ASSASSIN

All day we mock what
is beyond our touch
and at the end of the day
I drive thirty miles home
to sleep with a man
who doesn’t deserve
to live his life like a slave.
My children slake their own
thirsts hours away and I
watch videos of their childhood.
Outside, the pansies I have
yet to plant wither in October sun.
I am an American woman,
spoiled as last month’s gravy,
ripe as ground pork in a dumpster,
tethered by plenty,
undone by complacency
vivid as a severed hand.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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.

TO THE DAUGHTER I NEVER HAD

I saw you today at the playground.
You were wearing a little dress
that reminded me of all the dresses

I never bought for you,
all the sundresses and twirly skirts,
all the Hanna Anderssons.

You were on the swing, leaning back,
reaching up with your candy-striped legs,
as if to reinsert yourself

into an imaginary heaven,
into the realm of possibility.
You didn’t see me watching you

from a future in which you don’t exist,
but sometimes you smile at me
from the face of another man’s daughter—

a smile that contains all the mornings
we never baked bread together,
all the cartwheels you never turned,

all the stories you never told me
about all the things that never happened.
You are six, or nine, or fifteen, and always

as beautiful as I imagined, growing up
smart and graceful and strong, and I am glad,
and it breaks my heart

that you have become all this without me.
I have spent what would have been
your entire life breaking up

fights between the boys,
scrubbing the floor around the toilet,
trying to get them to change their underwear,

and knowing that I could not love anyone more—
not even you.
Perhaps someday you will understand

how it’s possible to regret
the life that never was, and still love nothing
more than the life that is.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

KNOWN

We can talk about my failure until the cows come home
Meaning, Baby,
It’s a fact
—Like how the health teacher told us about body types
Some girls, she said, will just be heavy
They could diet till the cows come home and still be heifers—
And how she laughed at her own joke
And how the fat girls started to sweat with shame
And I was skinny in that made of sticks way
That comes with being young
And I was skinny, but there were other girls
Who wore their bones like corsets
And fat girls with pretty fat girl faces who would do anything
To feel pretty and not fat
So I laughed—I laughed along
—I let you down,
Did I?
Of course I did—
This is something that you could have read in the leaves
Tea leaves gathered at the bottom of the cup
Leaves gathered in the gutter
Or written in the saliva words
I tongued across your stomach, your thighs, your trusting back
You were shown a thing or two a long while ago
—Remember that day our health teacher
Said those ugly words
And I laughed—
I laughed like the girl I was
And that should have told you something
That right there, should have told you a lot

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

REUNION
For Cheryl

For as long as I can remember
I’ve been an outsider
a stranger in my own heart
caught between the way it could have been
and the way it was.

You must have sensed me
thinking of you
in the birch trees on the mountain.
Or did you remember me
dreaming out your window
in the rain?

A hummingbird hovers
on the blossoms
of a giant saguaro
feasting on nectar.

You must have found me
thirsting in the desert
huddled under a paloverde.
Or did you hear me
weeping at the grave
beneath a cloudless sky?

When day becomes night
and we are held
in the twilight of not knowing
if it’s dusk or dawn
our dreams become real
in a half-lit room where
shadows chase each
other around the walls.

A pair of white-winged doves
build their nest on the chain link fence
that separates the prison
from the Sonoran Desert.

I hope you will find it better
to love a man
you cannot be with
than be with a man
you cannot love.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

DRIFTING

And doesn’t raw chicken breast always
look like South America—or Africa,
depending what side you slice from?
When I was little, I thought I saw
my dead father

                                    smoking a pipe
in the wood-grain paneling
of our living room, his black eyes
unremorseful, forgiving.
Should I have thought it a sign—
an old man

                                    trying to connect with me?
Is it much different than sensing
despair in the avocados as “Feliz
Navidad” played in the produce section
or finding hope in the outline of a woman’s
dress? I don’t see what I want to see.
I see what I have

                                    to see—faith
in a salt stain under a bridge. I laugh
at wakes because there is nothing
to crying. I began to see myself
in third person, the hardened pride of
putting out of mind my compulsion
to see you in an airport,
hear you say

                                    let me buy you a drink, son.
Tomorrow I will visit your grave
for the first time in nine years, the place
where at five, I traced the letters of your name.
I have tried so hard to imagine the concrete
again after seeing the abstract beneath.
The chicken breast

                                    is tasty.
Avocados are avocados. I say there is no hope
in a woman’s dress, but believe me,
it is there.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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..

MAPS

The other night I spaced a stop sign
and ran it 60mph and died
but didn’t. What algebra is this?
The night a dusty chalkboard
streaked with moonlight, my life hwy K,
hwy 51 N intersecting K in a near perfect T
like a cardiac monitor flatline, the afterlife
this narrowing gravel road beyond pavement
disappearing into endless juniper and birch.
It was very dark and the signs obscured.
By heavens no screaming headlights
T-boned me into oblivion. Instead
I kicked up a little dust on the other side,
turned the pines brake-light red
and spun around: fuck! The very next night
I witnessed two logging trucks
cross each other north/south like two vault doors
slicing closed the ghost path
I blindly whistled through. Now every night
I approach that frightened intersection
with full attention. Sometimes
I die. Sometimes I continue. But most times
it’s too close to call, the stars
always rearranging their astrologies,
each cloud narrowly missing the moon.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

HAPPINESS

He found it on the side of the road, blood
smeared across its fur like a strip of red flag.
And flies filled the air,
too many to count.

Back in the war, his wife used to make sense
of things like this
in long letters he held in his hands.
But she was gone
and the generals were gone too.

The sun was there with the flies
as it had been before,
and their metallic green bodies glowed
as they dove into the wreck, their tongues
like dreams their stomachs couldn’t wake.

The dog had been missing for days;
the man had no evidence
of its nostrils smoking like guns,
or its black pelt slick with the sweat
of a hunt.

He hadn’t seen the rabbit either,
skipping out over tall weeds,
four pounds of meat, hovering in the dog’s eyes
like happiness, but he knew
it had been there.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

Richard Garcia

JUST LIKE TWO PEOPLE

I got out of bed like a decomposing century of death. I had been in a dream in which we were together like a steel daisy and a rose made of razor wire. Then I took a shower, all the while thinking of you, and my thoughts were a robin frozen on your lawn or maybe like a snowman in a blizzard. So I drove to work which is actually next door to the bedroom. My office reminded me of a bloodsoaked hairdresser, at least that’s what I thought until I wrote a poem that hit me on the head like a book falling out of the sky. Later I rode my bike through the park that was like a hot iron I thought was unplugged. All the bare trees made me think of Vlad the Impaler, but the birds were chirping like explosions in reverse. Or was it bald trees, or bards, or tresses instead of trees? Bike—poem—thoughts of you—all in all a successful day. Time for a nap and I slept like a duck in a phone booth. Again, I dreamt of you, picking up where we had left off. You and I together just like…like shards of falling glass. Except that I was just like two people, someone named you and a person named I. Once again my brain waited for me to wake like the basket waiting beneath the guillotine. But it was too late, already I had fallen through the trapdoor of interviewing myself. I was also a panel on Keeping the Faith. I was the audience too. Sometimes bored and skeptical of my answers, sometimes amused, but cautiously so, like a lion tamer with narcolepsy.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007