July 25th, 2011
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Review by Lynn Levin
BORROWED WORLD
by Maggie Paul
Hummingbird Press
2299 Mattison Lane
Santa Cruz, CA 95062-1821
ISBN 13 978-0-9792567-6-9
2011, 72 pp., $15.00
http://www.skyhighway.com/~hummingbirdpress
I love many things about Borrowed World, California poet Maggie Paul’s first full-length collection, but what I love best is the gentleness and patience with which she addresses often very grim subject matter: a father’s alcoholism, parental domestic strife, the break-ups of couples. In this respect, her voice reminds me of Marie Howe’s. Both poets speak with generosity and tranquility even in the face of sorrow and hurt, and both are permeated with a spiritual awareness. As with Howe, Paul’s references are usually Catholic, though Paul’s spirituality often encompasses Buddhist or pantheistic ideas. And always she keeps faith with the natural world.
For me, Maggie Paul’s poems of a childhood tormented by a father’s alcoholism and absenteeism are among the most powerful in the collection. In “Arriving Home from the Dance,” Paul relates the harrowing experience of the speaker’s return after a social occasion to find the family home in flames: fire fighters throwing the sizzling mattress of the marriage bed out the window, the mother doing what she can to comfort the five children watching the scene and deliberating not blaming the young son who, in all likelihood, started the fire. What fills the mother with grief, says the speaker, is:
the absence of my father
whose whereabouts that time of night
could only be pinned down to one bar
or another, but which tonight and
how to get hold of him?
To deflect the rage one would legitimately feel toward the husband or the probable-culprit son, Paul focuses on the way the mother ascribes the fire instead to an electrical malfunction and reflects on her terror of losing those she loves. Anger and accusation are not the answer:
Blame never changed anything.
I mean, who can blame a nine-year-old
for wanting his father to come home?
The poet does not excuse the cruelty, coldness, or hurtfulness of others; it is that she forces her heart to look at it differently. Paul strives to relinquish, rather than carry, emotional burdens. Take, for example, the lovely poem “Stones from the Baskets of Others.” Here, Paul references no specific hurtful incident, but meditates on how to handle heavy legacies:
Today I talked with my mother
and she mentioned God.
I believed in the god in her
as I believe in the god in everyone
and my way appeared clearuntil now,
when my own weight
is so great
it competes with my joyso that I must let go,
god or no god,
of stones from the baskets of others.
But it is hard to let go from the stones of the baskets of others. Spiritual and emotional success is uncertain, but the poet’s desire for peace never lapses. Paul has a balletic way of thinking, an airborne point-of-view that allows her to turn continually toward the restorative powers of nature, motherhood, and spirit.
When I read a collection of poems, I put a dot next to my favorites in the table of contents. I have a dot by “Letter,” an epiphanic poem that speaks of memories evoked when two blue herons swoop over bulrushes. Another outstanding poem is “The Accountant,” which praises a father’s precision bookkeeping while also referencing the alcoholism that would later consume his life. I was also delighted by the witty instruction poem “Guidebook for the Woman Traveling Alone,” which counsels a female traveler to stay sexy and to:
Forget hooded sweatshirts and hiking boots
no matter how comfortable,
unless you want to look and feel
like a stuffed animal outside your natural habitat.
I found that very funny because that’s the dowdy fashion I have favored on my journeys. But then, the poem is essentially about loneliness, and ultimately observes:
Be prepared to befriend yourself.
Make offerings to the gods of human wishes.
Remember: we are all alone.
Although it breaks ranks with the tranquil and transcendent voice of most of the poems, I am particularly taken by Paul’s “Confession,” in which the poet’s voice turns ardent. Here is the poem in its entirety:
I am all about desire.
So my Buddhist friends say,
You are not free! I am a fountain of desire.
So Catholics send me to confession.
I am a wavelet of desire.
So dancers adore me.
I am a dream of desire
when my children wake me.
I am a forest of desire
Each time the birds sing.
