than a random sampling of a poet's best work.
On the back cover of the book there is a blurb by Thomas Lux: "Chains & Mirrors is a powerful and stunningly imaginative book that announces a hell of a good new poet!"
I couldn't say it any better myself.(less)
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Locket
by
Catherine Daly (Goodreads Author)
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Locket by Catherine Daly
(Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2005)
Published in Galatea Resurrects, Spring 2006
Catherine Daly’s Locket is sheathed in gold with black script, the flourish of an L a swooshing swirling metaphor for one particularly troublesome fou...more
Locket by Catherine Daly
(Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2005)
Published in Galatea Resurrects, Spring 2006
Catherine Daly’s Locket is sheathed in gold with black script, the flourish of an L a swooshing swirling metaphor for one particularly troublesome four-letter word. Yes, these are love poems.
Lashed with lust, lush with longing, luscious as a labial-lingual kiss, Daly pulls us through a landscape rippling with heat, bristling with the riddle of that ‘same old song’. These are poems that are as straightforward and unapologetic as they are sweet and circumspect.
Love’s a huge subject. I can’t tell you that Daly has anything new to say about love or its effects of consequence. It’s how she goes about saying it that makes this worth your time, with language that is sharp and clean and smart and funny. Take these lines from the third section of the poem, “Osculate”:
Our two, worth their maximum and minimum,
perambulate, perform. Parabola, ellipsis, ellipses:
I would like to mention discontinuity at this juncture.
It slices our pair from the earth’s mantle.
Out of context, this may seem like gobbledygook, but within these paper walls it makes perfect sense. This poem, in three sections, directly corresponds (in ascending order) to the Roman words for ‘kiss’: Osculum, a greeting, an air kiss; Basium, a direct lip-to-lip kiss between lovers; and Savium, a ‘deep kiss’, known nowadays as ‘french’. Slipped in between these ‘kisses’ are references to mathematics, Jimi Hendrix, and WWII. Now consider that this poem, “Osculate”, uses the word ‘vacillate’ in the penultimate line, and is followed by a poem titled “Oscillate”.These poems are thick with images, references, word-play, making each a rich read. Daly uses language like a child uses blocks: she builds it up to knock it down.
Here is her poem, “Couple”:
“many a slip between cup and lip”
Two tipple tea, tupple, Tippacanoe,
sumptuously sip, sup, supple.
Two pull and tamp
their ample mutual appeal.
Two grasp two apples, oh,
to journey from Tampa to Tupelo.
Two peel their clothes.
They put and place, topple,
tumble, not duplicitous, pillowed, paired,
duplex, circumspect, slumber together.
Dual and singular, nuptial bells peal.
Throughout I have found lines that seem particularly resonant. In the poem “Grain” the narrator states:
My love is a crop circle hoax,
has trampled all my grain.
Such a terrific metaphor for love’s crush, that something thought to be so miraculous and out-of-this-world can be flipped, becoming so real it turns fake, false.
Here is a line that I absolutely love from “American Beauty: Night”:
Comport yourself within this machinery of want.
‘Want’ is just that: a machine propelling us toward--something--that will (hopefully, temporarily) satisfy. But it is a messy, undignified process.
In “Endnotes” there is so much language-play that it almost becomes nonsensical, but it is joyful nonsense.
She scatters her words with Arabic numerals,
Superscript or superior, a supertitled opera,
supernumerary, numinous, superfluous, fluent.
Love may be her always implicit, sometimes explicit, subject, but it is the way she skips and dances around it that makes this book such an engaging read.
In “Footnotes,” on the facing page, there is a line which I think sums it up best:
If the ride’s pleasurable
it can be followed
Locket is a lovesong. If I were to locate one flaw, I would say it is in the seeming predictability of the narrative arc. But that can also be considered an asset. On all levels, Locket is pleasurably riddled and referenced; a reverberating read.
