September 25th, 2008
Review by Wendy Vardaman
SCHOLARSHIP GIRL
by Lesley Wheeler
Finishing Line Press
P.O. Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324
ISBN: 978-1-59924-226-2
25 pp., $12.00
www.finishinglinepress.com
Scholarship Girl is Lesley Wheeler’s first poetry collection, although Wheeler, Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, is the author of two scholarly books, and the co-editor of Letters to the World, a just-published anthology of contemporary women’s poems from the Women’s Poetry List-Serv. The chapbook displays a careful attention to craft, particularly to sound, a deft use of form, and considerable thought regarding some significant problems in contemporary poetry, especially the viability of the historical poem, whose devices, like description and personae, Wheeler demonstrates command of while simultaneously pointing, as a contemporary ethnographer might, to their limits.
Thus the collection opens with “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood,” a poem written in unmetered quatrains where near-rhyme and assonance replace the exact rhyme of the older historical poem, and personal content—here the mother/daughter relationship—is foregrounded against a particular geographical and historical background that comes in and out of focus throughout the book to form, along with family connections, the force that binds these poems together:
September 24th, 2008
Link • Poems • Leave a Comment
Jake Willard-Crist
MISS MEMORY
A woman on the radio can recall every day
of her life for the last thirty years. The weather,
headlines, whether it was Monday.Ten years old on a rainy Tuesday she bought loafers
with her mother. A Labrador wrung itself out like a rag.
She compares autumns. Ranks Easters by hams.Every morning in the bathroom she reflects on the day’s date,
compendiously calls up her history with June’s third Friday.
Drying her hair, what does she reconstruct in the steamy air?Something like this: “Five years ago I brushed my teeth here
and remembered a day five years before at another sink,
where I dried my hair remembering yet another bathroomfive years before, brushing, drying, passing time with past time.”
In the vortex of her memory the sinks change.
The porcelain warps into ovals and back to rectangles;pure white veins out into faux marble.
All the sunken sinks bob back into the present.
Outside the bathrooms that shutter into her nowthe weather warps. Rain on the awning yawns
into sun shooting through curtains, catching on wet tiles.
In the nostalgic spiral the mirror gets higher.She shrinks, her reflection usurped incrementally
by her mother’s behind her brushing out tangles.
She closes her eyes, winces. She memories pain away.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2008
September 23rd, 2008
Hilda Weiss
MY NEIGHBOR GIVES ME MEAT BONES
I bring her persimmons from the Farmer’s Market at midday.
Last of the season. Do you like to cook? Yes, I say, I like to cook.
Do you eat meat? Yes, I say, I eat meat.
I have meat for you.It’s frozen. Bright red. Big chunks still on the bone.
No need to call home. My parents are dead.
Anyway, it was on the farm—my mother’s childhood.
Stew meat. Beef. My grandmother cut it off the chalky bone.I thaw the meat in the fridge. It’s slow. It takes time. Imagine.
I let the dishwasher finish yesterday’s dishes. My mother,
grandmother, neighbor—none of them needs to know
how the sloshing water quiets the kitchen.How will I cook the meat? Oh. I have mushrooms.
Sun-dried tomatoes. A little red wine. Olives,
a few dark bitter ones from Greece. The memory
of the man I married. He’s dead, too. Sunlight
on the bamboo screen.If it were willow and you put it in water,
it would start to grow.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2008
September 22nd, 2008
MORNING AT THE ELIZABETH ARCH
The winos rise as beautiful as deer.
Look how they stagger from their sleep
as if the morning were a river
against which they contend.This is not a sentiment
filled with the disdain
of human pity.
They turn in the mind,
they turn
beyond the human order.One scratches his head and yawns.
Another rakes a hand
through slick mats of thinning hair.
They blink and the street litter moves
its slow, liturgical way.
A third falls back
bracing himself on an arm.At river’s edge, the deer stand poised.
One breaks the spell of his reflection with a hoof
and, struggling, begins to cross.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
September 21st, 2008
Review By Robert Neely
THE FRATERNITY OF OBLIVION
by Larry D. Thomas
Timberline Press.
6281 Red Bud, Fulton
Missouri, 65251
ISBN#: 978-0-944048-44-3
48 pp., $15.00
www.timberlinepress.com
One of the hardest traits for a poet to find in his work is originality. Most must begin with not only something to compel the reader to continue, but to compel the reader to continue this particular collection over others. Larry D. Thomas provides just this in the subject of his recent collection, Fraternity of Oblivion. In Fraternity, Thomas features poetry on and about the outlaw biker, a subject he brings to light with both beauty and violence.
Thomas has not forgotten to start off with a hook. The first poem, “Rite,” opens the collection with a scene where an inductee biker must allow “his woman” to be shared with the brothers of the pack:
and their sheep-woman
rising from the dunes,
sown with the rich,
chapter seed
of blood brethren.
