UTOPIA MINUS
by Susan Briante

Ahsahta Press
1910 University Drive
Boise, ID 83725
ISBN 978-1934103197
2011, 83 pp., $17.50
ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu.

Utopia Minus, the second collection of poetry from Susan Briante, takes as its inspiration the throwaway landscape of postmodern America: a boarded up Sunglass Hut, a cell-phone mast, gas station canopy. Briante, coolly observant and dissatisfied, searches for something of the eternal and metaphysical in public restroom scrawl and roadside vegetation.

And the potential for deeply affecting verse is palpable. These poems dare to ask why humans feel empty in the comfort of development, and how to live with the knowledge that development must decay. It is an ambitious and commendable inquiry, but Briante never finds an appropriate balance between sincerity and snark (“O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!”) to give her imagery the strength to work as social comment. The collection’s strongest poems are deeply nostalgic, but the reader is never sure of what. “There are no great cities left in America,” she writes in “Mid-State.” But for which great American cities of the past are we to yearn? She writes about General Sherman’s army raining fire and death in Georgia, and the horticultural finery of Robert E. Lee’s plantation house with some wistfulness. American Indians and Jamestown colonists give way to strip malls and strip clubs, but none of it comes to signify much more than a lazy afternoon rainstorm in the Metroplex. In “Short Lines,” Briante writes that “All the great metaphors have been taken,” and the reader is inclined to think she believes it.

The book, a physically gorgeous paperback from Ahsahta Press, is divided into three numbered sections separated by six open letters, written in margin-justified prose, to such figures as the Surgeon General and the President of the United States. In her memo to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, she recalls that “Lifting Farid’s face from my hair to watch him come this morning was the best of the day.” Farid is her husband, and a poet himself. “Farid and I have $15,000 in savings, $40,000 in debt”; inconsequential personal details like these undermine the collection’s purpose, and distract from the struggle for universal meaning that the poems chronicle.

It would be a mistake to discount Briante’s sharp eye for the image. Some lines in the collection are nothing short of astounding. She assures the reader in “I-35” that “A Georgia moon can strip color from the sky, turn a whole landscape into its still-wet negative,” a succulent image for its being so textured and visual. “In the hard soil of childhood, God was everywhere: in pitted sycamores, a vibrating clothes line, in fireflies hung still as lanterns from a Japanese maple”; when she conjures images as salient as these, there can be no question that Briante is a poet of real invention and inspiration. It would seem that Utopia Minus suffers not from a lack of zeal on the part of the poet, but from its over-ambition.

These poems, at their best, have moments of genuine resonance. At times, the beautiful imagery confronts the reader and asks what is gone wrong with the soul of America, why “We are trying to read a dirty world in structures of kinship, in gutted water heaters, in hills of plastic garbage bags.” But Briante can’t have it both ways: either the crumbling infrastructure and listless, quiet tragedies of postmodern society matter in the same way as the mythic history she exalts, or the cataloging of suburban minutia and its various boredoms and anxieties is mere self-absorption–with less poetic meaning and purpose than graffiti on an overpass.

____________

Nate Friedman is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University, and his poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and storySouth.

TALKING WITH STANLEY KUNITZ
by Juanita Torrence-Thompson

Torderwarz Publishing Company
P.O. Box 671058
Flushing, New York 11367-1058
ISBN 978-0-9652892-3-8
2012, 78 pp. $14.95
www.PoetryTown.com

In Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s latest book, Talking with Stanley Kunitz, her title poem describes a woman who attends a poetry reading, then has a serendipitous experience–an extended private conversation with Kunitz, the great poet. The poem, written with profound simplicity, ends with these lines:

She filled her mind with
Diamonds.
Every syllable glistened.

This same summary is appropriate for Torrence-Thompson’s book, for the title poem opens the door on a panorama of eclectic poetry, and indeed, every syllable glistens.

The book is divided into four groups of poems: “Talking with Stanley Kunitz”–30 poems, “Ellington Concertos in the Key of Vermont”–17 poems, Traveling on the Road with Dr. Martin Luther King”–10 poems, and “Driving Robert De Niro–Sestinas”–9 poems.

The 66 poems in this volume take the reader on a roller coaster ride of human experience and emotion—from the anticipatory climb toward exhilarating heights of love, of both nature and fellow humans–agape, eros, phileo, and storge (family love)–to breath-taking plunges into disappointment, sorrow, and loss (tsunamis, trapped miners, the death of Martin Luther King), to a plethora of exciting, unexpected curves into reflection, irony, mystery, and triumph, and frequent quick surprising dives into humor. This book will leave you breathless and wanting to ride again.

I enjoyed every poem in this book, but I had favorites in each section. In the first section, in a poem titled “Teenager in London’s West End,” there’s an incident about a teenager who by chance meets Orson Welles walking on the street with a beautiful young woman. She works up courage to ask for his autograph. He agrees to give it, but she can’t find a pen in her purse—

I quickly scrambled for a pen. That is, I tugged
and prodded, glancing frantically at Orson Welles
waiting patiently, while this starstruck slip of an
American girl looked for a pen, a pencil or even
an eyebrow pencil. Exasperated, I finally said,
“Do you have a pen, Mr. Welles?”
“No,” he said. Then he took the young woman’s hand
and walked away, while I stood there in Trafalgar Square
starstruck and dumbstruck in the velvet London night.

This writer has the ability to take you with her into situations and experiences with words and phrases that draw the reader into the moment. I love the comment “or even an eyebrow pencil.” With that small phrase, the poet captures the desperation and frustration of the moment. Haven’t we all been there? This poem struck my funny bone, yet it also left me feeling the disappointment the poet must have felt at this missed opportunity.

Fascinating titles like, “Under the Pomegranate Sky” have equally fascinating lines that leap playfully from the whimsical to the mundane, from “A wrinkled day/ With kitty-corner folds” to “Quaker Oats/ Boiling in the pot at sunrise” and “The canker in your mouth/ That wouldn’t go away/ Although you gargled and swished/ Until the 4th of July.”

Torrence-Thompson takes everyday experiences and magically turns them into special events. In her poem, “Turn Down the Sun,” readers meet Jeb Tompkins, who lives “Down the clay road/ Near Tompkin’s old barn” and who was “meaner than/ A fox on a trampoline,” and “Jeb’s new wife Laurel Lee” who was “Always putting on airs /Trying to be different/ From us plain folks.” The poem goes on to reveal the narrator as a nosy neighbor who uses a pair of binoculars to keep track of her interesting country neighbors. This curious spy concludes, “It’s none of my never mind./ I’d best get to the canning./ Can’t wait to hear the gossip/ Tonight at Johnson’s barn dance.”

In “Litany of a Wife,” Torrence-Thompson tells the poignant story of a trapped miner in the voice of an anguished wife who waits for her husband’s rescue. With her life “now surrounded/ by coal-black walls,” she thinks of all the ordinary things that become so precious when life is on the line. We hear agonized cries from her desolate heart as she waits for news of her husband. Like all who grieve, the woman focuses on small irrelevant details to keep from dealing with the enormity of the situation. While thinking how glad she is to have given him a good breakfast, she snaps to the fact that his breakfast is unimportant now when what he needs most is fresh air to breathe.

Lord, why am I thinking about food
when we have to worry about them
getting enough fresh air and hope
the explosion did not block his way
out of the labyrinth and that he was
not crushed in the black abyss.

In the first section were several poems about Little Neck Bay, and I found myself wanting to go there. The “bay” poems were among my favorites. It’s difficult to choose an excerpt; each stanza is exquisite and begs to be quoted. The third and fourth stanza from “Afternoon on Little Neck Bay” will give you a small taste of the bay poems:

I imagine myself charmed
by long-necked cormorant plying
the lapping waves at dawn. I’ll rest my head
upon the satin shore while silver moonbeams
inhabit my mind, and a nightingale perches
upon the black locust to lull me to sleep,

and I dream the bay and I
could stay here forever and ever
and ever.

The poem “Snowflake” proves that a poem does not have to be long to be effective. The stark simplicity of this poem is as perfect as the snowflake it describes, and although the tiny snowflake melts in the poem, it continues to hug my mind:

SNOWFLAKE

I watched a snowflake
fall and hug a wall
I blinked, and then
it wasn’t there at all

In a delightful poem “Cinnamon Day” I joined the poet sitting in an Italian restaurant, watching other patrons, and dreaming of exotic adventures until her food arrives. At the sight of the food, she is thrust into the immediate need of hunger, and her dreams melt like snow. Who among us has not experienced such as this? Our strong physical appetites in a temporal moment trump our long desired dreams and aspirations.

