David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 207

So, read him!

Into Daylight: Poems by Jeffrey Harrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a pleasure to read Jeffrey Harrison's plain but pur language. He strikes the right notes without pretension, but certainly with craft. There are tones of regret, mourning, whimsy, celebration, lust, humor, nostalgia, hope. Two examples of many possible:

"...she's collecting leaves: the yellow mittens
of the sassafras, the burgundy oaks,
the lemony ovals of the beeches baking
to brown, and the maples' red flamelets
scattered on the path, their backs a pale violet."

(from "Walking with Eliza")

If a poet's job is to pay attention, really pay attention, and then find the right words, this shows Harrison doing that job well.

Here he recalls in his son's drinking directly from a faucet the image of his brother who had committed suicide 10 years before:

"...and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need..."

I must admit a guilty pleasure in reading from "On Bitching":

"And stop bitching about editors
who keep publishing each other's poems...

"...And there's no point
in envying the poets who swagger into rooms,
charging every molecule with their need
to be important. So, let them be important....

"...but it's exasperating to listen to you
after you've had a few too many cups of wine
railing against the zealously self-promoting
postmodern obfuscators, the hip ironists revved up
on their own cleverness, the tedious fundamentalists
of rhyme and meter, or the one you call
the formalist narcissist Stalinist surrealist."

"You wanted to write poems. So, write them.
And the next time some self-satisfied preener
wins a prize, don't dwell on it, but remind yourself
of all the poems that didn't get away, the poems
of your friends and how they've borne you up
and spurred you on to better envy...
and thank the gods to the end of your days
for the time they've granted you to spend
on making poems, even if they come to nothing."

It is a neat twist how he allows himself to bitch publicly, while in the pose of complaining about such bitching. And it is probably to himself he says "So, write them." But his words certainly ring home to me.

So, read him.

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Talk and Reading at the Rotary Club of Rappahannock-Fredericksburg

Thank you Rotary Club of Rappahannock-Fredericksburg for allowing me to visit the day before Thanksgiving and talk about my book, "Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves."

Thank you for your ongoing support for Germanna Community College and to those members who purchased copies. I will now be able to write a larger check to our Educational Foundation in December.

David Sam's Reviews > Sea Garden by H. D.

Sea Garden by H.D.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this early and slim volume, you can see what will come in HD's later imagist writing. Here too often the diction of "high poetry" of the 19th Century appears. And too many poems are apostrophes to flowers and objects. But the irregular verse is free, the imagery true, and the language moving towards the modern.

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Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist

Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mary Szybist's second collection reaches for heaven through an imagining of the experience of Mary at Annunciation, and sometimes touches it with such lovely and simple language as:

"Time to enter yourself. Time to make your own sorrow. Time to unbrighten and discard even your slenderness."

"...having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name,"

"Now what seas, what meanings can I place in you?"

There are times when the simplicity becomes merely prosaic and the collection is a bit uneven. Still and all, a worthy effort.

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"Saint Friend" a fine collection by Carl Adamshick

Saint Friend by Carl Adamshick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This small collection is one of the finest I have read from a contemporary poet. Carl Adamshick writes with simple but supple grace and gives voices to others including Amelia Earhart. The poem "Layover" disguises craft under an illusion of stream of consciousness. But if you reread, it is hard to imagine a different order to the words. Poems abound in wonderful lines, a few of which I quote a here:

"...the moon laying its light on men
abandoned

to their immediate selves"

***

"It is the solace of a shadow

lost on black water."

***

"Growing up
I talked to the road near my house
when it was barren and straight miles
were buried under an eternity of moonlight."

***

"It's what we don't
have words for
that grows lonely within us."

We are all less lonely because Adamshick has given us some of the words with simple and profound eloquence.


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The Roots of a Poem

The opening poem in my collection "Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves," has its roots with William Wordsworth Spots in Time section of the Prelude:
From The Prelude Book TwelfthWilliam Wordsworth

There are in our existence spots of time,That with distinct pre-eminence retainA renovating virtue, whence--depressed                            By false opinion and contentious thought,Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,In trivial occupations, and the roundOf ordinary intercourse--our mindsAre nourished and invisibly repaired;A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,That penetrates, enables us to mount,When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.This efficacious spirit chiefly lurksAmong those passages of life that give                              Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,The mind is lord and master--outward senseThe obedient servant of her will. Such momentsAre scattered everywhere, taking their dateFrom our first childhood. I remember well,That once, while yet my inexperienced handCould scarcely hold a bridle, with proud hopesI mounted, and we journeyed towards the hills:An ancient servant of my father's houseWas with me, my encourager and guide:                                We had not travelled long, ere some mischanceDisjoined me from my comrade; and, through fearDismounting, down the rough and stony moorI led my horse, and, stumbling on, at lengthCame to a bottom, where in former timesA murderer had been hung in iron chains.   The Songs Between
David Anthony Sam
There are certain places, certain timeswhen the soul flies freelyand feels one with the wind,and one with the land,and one with the lives around it.
I have been graced with such places, such moments. They have demanded with need that I voice themand allowed my voice to fulfill them.
A Wyoming prairie sings to me. A cold lake in Oregonmade fresh from old winter snow dying.A lakeshore where waves clap,or an ocean of sand besidean ocean of sea and mist.
A small room with her face.A park with their laughter.A mountainside made blue to me by distance,and a wide river valley betweenfull of green, a gray slab of road,and the brown winding river.
There are such places, such timesthat make me think if death were this–this open disappearing into life–death would be a fine thing.
Instead I live between such places and such moments waiting only.
And the song finds me when I am ready.

Poetry Reading Saturday Nov. 15, 2014

Please join me for a reading from my books Saturday November 15, 2014 from 2 to 4 pm. I will also be available to sign copies for those who have purchased them. Thank you, Griffin!



Location:

The Griffin The Griffin Bookshop and Coffee Bar

723 Caroline StFredericksburg, Virginia 22401
http://www.griffinbookshop.com/

https://www.facebook.com/GriffinBookshop/info

I will read from Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves & Dark land, White Light.



Here is a poem from Memories:

of the clouds, dust, and cars, humming quietly.

Farewell Galway Kinnell

When I was first beginning to seriously contemplate a life of  poetry writing and living in Ann Arbor, I hear Galway Kinnell read at en event held by the University of Michigan. I went down the street to the Centicore Bookstore (also RIP) and bought what they had available.

How he influenced me is hard for me to describe. Style, yes a bit. Subject, yes his revelations of the holy in flesh and life and what some would call profane. I mourn his passing on and celebrate that he left so much behind in his poetry.

Here you can read some of his verse:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/kinnell/online.htm

More poems and some audios of him reading are here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/galway-kinnell#about

A first draft of an elegy for him is humbly offered here:

            In Memoriam Galway Kinnell
The nameless bud of your heartstands in for all words of things—Every thing flowers blessed byyour voice, your hand upon it—Creased by your foreheadthat gives its flesh to knowto sing as St. Francis sang toand for the birds the beasts—even for a sow slopped spiritual—How you rooted with heruplifting aromas of world—How you climbed with Fergusand avenued with Christ—How you forked a Maple treeto sit watch on drifts of snow—How now we lie down to soilbroken in heart and bereftin our lush of fragile flesh—But left with your retellingand sanctified in your longand perfect loveliness of song

            11/4/2014

My poem "Eden" is included in a free Kindle of the journal Literature Today.

My poem "Eden" is included in a free Kindle of the journal Literature Today.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P4HIW04

Photo from the Local Authors book fair at the Culpeper Library

Photo from the Local Authors book fair at the Culpeper Library on November 1, 2014