S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 12

In Maurizio Cucchi’s work there is a desire to made whole again, #poetry review

Maurizio Cucchi’s poetry is fragmented. Reading his work is like looking at a collage work that is both fascinating at the level of piece and whole. The new translations by Michael Palma, from Chelsea Editions $20, gathers his best work from 1965-2009 in No Part to Play.  Palma’s introduction makes a case that Cucchi is like T.S. Eliot, or Pound, relying on images and fragmented poetics to best illustrate the human condition. In his work you are likely to find narrative, lyric, philosophy, poetic dialogues with Beckett, fellow Italian poets, as well as references to soccer, computers, and the cosmos. Like the modernist before him, Cucchi takes in a world and chews it up and spits it back out in his verse.

Cucchi’s own biographical history is woven into the poems throughout the work, and while this is true for most writers--on some level-- it is interesting in Cucchi’s case because his father disappeared. Vanished into thin air, a mystery to the young Cucchi for years until he learned from his mother that his father had taken his own life due to financial failures. Cucchi himself declares that this fact is “overstated” in his work, but for the uninitiated reader of his oeuvre, the disappearance gives the reader an emotional window. Readers like a frame. Frame shapes the content and allows for an initial glimpse inside.

Regardless of how you take your criticism, Cucchi’s biography hangs upon the first section, “The Missing” from 1976. The poem “The House, the Outsiders, the Near Relations” shape and identify, clarify and classify the evidence of the missing loved one. “It was Thursday, after school, around noon...He died of a heart attack (or an accident on the road, or an illness, or because of a stone)...Let’s look at the TOPOGRAPHY OF THE HOUSE:..the meat mallet forgotten/on top of the refrigerator, or the apple/half-peeled and sliced that had turned black.” The speaker here attempts to make sense of his upside down emotional world. And the reader is along for the ride looking for clues and wondering what has happened. Poems from The Missing may be Cucchi’s most intriguing early work because of the mystery, because even after the reader has journeyed through that emotional landscape, and the gathering of evidence it still haunts later poems in the section. In “Court of Miracles” the subject is not necessarily the missing father, but rather the truth and folly of those who give their lives to the church. But the poem ends with the threatening image “The stealing from the poor boxes, the pistol/wrapped in newspaper, the bullet in the barrel...” We can’t help but leap back to the mystery of his father. Was he rubbed out by a mobster? A loan shark? The danger and pain remain. It’s there, it communicates to us through the associations. It’s partly what makes the early poems, and later poems, so powerful. It echoes back to the source.

Cucchi, like any writer, cannot be pinned down. He refuses to. The language of place is important in his works. Place names alone carry romantic resonance and poetry.  “Goree,” from 1996’s Poetry of the Source, encapsulates a region’s violent history in a pastorale sequence, “The House of Slaves/open to the ocean through a hole,/the greenery low and dusty as at Mozia/and the cannon at the summit./ The ordinary little red hotel/for a beer...the boys/lying stretched out in the December sun...mild/and delicate, Africa.” Cucchi’s lines remain short and tense, yet the image is peaceful, but haunted. The cannon a reminder of the past, the music of the Os and the sharp Ts, the delicate way the reader must sound out the place name “Mozia.” Later in that section, the poem “Poetry from the Source” offers up a wonderful moment where the speaker is the muse, of sorts, seeking it’s own beginning, “a source that is mine alone...Maybe...a broken question, a figure/that covers another figure.” Later the speaker “knocks on the poet’s little house...He’s rejecting me, I thought,/for not having loved him enough.” The modernist bent towards fragmentation is best felt and experienced in Cucchi’s juxtaposition of broken narratives and images in the poems from 1999’s Glenn’s Last Journey. These are poems that once again return to the father’s disappearance as a source. Long stanzas are separated from short stanzas with asterisks, each one a separate moment. To use a theater word, they are separated by a beat, where Cucchi changes tone and focuses on a sometimes contrasting image or emotion. This kind of juxtaposition was used by Pound in the Cantos, and Eliot in the Wasteland, and even later by Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Williams in their jazz and blues poems and Patterson, respectively.  It is the kind of juxtaposition one finds in visual collages, or in internet memes. Cucchi uses them to bounce back and forth temporally and emotionally; each poem, and each section create their own rules on how the fragments work and give the poems density.

In Cucchi’s work there is a desire to made whole again. To be reborn, to set what was wrong right. This is not done to be didactic, or to preach, but rather with marvel, and wonder. Perhaps it is better to say there is a desire to live, period.  In the 2003 poem “Malone Doesn’t Die” Cucchi writes “I’ve always thought that the end/is more important than the beginning/but if the end flows into the beginning/I come out remade.” This is the mystic, the poet as seer, if you will, a motif throughout the later poems that has Cucchi seeking awareness, seeking consciousness. To be present. To be alive. It is essential “to suck upon this one root of the earth/anxiously, to skim over this sludge stain./If not we lose life, present and awareness.”  Cucchi’s voice is one that seeks unification. How wonderful to find that he does so through pieces.

