David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 205

Worth reading---but the politically topical poems are weaker than the rest

Still to Mow by Maxine Kumin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to give this collection a higher rating than a 3, but the middle section particularly and other politically polemical poems were not of the usual quality I expect of Maxine Kumin. Then again, you have such terribly poignant lines as:

"We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward
stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last."

in describing a long marriage with both elderly and nearing their ends.

I recommend reading for the best of the poems. The more topical can be skipped or scanned.

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Another Fine Volume by Maxine Kumin

The Long Marriage: Poems by Maxine Kumin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Maxine Kumin has long been a favorite of mine for her steady eye on what it means to be human in a natural world. She is honest and yet hopeful about human relationships in the face of cruelty and death. In these poems she studies the headlines and brings disasters into her kitchen and garden even as she heals from her own injuries. Her death nearly a year ago is still a great loss.

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Beautiful and Evocative

Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"like the thin gray scarves
of immigrants
standing in line,
hands in their pockets,
cold fingers
pinching the lint
of their stories"

Thus Ted Kooser interweaves metaphor within metaphor, image within image, in this fine selection of poetry from 20 years of writing. His writing is lucid and simple, but beautiful and evocative. There are no sour notes, no tones of presumption or artificial distancing through obfuscation here.

"The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes."

Mortality hovers over every poem, but its bittersweet knowledge brings forth poetry worth spending time with.

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An eye-opening look into the poetry being written by contemporary writers in Arabic

The Gateway to Modern Arabic Poetry the English Version by Munir Mezyed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an eye-opening look into the poetry being written by contemporary writers in Arabic from throughout the Middle East and the diaspora. The translation is workmanlike, but occasionally stilted. The formatting, whether for the Nook or in PDF, leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, I recommend reading this translation. It helps us peer into verse that is not primarily Anglo-American and to hear the voices of men and women directly instead of as warped though the news outlets.

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A quietly brilliant collection.

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A quietly brilliant collection.

Ted Kooser's Delights & Shadows is one of those rare volumes where I wish I had written nearly every poem within. With few exceptions, each poem has just the right imagery and just the right, quiet word to explode like a milkweed pod into a fertility of grace and meaning.

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Aesthetics

In our art and literature, we have confused the shock of the new with the new having to shock.

Talked to sleep,

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wish I admired Lockwood's collection, I really do. There are some poems that come close to successful, and one ("The Rape Joke") which really hits home. Too many poems seem please with little dirty jokes or attempts at humor. "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" "The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple" and "The Descent of the Dunk" all come close. Too often I feel that what strives to be free and experimental is just undisciplined and needing rewriting.

The main conceit that nations and landscapes are treated as if human bodies and beings, and vice verse, just doesn't work here for me.

Perhaps it is just me. But I really wanted to admire this collection. But as Lockwood might write, "Naaaaaaah."

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Spend a Few Days with Traveler

Traveler: Poems by Devin Johnston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Traveler, Devin Johnston shows a range of formal ability including traditionally rhymed verse combined with an eye for nature and an ear for the right sound.

He sees the world in its natural and human history upwelling in geological and meteorological forces:

"In winter, clouds haul water from its source, the ocean basin, welling up by force of deep convection through the troposphere"

His range includes the imagistic and evocative, the intentionally archaic, and the sensual:

"Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, sand hissing through a glass, with the bedouin snap and flash of static-electric sparks disturbing fabric. This morning’s charge could rouse The Desert Fathers of Sinai over which I drowse."

I recommend spending a few days with this short volume.

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A weaving together of loss, running and nature.

Poverty Creek Journal by Thomas Gardner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this slim volume of meditations, we listen as Thomas Gardner interweaves his running, nature, and the loss of his brother with reflections on the writings of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. and other poets and philosophers. He speaks simply but profoundly, his images of the natural world he encounters on his runs expressed with quiet poetry:

"Bushes and leaves, heavy with frost, bending down to sip, drawing the light, in secret, to their lips."

His mourning is poignant and not self-pitying:

"Now I'm alone, wordless, with the strangest sens of being set apart to mourn or notice. I'm not sure which. The wind above us, moving across space."

He quotes Simone Weil: "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer." Gardner's Poverty Creek Journal shows this to be true on every page.

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Take a walk beside Rose McLarney

Its Day Being Gone by Rose McLarney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this collection, Rose McLarney interweaves the personal and the historical, the geography and the rain and mud, showing how all things are connected and the value and validity of the simple before the large.

Her language and imagery are evocative, but not overly studied, colloguial without being prosy.

Here she likens mistaking a doe for a predatory cougar to her thinking a young man who stops to offer her a lift is a rapist:

The predator’s eyes go gentle as a doe’s
because they are a doe’s. The man rides up, in shining
rims and mirror tinted windows.
And the sunset, which we love for its colored summary,
gloriously reimagines the day

As there is life in her writing, so there is a wistfulness for loss, that which is already past, and that which must soon go:

As if those lives had wandered away from me
and I was the one who would run for days
on a scent-memory toward

an end to which I thought I was bound.

Spending sometime with McLarney in this volume is well worth the travel.

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