Not only do I admire the spirit of this poem but also its inverted images: the speaker declares herself a dream of desire when awakened! She is in such sympathy with nature that birdsong wings her to a wild place. That same gift for inversion or transference, of seeing the unusual in the usual, allows Maggie Paul to capture, in the poem “Forgiveness” a painful good-bye between a man and woman, a moment so final it seems almost unbelievable. Here is how Paul allows nature to convey the incredulity:
Morning sun rains on the pond.
It does not expect this day
to be gone forever. Nor him.
But the birds know.
And the wind that led there.
Maggie Paul’s Borrowed World offers the reader much beauty and much gentle wisdom. Reading her poems, I imagine a soul swimming, not so much through, but above harsh currents with deftness, tranquility and grace.
____________
Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection Fair Creatures of an Hour was a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. A review of it appeared in Rattle.
January 20th, 2011
Review by Lynn Levin
THE GLASS BOOK
by Valerie Fox
Texture Press
1108 Westbrooke Terrace
Norman, OK 73072
ISBN 13 978-0-9797573-8-9
2010, 81 pages, $14.00
www.texturepress.org
As a reader and a writer, I have been striving to liberate myself from the literal, the grounded, and the logical. Toward this end, I’ve been exploring experimental poetry, and in this quest I was most fortunate to discover Valerie Fox’s enchanting new collection The Glass Book. Call these poems anti-narratives or lyrics of serendipitous moments, the poems, many of which are prose poems, tune into our clickable, branching, speeding, channel-changing lives. In this collection, her fourth, Fox pokes at memories and lets her poems vault from images of city streets and parks to old abodes, travels, and frequent references to cameras. The effect is fast-paced. The surprising juxtapositions often conjure the surreal. And while the poems love discontinuity, they are strung together by a sense of whimsy that is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes disturbing. Always through the chaos and trickiness, I feel the comfort of a moral sense.
Valerie Fox is, I believe, exploring the poetry of resistance, a term that Tony Hoagland uses in his essay “Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness” (Poetry, September 2010). Hoagland observes that contemporary poetry is bifurcating into two systems that seek “two different kinds of poetic meaning: Perspective versus Entanglement; the gong of recognition versus the bong of disorientation.” The latter type of poetry, says Hoagland, seeks “dis-arrangement.” It “aims to disrupt or re-arrange consciousness.” It resists conventional understanding and desires to draw “the reader into a condition of not-entirely-understanding.” Valerie Fox’s poems follow this spirit.
Take, for example, the title poem “The Glass Book,” in which the poetic speaker follows the rovings of a homeless and somewhat deranged woman through the outskirts of downtown Philadelphia.
Back in the city, the same woman was living on Green Street. Everyone was always saying how gentrification was happening so fact. Every day she saw it going slow.
She was having a slow life.
…
She sat in her own cave of warmth. Just a few minutes earlier she had been walking fast, searching and hungering for the word “I.”
The main text follows the homeless woman, but the poetic speaker interjects side statements that deliberately swerve from that lost soul to satirize the writing process or the literary or scholarly life. Many of these remarks, introduce themselves with the phrase, “I’m calling this page…”; and they are enclosed in parentheses. After a passage in which the homeless woman swings from thoughts about a particular street, her unborn children, a new hat, and farm food, the poet jars the reader with this self-ironizing observation:
(I’m calling this page, “What people really think about during times like job interviews”)
At another moment, Fox interjects:
(I’m calling this page, “Letters to real people and lyric poets”)
This longish poem strolls the city blocks glimpsing the violence and loneliness of the streets. It is embedded with compassion for its destitute and confused subject. Then every so often, it jumps from the streets to those satirical observations about life at the desk.
Fox’s interest in dreams and the subconscious meshes with the poet’s attraction to re-arranged awareness. A section of The Glass Book is called “The Dream Book” and includes such poems as “Dream Variations (For Tuesday)” and “Lecture on Dreams.” All the poems in the collection thrive on a mind open to randomness, and much of their delight comes from their constant movement and unpredictability. The poem “Arrange in an Order” offers the reader twelve lines that might variously be seen as hilarious, private, worried, or even everyday. Here are some samples:
you crossed some rivers, like 8 or 9 times
you are cooking this meat outside
you should delete that prison time from your resume
you must have been enchanted when you let go the mules
your fantasies are observing you
Should I try to rearrange them to make conventional sense? I don’t think that’s the point. Playfulness and deliberate re-arranging of consciousness is the point. The lines give me a disturbing kind of pleasure.