Elisa Nader's Escape from Eden is an action packed YA thriller, #fictionreview

Elisa Nader's Escape from Eden is a action packed YA thriller set in the jungles of South America, and pairs perfectly with other dystopian YA thrillers released this year, particularly Jeff Hirsch's masculine macho cult thriller, The Darkest Path. Like Path, the main character Mia, seeks a way out of the confines of religious life. Strict cult guidelines shape both Path and Eden, and both authors are pluck upon a new strain of the dystopian genre.  Eden features a cute heroine, who has mommy issues (and it’s easy to see why) and along the way becomes close with the handsome rebellious Gabriel, a new addition to Eden's Flock. Like Path, Eden explores heavy concepts, religious control, human slavery, deception, and the mundanity of evil.Eden's Flock, named after a character, Reverend Eden (the town is Edenton) is like many other cults, separating children from their parents and reinforcing traditional gender roles, and upholding a patriarchy. Reverend Eden is a condensation of so many real and fictional cult leaders; he's easy to hate, and has many henchmen to do his heavy lifting. As with most YA novels, the adults are static characters, Mia's own mother is no different, and like Mia she is also a victim, for Reverend Eden is a slick sadistic prick who deals in flesh, and alters memory and minds in the name of fatherly protection. The newcomer, the troublesome Gabriel discovers Eden's secret, a mirror community, a ying to Edenton's yang, where young people are brought drugged to serve the pleasure of the Reverend's customers and contacts, whose involvement hints at the Reverend's long term plans and machinations. The snappy dialogue is film ready. Gabriel is a likeable rogue and his flirtatious love/hate dynamic with Mia is immensely entertaining. He's handy in a fight as well, and in one particular action sequence serves as Mia's, and her friend, Juanita's savior. But as with most action novels, there is no easy safety. Mia and Gabriel are forced to leave Juanita behind, as well as their innocence as they make their way to San Sebastián and eventually into the Network, a group of people, freedom fighters, perhaps, trying to bust up the cult of Eden. They have a man on the inside, Dr. Gladstone, an homage to Dr. Livingstone--the famous lost Doc of the early 20th century, and Mia and Gabriel soon find themselves back in Edenton, lost in the tangles of the Reverend’s plot, except this time they are here to save and rescue everyone they can.
Escape from Eden, like most YA novels, relies on a myriad of characters to allow Mia and Gabriel to begin as innocent protagonist and end the novel as experienced "adults." Thankfully, Gabriel and Mia do not suffer horrible transgressions (they suffer plenty), they are spared this as the plot moves quickly and the action unfolds with cinematic pace. Eden's heart is less about religion, and more about freedom, and honesty. In the end when Mia and Gabriel orchestrate the freedom of Edenton from the cult's clutches, they also rip off a veil of denial and deception that has been blinding Edenton's residents for years. The novel isn't about the healing, it's about the action that leads up to the conclusion, which frankly is an emotional knot that Nader could continue to unravel if she chooses; her debut sparkles with intensity. Four Stars.

Burning Down the House: Francis Raven lowers a wrecking ball in Architectonic Conjectures, #poetryreview

Burning Down the House: Francis Raven lowers a wrecking ball in Architectonic Conjectures

Francis Raven’s Architectonic Conjectures arrives as Americans redefine their sense of home, their sense of identity in the wake of the worst economic recession in recent memory. Americans buy stuff. We are a nation of consumers, like it or not, and for many what we identify with is often our stuff. To quote Nick Hornby’s character Rob in High Fidelity, “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films - these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the fuckin' truth.” In a recent review in the Atlantic Monthly, journalist Sandra Tsing Loh explores how women in America define themselves, not by marriage or family, as previous generations of women have done, but by real estate. What does our McMansion say about us?  Loh plumbs her own personal narrative; recently divorced she finds herself owning a house that’s too big. She’s house poor, and makes sandwiches on the counter that house kitchen gadgets and accoutrements that amount to kitchen porn. Raven’s poems are about architecture, houses, homes, and communities, and are as much about us, as they are about the places we live. It’s a heady ambitious mix, written for the mind; a complex meditation on the ethics of architecture, the aesthetics, and the politics of what creates a space. It is difficult poetry, part philosophy, part free verse, part prose, part academic riffing, part language play, part meta, but also a rewarding deconstruction of what is and what isn’t personal space.

Architectonic Conjectures questions, as many Americans have been doing since the end of the Bush administration, what material possessions are worth keeping as one downsizes, or upsizes into a recently foreclosed house, what’s “worth lugging up the stairs?”

In “Touring a New Condo with Vitruvius” Raven, like Dante, wanders the condo with the Virgil of architects, pondering the rush of elegance, perhaps opulence of expensive properties, wondering what extreme measures must be taken to secure the “black gold” of the space, “a building needs symmetry to understand itself.”

But buildings don't exist in a vacuum. They must be designed, constructed, inhabited, and in some cases destroyed to be understood. In “Minoru Yamasaki and the Problem of Modern Life” Raven connects the buildings, those “high-density slabs tightly formed a web of crime,” to the hands of the workers who fashioned them, who live among the “lowest gears of our society.” Raven offers no answers, only connections, the existence of social exclusion via real estate. In the same poem he confronts the mortality of architecture, the spaces and concrete “floating candlesticks” of the World Trade Center, the embodiment of a “certain largeness of spirit” (from “A Morning in San Francisco Thinking About New York”). Buildings can be destroyed. Buildings, made by people.

