November 30th, 2010
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Review by Janet McCann
BLUE, CANDLED IN JANUARY SUN
by Sybil Pitmann Estess
WordTech Communications
PO Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254
ISBN# 1933456035
2005, 92pp., $17.00
www.wordtechcommunications.com
Sybil Estess is a poet of Southwestern vision. Her Texas is historical and current, and her imagery communicates a persuasive brand of Southern feminism. Estess writes mostly about women of middle age, surrounded by family and friends. The speaker’s story mingles with those of others: Bible women, friends, relatives, chance encounters; multiple voices emerge from a single consciousness.
Estess’s observations of the world are a little like Robert Frost’s, but with a distinctive woman’s turn. Frost provided a male perspective on gender difference, reflected in his male and female characters’ divergent perceptions of the natural world. The male/rational was the superior. Estess gives us the woman’s view and the primacy of her values: connectivity, friendship, family links, nourishment, loyalty, persistence. Also, she, like Frost, reads nature for its relevance to humanity, but Estess’s nature is layered with transcendence. In “Blowing Sand May Exist” the husband reasons about what this posted warning means while the wife feels. “I had been meditating as we whizzed by. / I didn’t even see it. ‘It may / exist,’ he reasoned, ‘it also may not.’ / All I knew was that grit got in my eye.” The two visions merge: “…Warned, we wait for the wind.” Both kinds of understanding are needed, the male logocentric and the female gnostic, to understand the world.
Estess is a keen observer of the social fabric and the rents and snags in it, as well as of the mystery of personality. War and injustice are often suggested by the individual stories she encounters; in “Blooms from Bogota,” she describes the cost of beauty in human suffering. The many transactions in these poems bring about glimpses of others’ lives. Things exchanged are symbols and sacramentals, and the act of giving or even buying becomes a female ritual of connection.
Stylistically, Estess’s, work is fascinating for its combination of metrics and speech patterns. Some poems are conversational free verse, but others use rhyme and rhythm subtly, so that there is a pull between natural speech patterns and the metrical frame. The rhymes are sometimes casual and slant, the unobtrusive music of the poem. Sound-echoes, gentle alliteration, and assonance help carry this music. Blue, Candled in January Sun is a powerful collection to be shared, discussed, remembered.
–from Rattle #25, Summer 2005
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Janet McCann‘s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Poetry. Her most recent books are Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press 2004) and Pascal Goes to the Races (WordTech Communications 2004).
November 29th, 2010
Bob Johnston
WAITING
It didn’t rain all summer, and the wind
Blew yellow dust from Colorado, mixed
With black dirt of our own. Tumbleweeds
And dust had buried all the fences. The taste
Of blackness was always in my throat, and grit
Was in my bed. Toward the end of the day
We sat and watched the devils march across
A dirty sunset. There wasn’t much to do—
The crops were burned and all the cows had died.
My father said that next week it would rain
Because the Lord would send it. In the north
Dry lightning flashed against a black curtain.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
November 28th, 2010
L. Lee Harper
DRIVING WITH MAN IN PASSENGER’S SEAT
The insult, an old one, almost palpable.
Tired of the wheel, you surrender it
and fall asleep before I’ve driven one mile.
When asked why, you plead exhaustion.
At day’s end, after two drinks, you offer,
whiny as some writers, that riding
makes you sick, that driving focuses your
nausea elsewhere, and after one beer
before the motel bed swallows our
inebriated lust at corporate rates,
you sink murmuring that my driving
makes you nuts and finally, truth,
that bear market, draining away
what few assets I have left.
This could be a narrative by Nabakov, whose trail
streams with hot blood, but there it cools.
Tomorrow as you snore and I drive, I imagine
strangers in Jags cruising along side,
Antonio Banderas maybe, so in love with me
in cinematic eroticism explicit as movie posters
at the mall. So, zen adultery. I cheat
on you mile after mile,
as you dream, implacable as lovestupor,
comfortable and married,
immutable as a familiar itch.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
November 27th, 2010
Christine Hamm
LOVE HURTS, SAN JOSE, 1975
in the photo
the man is sprawled
a Chinese ideogram
spelling knife or beauty
sadness or forgiveness
potato or tongue
blood has splashed and run
down the grey wastebasket
there is a golden cast
to the scene
the daisies on the yellow
kitchen wall the ochre
dishwasher door
one hand is curled near
his turned away face
a cheek the delicate pink
of a girl’s blush when she
is caught at her first lie
his shoes are black, cheap
embarrassing
the blood a triangle
spread over his stomach
like a bandanna folded
across his lap to hold
a tuna fish or roast beef
sandwich on a picnic table
the knife an afterthought
bright shadow
insubstantial smear
on a white t-shirt scrawled
with slogans
half words hidden
in the folds
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
November 26th, 2010
Terry Godbey
MY FACE AT 46
I’ve seen enough of my mouth
wrinkled as a drawstring purse,
my parade of big teeth,
the two in front tipping forward
like drunks, my right ear higher
than the left, skewing my earrings
like weights on a grandfather clock.
God makes us like a puzzle
and sometimes he mixes up the pieces,
my little boy says. I don’t blame anyone
but dread what’s next: breasts slowly
letting go, hands speckled like trout.
Most mornings I figure why bother
and dash off without mascara
or lipstick. Is that really me,
or is it the young woman
out of a Flemish oil painting
I expect to see in the mirror, flesh firm
and unblemished, a touch of blush
from anticipation, the bowl of satiny fruit
bursting from the table
paling next to her untasted beauty,
her boundless appetites.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