Italian bread was set
Upon a white linen tablecloth

…

She studied a painting
Of a young, blonde woman,
In a wide white hat
Legs crossed
Aboard ship with a collie

For 30 seconds she wished
She were the woman in the
Painting on an adventure
To the Taj Mahal
Ancient Acropolis
Or to the African tundra

Minestrone soup and
Hot antipasto arrived
Thrusting her into the moment
Melting her thoughts
Like snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro

In the second section of the book, “Ellington Concertos in the Key of Vermont,” the poem “Echoes from the Mountaintop” takes the poet back in time to a mountain hamlet, horse-drawn carriages, and her mother’s loving echo from the mountain peak. The poet lifts her hand into the air, almost touching the amber sky. I can feel with the poet the longing for less technology and impersonal efficiency and more warmth and personal attention. In this mountain hamlet the poet speaks of a general store on the town green where “Proprietor and clerks are pleasant/ and helpful while the town gentry/ hold doors open for tourists and writers/ making us feel welcome.”

This same longing for a simpler life and more peace and quiet pervades many of the poems in this section. In “Cracked Ceiling in a New England Country House”

A poet rhymes her verses
stacking them
with harsh metaphors
mocking the world
line after line

Nostalgia and enduring love clings to the stanzas of “Man and Woman in Vermont”:

They sit in the rose-colored
dining room…

coifed ivory hair
framing a weathered face
Hazel eyes engage
He smiles, leans forward for the salt
which he sprinkles on his broccoli…

A warmth emanates from them
like two cast iron stoves
plucking African violets on a scorching safari

In “Wind-Blown Thoughts” the poet “sits on a maple stump/ waiting for inspiration…She wonders why she is here/ Waiting for inspiration…Waiting to put cursive curliques/ On recycled paper.” She concludes it is “Time to speak out, be herself/ Time to show the world her mettle/ Time to write mellifluous thoughts/ Spilling onto parchment.” These “wind-blown thoughts” sum up the desire of poets and writers everywhere.

Near the end of the book among the sestinas, I found another poem about Little Neck Bay that I like best of all the bay poems. Although I’ve never been to Little Neck Bay, reading Torrence-Thompsons poems, especially “Falling in Love with Little Neck Bay” made me fall in love with it too. Here are a couple of stanzas from the sestina that took me there:

Blue, green, yellow bouquets
entice romantic love.
It is a honeymoon for my eyes
feasting on pristine Little Neck Bay
at high tide, when birds
take wing and prance on emerald shores.

Smoothly sculpted rocks pepper the shore.
Nature flings her bouquet
which spirals into the air, while birds
soar through teal blue skies with love,
tap dancing on Little Neck Bay
on a warm summer day. My eyes

scour the jade green landscape for other eyes
but I am alone on shore
watching boats ply the cerulean bay

Every poem in this volume is worthy of an individual critique, but space does not permit a full review of each individual jewel that fills this jewel box of a book. Besides if I shared every poem here, you would have no need to read the book, and you do need to read this book, and you will want to read it again and again. Juanita Torrence-Thompson lives up to her reputation as an important American poet.

___________

Valerie Martin Bailey is a poet and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She is the editor of three poetry anthologies: Inkwell Echoes, the San Antonio Poets Association anthology, The Dreamcatcher, the anthology for the Laurel Crown Foundation, and Encore, the anthology of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She serves on the Executive Board of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies as 2nd Vice Chancellor. A Councilor for the Poetry Society of Texas, she has won their two highest awards: The President’s Award and the Hilton Ross Greer Outstanding Service Award. She has chaired two state poetry conferences and one national poetry conference. She has served as the guest poetry editor for the San Antonio Express-News and is an associate editor of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry and Art Magazine published in San Antonio, Texas. She is in demand as a judge for state and national poetry contests and has judged for the state societies of: Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Utah, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and many others. She has been Poet Laureate of the San Antonio Poets Association eight times and has won their Poetic Excellence Award six times. She was recently one of twenty-one poets nominated in the city’s search for a Poet Laureate to represent the entire City of San Antonio.

DRASTIC DISLOCATIONS
by Barry Wallenstein

NYQ Books
Old Chelsea Station
New York, NY 10113
2012, 221pp., $18.95
ISBN 978-1-935520-43-6
www.nyqbooks.org

Drastic Dislocations is a selection of poetry from Barry Wallenstein’s six previous collections–from Beast is a Wolf with Brown Fire (1977) to Tony’s World (2009)–and includes more than sixty new poems. The selection is a shrewd one, exhibiting the poet’s peculiarly skewed and entirely unpredictable vision of contemporary life.

From poem to poem, stanza to stanza, Wallenstein’s tone shifts smoothly from robust to restrained, jubilant to jaundiced. He is a master of the almost invisible transition, the seemingly effortless metamorphosis of meaning and mood. He writes as vividly about the simple splendor of a summer day as he does when evoking what Delmore Schwartz described as “the famous unfathomable abyss.”

If existence is an abyss, it can best be fathomed, for Wallenstein, with family, good company, sensual experience, and, of course, the poet’s beloved jazz. (Many of these poems have been performed publicly, with live jazz accompaniment.) With its elastic inflections, Wallenstein’s verse is full of grace notes and blue streaks and surprising sideways turns into dreams of despair and cold-eyed self-assessment. He portrays pain authentically–which is to say, painfully–but also writes movingly about that most artistically unfashionable entity: human happiness.

Many of the poems in this volume are affirmative, full of an optimism that feels equal-parts European and American, simultaneously measured and carefree, open to every sensation, made buoyant by the bliss of infinite possibility. Whereas in his early work, one gets a sense of a poet who does not love quite enough, in his most recent verse Wallenstein seems to possess within him inexhaustible affection.

He writes most tenderly about his family. “Ballad,” a conversation between the poet and his deceased mother, is especially accomplished:

What are you doing my darling son?
I’m sitting in this boat, dear mother.
And where is your boat my son, pray tell?
At sea in the distance, my mother.

The poem, with its melancholic reverie, its intermingling of past and present, child and adult, question and answer, memory and dream, is simple and savagely stirring. The nursery-rhyme form carries the reader a long way, but the underlying sense of loss and anguish takes one further still.

A similar sequence in “Tony to His Mother” includes this invocation:

Mother, if you can see me,
imagine a well-carpeted iceberg,
thick enough for an eight day week.
And I’m alone on it
in a very comfortable chair –
a Morris design.
And we’re drifting out to sea,
the berg, its luxuries and me.

This stanza makes apparent many of Wallenstein’s skills: a commanding, unforced, authentic voice; a sharp wit and unexpected turn of phrase; a strange blend of boisterousness and resignation; the gentle, even restrained, specter of sadness; the almost reflexive movement between the abstract and the exact.

“Father at 85” is equally poignant and probing. The poem’s final line–“He still wants more.”– registers like a jolt of electricity. It is as powerful a refrain as Philip Levine’s “You can have it” or Frost’s “Provide, provide!” or the words that close out Delmore Schwartz’s “America, America!”: “More: more and more: always more.”

It seems fitting to follow Wallenstein’s family, his children, their history, from inception to adulthood, through the inter-leading rooms that form the house of this book. Here is Wallenstein in “Four Weeks to Birth”:

Our genes are hiding in the belly of a fish
in the skin of a belly
in the belly of a fish
floating glyphs
micro-hints of dancing ghosts.

In “Jessie Beforehand,” he describes his daughter’s fetus, which “swims in the famous lucidity / of mother’s love and our confusion.”

Wallenstein’s verse veers, too, between admirable lucidity and not always artful confusion. There are times–most frequently in Tony’s World–where he exhibits a tendency toward unnecessary abstraction. In these instances, his jazz métier begins to feel less like an asset and more like camouflage for cryptic sentiment. But it is possible to be both jazzy and precise, both cryptic and exacting.

The titular protagonist of Tony’s World is an elusive alter ego, reminiscent of the Henry of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. Tony is part hipster, part hustler, part self-hater, part self-infatuater, part cynic, part romantic. He is wholly compelling and his voice comes alive on the page. At once urban prophet and holy fool, Tony is deliciously defiant and defiantly himself–he is Wallenstein’s most memorable lyrical conceit.

