April 30th, 2011
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Review by David Lee Garrison
THE CASANOVA CHRONICLES
by Myrna Stone
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
84 West South Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
ISBN-13 978-0-9819687-3-5
2010, 72 pp., $17.95
www.etruscanpress.org
This is the third book by Myrna Stone, from Greenville, Ohio, who is emerging as a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry. She reveals a vast, rich vocabulary and, especially in this book, a fluent command of various forms, from the sonnet to the triolet to the sestina. As George Bilgere suggests in a quotation on the cover of the book, this is an “off-the-wall collection” in which “parrots, puppets and the great Casanova take turns force-feeding Viagra to the stuffy old sonnet. But it’s Myrna Stone’s Rabelaisian gift for language that really steals the show.” It is quite a show and, yes, she steals it again and again.
The book has three parts: “The Ballard Sonnets,” “Schlock Therapy,” and “The Casanova Chronicles.” The Ballard Sonnets have to do with a Long Island eccentric, Alba Ballard, who became a minor celebrity by training parrots and other animals to perform in costume. The poet tells this story in a series of sonnet monologues in the voices of Alba, her husband Marvin and son Claudio, and many of the parrots. “Marvin Ruminating,” for example, begins with the lines: “How I yearn to see you one more time, / Alba, teaching a bird to speak in rhyme / or pose at the piano dressed as Liberace.” The husband expresses his admiration and bafflement at the power his wife had over animals and, in the end, over him. He confesses, in the concluding couplet, that “of all the animals you tried to tame, / just one, Marvin Ballard, loved the rein.” The animals themselves are more cynical. Romeo, the oldest of the parrots, speaking to his progeny, recalls
…Alba, who with me
and Fifi Green (yes, your foul-mouthed, bad-
ass mother) turned into fans the bourgeoisie
of Long Island. The morning I first meowed,
Alba, obsessed, sewed me a cat suit of lame
and your mother a rat suit of felt. Cash cows
we were then, at fairs, bar mitzvahs, the VA.
All in all, it’s the story of a group that had a wild time together. That most of the family members are animals suggests the primitive urges that run wild in family life. Lust, power, greed, rivalry—a Long Island housewife harnessed these emotions for audiences, and the poet lets them loose. It is ironic that she lets them loose inside the controlled environment of the sonnet. The birds run around squawking inside a pen of fourteen rhyming lines, and yet Stone releases their wildness with an enjambed fluency that makes the poems sound like free-wheeling conversations.
A major theme of the book is performance. While the first section involves the performance of Alba Ballard’s animals, the next one moves from puppet performances in the Middle Ages staged by priests to explain the mysteries of the faith to a modern day priest who performs forbidden acts while chiding God about human weakness, from the banter between Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen to the macho strutting of a Mexican cowboy and the romantic babbling of a husband satirized by his wife. The title of the second section, “Schlock Therapy,” comes from a priceless poem about the interview by a young journalist of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television. Cheated out of the royalties due him for his invention, Farnsworth becomes a hermit and dismisses television, saying it’s “pap, it’s a peepshow // in a box, and everybody’s getting it, like a disease.” In his bitterness, he calls out to his wife for another drink and advises the journalist that “If we’re held in the cup // of God’s right hand, it’s because His left’s too busy / wiping our asses.”
In the last section, which provides the title of the book, the poet returns to the monologue sonnet in a tour-de-force sequence that outlines the life of Casanova. With information culled mainly from the lengthy life history written by the famous writer, actor, diplomat, lawyer, priest, and lover, and from other sources about him, the poet creates a kind of play. In fact, to clarify the characters involved, Stone opens this section with a helpful list of the “Dramatis Personae.” In the drama Casanova emerges not just as a libertine but as a multi-faceted human being with a wide range of emotions and talents. The interweaving of plots is too complex to cover in a review, so I will cite just one of the sonnets in full. It is in the form of a letter to a woman who with her sister was one of Casanova’s first conquests:
Letter to Sister Maria Concetta from Casanova
Paris, 2 July, 1750
Dear Marta, your letter cuts me to the quick
each time I read it. What has changed you so?
Can you not see, my love, that bitterness wicks
more than blood from your heart? When you forgome, and repudiate the intimacies you and I
and your sister shared, what is left but regret
for the appetites of the flesh? Till the day I die
I will think of you both as my little wives, my debtto you impossible to repay except by placing
your needs before mine. Thus, I will not see you
again, nor will I speak with Nanetta….The ring
you gave me is herewith enclosed. As evening bluesand my candle gutters, I conjure us up, I crave
us—three virginal shades both happy and grave.
Casanova, having received a letter from the dying Marta who longs to “expunge the wickedness you and I and my sister / committed in our bed,” accedes to her request never to see her again. We hear his voice, we see at the same time his unrelenting belief in the flesh and his sensitivity to his former lover, and we recognize the mix of love and death that haunted the man.
____________
The poetry, translations, and reviews of David Lee Garrison have appeared in Connecticut Review, The Nation, Poem, and Rattle, among other publications. Garrison Keillor read two poems from his book, Sweeping the Cemetery (Browser Books), on The Writer’s Almanac, and U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser featured one on his website, American Life in Poetry. Last year David won the Paul Laurence Dunbar Poetry Award; this year he won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District.
April 29th, 2011
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Julie Goldman
END OF SEASON
Washed and dried, my laundry smells “Spring Fresh,”
but to touch, it’s cooling, like autumn.
I fold tank tops, T-shirts, shorts. And last, the yellow sleeveless
button-down I wore over my bathing suit (like the tan, form-
fit model in the mail-order catalogue, who
sat on the sand while the others swam).