*****
Cati Porter is poet, artist, freelance writer, and editor of the online literary journal, Poemeleon. Her poetry has been featured on kaleidowhirl, Poetry Southeast, Sunspinner, Banyan Review, and Poetry Midwest. She lives in Riverside, California, with her husband and two young sons.(less)
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Adamantine
by
Shin Yu Pai (Goodreads Author)
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Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai
(Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2010)
Paper, 96 pp.: $14.00 ISBN 978-1-935210-18-4.
Published in Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Winter 2011
Adamantine is Shin Yu Pai’s eighth collection of poems. Early in this collection, in her...more
Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai
(Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2010)
Paper, 96 pp.: $14.00 ISBN 978-1-935210-18-4.
Published in Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Winter 2011
Adamantine is Shin Yu Pai’s eighth collection of poems. Early in this collection, in her poem “Blind Spot”, we find the speaker at a crosswalk. After the signal has changed to green, the speaker looks back “at the man poised at the street // crossing, long after / the light has gone green” only to then see “the round sticker affixed // to his chest / I am deaf and blind”. The speaker, who cannot even ask his permission, takes the man’s arm and guides him across the street: “… I / place myself between // his body & the hostile line / of humming cars queuing; // when we reach the other side / he’s ready for me to let go. // there is just this practice”.
Here, the reader – this reader – is forced to pause. What is meant by the heavily emphasized “this practice”? What practice is this? Later in the collection, we encounter another poem, titled simply, “Practice”:
my own practice:
carving holes in
poetry books w/
exacto blade & straight
edge, intervention as
design concept
a hole too uneven
a hole too big
a hole too ragged
a hole too small
every event a mirror
of mind & heart,
In carving holes into books of poetry, Pai “practices” an excavation of emptiness, and in so doing, we join her in the exploration of what that might mean. In spite of the inherent violence in the act of cutting, it is with compassion and a keen observation of human nature that we are led through these poems, and it is because we trust her that we follow, regardless of where they might lead.
Every poem in Adamantine is rooted in compassion, compassion that springs from Buddhist thought but does not dwell on it, instead panning between east and west. Even the title itself. Adamantine, as defined by Merriam Webster: Unbreakable, from the root word adamant, meaning “refusing to be persuaded or to change one’s mind”, which comes from the Greek, adamas — “untameable.” Adamantine. The hardest non-synthetic substance known to man, commonly known as diamond. And, incidentally, a word intrinsically linked to the particular form of Buddhism that Pai practices, Vajrayana. Often translated as the adamantine, or diamond, vehicle, the word vajra, from which Vajrayana is derived, references “a legendary weapon and divine attribute that was made from an adamantine, or indestructible, substance and which could therefore pierce and penetrate any obstacle or obfuscation.” It is one of the core symbols of Vajrayana, and is a metaphor for wisdom, specifically a “wisdom realizing emptiness”.
These poems, while far from empty, are indeed wise, and it is this wisdom, this weapon, that Pai turns toward her subjects, finding beauty in all things. What defines Pai’s Adamantine is a fierce looking-out, both literally and figuratively. There is a clarity here that is rare among poets. Pai observes, and documents her observations with an unsentimental, and at times unsettling, eye that allows those observations to speak for themselves:
At 82, Luciano Mares remembers
the night his house burned to the ground
and wonders:
Does a mouse have Buddha nature?
I had some leaves
burning outside,
so I threw it in
the fire, mouse
trap – the heat
loosened the glue
incensed,
the creature ran
back towards the house
where flames lit
the curtains &
spread up from there
destroying everything
Buddha nature. The potential for reaching enlightenment. Does a mouse have that potential? Pai, wisely, does not offer an answer.
Pai, a native of the Inland Empire, has lived in Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado, Illinois, Washington State, and Arkansas — and probably elsewhere as well. In a recent interview she states that she doesn’t consider herself a regional writer, but there is a definite sense of ‘place’ within much of her work, from exotic Asian locales to the unremarkable terrain of Riverside, California, where we learn that the local saying is “homicide, suicide, Riverside” (“The Diamond Path”). But where Adamantine is truly located is within the heart — a recurrent image throughout.