Wallenstein shares some of Berryman’s gifts: the structural formality counterbalanced with a conscious restlessness; the manner in which daily experience is refracted through a lens of absurdity and intemperance; the relentless pathos; the tempering of idleness and self-indulgence with something close to existential panic; the inspired zigs and zags; the peremptory serve-and-return delivery of set-ups and punchlines. Here, for example, is Berryman in The Dream Songs:

Henry rested, possessed of many pills
& gin & whiskey. He put up his feet
& switched on Schubert.
His tranquility lasted five minutes.

And here is Wallenstein in Tony’s World:

Tony reads the news
smokes a joint
bites his lip, spins
and goes out to see the stylist
to have his hair turned red.

Perhaps surprisingly for a poet who has spent most of his life in Manhattan, some of the finest poems in Drastic Dislocations concentrate on the country rather than the city. Wallenstein rarely romanticizes nature, nor does he attempt to desensitize or demolish it. He is attentive in an unpretentious manner, aspiring toward understated Impressionism and gentle self-expression. The marvellously meditative early poem, “A House in the Mountains,” celebrates simple pleasure and a lovely calm, as its speaker spends hours “watching a valley / move through color and into the dark.” The naturalism in later poems is poised between classical evocation and a mordant, modern wit.

Elsewhere in the collection, Wallenstein frames his verse within the Brownean dramatic monologue, subverts fairy tales and simple rhyme, and re-makes myth. He excels at interrogating the intersection between the earthly and the outward-bound. Memorable poems include the wonderfully wild “Roller Coaster Kid,” and “A Turn of Events,” which feels like Robert Frost by way of Sam Peckinpah.

Wallenstein writes candidly about “the gathering grace of–going on.” Whereas many poets become weary with age, Wallenstein appears to feel both freed up and fired up, experimenting with form and unafraid to explore life’s pleasures and perils. His best poems are powered by an incantatory groove, amplified by conceits that are as poignant as they are witty and deft. Drastic Dislocations demonstrates the consistently high standard of his work these past thirty-five years.

Whether one is a longtime admirer or engaging with Wallenstein’s verse for the first time, this is a vibrant and valuable volume.

____________

Roy Robins was formerly the online and associate editor of Granta magazine. Prior to that, he edited New Contrast, South Africa’s oldest literary journal. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Cape Town..

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT
by Paul Hostovsky

Main Street Rag
PO BOX 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
ISBN 978-1-59948-303-0
2011, 90 pp.,$14.00
www.mainstreetrag.com

Journeyman poet Paul Hostovsky is lucky that Major League Baseball doesn’t drug test poetry. The piss in his collection, A Little in Love A Lot, is full of steroids. His poems begin so easy and innocent, but then the juice kicks and Hostovsky plugs in another amp. In the sonnet “Pop Flies,” two buddies hit pop flies to each other. A bully comes along, walking his Doberman Pinscher:

He asks me gruffly for a turn at bat, and the Doberman
growls…silently surrender
the bat and ball. A wind dies on the schoolyard.

He tosses the ball up, swings at the exact second
that the Doberman, sniffing a game, jumps for the ball
and catches the bat in his head—suddenly there’s blood
everywhere, the Doberman’s seizing, dying…

What happens in the schoolyard tends to happen in the bedroom–a rumbling before each poem transforms choir boy into werewolf. Hostovsky skillfully uses both personalities, the night and the day of himself, to cut through the world’s barriers in order to feel empathy. He writes: “The way out/ isn’t under or/ over or around/ or even through./ It’s with. With/ is the only way out.”

Make no mistake, these are not dark alley poems, but Hostovsky’s fears of dying unloved and alone shade the Wonder Years neighborhood of these ballads, rants, and comedies. For most of us the great abyss is only the shallow grave. Hostovsky’s is the Grand Canyon. If you squint you can see him at the bottom working a shovel, digging the hole deeper. When he reaches Hell he keeps on going, laughing at times, yelling out his love songs: “the background music…/ so loud it was in the foreground.”

These urgent poems of desperate, funny, compelling observations are placated by the metaphor of love and sex in the author’s quest for empathy. True connection between spouses, lovers, friends, neighbors, demented aunts, fathers and sons is almost impossible for Hostovsky, in spite of an otherworldly harmony teasing him at every jagged turn. Porcupines mate after all. So do elephants. Even a turkey buzzard will raise its feathered hem and wink for love.

Move over Woody Allen. In “Love and Death” a couple makes love “on her all-encompassing couch” and afterwards, sipping tea, the speaker volunteers, “I love sitting here opposite you in our underwear,/ talking about death.” Hostovsky is just warming up. “I assert there really is no death, there is only// life, which has no opposite because/ it is all-encompassing.” His lover then tells the story of a relative dying of pancreatic cancer, three months of the kind of pain no one else could bear for three hours. The speaker gives her “a peck” and goes “into the kitchen to make more tea.” There, he watches the flame for three minutes waiting for the water to boil.

The characters in Hostovsky’s poems look out the same window but witness very different versions of life. Agreements are rare, polite arguments are plenty. People seem to work out a system of taking turns being right and wrong, giving love, receiving it. “The Debate at Duffy’s” begins: “She said that sex was a yearning of the soul./ He said it was a very compelling argument/ of the body.” The two argue the length of the baseball game being played on television while filling and draining their cups until she wins “in the bottom of the ninth.” Another poem, “Kiss,” takes place on a train “heading south/ all the seats/ facing north/ like the meeting/ of east and west/ our heads turning slowly/ on the headrests/ towards each other/ like two completely/ different ways of life/ coming together.” The poem ends with the suggestion of kissing: “exchanging aloft/ the moist and crumpled/ messages”–of our lips, Hostovsky wisely lets the reader suppose.

Opposites might attract, but they also might blow each other’s brains out. “We are all attracted to suffering/ and repulsed by it, too./ This doesn’t make the world go around exactly./ It isn’t a law of physics technically./ But it may have something to do/ with the relationships of bodies/ in the universe.” “Cholera” parodies magic realism. A lover has read Love in the Time of Cholera whereas the speaker can’t get past fifty pages without dreaming of cholera. He says, “I think cholera is one of those words, that,/ if divorced from its meaning, would make a beautiful/ name for a girl. Like Treblinka.” The lover “gave me a pained look in the dream then, and I wondered/ if it meant you didn’t agree with me, or if it meant/ that what you were eating didn’t agree with you./ Either way, it was plain to see that you were suffering.”

Hostovsky modulates this contrary world of apartness between intimates by offering several poems which convey the resemblances between strangers. In “Waiting Room” a woman with a portable oxygen tank stands in front of the exotic fish tank: “The woman looks like the fish/ with her bulging eyes and her yellow rain coat.” In “Uncanny”:

Bob Dylan in his late 60’s
looks a lot like my mother.
It’s partly the nose,
Partly the big hair.

Hostovsky understands that gesture is essential to holding the doubtful reader at bay. He’s made a career out of it, working as a sign language interpreter. One of the hearing, his is a blended family of a deaf partner, and one deaf and one hearing child. Perhaps this experience is why a young speaker doesn’t just raise his hand for emphasis, he holds his “palm up in the air like one who is trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not it has started to rain.” Likewise, the co-ed in his German class has a charming defect: “I whispered Ich liebe dich into her umlaut—that pair of moles on her left earlobe.” Such fantastic detail and kinetic gesture would rival that in any silent movie. They keep the poems moving too quickly for the reader to dare jump off. It’s best to just hang on for the climax. Some poets like Billy Collins will gently lay down a reader in the soft bed of a poem’s ending and perhaps give the reader’s toe a wiggle pinch. Hostovsky often will leave us lying in a ditch, dashed and wrecked with enervating surprises. His brilliant seduction begins when we’re just coming-to after an unexpected turn. Hostovsky weaves the abstract and the concrete when we’re most vulnerable. In “Tree Poem” a father sits in a tree contemplating suicide after a day at work. He does this every day when he arrives home. After twenty lines of deliberation, “he climbed down from the tree in the car in the garage/ every time, and walked back into his life with a few/ leaves and twigs still sticking to his head.” Sticking. Nice, very nice.