At times Raven’s work seems to ask, is not our great Democracy reflected in the architecture? In our cities? Here the poet offers Plato and Aristotle, memories of relatives who describe the lush neighborhoods of the west coast, the relationship between a house a street, a street and a building. Communities. Government documents. Places to shop. Raven questions the tenuous relationship between a person and the land, for America is a peopled by nomads who move around from city to city, college to job, job to city to subdivision. What makes a native a native? How is your neighborhood yours? The question of ownership, to one’s property, to one’s land, to one’s city is a central meditation in the second half of the book. There’s a quiet violence in the later poems, as the poet moves into a gentrified neighborhood of Washington DC. After all gentrification is destruction, albeit for the good of a community, or neighborhood, but destruction nevertheless. “There are so many problems in the world” the poet writes in “How the Mode of Transport Alters Life Above” how is it that our shopping sprees, and rental cars, and tax bases, and marketing take precedent? What kind of people are we? There are no answers, only more questions, and Raven’s work is a like that of an engineer organizing living into slots, spaces, and stairwells, structuring the space and language of the book, not forgetting that the building must be housed, by people, by us.

Elisa Biagini's sensuality on display in The Guest in the Wood, #poetryreview

Elisa Biagini’s poetry is sensual, erotic even, and domestic. I do not mean to imply that her poems are tamed, domesticated, for they are often wild things of eye and ear, but many of the poems are rooted in familiar words and worlds of home, family, food, and the body. But these are not poems of a desperate housewife cliche, rather these are poems that use the mundane to strike poetic ground. Chelsea Editions offers up a new collection of her work, translated by Diana Thow, Sarah Strickney, and Eugene Ostahevsky, entitled The Guest in the Wood, $20. The collection combines two of Biagini’s works 2004’s The Guest, and 2007’s Into the Wood, and the selections from these two collections show off Biagini’s attention for detail, her snapshots of the body, rooted in the language of food, home, and the senses.

Biagini’s poems appear, at first, to be delicate short creations, the kind of small poems that focus on image through an economy of language, but Biagini works like a great composer, her images repeat and couple, and form chords if you will, that play as Biagini  directs her breath and language. Eggs become not only food, but a symbol of promise, fragility, hollowness. Simple “yellow cooking oil” becomes the sickened eyes of dying relatives that require care and emotional energy. The Guest in the Wood’s motifs are well suited for each other, like a seasoned quartet. She has a fondness for broken things, as well as how the spirit, or consciousness, is often estranged to the body; we are strangers in our skin, finding comfort in food, companionship, and even death.

What I loved about The Guest in the Wood was the coziness of the poems. Much of the poems are untitled, and the reader jumps into the language without expectations, without the benefit of a framing title. Consider the poem that begins “Senseless,/ like ironing sheets/and towels, just/to be able to say that/the iron’s steam is/your sweat.” It is clear we dealing with intimacy, probably a lover, whose body is recalled via chore, the same sheets that were no doubt soiled by the absent lover who left a “finger/in the cake for my sake,/for me, when you know/I only like bread.” There’s contention here, the stress is highlighted by the short lines, the quick brief rhyme, and the poem ends with the image of an oven, “the heat of breath.” Biagini’s choice of imagery is universal, simple, domestic, but they are combined in a way that strikes an aching, elegiac tone. This isn’t a happy relationship, by any means, and a wet damp hot one at that. Humidity has rarely captured unrest as it does here. In “housewife afterlife” the speaker gleefully sends off the role, the cause of the housewife to the afterlife with “cup, plate, utensils/too, needle and thread if you like, with/soap as if you were camping,/with two pairs of socks, for/the drafts....” Whether it is poet herself shucking the role, or just the speaker in the poem, the compartmentalized life of a housewife is just that, a part of the whole, perhaps the broken part of the whole, broken because it is unwanted, incomplete. In the short poem “the unloved dead shiver and have eyes of musk” the speaker seethes “to make things spic/and span I’ll/eat you,/I’ll make you disappear/like the black line/in the bathtub.” I recognize this emotion, identify with it, not as a spurned lover, or a housewife, but as partner in my own domestic responsibilities. Sometimes mundane chores can be a transformative, freeing experience, and other times the chores become a focal point for emotion, perhaps not for the dead whom the speaker is cleaning up after, but certainly for another person in the household. How many times have we in the middle of chore swore at our wives or husbands, wondering “how did I get stuck with this detail?” Either way Biagini shows us that the anger and bitterness of our failures is inside us. As much as we hope blame exists in our chores, and our roles, and in our outside world, the problem lies within.

The motif of the failing body, or perhaps the fallible body, and its disconnection or connection between the spirit is explored throughout the collection. Whether the speaker recalls “a voice that skins my ear...your peeled hands/are tapestries” or someone who “descend into sleep/like a diver,” Biagini shows us frailty, offers up our skin and bones as evidence of a life, “the body,/last place/i can hide,” and of the spirit within that is bound to the past as it longs for the “milk to come.”

