August 17th, 2010
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Donald Mace Williams
THE VENTURI EFFECT
You may have thought, from visiting art shows,
that canyons squeezed together on their way
downstream. No. That’s only perspective. They
in fact, as any hiker my age knows,
spread out and vanish. Their canyonness goes.
Their vital currents pool up, slacken, splay,
their tall red hoodoos melt into flat gray,
the bankside cottonwoods go, nothing grows.
This one the same. Far downstream now, my feet
have brought me where I see the end. No foam
from water straitened, focused one last time
by rock walls aping art, trying to meet,
but alkali-white flatlands, killdeers’ home,
walls gone, speed gone, all low that was high prime.
–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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Read by Tim
April 15th, 2010
Review by Donald Mace Williams 
MELOPOEIA
by Rhina P. Espaillat, Alfred Nicol, and John Tavano
Rhina Espaillat
12 Charron Drive
Newburyport, MA 01950
ASIN: B002Q76ZOK
2009, $15.00
www.amazon.com
My Greek lexicon translates “melopoeia” as “a making of lyric poems or music.” In brief notes accompanying this CD, Rhina Espaillat says that in melopoeia the poetry and music “flow separately, through and around each other, without either becoming dominant over the other.” That is the case with these eighteen lyric poems, which are recited by their makers, Espaillat and Alfred Nicol, as John Tavano’s fine guitar plays short pieces by composers ranging from Bach to Satie to Lennon & McCartney and, in four cases, Tavano himself. But when I tried, on first hearing, to listen as closely to one as to the other, I ended up, though charmed and intrigued, also dissatisfied because I hadn’t caught enough of the words. I played the CD again, focusing on the words. Ah! They came across clearly that way, and yet I also heard and enjoyed the music. The title of one of Antonio Salieri’s operas, Prima la musica, poi le parole, is a valid maxim for a medium in which the words embody the music. But when poetry is spoken as music plays, the rule has to be reversed: “First the words, then the music.” Then, as here, they really do flow through each other.
I had known and loved Espaillat’s poetry before, and—full disclosure—known her too, though more by correspondence than in person. Nicol’s poems were new to me, but that was my loss. His work, as displayed on this CD, has humor, a quiet passion, and lovely images: “The laundered clouds are piled so high, the branches will not let them pass.” All the poems on the disc, as far as my ear could discern, are in meter, and most or all of them in rhyme. Each of the poets has a villanelle among the lot—his is “Burn,” hers is “Guidelines”—and I found myself catching with pleasure the recurrences of the rhymes and of the first and third lines. The music with “Burn,” an original composition by Tavano, swelled enough once or twice that I lost a few words. Otherwise, the balance in all these poems seemed perfect for both intelligibility and blend.
Both poets speak clearly and expressively. The lyrical beauty of Espaillat’s voice is a special charm. She spent her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, and she reads one of her poems, “Next-to-Last Song,” in her Spanish version as Nicol echoes with her English one, stanza by stanza, along with Tavano’s pleasant “Spanish Improvisation.” In her sonnet “If There Had Been,” the voices also alternate, as a man and a woman enact a little drama of ifs:
If there had been more time; if you had stayed;
if you had spoken sooner or said less;
if you had turned away; if the parade
had halted elsewhere; if the wrong address
had not been scribbled, or the train delayed . . .
I got those lines from Espaillat’s book Her Place in These Designs, not being a quick enough scribbler to have taken them down by ear. In several other instances, I looked up the poems in print so I could follow as I listened—and that was a mistake. Somehow reading along dulled the pleasure of hearing. It was like watching the projected translations at an opera, when the line comes up overhead a second early, before the music and words make their joint effect—and so the effect isn’t made; the written words have spoiled it. I thought at first that the CD should have included texts of the poems. No. The whole point is that these poems, with this music, are for the ear. It’s a point that would have seemed obvious to Greeks a couple of thousand years ago. These three performers are trying, with dedication and artistry, to make it obvious to us, today. How much success they’ll have, I can’t say, but I know that this disc is a delight to hear, a polished and distinctive performance of notable works.
____________
Donald Mace Williams, who lives in the Texas Panhandle, is a retired newspaper writer and editor, now writing fiction and poetry. He is the author of the novel Black Tuesday’s Child and the poetry chapbook “Wolfe.” He can be contacted at: donaldmacewms@gmail.com.
May 5th, 2009
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Review by Donald Mace Williams
HER PLACE IN THESE DESIGNS
by Rhina P. Espaillat
Truman State University Press
100 E. Normal St.
Kirksville, MO 63501-4221
ISBN: 978-1-931112-89-5
2008, 91 pp., $15.95
http://tsup.truman.edu
If this book is feminist, as its name and the beautiful cover sculpture of a nude woman (by the poet’s husband, Alfred Moskowitz) may suggest, the feminism is that of a woman happy in her motherhood, her marriage, and her home—though not always in her housekeeping, I gather—and warm in memories of her parents. Is she happy also with the world, or with God? Not always. She writes, in “Kinderszenen,” about
those God did not wholly see:
that boy, for one, charred in the hotel bed
his father fled before he lit the flame;
And in “Case Study,” about
a woman whose one son went bad,
stole cash out of her purse, hunted and found
her wedding ring and sold it; all she had
he concentrated on a band around
his arm, a needle in his vein.
