David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 200
September 6, 2015
Fails to “separate from the rummage”
A Several World by Brian Blanchfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
When you try to condense your critical opinion of a collection of poems to a number of stars, you realize the inadequacy of ratings.
I admire much of Brian Blanchfield’s ambitious and generous collection. He has a gift of the short and pungent phrase, epigrammatic without being obvious. His language has echoes of the lusciousness of Wallace Stevens and the obscure juxtaposition of John Ashberry. Blanchfield interplays the grammatical, the etymological, and the personal in interesting ways.
But when I am done, and I ask if I willread it again, I must admit that the answer is probably no. I admire the effort and often the craft. But I am left cold and oddly noncurious. Perhaps it is my failure as a reader. Perhaps the work in the end fails to “separate from the rummage.”
September 5, 2015
Thank you Allegro for accepting “Outcast Winter” for publication
Allegro Poetry Magazine has accepted another of my poems for their March 2016 issue.
September 4, 2015
A Poet with a Scientist’s Eye and a Naturalist’s Heart
Splitting and Binding by Pattiann Rogers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Pattiann Rogers is that rare poet who writes with the lyrical love of nature that Wordsworth had but without any false sentimentality. Instead, she brings the eye of the scientist together with the heart of the naturalist. She is unafraid to face the harsh reality of life and death in her own existence or in the natural or human world around her. This mid-career collection shows Rogers at her best.
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.