There is a good bit of dreaminess or surreal imagery in Biagini. Not the high fantasy magical realism can create, but more of the kitchen sink variety where the mundane is turned inside out or juxtaposed with another image to create a David Lynchian creepiness. This is most evident in the final section of the collection, “Gretel, or About Getting Lost” where the Grimm fairy tale is recast with the tropes of Biagini’s poetry. Her economy of language, her willingness to become lost within her own imagery evokes a creepy psychosexual landscape where the losses are not only life-threatening, but spirit crushing. The heroine here is seeking human connection “i thumb the thread/from house to/house/from body/to body,” but human-ness, being of the body, fails her, “a map chewed and/spat out:the trail,/on the throat...(grass turns into body--/hair, and that, to grass.../roots sitting in the dark to hold/fast the bonehouse).” Or at least fails her for a time, for the longer Gretel is lost, the more comfortable she is about being lost, and the more in tune with her present she becomes.  Gretel survives by “eating/my way out of here,” her tongue “an axe,” the “earth is up to/the heart...” In these poems to be lost is the journey. To be turned inside out by hunger, ache, loneliness, and fear is to begin again, a wild woman with “nerves/wrapped around/the forks of hair.”

The Guest in the Wood is provocative and haunting, sensual in surprising ways.  Together with the translating team has crafted a remarkable look at what it means to be a body, to be a collection of nerves lost in the big bad wood.

Joan Colby is a peasant. Selected #Poems from FutureCycle Press is a must

Joan Colby’s Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press, is a fresh selected collection gathering Colby’s work from the late 1970s through the present. A midwestern practicality forms the backbone of these poems, from the history of work, family, and the land. She is a poet with a place and something to say about it. A poet of rural life, a peasant, perhaps, a welcome voice among the masses of poetry nation.

I like watching the poet’s music change over the course of years which reveals itself in a collection such as with Colby’s. The music of the syllables take turns, puts on new keys, dresses up in a new mode, and saunters back with a fresher voice, the poet’s newer work. Anne Sexton once said that poet’s always prefer their newest work, something I personally identify with, and I wonder if Colby does too.  Colby’s newest work flashes and crackles with urgency. Danger lurks in her landscape in forms of hunger, death, and drought.

“A dark wind batters the door./Our minds unchink as/the chimney roars and the eaves/shriek in their rusty dreams.” In “Rose Red to Snow White” Colby channels a dark sexual energy and the language comes up and behaves like a blond girl in a thriller movie, always looking back. You can see the speaker and the words themselves turn around and watch for the beast breaking ot in the wood. “Something is snapping in the Applewood” and danger is a blizzard, danger is a bear, danger is a lust for wildness.  In “Lunar Year” Colby wears the moons of the year, and the images of a stark hunger and of predator and prey put into perspective our human follies. Really, Colby winks at us, is our notion of what to do with a life centered around beauty or politics or money? We could easily be savage, hunting daily to live, marked for a kill by a predator lurking out of our line of sight? There isn’t that much that separates the world from the wilderness, Colby reminds us, we’re still close.

The danger felt in many of the later poems are present in moments from the older works. But Colby is a poet of pasture and grain. Her language comes from the earth and all the dark that dwells in that earth, worm, mud, and snake.  The collection opens with a poem rooted in nature, the weather, and family, the language of horses and fields. “Morning in Late October” reminds the reader that we live in nature’s language, as she and her son set out on horseback in the early cold, “the new moon still hanging in the slate blue east/like a parenthesis.” In later work “Chickens scratch a pointless calligraphy,”  and Colby employs this metaphor time and time again.  Coupled with lush and hard syllables of rural life that Colby rubs together like a farmer’s hands trying to warm up, Colby’s voice is one of the American Romantic.

Colby’s experience with horses and farms and work bring a working class rhythm to her work.  In the early poems, as well as later gems, the poet finds her way through the natural world.  In “White Lilacs” nature itself guides the poet, “it points at me/standing in May twilight/with barbed wire hooking the darkness.”  And later, “The white lilacs tremble/as I tremble.”  The identification of the poet with nature is a song as old as poetry. Colby’s world is not the natural splendor of a haiku, nor is it the reed of a Chinese poem, Colby works towards her own foot, and her poems consistently skew towards short lines, short poems. You can almost imagine her swinging bales of hay for her horses to feed, or scattering corn for chickens. Colby fights off death, and stands up to it throughout the collection. The intimacy of a dying colt, or even a divorce is written in sharp detail. Experience adds to the poems rustic authenticity. She knows the farmers she describes, and when Colby puts on a personae, as she does so well, she wears the mask of killers, madwomen, and lovers with equal grace and authority as she does when she is writing about a harsh winter, or an ox ploughing a field.