“Miracles” also weaves the abstract, but also is one of those rare wildcards Hostovsky sometimes deals which explain the greater sum:

Spiritual texts are the most boring in the world.
None of them mentions a bicycle,
or a ferris wheel, or baseball, or sea lions, or ice cream.
They just lump them all together into “the world.”
The “world of appearances.”The “world of illusions.”
You can walk through this world and not
believe it for a minute…
And when the doctor comes in with his numbers
which are your numbers, you can
not believe that either. You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ear, pool on the floor where your eyes
and his eyes have fallen. He won’t
mention the bicycle, or the ferris wheel which is
taking up a lot of room right now in the little
examining room where a sea lion has clambered up
onto the table and is barking, and the baseballs are flying,
and the vendors are hawking ice cream—because he can’t
see them. He can’t perform a miracle.

A Little in Love A Lot is Hostovsky’s miracle, because finally, the miracle is not about sea lions or feeling detached from a lover or dying. The miracle is language itself. These are poems about poetry, each of them an impossible glancing shot, salted with nods to the masters. Writing about a graveyard where he steals quarters off “Naughton’s tombstone” which are left there by descendants, Hostovsky is writing about stealing from traditional poetry, getting it how he can, “because I need them/ for the parking meters/ when I’m driving…Naughton has plenty/ and doesn’t drive anymore anyway.” Alone in a Burger King, Hostovsky remembers Rilke’s commandment about making art, and guiltily believes he cannot call forth riches from his experience. Quite suddenly a family enters, “and while their parents order they play/ duck duck goose, touching all the tables,/ and all the chairs, the girl behind the boy/ following him, copying him and laughing/ louder and louder, because it’s all so wonderful/ here at Burger King, which they seem to have/ all to themselves, except for one man in a booth/ smiling, writing something down on a piece of paper.”

____________

Barrett Warner’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Comstock Review, Natural Bridge, Freshwater, Quarter After Eight, and others. His chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face was published by Tropos Press.

FOSSIL HONEY
by Charles Atkinson

Hummingbird Press
2299 Mattison Lane
Santa Cruz, CA 95062-1821
ISBN 0-9716373-9-3
2006, 96 pages, $12.00
www.hummingbirdpresspoetry.com

Fossil Honey is the fourth collection of poetry by Charles Atkinson, who taught on the creative writing faculty of the University of California-Santa Cruz for twenty-five years before retiring in 2007. Among other awards, he has received of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize, the Stanford Prize, the Comstock Review Prize, and the Emily Dickinson Award.

Once and forever a Banana Slug, I was drawn to the book because of nostalgia for my daily hike through the redwoods to Kresge College and because I missed the slice of ocean view from our apartment in Family Student Housing. I never signed up for a class from Atkinson (so many professors and courses to choose from, and so little time), but after reading these poems, I wish I had.

Apostasy: if I could play an instrument well–a piano, a flute, a horn–would I write poetry? In western culture, music has the power of the minor key, the sound that exposes us. We’re vulnerable to certain memories. We have regrets. We wish and dream and want what can’t be given anywhere, by anyone. When language works this way, it’s a gift from the poet to those who can shut down the chatter of the world and listen. It’s a rare gift when poems take off the top of one’s head, and which poems those would be are, of course, subjective, as Emily would be sure to admit. But the poems in this collection reveal the human family and are personal and universal: we are all sons and daughters, and some of us are fathers and mothers, and some of us are lovers, husbands and wives.

The book is divided into four sections, each focused on relationships within the speaker’s family, and unfolds a coming-of-age narrative. This “growing up” does not have to do with years on earth but with facing responsibility for what life is.

Opening with “The Foolishness of a Map,” the book is a juxtaposition of mixed form that includes meditations, dream logs, the narrative, and the lyric–all serving to mirror the confusions, contradictions, and upheaval of a marriage that is over. The first poem, “Puer Aeternus,” works well as the introduction to the book and acts as its locus. The speaker is “[a]drift at a midsummer revel, its bonfire and/ cheer” and contrasts his past–“[y]ou were devoted to hearth and union—/ ancient role, to anneal you as a man”–with his present: “a drowsing boy turned toward the heat” of sexual desire and abandon. The “eternal boy” of Jungian archetype can be either positive (he’ll grow up; he’ll become wise), or negative (he refuses to grow up; he’ll always remain childlike in his approach to the world). In this poem, the lure of living forever as a boy is strong, “a beckoning zodiac/ in a dream that wants you never to wake—/ adored forever, love without limits at last.” The words “at last” create a world the speaker knows can never exist, but the dream of that world can suffice, for the time being, for the child-god.

What follows takes us out of this dream into the emotional realities of dismantling a family. Desire, grief, and longing haunt the poems, and we have glimpses into the characters in this drama and what they have done to bring about disillusionment. In “Fragmentary, ii. why,” the meditation foreshadows poems later in the collection that question what we must do in this life that too soon ends:

If you ask him–Why did you do it?–
he’ll say almost nothing, a cliché:
he’s dying too soon, he has to
say yes to whatever is left.

“Ring Ceremony” turns on its head the marriage rite of the exchange of rings; the husband and wife disband separately in their own rituals–“[s]he must have slipped it off in their room—/ after work, a shower—//forgot to put it back on;/ it was easy.” And the husband “holds/ the hand under cold water, soaps his knuckle/ to work the band free.” Years since I thought about what this felt like, the ring finger naked. Divorce, if you haven’t experienced it, is getting off a train in a foreign country you’ve never seen on a map. You don’t speak the language, you aren’t dressed for the weather, you don’t recognize the food. You wear a new label that sticks out of the neck of your coat. Atkinson fumbles around in this new place, and he helps readers remember its strangeness or sets them down in the station for the first time. The last poem in this section tells us more:

                                     Early summer alone.
The foolishness of a map. If only your life
were as clear as water on granite, if you
knew each plunge would take you where
you needed to go, you might begin again.

“Perfection Means to Hurt” moves the focus from divorce to the relationship of father and sons in the aftermath of divorce, but also explores how fathers live on in their sons, and how sons will grow to supplant their fathers. Again, as with the first section, no reliable maps exist for this journey, and the speaker in his need longs for the senex (in opposition to the puer) the Old Man, the wise one who can tell him what he needs to know to be a father, to be a man. The poems shift in tone here and show the opening into self-awareness. The father is beginning to understand his life, how he didn’t know how to show emotion to those he loved, emotion which means communication, which means this is what matters in human relationships. Atkinson has explored this idea before in other work, and the poems here recall Tony Hoagland (and others) who have also addressed the problem of men who consider “feeling” an “f” word and thus cannot or will not express emotion beyond anger. The great fear, of course, is of vulnerability. But Atkinson captures what is lost by this suppression in “Greeting Grown Sons,” a poem that most men have lived:

I used to study gestures
at the airport gates. This
is how the fathers do it:

clap a sunburnt arm
around a strapping shoulder—
one quick squeeze to skirt

the touch and silence—push
away and start the banter.
I know what’s expected.

but I’ve grown more impulsive
and wave my arms above
the crowd; I elbow forward,

strain, enfold his muscled
back without a word.
We rock back and forth,

eyes shut, a channel buoy
that cleaves the roiling current.
When we break I stammer—

At last…I’ve missed…ok?
Inadvertent croaks,
still, the tears surprise me.

The P.A. crackles, luggage
tumbles to the carousel.
All my father missed.

“Let Go” continues the exploration of family and serves to express love and trepidation regarding the mother. The poems frame young motherhood, aging, and death and reveal the mother’s mantra toward her son: “You can be better.” The poet now understands what this has meant, how the advice to encourage him has resulted in the opposite effect. He can never be good enough, can never meet her expectations. The poems continue to be self-revelatory but are never self-indulgent. They are the insights and sorrows of a mature man.

In “Grown Up,” the speaker faces his mother’s death when he has a birthday. Even if we are sixty when we celebrate our seasons, our mother or father, if we are fortunate to still have them, remind us of our place within our original family. Someone has said that we do not truly grow up until we have lost our parents. In this poem, the poet recalls the last card he received from his mother:

from her bed—a simple pen and ink, Canada geese
winging north–from a Longtime Admirer.
I was at the window. Thirty years and never
once had she said that, the treeline wavering,
my nose dripping—and I knew then how much
it would have helped to hear those words before.

Too late to tell her: all the years, and still I’d
never been quite good enough to make her glad.
Too late to chasten her, and maybe just as well–
by March I found what it meant to be
grown up in the world, no one left to blame.