Fastening every other shirt button in the row,
I admire the straight and even
stitches that hold the body together. No
loose ends. I spread this vestige of my last summer, face down
on the table, and while ironing
its lifeless, limbless back with flat, heavy palms,
let the illusion of reverse aging
materialize, the wrinkles
disappear. Like a soldier folding the flag,
I fold the shirt lengthwise,
from right shoulder to hip: the margin
narrows like the doctor’s prognosis.
Along the left fold, the breast pocket outlines
the mastectomy site. The final fold cuts
across the width, where the latest CAT scan
reports increasing tumor activity. The folded shirt goes with the rest,
face up in a storage box that smells of cedar, like a casket.
–from Rattle #25, Spring 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle
April 27th, 2011
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Tony Gloeggler
1969
My brother enlisted
in the winter. I pitched
for the sixth-grade Indians
and coach said
I was almost as good
as Johnny. My mother
fingered rosary beads,
watched Cronkite say
and that’s the way it is.
I smoked my first
and last cigarette. My father
kept his promise,
washed Johnny’s Mustang
every weekend. Brenda Whitson
taught me how to French kiss
in her basement. Sundays
we went to ten o’clock Mass,
dipped hands in holy water,
genuflected, walked down
the aisle and received
Communion. Cleon Jones
got down on one knee, caught
the last out and the Mets
won the World Series.
Two white-gloved Marines
rang the bell, stood
on our stoop. My father
watched their car
pull away, then locked
the wooden door. I went
to our room, climbed
into the top bunk,
pounded a hard ball
into his pillow. My mother
found her Bible, took
out my brother’s letters,
put them in the pocket
of her blue robe. My father
started Johnny’s car,
revved the engine
until every tool
hanging in the garage
shook.
–from Rattle #25, Spring 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle
April 26th, 2011
Cullen Bailey Burns
WE JUST WANT IT TO BE HEALTHY
Here is the little bomb. We call it baby,
all mouth and potential. We do not speak
of disappointments—no one to strap it on yet
and cross the border, the demilitarized zone
of our foyer. The neighbors coo at it, rub
the tops of its dimpled hands with their thumbs
and say, “give me a smile.”
We think about schools and such, of course.
But at night when we lay our plans
it always kicks its feet from the bassinette
in the corner of the room, central to everything,
central to some final detonation.
–from Rattle #25, Spring 2006
2007 Neil Postman Award Winner
April 25th, 2011
Review by Jeannine Hall Gailey
THE ALCHEMIST’S KITCHEN
by Susan Rich
White Pine Press
P.O. Box 236
Buffalo, NY 14201
ISBN 978-1-935210-14-6
2010, 06 pp., $16.00
www.whitepine.org
Susan Rich’s third book, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, contains, as you might expect given the title, some lovely sensual poems about the kitchen and food as metaphor; it also addresses art, aging, and the poet’s acute empathy for students, strangers, lovers, and the crowds that surround her. Her poems start with the home and range the reaches of the imagination; the three sections, “Incantation,” Transformation,” and “Song,” begin with prayer (“Different Places to Pray,”) travel through the life a female photographer from the past, and end in a poem of praise to small things (“Letter to the End of the Year”).
The beginning of the poem “Chanterelle” introduces the connections the author makes between the beauties of food and the beauties of language throughout the book:
Perhaps consider poetry
a gourmet grocery shop,
endless pyramids of
shape-shifting fruit:
persimmon, star flower, pomegranate–
The first section follows the author’s own imagination, through scapes of both art and nature, ice cream, tulips, and conversations with Hayden and Lorca. The middle section, which follows themes of food and female choices at mid-life, Rich evokes the life of Myra Albert Wiggins. She was a photographer from the 1800’s, in a series of poems that remind us of the work, the rebellions involved in acts of creation by a female artist from a more difficult time, her small acts of defiance. Rich’s persona poem in the voice of Myra Wiggins’ husband, “My. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement,” is both humorous and endearing, one of the best in the section.
Everyone knew she was in love
with her own life: bareback rides, opera singing,
and the New York artiste nights. But I expected
to live a little, too.
The third section draws us back into the artist’s imagination. While her second book, Cures Include Travel, was concerned with place–Rich’s international travels, her work with the Peace Corps and with her students from lands as far flung as Somalia and Afghanistan– The Alchemist’s Kitchen stays closer to hearth and home. Rich’s current hometown, Seattle, shows up as a recurring character in the book, although the speakers are often lost in reverie of distant lands. In “The Idea of Ice Cream on Alki Beach” (a nod to Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West,”) the speaker muses that “A taste of dark chocolate or true pistachio/ suffice for travelers from Dubai or New England.”
Her poems also address the lost: lost men in “You Might Consider…” (“how my long life of losing men/could create a new international sport”), children that remain unborn in “The Never Born Comes of Age,” even lost customs, like the drawing back of the velvet curtain at movie theaters in “The Lost.”
The poems I liked the most in the book were the most intimate, like “At Middle Life: A Romance” and “Refrain of the Woman Who Has Lived Too Long Alone,” both of which address, in different ways, the trickiness of romantic expectations and longings of the heart. From “At Middle-Life: A Romance:”
Let love be imminent and let it be a train;
let it arrive at dawn, its whistle whiskering the air—
all brightness and verb…Let love be a breakfast
of crème cakes, pomegranate juice, a lively Spanish torte.
This is the kind of book you want to linger over and savor, as Rich’s poems bring the reader into a circle of awareness: to the flavors, the undercurrents of poignancy in the familiar and the exotic, in the world around them.
____________
Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Rattle. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.