The surreal and a sense of threat brew in many poems. Take these lines from “Hotel Resident Artist”:
Then there’s a crow hovering outside my hotel
window. It dips close, red talons raised,
wearing not just fur, but blue fur
and shopped out wheezing under the weight
of its purchases. Walking around underground.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Tour of Old Haunts,” a poem that seems to combine private references to incidents in the speaker’s life with admonitions to self. The impression I get is of a person trying to gently coax herself into forming normal reactions and behaviors. And that would work just fine if events didn’t throw curve balls at her and life weren’t inherently so strange. On a return trip to an old neighborhood, the speaker announces:
She carried around the throwaway camera, all day, and there were many times to use it, though she didn’t.
There’s a lot of undeveloped film in her life, and film canisters.
…
Across from there they saw Fred’s Magic World. Twice she had to go on stage, once to tie someone up.
The above line about tying someone up in a magic show speaks to a normal event in a magic show, but the reference to the magic show itself casts the poem into a sort of paranormal world. And the poem, true to its subjectivity stays in that mysterious space until it ends with a visit to a retired philosophy professor who is dying and, in his final moments, asks a visitor to tell him who is he is. The idea of visiting one’s old haunts turns from memory to humor to the staging of magic to death and loss of self.
Fox’s poems embody a sly humor but also reference violence and loss. Her poetry of resistance beckons me outside my structured and conventional way of reading and perceiving. The poems tell me to be friends with the unpredictable. The poems say, don’t parse us, ride us.
____________
Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection Fair Creatures of an Hour was a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. A review of it appeared in Rattle.
September 30th, 2010
Review by Lynn Levin
JAMBANDBOOTLEG
by Paul Siegell
A-Head Publishing
Nicasio, CA
ISBN 13 978-0-9816283-2-5
2009, 121 pp., $12.00
www.a-headpublishing.com
I haven’t had this much fun reading a book of poems in a long time. Paul Siegell’s fast-paced rave-on-the-page jambandbootleg follows a loose narrative in which the speaker and his friends travel the country attending concerts by their beloved jam band Phish. The poems mostly explore the ecstatic experiences of phandom and concert-going. For me, the most exciting moments—and there are scores of such moments—center on the revelry of the “phans” in parking lots before the concerts and the descriptions of the emotional rush of the music in the midst of them. The poems surge with the love of fun, and it’s about time poetry engaged fun.
While Siegell’s poems treat the reader to a rock concert party, his work reveals a deep awareness of his poetic elders, especially Allen Ginsberg (the voracious jazzy language and beat rhythms), G. M. Hopkins (the trippy whirling phrases), and Walt Whitman (the joy and expansiveness). While the poems speak mostly of “phandom” and the hyped-up pleasure of the music, they also engage some of the unhappy sides of youth culture (which Siegell spells as “Uth Culture” ): the travails of job-seeking, the uncertainty of what path one should take in life, the woeful lives of some down-and-outers, and the stories of phans who have lost their way. But mostly the subject and the mood is joy.
As I read the poems, I kept thinking that if Allen Ginsberg had not been kvetching and ranting he might have been writing lines like these from Siegell’s poem “*SET I*”:
stoked split-sec/onds of sensitive, extraAbstract
bandana-delicate aficionados patchwork’d in flux>how the plan is to play jazz:
the happiness of having tickets—have you examined much:
the forensics of a parking lot?eYeLeVeL w/ the spontaneous relationships & bizarre
bazaars of Jamband Tailgate Showcase Multitudes—Come along, my friend my friends:
Shall we off to the estate?after flirting in a minor key, the great “YEAH!” of rockNroll
cries out from inside—www.the_anti-depressant_of_band_expression.tour
of a peak’s release, a chills-guaranteeing song, of a peak’s
more ridiculous liftoff
Siegell’s lines provide wave after wave of emotional highs. As with Ginsberg’s “Howl,” these poems look spontaneous on the surface, but they are well-worked pieces. Siegell incorporates witty word plays, language poetry moves (see how Picasso invades “*Patchwork Acrobatics: Harlequin Period Typos*”), references to Jewish spirituality (“*Tekiah Gedolaaaaahhhhh*”), neologisms, anaphora, slant rhymes, unique and comic spellings, and artistic use of typography. I found no clichés, no commonplaces here, but countless wildly inventive descriptions of peak emotional states. Siegell’s sense of awe just keeps on coming.