So this is his understanding: In this life we are clumsy, dropping things, trying to get through the swamps of this uncharted land. We must forgive ourselves, forgive each other.

Poems for the poet’s father comprise the last division in the collection, “Reading the River,” as the poems come full circle back to their origin, the connection between boy and man, son and father. The poem that resonated with me–no, too inadequate a word–seared my skull, and (dare I use this word that shows such vulnerability?) my heart: “Avocados for My Father.” Very personal for Atkinson, very personal for me, and worth quoting in whole:

Diffident for years, he now tells perfect strangers—
This week I’ll be ninety!—amazing them, the way
he’d hoped. In honor, children and their children
arrive from other coasts, from their important lives,
convene at a long white table to celebrate a man for
what he did by avoiding harm—a childhood of hurt
he didn’t pass on. Here to witness the glacial
creep of generations toward the good—a raised fist
that doesn’t descend, the settling face across a table.

They jest at the awkward—neckties, jaunty toasts,
which fork for what—discourse on the soup, glazed
onions, steak and shrimp. Someone recalls lobster—
a picnic in Nantucket (one of them lugged avocadoes),
cherries from the Fingerlakes. They make the affable
chatter of those who choose to get along—seasons
and the tales of children.
                                            One of them, unsettled,
wants to tap a glass, rise and, face to face,
Thank you for your life, Old Man—I love you.
It would be indiscreet and spoil a genial meal.
He waits for the moment, longing to affirm it and,
diffident for years, he now tells perfect strangers.

Thus these last poems fulfill the promise of the book. Cycles can be broken. The poet has moved from the dream of life (its sweet and illusionary boy-song) to the more realistic promise of life: pleasure and suffering–faced and understood and expressed–have made him fully alive, fully human, fully grown. But there’s more here than one man’s journey to understand his life and the “fossil honey” of memory. The poems tell us again and again that we cannot take any of this for granted, that we have to say and feel and face what there is that makes this life worth its high price, the wages we must pay by our death. Don’t tell perfect strangers. Tell the ones you love.

Cherry Grove published Carmen Germain’s poetry collection These Things I Will Take with Me, and recent work has appeared in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and A Sense of Place, a Google Earth project featuring Washington state poets.

DREAM CABINET
by Ann Fisher-Wirth

Wings Press
627 E. Guenther
San Antonio, TX 78210
ISBN 978-0-916727-93-2
2012, 85 pp., $16.00
www.wingspress.com

Ann Fisher-Wirth, the author of three previous books of poetry, including, most recently, the book-length poem Carta Marina (Wings Press, 2009), returns to the individual poem in all its many forms in her latest collection, Dream Cabinet. Perhaps most stunning to me in this latest project is the breadth of subject material that Fisher-Wirth not only covers but covers well. She grapples with both the personal and the environmental and political, from her own family lineage to the BP oil spill. Through rigorous attention and self-reflection, she makes particular what is national and even global, and she opens individual experience beyond itself to the larger natural world whose cycles exceed the scope of any one life.

The book, divided into three sections, opens first with the prelude “Slow Rain, October.” In the poem, the poet takes her first of many steps outside of time, opting not for the mindless bustle of the day but for stillness: “Sweetness of not making the bed today, / not making the body today, not making / the life today.” Quiet and dissolution become their own kind of work, and the poet finds all that is familiar around her turned strange:

I die now for a little while: even the family photos
in the Welsh cabinet by the bed are strange to me—
parents marrying, parents aging, children small,
children grown, husband and wife
(that’s I) embracing—sixty years of family.

Meanwhile, “three white roses on the Welsh cabinet / open further, ripen, slacken, begin to bruise.” The roses are, of course, our poet too. She sees in the span of framed faces her own place in time, which is a realization of mortality and also the infinite to which we return.

Fisher-Wirth’s investigations into time and family continue in the first section, whose ordering works effectively as the poems journey backwards. We begin in 1982, with the poet traveling abroad with her second husband, all the while imagining “the family [she] broke / to be with [him],” and then we move to 1972, the poet reading Mann all day and suffering the California heat, knowing that her first marriage is ending: “One night she sits till dawn, the door is open, / crickets clamor in the lemon tree, / she is not reading now, just waiting.” Instead of following a narrative forward, then, we trace it back, and so the poems’ order mimics the experience of memory itself, how we carry the past with us, perhaps growing tired under its weight, even as we ceaselessly prod and try to explain it.

We take another step backwards in time with the resonant “1928. Girl Riding,” in which the poet imagines her mother on a train bound for her freshman year of college, being carried “deeper / into twilight’s beautiful estrangement.” The poem ends with a direct address to the mother, which is also a protest against time:

                                                             If you
get off the train you will become my mother,

so don’t, don’t, because then I will lose you:
ride forever through the tender night, as smoke
drifts around your carefully drawn lips and soft hair.

Impressive, again, is Fisher-Wirth’s ordering, as this poem of intimacy is followed by a very different kind of loss, which is the loss of never really knowing: “Heretic Narrative” reads, “[M]other, father, how little / I knew of your lives.” The poet is simultaneously connected to her deceased parents and held irredeemably apart. All the complexity of a lived life is present in these poems, and the multiplicity of emotional responses is held tensely open, never stifled in favor of one narrative.

Midway, the first section reverses its direction–having reached back, the poet now reaches forward to a grandchild, “dream-filled,” “her cells / a riot of growing,” who is, in the poem “Of a Photograph,” in the process of recognizing her own reflection perhaps for the first time. In “Family Gatherings,” too, the poet reaches to her own daughters, grown now, with “lines that are just beginning // to come around their mouths and eyes,” while she herself admits:

The power that will cast me

like a wad of leaves in the muddy river

is growing in me now. So many years I seemed
unchanging, so many years I ran through life.

Lines like this, honest meditations on one’s own mortality, one’s own self which will pass, mark some of the strongest and most poignant moments in the book, as in “Now Vow,” in which the poet admits, “The world makes you no vow. / Flies want what you offer.” In the end, then, what is there to do but enjoy the world: “The hay is white and golden in the wind. / The thistles, crowns of thorn, with light on every sepal.”

The second section is occupied by Fisher-Wirth’s long poem “Dream Cabinet,” written in eighteen sections of varying lengths and forms. The poem is, in essence, a series of observations, mediations, and protestations made during a summer stay on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. “Dream Cabinet” works much as a fulcrum in the book, continuing the first section’s investigations but also introducing the ecopoetical concerns that continue to gain importance in the third section.

The poem begins with the poet awakened by a nightmare, and as the title indicates, dreams and the dreamlike rhythms of the world–“the lip, lip, lip of the quiet water between the islands”–are crucial to the poem and function simultaneously alongside lines written against very real environmental devastation. Indeed, the poet is working through how she can rectify desiring peace and “the silence of myself” while living in a world in crisis:

Surrounded by trees and water, I want

to be writing of peace, want to be moving into that deeper
harmony where earth and sea and sky seep into, into,

every pulse of my blood. But I keep thinking
to write of peace right now is to be a tourist.

Fisher-Wirth is not afraid either to implicate herself or to say it like it is, and throughout the poem, there are many overt lines of protestation, such as when she aptly warns that “[w]e will tip // the planet past the healing point,” and that “death will be the kind one, yet so plenteous // are our gizmos there will be no silence, no darkness / even in death. The grave, a brightly lit parking lot.”

Such blunt, even instructive moments function as one kind of ecopoetry, but another equally important kind of ecopoetry is closely-paid attention, of which Fisher-Wirth is a master. “Dream Cabinet” traces out Fogdö’s specific northern beauty, where one can “watch the sky that never turns black // grow light again,” and the poet celebrates the specificities of this place–“soft Falun red of the ramshackle summer house / soaking up shadows,” “the scrotal sponginess / of puffballs, luminescence of chanterelles,” “the tight green pinecones [that] ripen like roses.” Most importantly, the poet still yearns to enter the landscape more fully, desiring “[t]o know this place in the fullness of its seasons. / And watch the light on water, day after day, // empty out my everlasting self-regard.” This attention to detail and this insistence on knowing one little space of the world better and better is, at its core, ecopoetry. So too is Fisher-Wirth’s emphasis on putting the self in relation to the grandeur of the larger, nonhuman world.