In these fifty poems that comprise Adamantine, what we find, contrary to what the title might imply, is not a study in permanence but an excavation of impermanence, of an existence that is simultaneously full and empty, meaningful and meaningless, intersecting where heart and stone meet; their steadfast refusal to burn.(less)
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A Review of What Feeds Us by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2006)
Published in Poetry Southeast, Spring 2007
Diane Lockward's second book, “What Feeds Us” (winner of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize), is chock full of tasty poems; fresh, delectab...more
A Review of What Feeds Us by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2006)
Published in Poetry Southeast, Spring 2007
Diane Lockward's second book, “What Feeds Us” (winner of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize), is chock full of tasty poems; fresh, delectable poems; poems that drip blue juice that runs alluringly down your chin as you read.
What feeds us here is desire: desire for love, for a lover, for a lost child, for a lost parent, all this desire projected onto objects that one can sink their teeth into: a singular artichoke that grew against all odds; blueberry pancakes; a pear; an avocado. Each of these edible objects represent something to the speaker: a father walking out on the family; a mother lost and found and lost again; the redolence of reticence; the persistence -- no, insistence -- of self, and self-reliance.
The opening poem, “What Feeds Us”, a poem in seven sections, effectively sets up the major themes of this collection:
I brought the things I really need --
two books I love, a laptop,
clean white paper, a radio
in case I get lonely.
I packed two issues of the Hungry Mind Review
and just enough clothes.
Vitamins, ginger tea, a Gauguin cup.
I carried three almond croissants,
one of which I have already eaten.
The speaker, in indicating that she has brought only the things she needs, has deliberately distanced herself, and it is this distance that enables her to find a way back in to her tender subjects. In the second section of the poem, she walks into a deli and spots a cookie:
... and right away I start thinking about Joe
and the story he told about Darlene,
the one girl he really could have loved back
in high school, Darlene with the long yummy legs,
when Joe was a short, fat-assed kid
with zits. He'd sit in the cafeteria
and watch luscious Darlene nibble
a cookie, and he'd dream that one day
she'd sashay to his table,
hold our her cookie like a valentine,
and he'd take that cookie, and Darlene's lips
would be all over it.
The other sections of this poem present us with an abusive father, a return to the imagined love affair between Joe and Darlene, and, in a nod to Lockward's first book, Eve's Red Dress, a walk with Eve out of the garden, who carries an apple with her because “(s)he didn't know where she was going / but she knew she'd need something to eat.”
Fruit is returned to again and again throughout this collection. The noteworthy poem “Organic Fruit”, a shaped poem in praise of the avocado -- a “strict individualist” -- describes its subject as “schmoo-shaped”. Schmoo, satirical comic book characters created by Al Capp for the Lil' Abner cartoon series, purportedly reproduce asexually and require no sustenance.
Though not all of the poems include food as an ingredient, many of them do, employing food as a metaphor in surprising ways. In looking up the etymological beginnings of the oh-so-edible avocado, this reviewer found that it arises from the word testicle, finding reciprocity in “The History of Vanilla”, a sort of lullaby which reveals the evolution of the word vanilla as having its roots in the Latin vagina.
In the very fun “The Best Words” Lockward explores the tantalizingly forbidden encapsulated within ordinary everyday words “...that put a finger to the flame but don't burn. / Words like asinine, poppycock, titmouse, tit for tat, / woodpecker, pecorino, poop deck, and beaver.” These are sensual poems; ripe, verdant.
The poem, “Meditation on Green” begins:
It comes to me as a commandment:
Thou shalt meditate on green,
And because I am obedient
my thoughts turn to grass, blades
crushed under my feet, tiny green
grasshopper grinding his broken song.
Thence to the lime for it is a tart
fruit and hangs from trees without
causing any woman to fall. Green
for the novice, the inexperienced,
the not-knowing-any-better.
The pickle, repeatedly tempting me
to devour its green obscene shape.