Peasant life puts into focus the joy of simple living and the joy of work. But Colby can also wield mystic poetry, lines that capture the shimmering joy of life. In this case, best represented by her ekphrasis poetry inspired by the surrealist Mark Chagall. Colby composes “Peasant Life,” about the painting of the same name (Google images brings up all the Chagall poems Colby has written poems about) and she could easily be talking about her own life, or at the very least rural life in general. “Feed sugar beets to the white horse,/ dance on the blue mountain,” the poem begins with the order to work followed up by an order to play. The simple pleasure of dancing on the mountain side is followed by the more surreal, “Let the little horse/draw your grandfather up to the moon.” Easily death, easily dream, easily the image of working at night on some necessary chore. Colby doesn’t tell us what she means, she doesn’t have to. Later in the poem she confirm the toughness of her characters, “Your red cap and pug nose/prepare to tackle anything...Let a tree grow in your mind...it is your life ahead of you.” The happy full life of work and family combined with the majesty of the natural world meet in Colby’s lines. You can feel her passion for them, they shimmer, and stand up to old man death, which waits for us all.

Rod Jellema's Incarnality has wings, #poetryreview

Rod Jellema, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, has released a collection of poetry that distills his 40 year career into Incarnality, an embodiment of physically and spiritually gifted poems that tug against each other, jostling for an one up on the other.  Incarnality isn’t a typical collection, nor a collected, but rather new married with older work creating a thematic arc stretching back to the poet's youth, and ahead towards future selves. In many ways Incarnality is a self affirmation of the poet’s voice and craft, and of mankind and our clumsy fumbling about in the world as we try to transcend flesh. It’s a book that longs for spiritual grace and finds it in the physical, carnal world, and it’s that tension between the earthiness of experience and the transcendence of the spirit that give Jellema's poems wings.  

In “Reading Faces” the speaker recalls on a snowy travel worn night, his father who worked with drunks, who said: Addiction… is 80 to 100 percent proof that spirit exists and that it craves to be incarnate, to be flesh. But he saw how it sometimes runs in reverse, The body craving spirit, fixing some drinkers onto Highly distilled escapes from the world of matter Looking for what is disembodied and timeless.
Addiction, like words, are abstract keys to the spirit, and some drunks wish to be free of their bodies, to give up the physical world in blackout binge, to join some larger party, in the same way a poet gives life to words by collecting them and organizing their power, giving up their music for a larger sound, a larger body  Jellema argues a Democratic God, or more specifically Jesus, a higher power that isn’t abstract, and cannot be found on printed pages, but in the faces of the drunk, the poor, the homeless that shuffle at the edges of our lives.
Language, for Jellema, has its roots in his Frisian heritage, the varied tongues one hears moving from one culture to another,  and some of the collections finest moments are when Jellema translates Frisian poets, or muses on his heritage such as in “Language Formation: An Introduction” where the “Frisians even now say little, but break/their diphthongs hard, make rough consonants in the quiet/churning of vowels.” Language, we are reminded, is our everyday music, given life by our breath; a theme that touches upon his dual lingua, his poetic voice, and the voice of the spirit, which is elusive, and musical, and slips beyond what we can touch. In “Some Things I Try to Forget”  the speaker says “My voice makes a fist,” and Jellema wields language to fight, or even better, to sing in the shower, and how both scores make our flesh all the more fuller, richer.  In his exploration of the word, the sounds of fricatives and plosives, Jellema considers Adam’s task of naming the world, the naming of fog, diary entries of those who died long ago; the Spanish of Nicaragua where he reminds us that Borges said “only a poem knows how to distrust the language.”

Incarnality includes an audio recording of the poet reading from his work, a trend that is finally coming around, after all, as Jellema knows, the music of language isn't written to sit on the page, it is written to lift off the page, a rolling tongue, a throat singing.

Looking for the next William S Burroughs? Check out Steven Leech's #bizarro #novels, #fictionreview

Steven Leech does not like history. Leech, a prolific writer whose novels, Untime, Poe’s Daughter, Pym’s Soul, and 2000 Years re-write history and pull together a vast universe of story threads into three distinct, yet thematically similar novels whose goal is to present an alternative history of America, and the world.

These novels are not part of a series, nor are they connected other than through my own imagination as a reader and reviewer. Leech’s novel Poe ‘s Daughter, Pym’s Soul concerns the writer and his various allegiances, dalliances, and rivalries as Poe seeks the muse, money, and peace. Leech ingeniously weaves African American magic into the narrative when he introduces Poe’s friend, Armistead, a slave, and disciple of sorts to Netta, a magic woman, an old world spirit shaker; a witch. Netta and Armistead provide Poe with unique insights into the slavery question, but no answers. Leech isn’t interested in answers, they are not as interesting as the questions and conflicts themselves which Poe witneses as the country builds towards the Civil War. In Poe’s Daughter, Poe rails, rants, drinks, goes on the wagon, suffers, and mourns, and suffers some more. He doesn’t ever seem happy, save when he is sparring with Delaware literary (forgotten) legend John Lofton.  These sections are where Leech’s talent shines. He is most comfortable throwing muses as Poe and Lofton barb and bard over drinks and laudanum.