The third section continues the ecopoetical work of “Dream Cabinet,” relocating us to the American South and Mississippi in particular, where Fisher-Wirth has lived for many years. The section opens with “BP,” which sets phrases from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling January 2011 Report to the President against Fisher-Wirth’s own lines, revealing the fragility of a ecosystem in which a dragonfly scrubbing “its oiled face” can best be described as “filthy / iridescence” and pelicans “strain forward above the slick but / cannot rise.”

In addition to the destruction of the natural world and animal life, Fisher-Wirth also reveals the human cost of policies and actions that wreck the environment. In “Sweetgum Country,” for example, she writes of a student

burned by the sun
where pesticides sensitized his skin,
those years of his childhood, playing
in Delta cotton fields

and a Tallahatchie swamp where men and women “fish for buffalo, catfish, bass, / despite the fish advisories, the waters laced with mercury.”

Other poems in the third section are equally as political as Fisher-Wirth’s ecological poems. “Army Men,” for example, explores what war does to soldiers, including a student named Isaac, whose “eyelid twitches, small as a waterbug’s / ripples on still water,” and the poet’s own father, whose trauma she learned about only through her mother:

[M]y mother said, when she picked him up
at the Omaha train station, Christmas ’45,
she found him alone on a bench
at the far end of the room, huddled over,
head in his hands. When I asked her what was wrong
she said, If you don’t know I can’t tell you.

From here, the third section transitions, and the book ends with an incredible sense of both openness and fullness, which seem very much the result of being grounded in love and place. The poet, still vulnerable, still searching and prodding, is nonetheless at home. She is at home in her marriage in which, even during the “misery” of a fight, “this man and I are wedded at the marrow.” She is at home, too, in Mississippi where “[t]he scarlet vincas blanch and crumple” and “a strange peace rises.” She is at home even in “this old beadboard house / with its drafts and cracks and currents.” In “If Not, Winter—,” the poet writes of how, after surgery,

I have opened up my brace.
I have propped my betadine-yellow leg

and wrapped my swollen foot in cabbage leaves.
I lie here, simply breathing,
old wood of this house holding me.

Even in recovery, in pain and limited by crutches, the poet praises each element. She praises “the glacial knit of bone, / ebb of lymph, gradual shrinking of elephant skin.” She praises her husband who has cared for her and even “these bandages stuck to my knee” and, finally, “the seasons that slowly heal me.” It is this infectious attention to and appreciation of experience which makes Fisher-Wirth’s personal poems so much bigger than herself, leaving ample room for the reader to enter. She also rightly acknowledges a few pages later, in “Credo,” that, as wonderful as the world is to experience subjectively, it is much bigger than our individual lives:

But the cardinal, the birdsong, do not need you,
to pulse forward into the light. The peaches do not need you,

to swell and soften, dark with the sugars of summer.
Oh you can be the flesh their juices run down,
but you do not make the seed nor the earth it grows in.

Such lines are representative of Fisher-Wirth’s poetry, which celebrates the self and its value but warns us against putting all our stock in that self as well.

In “Over All a Mist of Sweetness,” the second-to-last poem, Fisher-Wirth writes of the “thousands of berries / these warm September days / [which] keep pushing forward,” “the little ones / lin[ing] up, still green, awaiting their turn / to ripen.” This image seems apt for so much of what Fisher-Wirth offers in Dream Cabinet. These berries are redemptive nature which pushes forward even as the earth is environmentally wrecked; these berries are also our lives and the lives of those who came before us and the lives of those who will inevitably follow. Fisher-Wirth has retold the oldest story of where we fit in time’s endless push, and she has done it beautifully well.

____________

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in such journals as Tampa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, and 32 Poems. She is the recipient of a 2010 AWP Intro Journals Award in poetry and was named a Ruth Lilly finalist in 2011. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Mississippi and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California.

I LIVE IN A HUT
by S.E. Smith

Cleveland State University Poetry Center
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44115-2214
ISBN 978-I-880834-98-5
2012, 62 pp., $15.95
www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives
alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.
-Terrance Hayes

A week before I read S.E. Smith’s I Live in a Hut, I got a phone call from the director of NYU’s Creative Writing Program offering me a full ride and a completely unexpected fellowship. Shocked, disbelieving, and euphoric, I attended AWP several days later feeling strangely lightheaded and buoyant—both of which are words that aptly describe Smith’s debut collection, a suite of poems that are more concerned with surprise, misdirection, and creative flair than they are with the humdrum, conciliatory, another-day-another-dollar mindset most of us use to get through a prototypical day.

I first opened I Live in a Hut on an American Airlines flight from Chicago back to Austin, which, if you can manage to re-create, is a reading environment for this book I highly recommend. Smith, who has been publishing quirky, Dean-Young-esque poems with titles like “The Pony of Darkness,” “Big Slutty Bear,” and “Becky Home-Ecky and Her Fourteen Boyfriends” for years now, refuses to take about 80% of any given utterance seriously. This results in a first collection that is equal parts farce, diary-esque reflection, and satirical wit. Consistent in her balancing of seemingly incongruent poetic approaches, Smith weaves the ironic, intensely personal, and outrageously hilarious together with a consistent declarative line that makes zany leaps while remaining syntactically careful and clean.

“Un Peu,” a poem bemoaning the French people’s inability to gain weight juxtaposed alongside one of Smith’s failed romances, evidences the poet’s unique ability to work in several registers at the same time (something that is highly admirable, as well as distinct, about her work):

I would like to swap some of my eternity for some
of yours. I don’t know how but I love you so it may
be possible and the French are fat at last. Finally
they are fat. They move slowly, like bears. Maybe now
they’ll leave us alone, maybe now we can get on with it.

I was particularly moved by many of the love poems in I Live in a Hut—finding it easy to identify with their detached, performative, going-through-the-romantic-motions voices because, like them, I felt equally removed from the girl I was currently seeing—the shelf-life of our short-lived relationship made painfully apparent by my upcoming move to New York City.

To throw a tangential, completely out-of-place monkey wrench in this otherwise serious review, I was emotionally compromised when I read I Live in a Hut—in love with a girl I couldn’t stay with after my move to New York City—and there was nothing I could do to change that cosmic fact except read Smith’s book and feel passionately sorry for the speakers of her poems, many of whom lament similarly failed romantic experiences—albeit from a distance, and with a degree of dispassion that I doubted but remained effective, in part because Smith’s poetry evidences how unfortunately elliptical, illusory, and highbrow contemporary poetry expects capital-l Love to be. Aware of this expectation, Smith takes an enormous (and successful) risk by putting romantic expectation on display–poking, prodding, and otherwise dismantling it in these poems, ultimately revealing the vulnerability and concern present in even the most “contemporary” voice.

Heaven forbid our great loves be cliché, and we write honest, unapologetic lines like, “It is getting / dark. I love you,” as Smith does at the beginning of “Sturgeons,” a poem that has more to do with failed romantic interactions (“I propose that we / move on from this place”) and their sexy, metaphysical fallout even before they are allowed to begin (“Deep down I suspect I am a clock-watcher / anxious for this beautiful moment to end”) than it does with sturgeons, the Caspian Sea, or the Ohio River—all of which dominate the surface of what I would argue is the most important, heartfelt poem in the book.

Speaking of hearts . . . I went over to my girlfriend’s apartment when I got back from AWP to try to salvage whatever version of our relationship I could and should have read her Smith’s poem “Happiness,” although I didn’t because I was already too afraid of losing her. It has one of the best opening stanzas I’ve read in quite some time, and served as a welcome distraction from my own failure at attaining happiness during the difficult weeks of What if? after AWP:

Briefly, it is possible. The rain shines down,
the bucket is ready. It makes a nice click,
the last snap on the jacket. It doesn’t have
to be a particular kind of jacket. But it has
to be November, and you must be at the zoo.

I felt more than a bit like the speaker in “Vertical Lake” as well when I left my girlfriend’s apartment later that night, our kissing (and not being able to stop) juxtaposed sharply with the verticality of my body, the rigidity of it, as I forced the car door closed and drove away:

Okay, bye,
I said. I have to get going.

I was dead. It was snowing.
I was going into the vertical lake.

Several days before this it actually did snow in Chicago, and we had texted each other back-and-forth sporadically during AWP, apologizing that we couldn’t play more active roles in one another’s increasingly distant lives (she was on the verge of opening a hip Austin wine and cheese bar that kept her working 60-hour weeks, and I was, obviously, at AWP, meeting NYU students and faculty and trying to decide whether or not I would commit to an MFA.)