This poem – beginning with a simple meditation on the color green – becomes more and more substantial with each turn of the line. Food may be the jumping off point, but these poems have depth. These are mature poems dealing with mature subjects, even tackling formal verse, as in “Love Test: A Ghazal”:
“The sign on the wall read: Test on love
coming soon. “My God,” I thought, “a test on love!”
I felt the familiar panic,
the tightening in my chest. On love
I'd be lucky if I pulled a C-.
I've always made a mess of love.
Occasionally the poems rely on insects as metaphor, as in “Fear”, where they are “...wasps / poised over your head, abuzz / while you sleep, or don't sleep”. A mother's hatred and loathing for anything that threatens her child invoked in “Invective Against the Bumblebee”:
I despise you for you have swooped down
on my baby boy, harmless on a blanket of lawn,
his belly plumping through his orange stretch suit,
yellow hat over the fuzz of his head.
Though you mistook him for a sunflower,
I do not exonerate you.
In yet another, the speaker finds herself amazed at her friend's ability to charm a bee from her lunch bag without getting stung, while in the “The Bee Charmer” a lover succeeds in convincing her of the necessity of bees, and, by extension, acknowledges the necessity of adversity in our lives, if only to provide contrast for the sweet.
“What Feeds Us” is a feast: frequently messy, but always delicious. You may be tempted, but you cannot eat this book.
You will want to read it again.(less)
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Review of Five Terraces by Ann Fisher-Wirth, Wind Publications, 2005
Published in Poetry Southeast, Fall 2006
In Shanxi province, China, there is a mountain, Wutai Shan, which means “Mountain of Five Terraces.” It is said that Manjusri, the bodhisatttv...more
Review of Five Terraces by Ann Fisher-Wirth, Wind Publications, 2005
Published in Poetry Southeast, Fall 2006
In Shanxi province, China, there is a mountain, Wutai Shan, which means “Mountain of Five Terraces.” It is said that Manjusri, the bodhisatttva representing wisdom, resides there, centered between Buddha’s eyebrows.
So it is not insignificant that the poem for which this collection is titled, “Five Terraces,” occurs almost dead-center in the book, for wisdom is what you find at its heart, its center. Consider some of the subjects she explores throughout this collection: the complexities of love, the death of a parent, the death of a child: all of these imply a circumnavigation of the heart, and an excavation of it.
Five Terraces is divided not into five sections as I had imagined, but seven. This initially surprised me, but I have come to see the opening and closing sections – both titled “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll” – as sort of beginning and ending punctuation. But rather than end-stops or exclamation marks, they act as ellipses for thought that begins before you enter the book and continues after you have set it down.
This is very much in the spirit of the scroll’s title. According to the end notes, the title of the room-length horizontal scroll by Ming Dynasty artist Wu Wei, Le Grande Fleuve a perte de vue, “Translated from the French translation from the Chinese, the title means, approximately, “the great river as far as the eye can see,” or, more evocatively, “the great river to the loss of sight or view.”
In an interview with the Southeast Review, Ann Fisher-Wirth references a Buddhist metaphor for the universe as “mountains and rivers without end,” which is how she sees the scroll, and her poem, which both contain an expansiveness, an openness, that paradoxically draws the reader in.
You could be the man in the small house making tea,
or one of the friends fishing off the footbridge of the river.
* * *
You could be that aspen, that cedar —
or the woman we do not see, who spins thread or boils silkworms
in the house below the boulder, the house
of which we see
an upper roof corner, and another, then the rocks surround it.
“Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” when encountered as the last section of the book, appears in reverse order, and has the effect of lifting us gently back out, but as an opening sequence, it zooms us in:
And look, here someone rides home –
or is it a squiggle —
up the path to a terraced house.
Then a village fading in fog,
on the watery side of a mountain.
As the observer is drawn in to each individual scene on the scroll, we are drawn in to the house, the village, the people in that village.
