David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 207

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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My poem "Above Emile Creek" is included in the Fall 2014 ...

My poem "Above Emile Creek" is included in the Fall 2014 edition of FLARE: The Flager Review, available here:

http://issuu.com/bthompson73/docs/flare_fall_2014

on page 42.






















Don't be confused by the misprint in the contents. My name has not changed to "David Dam."

A Clear and True Collection of Verse

Living Wages by Michael Chitwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In "Living Wages," Michael Chitwood displays Robert Frost's love of manual labor and his simplicity of language and everyday imagery coupled with depth of thought and feeling.

Something's being painted or patched.
The rattle of the handy, portable
rack of stairs is a sound like no other.
The shudder of the extension,
as one reach rides its twin
up until it's twice as long as it began.
Good work needs good assistance
and what a clever commotion this is.

There are no weak poems in this collection, no twaddle of seeking the "experimental" which too often means the inconsequential phrased as the incommunicable. Chitwood speaks cleanly and clearly and reaches the heart's muscle fiber.

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Merry Christmas

SolsticeThe clear night drops snow from
the clarity of stars, sighing in
a gather under our footsteps.The brevity of cold light outside
leads us indoors to the warmth
greeting from a fireplace.There oak and maple hiss steam
from snow crannied into bark.
Summer sweet sap crackles.And we are witness to the logs
becoming red glows, our faces
the embers of quiet celebration.

Thank you to all who bought my books

My deepest gratitude to all who bought copies of my books during 2014. As promised, because there was a profit on Memories in Clay, Dreams or Wolves, a donation of $300 was made to the Germanna Community College Educational Foundation.

A Fine Collection from One of the Best Poets of the Last Century

What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems by Ruth Stone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"My unknown, my own skeleton,
you will take me where the cartilage loosens
and the blood dries
and I will let go
my burning suns.

On this fine collection of poems, Ruth Stone shows why she was one of the finest poets of the last century, and why she is too often under-rated today. Stone writes from life but not wallow in herself. She reconnects science with common life experience. And with a common word, she uncommonly phrases for us what we need to have said.

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David Sam's Reviews > The Book of Goodbyes

The Book of Goodbyes by Jillian Weise
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Weise obviously spent time and attention to her vision of what this book should be. It strives to be experimental, a common aesthetic standard today. After Dada, experimental is a hard direction to go and still have something to communicate.

In sum, it may just be me, but this collection did not engage me, surprise me, or in any significant way cause me to reread. In fact, I skimmed many after the first few lines put me off.

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Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr

Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Orr's guide is not really a guide to reading poems as such, although the chapter on Form does a bit of that. Rather, it is mostly a guide to the established Poetry Business and to how most writers who aspire to formal recognition play the game, willingly or not. If you love or like some poems, that us, if some speak to you in ways that matter, you may be interested in the oil and grease and gears and noise behind the machines that make published poetry. Or not.

If you are wondering, in the words of the last chapter, "Why bother?" then I would not start here. There are several other books that offer you a way into reading poetry so that you might discover the ones that matter to you and are good art:

A Poetry Handbook Paperback
by Mary Oliver

How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
Edward Hirsch

And others.

Orr offers this humble, and somewhat underwhelming reason:

"I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all the other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident."

This is good for those of us who write poetry to read. It steadies us in our hope and ambition to the small crystals we may once in a while produce. It helps us to keep our egos under control.

But as a reader of poetry, I have heard some poems sing loudly to me in a clear voice that really mattered. Just as certain music has reached me. Certain visual art. Certain movies and plays. There is a reason why we humans keep doing this stuff.

Orr diminishes Rita Dove when she writes that “[p]oetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” He says that can happen in writing that is not called a poem. Yes. Poetry in Dove's sense is the right words that sing out, loudly or quietly. And this can occur in any place where a writer writes. Poems and the are artifacts. Orr does not clearly make or care to make this distinction.

For me, as a sometimes published poet, one way outside the academic and conference and MFA and workshop world of the Poe-biz, this book helps me remember to keep two ambitions separate: 1. The ambition to write an artifact that centers around the distilled and powerful saying of meaningful questions and experiences. 2. The ambition of being published enough and recognized enough so that more readers may give what I write a chance.

The rest is beautiful and pointless noise in the system.

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