To appreciate the collection, I had to read up on the band Phish, which Siegell spells as “PHiSH,” and that definitely enhanced my understanding and appreciation of the poems. Plus, I loved getting an inside look into the phan culture. For example, I learned that Phish phans in the audience legally produce bootleg tapes during concerts by holding up boom microphones. They then trade these bootleg tapes, a practice that is also in compliance with Phish’s policy. Hence the title of Siegell’s collection, jambandbootleg. In the poem “*SET II*” the poet writes of:
tradable hours&hours recorded Inside,
during the show, by the microphoneforests of tapers
… consider bootlegs the closest thing
our jampastime has to baseballcards …
I also learned that the Phish phans caravan across the country following the band, setting up tents in parking lots and campgrounds at which the band performs. One poem, “*MIDNIGHT to SUNRISE: N. Y. E. PHiSH 2000*” describes the weary but amazed aura worn by phans after a two-day marathon Y2K Phish concert at a Seminole Indian Reservation (N. Y. E. stands for New Year’s Eve). This was said to be the largest of the Y2K concerts in the US with over 75,000 people present. Much of this poem’s text is laid out in a large numeral 2 to represent the year 2000, and while I will not attempt to reproduce the graphics, here are some lines from the poem:
a two-day fête soundboarding
84 celebrated songs w/ enough gumption
to make it, & us, feel: Meaningful>we_were there
…
An A+ ambitious,
ridiculous all-nighter
a once glowring-
organic rave…
I love that Siegell lets me ride along on his excited vibe, that he shares his tipsy neural wow with me. And I don’t even have to camp out and get all sweaty and dirty like a real reveler. I can groove at my desk. Cool!
Other poems in Siegell’s genre of shaped or concrete poetry include “*06.25.00 – PHiSH – Alltel Pavilion, NC,*” a poem that was originally published in Rattle, and which is laid out in the form of a flame. In a portion of “*SET II,*” Siegell rotates some of the type to set up an isosceles triangle. In one non-Phish poem about a younger set of concert goers – “emo/alt teen boys/ in shirts &/ ties…” at a Bright Eyes show, Siegell lays his lines out in a guitar shape. Diversity in layout is key for Siegell. Short lines, long lines, double-column poems also provide constant graphic interest, but the poet never sacrifices language for shape on the page. I also appreciated Siegell’s witty use of typographical illustration as in “<*(((><.” And see “*Meet Me at Will Call*” for some more typographical fooling around.
Taking a break from the plunges into the concert midst, Paul Siegell also writes these beautiful rhythmic lines in “*12.03.05 – Iron & Wine w/ Calexico – Electric Factory, PA*” about a woman for whom the speaker falls in a crush:
girl of the keyhole, haloed
statue in the negative space:
legs bent, posed in a pull on of jeans –
how may I align with such rare signature?
Another calm-down occurs in the long and wondrous poem “*SET III,*” which comes to rest with these final lines, “for Dionysus speaks:/Apollo descends w/ boundaries.” Although I loved the ecstatic poems, one of my favorite poems in the collection was a very grounded one entitled “*Pass/Fail*” that recounts the speaker’s father’s close encounter with the Selective Service. jambandbootleg then has its meditative moments, but mostly its poems dance with musical joy and Phish phandom. They are poems that love being alive, and that’s why they make me cheer.
____________
Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection Fair Creatures of an Hour was a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. A review of it appeared in Rattle.