Long story short, I did commit. And we did break up. And Smith’s I Live in a Hut remained a beautiful, heartbreaking book throughout this simultaneously necessary and difficult process. While Smith took “history lessons / from a West Virginian horse thief / named Dirk,” I gave two-stepping lessons to the beautiful Jewish/Spanish/French girl I would eventually have to step away from irrevocably—and without even having the ability to repeatedly hurt her, or be hurt by her, or get in our first epic fight (which the unexpected NYU acceptance prevented us from ever having).

“Already we are off to a terrible start,” Smith says at the beginning of “Beauty,” and I couldn’t agree with her more as I thought about all of the possible ways I could manipulate the girl I loved into moving to New York City with me—eventually realizing that to do so would mean acting similarly to the speaker of “Fuck You,” who repeatedly “takes exasperated measures” and “saves [her lover] for later,” comparing his body, with its oils and sugar-sweet taste, to “a pastry . . . in a [metaphorical] bag” of possessiveness.

I had to leave the girl I loved, and Smith’s book—with its insistence on finding grace and beauty in even the most awkward, unfortunate break-ups—helped me understand why. I didn’t want to, but doing so was part of the painful (though altogether necessary) process of fully letting go.

Like the anthropomorphized truth in Smith’s “Your Scrappy Truth,” I “insisted / on taking the high narrow road / out of town.” I simply couldn’t manipulate my girlfriend and ever expect to live with myself afterwards, so I got off the plane (having finished I Live in a Hut) knowing what I had to do, realizing I had to break up with her in order to shatter completely the expectation that she drop everything in her life to accommodate me and my dreams in New York City–where I would be a poet, if only a bad one, in a city full of people far more selfish, witty, and strong-willed, even, than me, and where our hypothetical break-up would probably be three to four times as messy, eight to nine times as heartbreaking, and still—even then—not hold a candle to the raw emotional core burning at the center of Smith’s remarkable first book.

While my Rattle reviews typically tend to focus on the poet rather than his or her audience, in this particular instance I wanted to make clear the connection between Smith’s work and my own life. While such a critical leap might at first seem taboo and/or unwarranted, I think framing this review with a personal narrative is something Smith herself would applaud—her poems being, at their roots, intimate portraits of human awkwardness, honesty, and confusion. I Live in a Hut is a beautiful, delicate, daring, exquisite first effort—whether you identify with my sappy break-up story or not—one that helped me see beyond my own field of vision with a clarity I didn’t possess before reading it. I hope that, in my future writing (and life off the page), I can be half as daring, quick, and imaginative as S.E. Smith is. At the very least, reading her work, I’m encouraged to try.

____________

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet and poetry critic from Llano, Texas. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Tar River Poetry, Front Porch, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Writers’ Bloc, Windhover, and elsewhere. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. His current writing project, County Lines: The Llano Poems, explores small-town life in the Texas Hill Country.

XICANO DUENDE: A SELECT ANTHOLOGY
by Alurista

Bilingual Review Press
PO Box 875303
Tempe AZ 85287-5303
ISBN-13 978-1-931010-72-6
2011, 145 pp., $16.00
www.amazon.com

Xicano Duende offers a summary of the poetic career of bilingual Chicano poet Alurista, with selections starting with Nationchild plumaroja (1972) and continuing to his tenth book of poetry, Tunaluna (2010). Published on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Floricanto en Aztlán, this collection is an inspirational exploration of the cultural and political issues that are essential to his personal language, which is also a people’s language.

Some of Alurista’s fluid, sinuous poems are in English, some are in Spanish, and some are a mix. In the 1970s in San Diego when Alurista was writing and teaching there, I eagerly read Floricanto en Aztlán, which has since its publication been assigned the label “experimental.” I place the word in quotation marks because in the Southwestern United States, it is natural for many to mix English and Spanish in a conversation or a sentence. The introduction by Rigoberto Gonzalez explores how Alurista’s poetry embodies the language of Aztlán and celebrates “the Chicano in all of us.” Alurista sometimes directs his polemic at highly specific targets, such as former governer of California Pete Wilson:

                           wilsonitis is an ingrown
                                    epidemic

Other poems are all about the lyricism:

                      abotona tu vientre, maja
easels b ready
                    to capture flight

…

cherish thigh
        hug torso
                        b one
        with duende within
discover
                    sun risa raza roja

Alurista also connects the personal and the political. One person’s demons are a reflection of an entire people’s struggles:

                  suicide is no longer a personal
                        choice

and in a poem about heroin addiction, he recalls:

                                                                i cook it ‘n’ i wash
            my dish. i cook not for myself. i cook for us cora, zón
            zón. zón. cora. zón. sleep at the wheel burping and
            bumping into police cars frozen in their black and white.

            …

                                                                                 revolution
            is somewhere awaiting to be awakened lovingly and
            mercilessly

In “ya estufas” Alurista calls for revolution:

                                         el cielo colorado
            witnessed a dusk
                                  of murals
                                      painted
            in the spirit
                           of the fallen
            brown dry leaves
                           of autumn
            las cananas en
                           la tarde
            aparecieron and
                           thousands
            of bullets
                           turned
                       to flowers

One of Alurista’s great strengths is his lyrical playfulness, which he enhances by switching languages as needed for sound and sense. For example in “ex-ostion” he begins by exploiting the sonorousness of Spanish:

            ex-ostión, no se diga tiburón,
                         and the shallow waters
            of shellfish para qué preguntar
            si la mariposa nació con alas

then switches to English for the high rhetoric of the conclusion:

                                       desirelessness
            cannot be purchased, invoked
                         or dreamed, falcons do
            not worry about the plunge

This mix of playfulness and seriousness also serves, in Alurista’s many political poems, to humble enemies of la raza and its anarchic freedom. In “convencido,” he concludes: “la sal sudor de nuestro pueblo acribilla cualquier bob osada.” Alurista’s poetry is embodied in and embodies his Chicano language, and Gonzalez appropriately calls Alurista’s puns intralingual rather than interlingual. Alurista’s poetry continues to inspire, and this anthology, with seventeen illustrations and a representative sample from all of his books but one, belongs in the libraries of all poets of the real and imaginary Southwest.

____________

Eric Howard is a magazine editor and former bilingual press editor who has published poetry in Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Plainsong, and The Sun. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the Writers at Work poetry workshop.

MAKE YOURSELF SMALL
by Michelle Brooks

The Backwaters Press
3502 52nd Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68104-3506
ISBN 978-1-935218-26-5
2011, 84 pp., $16.00
http://www.thebackwaterspress.org/

You might think of Michelle Brooks’ volume of poetry, Make Yourself small, as the lyric portrayal of Eminem’s Detroit, complete with trailer courts, suicide, rape, violence, death, and guns. The collection evoked a sense of toughness often associated with West Texas and Detroit. Yet the poems drew me in despite their consistently dark subject matter. What kept me reading was not only Brooks’ skillful writing, but the way she conveys a poignant truth about how we adapt to life by forging our unique response to its difficulty.

In the first poem of the book, “Chiggers,” Brooks writes of a time in childhood when she and a friend were warned by the friend’s father to stay close to the trailer because “a woman had been gang-raped four trailers over.” Of an exhibitionist in the neighborhood, she writes in “All Day You Hear Sirens,” “it was the same old story,/someone showing you something/you didn’t want to see, nothing/new.” The lines that follow sum up what I see as the overarching theme of the book, which is Brooks’ own response to the horrific situations portrayed in these poems: “and you think—how can/he stand it in the rain, pants/around his ankles? You shut/him down.” According to Brooks, you shut it down, you make yourself small, small enough to duck the punches life throws at you, small enough to not attract attention.

The bleak subject matter continues throughout the collection. In “A Stranger to Nothing” she writes of a failed marriage, saying of her ex-husband, “He was someone to do things with while/my insides rotted away with thought of my/rape years before.” In this poem, we see a glimpse of a secondary theme: how we integrate accepting–or rather, adapting to–the things we have been taught as children by adults. She goes on in this poem to write these intriguing lines: “You can’t get everything from one person./My mother said that. She didn’t even try and her/divided heart never healed.” In “Bedtime Stories,” Brooks writes, “Men hide under cars, slash a woman’s/tendons so she can’t run, my mother/said” and “we’d play a game before/bed—What would you do if?, each/scenario with just enough opportunity/to escape if you were smart and quick.” In a poem called “Late,” about a grandfather’s abuse of the grandmother, Brooks again demonstrates how childhood experiences create our adult responses. “I could hear yelling through/the trailer window, and nobody knew what/to do so we drove away and left her there/with the only man she had ever loved.” She goes on to write, “Even/then, I understood you couldn’t save someone/unless you were willing to crucify yourself.”

