David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 199
August 30, 2015
A Fine Collection by a Contemporary Welsh Poet
Parables & Faxes by Gwyneth Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gwyneth Lewis is a Welsh writer whose poetry in English is infused with the Welsh language and land. But there are touches of cummings and Dickinson in such poems as “A Fanciful Marriage” and “Annunciation.”Her humor and slantwise look at living in this world are graced with a humane touch and a lyrical voice. She uses patterns of lines with end half-rhymes that are enjambed so the music is there but subtle. Lewis views modern life through a lens of fable and some whimsy, weaving the human and the natural in close identification. She is unheralded today in the US and should be read as a partial antidote to the prosy fracturing of the late Postmodern verse that pervades MFA programs.
August 29, 2015
Allegro Poetry Magazine will publish my poem “Happy Halloween” in November
Allegro Poetry Magazine will publish my poem “Happy Halloween” in November 2015 http://allegropoetry.org/
August 26, 2015
Yellow Chair Review has accepted “Ghosts: Paper or Plastic”
Yellow Chair Review has accepted “Ghosts: Paper or Plastic” for their Horror Issue set to release October
August 25, 2015
Touch: The Journal of Healing has accepted 4 of my poems
Touch: The Journal of Healing has accepted 4 of my poems for publications this fall.
http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Home/index.html
August 24, 2015
Empty Sink has published 2 of my poems
Empty Sink has published 2 of my poems:
http://emptysinkpublishing.com/poetry/two-poems-david-anthony-sam/
August 23, 2015
A fine collection by Mark Doty
Fire to Fire by Mark Doty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A courageous and emotionally powerful collection, “Fire to Fire” exhibits Mark Doty’s poetical range and aesthetic. He speaks with clarity of language and image, is not afraid to allow the natural world to speak for him, and faces death and life after the deaths of so many close to him with honesty and impossible hope:
“All smolder and oxblood, these flowerheads, flames of August: fierce bronze, or murky rose, petals concluded in gold— And as if fire called its double down the paired goldfinches come swerving quick on the branching towers, so the blooms sway with the heft of hungers indistinguishable, now, from the blossoms.”
“Sometimes we wake not knowing how we came to lie here, or who has crowned us with these temporary, precious stones.”
He reveals the survivor’s wonder and guilt when he survives when so many friends and a lover die in the great AIDS crisis:
“And why did a god so invested in permanence choose so fragile a medium, the last material he might expect to last?”
Doty is not afraid to come close to the sentimental when talking about Beau and Arden, his dogs, as they age through their briefer lives and die before he was ready.
Every poems is crafted for this world. And while Doty acknowledges the great rift created by the 1970s Postmodern experimentation and loss of faith in language, he believes in the power of words well-chosen to carry us through our individual and collective search for meaning: He knows the surprise that comes when the poem reaches beyond what the poet thought he wanted:
“The poem wants the impossible; the poem wants a name for the kind nothing at the core of time,”
Read this collection. You will be heartbroken at times, but that is our lot. And Doty is a great voice and his gentle but courageous presence is welcome on this journey.
August 13, 2015
Well Worth the Challenge
Scar Tissue: Poems by Charles Wright
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This 2006 collection by Charles Wright describes the “scar tissue” of living and of nostalgia for real or imagined better times. Wright is not a “nature poet” so much as a philosophical one as Coleridge described Wordsworth, one who uses his relationship with nature to explore and expose life’s challenge of finding meaning. The experience of sunset becomes an analogy for human biography:
“If night is our last address
This is the pace we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive….
“And where are we headed for?
The country of Narrative, that dark territory
Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning…”
Wright’s poetry challenges us—not with obscurity or experimental language, but with living fully awake and aware, where “Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, neversleeping, just possible past reason.”
The time spent being so challenged is well worth it.
August 7, 2015
Stoneboat Literary Review will publish my poem “Recapitulation” in its upcoming issue
Stoneboat Literary Review will publish my poem “Recapitulation” in its upcoming issue.
Red Savina Review will publish my poem “Stone Birds” in its Spring 2016 issue
Red Savina Review will publish my poem “Stone Birds” in its Spring 2016 issue.
The latest issue of Clementine include my poem “Last Journal”
The latest issue of Clementine include my poem “Last Journal”