Leech is an accomplished writer, the narrative flows and the prose sparkles, and my only criticism of Poe’s Daughter, and for that matter any novel written about Poe, is the unshakable mantle of matching the scary and or psychologically interesting matter of as Poe’s fictions or verse. Leech avoids this trap by at least being as psychedelic as Poe, and uses Poe’s love of opium to effect.  Leech is writing his own history of Poe, and weaves into the tale real bits of history, people, places, and things, but it is never harrowing or frightening, that is until Poe is plied with booze in the voting schemes, essentially similar to how the navy used to conscript sailors: get them drunk and sign them up and when they wake up on ship their lives are controlled by her majesty, or the country’s navy. Poe’s death is a drawn out affair, and the city mourns him. Netta the witch is kept from Poe, and Poe slips from this world in a delirium.

2000 Years is described as “an eschatological gothic romance,” an apocalyptic delirious sensual study of evil. The book opens with the voice of Renfeld, Draculas’ loyal mad henchman, who is mostly a passive character in literature, locked up in Seward’s cell waiting for the Master to arrive. Leech revives Renfeld and through the opening passage takes the reader down into a rabbit hole. Renfeld is really Vlad Dracul, son of the dragon, the anti-Christ, and brother of Jeshuah, Immanuel, the bright twin of light. Through Renfeld/Vlad’s eyes we see Jack the Ripper removing breasts and a liver, as well as the machinations of the Count, who has returned through Renfeld, undead, through time. And time doesn’t run as a line through this work, rather it loops and returns and shoots forth to return again. Leech gets a thrill from dissecting Christian myths and pairing them with Stoker’s immortal beast.

In 2000 Years, Leech’s gift for sensuality blooms. Lovers of food porn, and travel porn will delight in the descriptions of food, drink, the flesh, and the romance of Europe. Like in Poe’s Daughter, Leech uses poetry to knit together the fabric of his alternate universe. This instinct is perfectly postmodern and appropriate for the kind of novels Leech’s has written here, but likely the casual reader will find the mash-up to be disconcerting. Leech’s novels are not plot machines, but rather character studies, and philosophical studies masked as novels. He forgoes typical plot techniques that create page turners and uses sensual passages to push the story along. 2000 Years is despairing for its brokenness, and the format lends itself well to showing that even vampires can become mired in love’s distress. We feel Vlad’s heart fall apart for his dear Wanda, his dear victims, and even for his brother, the crucified Jeshuah. Dracula fans will find much to admire here, and vampire lovers will note the similar sensuality Leech brings to the fanged villains that Anne Rice so famously brought to the genre some thirty years ago.

Leech’s Untime is not for the faint of heart. It’s a dense read. Untime eschews the conventions of a novel altogether. It’s often compelling, but it’s like reading Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, or more appropriately Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, for Leech creates his own language for Untime, a language rooted in dystopia.  It’s difficult to describe, Leech’s world, for it is a mash-up of American Nazism and technological slavery, not unlike say David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, save for the technology of Untime has more in common with the serials of the 1950s and seedy Adult cinemas of the 1970s.  The novel takes place in a reimagined world post WW-II where the government control is a fist around the city, and the seamier side of life thrives.

The rich life and death of the low-life culture is most apparent in the music of Leech’s prose.  Never you mind the pop culture references woven through-out, which create a nostalgic feel for life after the war, Leech drops verbs, constricts sentences, and then in the next instant uses standardized English to keep the reader moving forward. “So after Panama got her fun like she never had before and never will again ‘less I come into town. I got my movie. Got it for you. Believe it or not. Downstairs. Down the elevator when you take it. Down there. Alex. A guy with a big moustache and a wise crack view of life. Came home through the lobby. Crestfallen. In this movie. Alex came from Staten Island. Where his croaker died. Sudden. On his last fix found the croaker’s funeral. The junkies cried. Not for the croaker. But because he died. Now time will begin again.”  Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I can hear the rustle of the street in the language, the gravel house grind of someone who just wants to lose himself in a fix, a drunk, or a good fuck. To call Leech’s language here ebonics, or heaven forbid “jive” is to miss the point. Leech is creating a new language using memes and phonemes of our world to describe a world that doesn’t exist. It’s ballsy and interesting, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes just confusing.  

Leech’s language mirrors the world itself, where characters can bi-locate, and the setting blurs as if the world is a film, a celluloid lie. In fact, Untime would make an interesting film--  animation, live action, and a loose sense of structure could be imposed upon the alien world, albeit a cultish yarn and warning about the slavery of consciousness.  And in a sense Leech has crafted a book that is an altered consciousness, a sermon of the floating church. Like Poe’s Daughter, and 2000 Years, Leech writes around plot, instead juxtaposing philosophy with image, marrying sensuality to rhythm.

Peter Krok's Looking for an Eye could have been called looking for a door, or an exit, or an answer, #poetryreview

Night. Lamplight. A lover’s touch. Piano enlarging the air.
If the cover design on Peter Krok’s Looking for an Eye were an album cover, the green eye lurking at the edge of Stephen King’s dock would fit nicely among dusty 13th Floor Elevators records, Cramps singles, and Ramones LPs in a bedroom adorned with B movie posters promising doom, doom, doom. It’s a whimsical cover; the menacing shadow on the planks reminds me of a man with an axe. Or a hook. The more I look at it the more I think it’s a hook. Plus it feels as if I’m looking into the eye of the Incredible Hulk, the eyelid as green as radioactive rage.