As if speaking to both herself and to her reader, Brooks sums up a potential response to these poems in “You Can’t See It in This Picture.” This is a poem about pain. It is also about what you cannot see in a photograph–or rather what you cannot, or choose not, to see in life’s experiences. In this case it is symbolized by a missing cheap tiara on the head of the subject. Brooks writes, “Linda Lovelace says if you watch/Deep Throat closely, you can see her bruises.” She ends the poem by inviting the reader to “come closer” and then “or don’t,” suggesting that if you choose to, you can look away from the pain. Brooks’ poems enabled me as a reader to look directly at them. Form—-even free form—-places safe boundaries around difficult subject matter in a way that allows the poet to safely verbalize the unspeakable. This is what Brooks does so well in this collection.

In poem after poem, she delves into the dark and seamy side of life; however, the collection is not about these topics, but about how we respond to life. It is also about how we can spend a lifetime trying to heal from a rape, the death of a parent, or from all the things we were wrongly told about the world when we are children. In “Kentucky Derby Day at My Aunt’s House,” Brooks ends by describing how the family argues over the best way to make a Mint Julep, a drink (the life) they all share.

Each year our family
argues about how to make them, each
year they taste the same. It’s a tradition,
my mother says, you can’t watch the Derby
without drinking at least one. It doesn’t matter
if the mint leaves are bruised or crushed, I can’t
drink enough of other things to get the tastes
of the drink we all share out of my mouth.

In the latter part of the book, Brooks continues to write on the subject of rape–“Tailhook,” “Day of the Dead”–and the scar it leaves. She has used poetry to adeptly explore this and her other topics. In reading her collection, I came to an understanding of how she has come to terms with the difficult subject matter and with the contradictions that abound in her life. Some poems worked better for me than others, but overall, she has done a good job of providing the poetic discernment that separates a simple retelling of sordid facts from work that has universal appeal. While there is Detroit-worthy grittiness in this collection that makes the poems interesting, there is also intelligence and compassion and even occasional humor. This prevents the book from being sensational, maudlin, or depressing, and renders it deeply insightful.

____________

Grace Curtis reviews poetry and expounds on the topic of poetry at her website :www.n2poetry.com. Her chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, 2010 was selected by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the Lettre Sauvage poetry contest. Her poems can also be found in numerous journals.

DIRT SONGS: A PLAINS DUET
by Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrom

The Backwaters Press
3502 N. 52nd Street
Omaha, NE 68104-3506
ISBN 978-1-935218-24-1
2011, 147 pp., $16.00
www.thebackwaterspress.com

Birds, friends, plants, events from the newspaper, walks, labor and family populate the poems in Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet. The two poets, Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrom, compose harmonizing melodies. Mostly free verse, the poems flow sequentially and can also be dipped into at random.

The poets know the places they write of: Nebraska for Hansen in Part One, South Dakota for Hasselstrom in Part Two. The collection starts with Hansen’s “Morning Fog” pointing out that, amidst pollution ad sprawl, “we’re all here now, in early fall walking/over Salt Creek, breathing the collective air, right under our noses.” Hansen and Hasselstrom ask the reader to pay attention, to bluestem, red cedar, opossum, swallow, and old friends. Their poems are simply titled, naming the subject they address, as in “Lettuce,” “Egg,” and “Autumn” or summarizing the poem’s event: “Lost in the City Again,” “Visiting the Nursing Home,” and “Ice Skating on the Dam.” The apparent simplicity defies the depth of feeling achieved. When Hansen writes that “all day the house as if holding its breath” in “My Granddaughter Sick” the reader feels the apprehension surrounding the feverish child while “the moon, a heavy saucer, reclines/pale and cumbersome above the treeline,/this chilled horizon brittle with bare limbs.” In Hasselstrom’s “Making the Best of It,” loss pervades a widow’s move. “In this village where/no one speaks my language,” she writes, “I live in a single room.” Throughout her section of Dirt Song, Hasselstrom addresses the making of a poet’s life. This poem concludes

I watch and write
compact words that seem
to form themselves in lines.
Paragraphs scale the walls.
On the tawny cliff before me,
I witness each day live and die,
and never calculate its whole.

In Hasselstrom’s “I Ain’t Blind and This is What I Think I See,” the speaker is driving the Interstate to a poetry teaching gig. She notices roadkill and trash, the hawk among it, and remembers images, words her father said, and The New Yorker who told her she couldn’t be a poet. Her poems take the reader deep into the past. “Valentine for My Mother” alternates between a Safeway shopping trip and a mother’s last days. Time waves, dropping linearity.

Tomorrow all the blooms
that do not sell will pucker
in the dumpster
brown as the roses whipped
by the cemetery wind
the day after my mother’s burial.
Cut flowers don’t last
I muttered to the mound
above her heart.

In “Finding Mother’s Jewelry,” the speaker wonders about the onyx, opal, rhinestone and coral she finds in a tin while the woman who once wore the pieces is “lain beneath the only stone she owns,/where her name is carved in granite.” The speaker decides to take the “hoard” of jewelry to Goodwill.

Hasselstrom’s poems snag time by pinpointing lives among the passing news. In “On This Day,” a “ragged little dog” dies on December 20th and the speaker notes historical events that occurred the same day: Gershwin’s birthday, a coal mine explosion, a ship’s explosion. “Faces flicker through my mind,” the poet writes, “all the people I have loved/who are dead on this day–/millions I have never known,/lovers, husbands, parents, children,/all dead and remembered or forgotten.”

“When a Poet Dies” showcases the best of the time travel and reflection on writing; the speaker swings between a “lesser” poet passing time and the death of William Stafford, a poet she admires. The refrain “when a poet dies” beats like a heart through the poem.

When a poet dies, no one lowers a flag,
or beats a muffled drum to the cadence
of the poet’s best-known elegy.
When a poet dies, no one leads a riderless horse
down the avenue, spurred boots turned backward.
No one shoots the poet’s typewriter beside the open grave,
tells the bees, frames the family photograph in crape,
hangs a black wreath on the door. Somewhere,
a publisher may nod and think Collected Works.

She brings to the poem’s end a “a mule deer doe stepping off a shelf of ice.”

Read in order, Hansen’s elegies in Part One set the reader up for “When a Poet Dies,” in Part Two. Hansen’s “Work” recalls a time when “we took care of the land; the land took care of us” and reminds that “all honeybees need is pollen and nectar, an unspoiled spring-/fed creek, the occasional gentle hand to encourage them on.” In “Early Walk, Late October,” Hansen’s speaker finds a doe, “its rear legs wrenched beneath” as “the string of traffic swerves, does not slow down.” The poem continues

Pawing her front legs, she struggles to lift the sack
of her body out of harm’s way, her brown eyes
huge in the oncoming headlights. Nobody’s fault.

How many times before, I think, she must have
chanced this clash of nature and development,
survived by the sheer luck of numbers. Late

October, and soon enough, the night will swell
with witches and brooms, clowns and monsters,
the chatter of youth, chill of the unknown.

There’s nothing I can do: crush of tires,
her 200 pounds. I turn and run. Trailing me,
a human-like sound crying out from the wind.

How little and how much a poet can do to gentle the world–that’s what the poems in Dirt Songs show. Poets, the lesser and the great, look at each day and address it. We write of deer, dogs, grandmothers, fathers, lovers, wars, news and breakfast. Like Hansen’s child protagonist in “Small,” every poet is, in a sense, a “small fry in a small town, making small/talk about small-time lives into the small hours.” The poems in Dirt Songs are mugs of drip coffee shared over a scratched table; they are not not tiny cups of cappuccino in a wi-fi cafe. They ask you to roll up your sleeves, stay awake, pay attention, and grab a pen.

____________

Alexa Mergen’s poems appear most recently in The Packinghouse Review, Quill & Parchment, and Verbatim. She lives in Sacramento and works with people locally and long-distance as a writing guide and creativity coach. Her website is: www.alexamergen.com.