Wu Wei, in addition to being the artist referred to in the title, is also a major tenet of Taoist philosophy, which means, roughly, Wu (without) and Wei, (action). But Wu Wei does not imply apathy, but rather an instinctual kind of control, summed up best by the phrase wei wu wei, or action without action. It has also been described as the art of letting be. So “Walking Wu Wei’s
Scroll” can be taken as both the literal walking back and forth the poet did while admiring the scroll, and also the precarious ropewalk of “the art of letting be.”
Grief, no small topic, appears and reappears throughout. Here is an excerpt from “Anti-Elegy,” which appears in section IV:
(...)I’m willing
to say death’s a gift. But how lonely, to wait –
then afterward, to shift and mumble grief’s bones.
And, then, “But the Bodhisattva Comes”:
But the bodhisattva comes
to teach us the path through suffering.
So here is the wisdom borne of grief, of suffering. She explores this theme further, alongside others like sexuality in the face of aging, in the section titled, “The Trinket Poems.”
In April, 2002, the University of Mississippi assembled an exhibition featuring memorabilia from Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams’ career. It was during this time that the university put on a production of his little-known short play titled “The Mutilated,” which featured Ann Fisher-Wirth as Trinket Dugan. The experience of playing Trinket proved fruitful, resulting in a chapbook-length series of poems that draw us in to the actor’s life, both on and off stage, as she becomes Trinket. There is a sometimes sweet, sometimes crude, frankness to many of these poems. Here are the opening lines from “After Many Years She Returns to the Stage in “The Mutilated,” by Tennessee Williams”:
She runs her fingers over the cheek and down the throat
and slender chest of this boy
fuck age-appropriate
fuck that she’s a professor it’s not specific to him anyway
she arches her body against him and moans
when he orders her be my slave and God she has
climbed inside delirium
As she moves deeper and deeper into her character, the transformation begins to overtake her, as in “Small Interlude, Still, Where She Argues:”
Hang on to the real, she said to herself,
this is getting full of gods and Sailors.
You can’t just admit they’re college kids,
you’re an English professor and mother of five
slumming in satin, fake fur, and grease paint?
Each section is self-contained. Some poems in this collection haul up the detritus – stuff that most of us would rather have left buried – and turn it into something shining, something sharp, worth holding on to even if it hurts. “Mississippi,” a poem in eight sections which takes us away from the speaker’s home in order to lead us back, opens with:
Since Friday a small white cat has lain on the sidewalk next to Inside
Oxford. Ants crawl in its fur, ichor pools around its nostrils. Soon, that
sweet smell will rise as it bloats in the heat and stiffens further. Drive by
it, drive back at the end of the day. No one has removed it. Drive by
again next morning, then, in the evening, walk up close to look at it. Its
eyes have spread from temple to temple, as if someone had laid the blue
wings of a Morphos butterfly tenderly across it.
This is the stuff we cannot look away from. There are things we cannot defy, or define, as in the poem, “Rain:”
She has words for the others. Husband, friend, child... But what do you
call a man you love, a man who loves you, who is not your husband and
not – because of your husband, his wife – your lover? Not my love, and
not my other love either. Not sweetheart, she doesn’t quite dare. Not,
God forbid, my temptation. Though she’s been tempted.
To return to “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” there is a particularly resonant line:
No climax, no conclusion.
We are in the gallery:
And half the people walking the scroll
here at the Grand Palais on the 21st of June
move left to right, and half move right to left.
It doesn’t matter
Of the poem, Ann Fisher-Wirth states in her Southeast Review interview: “I like to think that, like the scroll itself, one can enter the poem anywhere and find it sufficient and complete at every moment...” The same can be said about the whole of Five Terraces.
I am writing this on the 21st if June.(less)
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Hi Cati, thank you for adding this fellow author to your circle of friends here on Goodreads. I hope you'll add my books What Would Nancy Do?, The Christmas to Remember, In the Company of Women and Finding Normal to your to-read list. I look forward to reading your book reviews and recommendations. Happy reading!