Looking for an Eye could have been called Looking for a door, or an exit, or an answer, or for rhythm; and Krok’s new collection is like listening to well traveled busker, his cap like an overturned spider on the concrete before him, the next T already spilling out of dark tunnels.

It’s not that he’s writing bluesy alt-beat poetry or anything of the sort; Krok crafts image driven poetry centered around his home, both visceral and that of memory, and of course his heart. And the book might as well been called Searching for a key, for the landscape is littered with music, voices, and sound.

Some of the best moments are when Fur Elise echoes through the home, cool darkness pressing against the lamplight. For Krok, music, and sound are just as important as the images he frames with sparse form, or the landscapes he visits.

And there are people there too, not huddling around a campfire near Stephen King’s dock, avoiding the gaze of the grouchy Hulk, but working long hours, coming home to dose up on late night TV or searching neighborhood trash cans for reusable stuff. They are touching images, and earnest, and Krok, in these poems, acts as advocate, voice, and eye for the lower class and working class people of his neighborhood.

In the end Looking for an Eye makes an appropriate title, for Krok’s work is anchored by image. Some of the poems, in particular the elegies towards the end, travel smooth like old cowboy boots, for when the poet marries image with the iambic rhythm of really good conversation the poems break into easy strides; driving through Ohio, boarding the city bus, a lover’s touch.

Surrealism simmers in a few of these poems as the city darkens, “My City” and “10 PM At a Philadelphia Rec Center” among them, and Krok plays with WC Williams in “Dodge Poetry Festival” when he relishes a portabella mushroom sandwich like a widow relishes plums; conversations Krok allows us to eavesdrop upon.

Sometimes his eye does more talking than his ear, such as in “Girl with Bass Fiddle” where the poor musician is frozen by his eye, but Krok, like a busker, plays with the reader as if the reader was a listener, coin in hand, such as in “Athens, OH” where he teases out the music of the word Ohio, then drops the music, the assonance, half way through the poem, only to pick up on it at the end and echo it in the following poem, “The Ride We Left Behind.” Like a barroom piano player Krok returns to riffs and keys, the manuscript a carefully crafted playlist. And he returns to youth at the end, and in “Returning” the speaker graces the old cathedral of youth “to prepare for the voice/ behind the curtain and tomorrow;” voices aches and bend the air throughout the manuscript.

Krok’s a prodder, unafraid to question, unafraid of the question, a noble tradition in its own right, whose heart is centered, seeking a way to end the nagging that is to be alive and a feeling person in a country littered with noise, spin and easy fixes.
And perhaps that is why the Incredible Hulk at the end of Stephen King’s dock is so angry, no one bothers to stop and question anymore, at least that’s what the Hulk would like us to believe. Certainly Krok thinks that questioning is important, to stare yourself down, to ask “…who am I in the scheme/of things? What kind of noisemaker would you call me?”

Christopher Merrill's Necessities pours forth with an orgy of associations, #poetryreview

Christopher Merrill's collection of prose poems, Necessities, weaves a dystopian tapestry questioning and satirizing Western culture in a surprising and often unnerving whirl of associations. Composed in three sections, the overlapping subplots evoke a compromised world. Whether the images employed are Hollywood cool, or old school tough, Merrill tells humanity’s story, and speaks to us directly.These prose poems are dense, difficult but rewarding. Merrill has cast himself as writer-as-survivalist, slinging barebone knuckle images against shifting antagonists. He is also a stage designer & director, setting up contrasting motifs, a setting that often evokes and reflects a modern western truth: no matter what you look for, gold, desire, truth, or academic immortality, when you capture it, what have you won?The first section is composed as a controlled band of language that brings to mind the black armbands Jews wore in Nazi era Europe. The text is dense, wraps around the pages, and tramps through a desperate landscape, reflected in his imagery and language. "We had to act fast: our list was growing longer, our supplies were dwindling and no one knew how to fire a gun." Bears and wolves wander the wilderness, a blacksmith dreams of transfiguration where a "spark from his anvil will ignite another wave of conversions."  In the later two sections, Merrill allows the prose poems to scroll all the way down the page, yet the urgency remains, for food, for jobs, for desire, and for spiritual necessity. The imposing "Great Invisibles" coupled with the hyper-archetypal Pharmacy of God, the Emperor of Necessity, and others, are both agents of change and stagnation; "The Great Invisibles must translate the smoke signals spiraling above the mountain, or else we may mistake the church ruins for railroad tracks." In many ways this is The Waste Land for a post Google world. It is as if Merrill has gathered totems against fear and madness in a wilderness where the old ways might just be the key to surviving the future,  "how the tables crumbling in our hands might save us all in the end."Technically, Necessities, shows off Merrill’s skill as a collage artist, or surrealist. In a single passage Merrill bridges "the drunken ferryman" who "suspended crossings in calm weather," which is both Charon, and a working class schmo cut from Drudge Report headlines, with a downtown where the homeless march and where a cry rises from the financial district to "Sell today or jump tomorrow!" Merrill drops in a "man carrying a rifle into the patent office..." which could be Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Watertown.  Are lofty ambitions feel emotionally futile in a world where "Every block has its own radio station," where information comes from everywhere, in a white noise.Artists often make the choice to cut through the white noise, or like Merrill, pour it on, adding layers and layers of feedback. While turning the volume up to eleven, he is both winking at us, and warning us. "Who was telling the truth?" he asks in the final section, where "everything tastes like the end."Merrill's Necessities pours forth with an orgy of associations, its grossness a collection of fears, desires, needs, and debaucheries that when you step away from look alot like us, the reader, the double, mon frere.

