May 16th, 2010
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Judith Tate O’Brien
SECOND WIFE
I keep drawing the first
one from the cemetery
into the house
and pose her
perfect as a mannequin
at the kitchen table
where, chin resting
on a long-fingered hand,
she surveys
the bran muffins
and finds them crumbly.
I imagine her coming
to their bed
smooth-bodied.
I arrive bone tired,
half a century
etched in my flesh.
She gave him
babies. I, a notebook
filled with poems.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
May 15th, 2010
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Review by Dori Appel
MORE
by Barbara Crooker
C&R Press
812 Westwood Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37405,
ISBN978-1-936196-00-5
2010, 68 pp., $14.95
www.amazon.com
As a fan of Barbara Crooker’s two previous collections, Radiance and Line Dance, I approached her newest, More, with an enthusiast’s high expectations. In this latest volume I found everything I’d hoped for: keen observation, generosity of spirit, supple wit— and more!
The title is a perfect choice, and while Crooker speaks often about desire, longing, and the wish to make things last, her bracing appetite bears no relation to greed. A celebrant of food (olive oil, salt, all five flavors of chocolate), she also pays enthusiastic tribute to the miracle of a new day: “dawn turned up its dimmer/ set the net of dew on the lawn to shining” (“Narrative”), and her fellow celebrants : “every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running/ for the sheer, dopey joy of it” (“Strewn”). “Excuses, Excuses” includes this tender and memorable tribute to her husband of thirty years: “I would choose you again if I met/you at a party, even if I could see/the future, the damaged child/ the bodies that creak and sag.”
Walking on the beach, Crooker’s “Surfer Girl” leads us with easy humor from a description of herself “on the far side of sixty, athletic as a sofa” to her youthful alter-ego “lithe and long-limbed, tanned California bronze,/ short tousled hair full of sunshine.” Longing and whimsy merge as she feels the wind at her back and imagines the bliss of catching the perfect wave, “choosing my line like I choose these words, writing my name/ on water, writing my name on air.”
Here, as in many other poems, touring the natural world in her company is an invigorating experience. In the collection’s opening selection: “A thin comma moon rises orange. a skinny slice of melon,/ so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole/ thing, down to the rind” (“How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River”). A variety of small birds flit among the pages, autumn’s late bare branches are saluted after “the burning bush has given up, slipped out/ of its scarlet dress” (“The Mother Suite”), and a stone “that lies there, inert, nothing but itself” ultimately gives voice to its “one long song. Something about eternity. Something about the sea” (“Geology”).
The ekphrastic poems of the book’s third section take a number of striking turns. I particularly liked the dismissal of critics who “fail to see the forest/ for the brushstrokes, the celestial city in the centrifugal clouds” (“Late Turners”). Crooker is clearly an ardent appreciator of clouds: rolling, expanding, changing their colors and shapes, being pulled apart like taffy, and in one poem’s moving conclusion, bleaching themselves pure white—with a poignantly darker lining: “White,/ the memory of itself, what you see before/you fall into bed at night, into the arms of sleep./ or the long tunnel you swim through/on that last journey home (“White”).
In the beautifully harrowing journey of “Demeter,” the poem’s movement is in an opposite direction, from darkness to light: “It was November when my middle daughter/ descended to the underworld. She fell/off her horse straight into Coma’s arms./ He dragged her down, wrapped her in a sleep/so deep I thought I would never see her again.” Eventually, the daughter rises from her coma, heals, and resumes her life. For her parents, however, seen in a snapshot, “drinking coffee and smiling,” there will always be the hovering awareness of possible, irreplaceable loss.
More is the work of a poet who understands the paradox of fulfillment within impermanence—reading these poems feels like a wake-up call to notice. The penultimate selection, “Strewn,” closes with lines that capture the collection’s essence and Crooker’s readiness to meet life’s exhilarating, sometimes painful, embrace: “All of us broken, some way/ or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant, slanting light.”