But both those poems, being sonnets « Read the rest of this entry »
January 7th, 2009
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Donald Mace Williams
WOLFE
Tha com of more under misthleoþum
Grendel gongan, Godes yrre bær.
—Beowulf
(Then came from the moor under the mist-cliffs
Grendel stalking, God’s ire he bore.)When he arrived at the cave or den, the hunter took a short
candle in one hand, his six-shooter in the other, wiggled into the
den, and shot … by the reflection of the light in her eyes.
—J. Evetts Haley, The XIT Ranch of TexasFat Herefords grazed on rich brown grass.
Tom Rogers watched three winters pass,
Then, all his ranch paid off, designed
A bunkhouse, biggest of its kind
In that wide stretch of Caprock lands,
To house the army of top hands
That rising markets and good rain
Forced and allowed him to maintain.
At night sometimes a cowboy sang
Briefly to a guitar’s soft twang
While others talked, wrote letters home,
Or stared into brown-bottle foam.
Rogers, white-haired as washed gyp rock,
Stood winding Cyclops, the tall clock,
One night and heard the sleepy sound
Of song across the strip of ground
Between the bunkhouse and the house.
He smiled and dropped his hand. Near Taos,
At night, pensive and wandering out
From camp, a young surveyor-scout,
He had heard singing just that thin
Rise from the pueblo. Go on in,
A voice kept saying, but he stood,
One arm hooked round a cottonwood
For strength until, ashamed, he whirled
And strode back to the measured world.
Strange, how that wild sound in the night
Had drawn him, who was hired to sight
Down lines that tamed. So now, he thought,
Winding until the spring came taut,
This clock, this house, these wide fenced plains,
These little towns prove up our pains.
He went to bed, blew out the light
On the nightstand, said a good night
To Elsa, and dropped off to sleep
Hearing a last faint twang.From deep
In the fierce breaks came a reply,
A drawn-out keening, pitched as high
And savage as if cowboy songs,
To strange, sharp ears, summed up all wrongs
Done to the wilderness by men,
Fences, and cows. With bared teeth then,
Ears back, the apparition skulked
Across the ridges toward the bulked,
Repulsive forms of house and shed,
Till now not neared. The next dawn’s red
Revealed a redder scene. The pen
Where calving heifers were brought in
In case of need lay strewn and gory,
Each throat and belly slashed, a story
Of rage, not hunger; nothing gone
But one calf ’s liver. His face drawn,
Rogers bent close to find a track
In the hard dirt. Then he drew back,
Aghast. Though it was mild and fair,
He would always thereafter swear
There hung above that broad paw print
With two deep claw holes a mere hint,
The sheerest wisp, of steam. He stood
Silent. When finally he could,
He said, “Well, I guess we all know
What done this. No plain lobo, though.
I’ve seen a few. They never killed
More than to get their belly filled.
This one’s a devil. Look at that.”
He toed a carcass. Where the fat
And lean had been flensed, red and white,
From a front leg, a second bite
Had crushed the bone above the knee.
By ones and twos men leaned to see
With open mouths. A clean, dark hole
At one side punched clear through the bole.
“That’s no tooth, it’s a railroad spike,”
One cowboy breathed. Or else it’s like,
Tom Rogers thought, a steel-tipped arrow
Such as once pierced him, bone and marrow,
Mid-calf when, riding in advance
Of wagons on the trail to Grants,
Attacked, he turned and in the mud
Escaped with one boot full of blood.
At least the Indians had a cause,
He thought. This thing came from the draws
To kill and waste, no more. He spat
And said, “I’ll get hitched up.” At that,
Two cowboys jumped to do the chore
While from the pile by the back door
Others, jaws set, began to carry
Cottonwood logs onto the prairie
Where horses dragged the grim night’s dead
Like travois to their fiery bed.
Rogers, with hands in pockets, stood
And said, “That barbecue smells good.”
But the half-smile he struggled for
Turned on him like a scimitar
And cowboys, sensing, kept their eyes
Down and said nothing. By sunrise
Of the next day the word was out
By mouth and telegraph about
The beast that crept out of the dark
And slaughtered like a land-bound shark,
Evil, bloodthirsty, monstrous. Soon
The story was that the full moon
Caused that four-legged beast to rise
On two feet and with bloodshot eyes
To roam the plains in search of prey
Like some cursed half-man. In one day
Three of Rogers’ good cowboys quit,
No cowards but not blessed with wit
To fathom the unknown, and more
Kept glancing at the bunkhouse door
At night as if, next time, the thing
Might burst inside. “Hey, man, don’t sing,”
One said as a guitar came out.
There did seem, thinking back, no doubt
That music must have been what stirred
The anger out there. Some had heard
The answer. They agreed the sound
Came after Ashley’s fingers found
The highest note of that night’s strumming.
“Play it again you know what’s coming,”
…
(Purchase Rattle #30 to read the rest of the poem.)
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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