August 5th, 2010
Review by Lynn Levin
SEEING BIRDS IN CHURCH IS A KIND OF ADIEU
by Arlene Ang
Cinnamon Press
Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau,
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Gwynedd, LL41 3SU
Wales
UK
ISBN 978-1-907090-06-6
2010, 80 pp., L7.99 UK, L8.99 outside UK
www.cinnamonpress.com
The poems in Arlene Ang’s new collection Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu bid farewell to mothers, fathers, spouses, children, comrades in arms, and others. My own parents are elderly, and I know that I will endure some of the losses that Ang describes in this new collection. I will return to her lyrics at that sad time because of the tenderness they offer, but I savor the poems now for their beauty. These poems of death and remembrance speak intimately of family ties. While a few poems might hint of regret, most reflect on relationships that are solid, tender, and loyal. Though unsentimental, the poems are steeped in love.
In her 2008 collection Bundles of Letters Including A, V, and Epsilon, a collaborative work with poet Valerie Fox, Ang was playful, experimental, and avant-garde. Her 2005 collection The Desecration of Doves delighted with stylish, and sometimes sexy, lyrics. In Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu, her fifth collection, Ang returns to the lyrical and richly descriptive style of The Desecration of Doves.
Arlene Ang’s metaphors startle and amaze. A house in August wears “heat like hosiery” (“The Day She Was Called to Identify the Body”). Parents contemplating their adult son’s death, stand outside his bedroom door “like phantom limbs” (“As we think”). In a house of mourning, time passes to no effect: “Like a mother, the clock wipes its face over and over/with its hands” (“A Sun That Isn’t a Source of Heat…”). Ang, who lives near Venice, sometimes brings glimpses of Italy into her poems. In “Col San Martino,” a wife drives to visit the remains of the car wreck that claimed her husband, and the landscape speaks: “From this hillside, the vineyards/sprawl like cemeteries, grape stalks crucified on white pales.”
In the title poem, “Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu,” the poet unfolds a painterly tableau in which a sparrow, a pigeon, and a blackbird alight upon a pew, a statue of Christ, and a bronze of a station of the Cross. The poem opens with these lines:
The silence never lasts long.
Wings in the air stroke and turn it upside-down.
Ears were made to capture chaos,
you said. A tree sparrow raps
its beak on the pew as if to remind the wood
that it was once a tree.
The birds seem to symbolize the spirit of a person – a father perhaps? – who had wanted a room overlooking the church.
Ang often memorializes the dead by describing the spaces in which they lived or the rooms in which they are dying. She shows us a sickroom with its crumpled sheets and pills, a studio, a kitchen. In “Leopold’s Room,” a mother seeks to hold on to the memory of her son who died of cancer by having his bedroom videotaped.
The curtains – craggy with nicotine – billow,
smudging a view of the lake.
The tape jams. You don’t slap
the video camera awake, but watch
the wind shut the door on Leopold’s secrets:
the x-rays, the synthetic wigs,
the unworn sweaters
with moth holes mouthing sarcomata.
Amid the tender moments, Ang faithfully observes the things that are not so neat and beautiful. Various poems speak of incontinence or food spoiling in the dying person’s fridge. And yet, one of the things that impress me about these poems is how kind the people in them are to each other, the sensitivity they show, and the dignity they accord those who are suffering the humiliations of illness. In “Surviving Grandfather,” a poem written from a child’s point-of-view, Ang writes:
In the end, his fingers cast spidery
shadows on the wallpaper, white sheets
became stained: this was coffee,
everyone said, and we shouldn’t stare.
The children are then sent outdoors to play, and there they encounter still other clues of the grandfather’s illness.
Ang includes a number of sonnenizios on lines from the poets Ros Barber, Merryn Williams, and Jean Cassou. Invented by the Kim Addonizio, the sonnenizio is a fourteen-line poem that springboards off a line from someone else’s sonnet and which incorporates a word from that first borrowed line in each of the successive thirteen lines. The poem ends with a couplet. I was delighted to discover the sonnenizio, and I see that it is catching on with other poets.
The poems in Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu throw their net over a world that is receding, fading, and therefore all the more dear. The poet says to us: “You are facing a loved one’s death, you are visiting his possessions and keepsakes. I’ve been there, too, and this is how it was for me.” These are poems that console. They are clear-minded, unsentimental, stoic even, and yet they radiate love.
____________
Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection is Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009).