____________
Dori Appel’s collection of poems, Another Rude Awakening is published by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems have also appeared in many journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Calyx, as well as in a number of anthologies, including When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple (Papier Mache Press) and From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press). A playwright as well as a poet, her plays have been widely produced in the United States and internationally. Three of her full-length plays are published by Samuel French and a number of her monologues are included in anthologies. She was the winner of the Oregon Book Award in Drama in 1998, 1999, and 2001.
May 14th, 2010
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Megan O’Reilly
AND AFTER
It comes back to this: dressing in the
bathroom of that motel room, together
but not speaking, like children at a funeral–
your department store bra pulled over
your sticky chest, his ankles grotesquely human,
both of you sixteen and as sexy as wet eggs.
It’s the same years later, though you learn to
converse afterward, the delicate obligatory,
like RSVPing, lining up forks the right way.
Still, you always find yourself homesick
for the way the bed looked an hour ago, the first
glance in good light, the promising turn of the key.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
May 13th, 2010
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Nancy Pagh
SPRING SALMON AT NIGHT
I thought the west wind called me from bed
the night the river ran so hard.
I followed it over the moonlit lawn
across the road and into the woods,
climbing fallen cedars and moving
beyond the skunk cabbages. I followed
the west wind to the river bed and
plunged my legs in dark water
that sucked and swirled behind my knees
and tried to pull me beyond the bank.
And the wind stopped.
And I forgot why I came out in the night.
And I clenched the underwater moss with my toes
and was lost
until the spring salmon came,
their torpedo-shaped bodies knowing me
as another follower of currents.
In the cold gray river the spring salmon
found and circled me, their forms almost warm
as they touched the backs of my legs
guiding me back through the forest
across suburban lawns and down my own hallway
from bedroom to kitchen
until I found myself standing at the cat-food cupboard
and recognized each cat circling my legs
and my own gullibility
or desire to be lead
in the direction of someone else’s hunger.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
May 12th, 2010
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Ricardo Pau-Llosa
ABACUS
Havana 1933, 1954, Miami 2002
for Nicolás, the last of the Cubans
“Melancholy is a sin, really it is a sin, instar ominum, for not to will
deeply and sincerely is sin, and this is the mother of all sins”
—Kierkegaard, Guilty/Not Guilty.
They were dancing on the roof of the house
next door, flames leaping from the windows,
in the calm metronome of a danzón,
or maybe the mob were clicking their heels
savagely, not, therefore, a dance properly,
but a sudden shaping of flesh to the clay
of vengeful joy. A boy of eight is straying
the opulent streets to amaze at the inkness
of blood on pavement, how it oils the asphalt
into mat provinces the body has seized,
imperial of just dead space, as it quietly fell,
broke and rag turned. The boy had never heard
such silence on this street. Now a grandfather,
Nicolás Quintana is writing his memoirs.
He’d build some of Cuba’s vanguard homes and buildings,
later, decades between this ancient day Machado fell
when Nicolás, then a boy, saw the swarm waltz
on the neighbor’s roof, and he pondered their arms
curving and legs jerking straight, bodies spun
as if they’d caught or were still trying to net
the incomparable fish of history. He knew
he’d always fall for the narrow joys. After his tale,
in my living room sixty-eight years after the dance,
I dreamt I had been a man the year of my birth,
forty-eight years ago, and chaos fired up
the schooner wind, whipping wave, slamming
the keel against surf. My new woman on deck,
sunglassed, trim and linened. Filling with liquor,
she might be the muse of history.
She of the Italian scarf flitting in the acetylene wind
of the Gulf stream. We’d be heading back to port
in Havana, to more rum and the climax of air
conditioning, but now she reclined like a tongue
between the lip of clouds and the jaw of cushions,
and tasted the blood metallic sea spray on her face.
Havana sparkled behind her in late fifties summer.
Gleamed like a trumpet just polished. Her turboprop
for New York leaves in the morning. A decade from now
it will be too late to live and too soon to remember.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