Ned Condini's Heading for Valparaiso is a rich feast of #poetry, #review

Chelsea Editions Heading for Valparaiso $20, selected poems by Italian poet Ned Condini, is rich feast. Condini translated the poems himself, and much of the poetry is broad in scope, rather than microscopic or focused in terms of vision. These poems are like Medieval tapestries with brocade, lace, detailed embroidery depicting classic imagery coalescing into Condini’s personal mythos. They are pretty creations, sometimes violent, sometimes meditative, reflecting his Italian heritage and his American life. “I am all eyes,” Condini writes in “Mr.Sammler at the Confessional,” and his eyes gather images as varied from roses, and unicorns, the Panama Canal, to the opaque imagery of Christianity, and offer up poetry seeking connection with quiet, solitude, the breath of the spirit.

In the book’s second section, In Memoriam, the family of the deceased become characters out of history in “They Too, Show Up: Uncle Alex”, “With Johnny, storytelling Triton,/I snorkeled every day to watch him...Do you recall Venus’s imprints on the beach, our toes/tickled by sand.” Later in the collection, in “Blue Hair,” his father’s tools become Vulcan’s tools. This comparison to and mythologizing of family members is from the high Romantic tradition, the recycling of ancient tropes and icons. Condini doesn’t limit homages to antiquity either, in an earlier poem “Brooding in Jacob’s Room” Condini borrows Macbeth’s rhythm and energy to mark despair, “Shadows, shadows. Life is a but a show of shadows.” And this image repeats as the speaker finds that the dead “seems to move/when I,too, move” the age old problem of self and how to change it wrapped up in the memory of the dead. By using “dead” icons and rhythms Condini heightens the distance between the living and the dead, between the past and the present. The anguish of loss is heightened as well, a tone Condini returns to towards the end of the collection when he walks hand in hand with John Berryman’s madness.

One of the repeating images of the collection is the sun. The sun is spirit. The sun is the apex of the muse. The sun is the symbol for God. The sun is the symbol for youth. The sun appears as folly in the poet’s youth in “Saint Denis”, “those were the days I dared to court the sun,” or as a symbol for vigor in “Barnegat” where “suffers play blind man’s bluff with death.” But the sun also is peak of ache and want in “The End of Delight,”  as the “summer sprung from all the trees...I on my knees,/will strain through shock to remember, repeat.../demise in every street.” And in the end the sun is like an old friend, or even better, a lover lacing the leafy limbs of a birch tree.

The idea of want, and the isolation that our desires bring is ever present in the poems from “Quartettsatz” where “God does not see him,” and the world “appeared to me who sounded it/with the eyes of an alien,” from “A Woman’s Thoughts” and “His Answer.” And in “Now the Muse Speaks” the poet, presumably, or the speaker, realizes that he doesn’t matter. That in fact he is alien and indifferent to the people and to the world as the muse can be alien and indifferent to the artist. “Nobody has banned you, nobody hates you./It’s even worse: nobody gives a damn.” The title poem of the section, “quartettsatz,” is one of Condini’s masterpieces, a poem fashioned after Schubert and Berryman, a poet whom he carries on a dialogue throughout the latter half of the book, touching on like themes and imagery. Berryman excites Condini, both “quartettsatz” and the later “...386 chod” are energized by the poet’s interaction with the late poet’s tropes. Both poems express an internal struggle with mortality, “God throw another jerk/into a hole, not me” and “Maybe to lose the body is no big deal,” respectfully. Condini also finds energy in the discovery of isolation. The title poem, Heading for Valparaiso, is a big ambitious travelogue of identity, politics, and humanity, where the speaker finds himself “an exile in a land not mine,”  traveling from Lima, to Bolivia, to the sea beyond the Canary Islands, calling out both God and all of the tortured history of the land, Che and all, “show me/ the way, come meet me walking/like Him upon the water.” Here the speaker is the vessel, and the vessel is the speaker as much as it is his spirit. He is poet as witness, and poet as speaker for those who have no voice, for Condini beds down with the rebels, headhunters, the outsiders, in the earth which is home to bones and blood, and the sea a mother and wife.
Condini works spiritually through his poetry, seeking a body of breath, as many of the figures in his poetry seek a relationship to their own physical body. In this sense Condini is a philosopher-poet, or even visionary, for there is hope in looking up to the sun. Hope in a sunny kind of pastorale, as there is hope in divine, even for the subjects of many of these poem for whom consciousness is not kind. Consciousness wasn’t always kind to Berryman, Condini’s muse, or to some of the spirit seekers embroidered in his poetry seeking answers, a way out, to be made “bolder,” or to find the “archangel” who will save them.