March 5th, 2010
Review by Rob Wright
FAIR CREATURE OF AN HOUR
by Lynn Levin
Loonfeather Press
P.O. Box 1212
Bemidji, MN 56619
ISBN 978-0-926147-28-7
2009, 74 pp., $12.95
www.loonfeatherpress.com
What is a “fair creature of an hour?” The title of Lynn Levin’s new poetry collection suggests ephemerality. In the case of the sonnet from which the title is taken, it’s the end of Keats’ experience of the world, of fair creatures. By the end of Lynn Levin’s collection I was convinced that there were other sorts of “fair creatures”: a race horse whose fame ended when he won two, but failed to take the third race of the Triple Crown, and a soul that just looked death in face.
Sadly, poems themselves are often ephemeral. How long does a poem stay with us on a casual reading? An hour? True, most of us can bring to mind phrases and images from poems we know and love, but for the most part, poems are only briefly held in our minds and are transient, like the thistledown which is the title of one of my favorite of Levin’s poems from this collection. Friends are arguing about the nature of the soul when a car—a Vauxhall, setting the scene in England—races toward them “on the wrong side of the road,” almost bringing on their deaths. The poet wonders if the soul is not “perishable? Organically based?” By the poem’s end, the friends who have “gulped back our ghosts” after fast action by the driver are now “spinning, laughing, waving their arms” in a field of thistledown that sticks to their clothes. It is moments like these, testifying to the joy of observation and survival that appear again and again in this collection and stay with me.
Lynn Levin has divided her book into four parts with notes at the end. The poems are almost without exception free verse, except for a sonnet titled “Freefall” and a triolet “For the Red Planet.” The formal device of alternating iambic with trochaic lines gives “In the Alte Pinkothek” a pleasant rambling rhythm suitable for wandering around a museum. Although the first sections poems seem to me grouped by observation, by a rather original eye, the second section’s images and narratives are grounded firmly in religion. Ideas are taken from the books of the Bible, like the witty “Numbers,“ and from tradition, like the search for the hidden matzoh in “What You’re Looking For.” By tradition, the collection’s notes tell us, a piece of ceremonial bread is hidden during the Seder, the meal honoring deliverance. The poet wonders if the bread is hidden “between old LPs / after a certain decimal of pi,” then wonders what to do with it once it has been found: “be able to read its Braille / play its sheet music, / want to eat it.” It’s typical of this poet to think of the most obvious thing last. But to be able to read the Braille of a matzoh is an astonishing idea. What would the poet, or her readers find in the bread baked for a ceremony of deliverance: history, tragedy, survival? I love the idea later suggested that there are those who “hope never to find it / fearing that once in hand / the thing might crack / or loose the charm.” How much like the creation of a poem, or any work of art that is. The artist asks herself, “Will this hang together? Where is it going?”
In Lynn Levin’s poems the reader gets to witness the exploration of seeing a poem travel to strange and unexpected places, as in the earlier mentioned poem “Numbers,” which she begins by speculating on the mistranslation of a passage from the book of Numbers as red heifer rather than, as it should be, a red herring. The poet moves on to what would happen if we had two toes like sloths. Would the year two-thousand be meaningless? She then imagines humans condemned to “hang / upside-down by our nails in a rain forest” and how we would lose all sense of humor and irony, but would “think the sky had wings.” Here “Numbers” is not only the fourth book of the Bible, but counted years and the digits on our hands. The imagination of the poet (and the reader) ranges, but returns again to the touchstone of the red herring, the quirk, the trick of translation. The poet does not only see the world around her in a surprising and original way, but watches the way her own mind works to produce those quirks and red herrings, which testifies to a great originality. In “Sybarite,” the poet confesses that it “was for lack of shelter/but for love of hedgerows/ that I stood in the rain.” And later, ”I rarely thought/of the way all things/stream headlong to disorder,” evoking a confidence in her own love of experience and a willful disregard for the threat of chaos around her—two charms, or faults that I cheerfully admit sharing with her.
I find the title of this collection ironic. But the irony comes from the poet’s testimony of survival rather than that of ephemerality of poetry and life. Survival of the poet’s words and ideas, and indeed the poet herself comes through memory, observance of tradition and the very human need to imagine, to turn potential tragedy into joy. For me, survival is the theme that runs through these poems and lifts them beyond the experience of the transient, of an hour.
