April 25th, 2010
Review by Mary Harwell Sayler
BEADS FOR THE MESSIAH’S BRIDE: POEMS ON LEVITICUS
by Yakov Azriel
Time Being Books
10411 Clayton Road
St. Louis, Missouri 63131
ISBN 978-156809-128-0
2009, 118 pp., $15.95
www.timebeing.com
As a lifelong lover of the Bible and an almost lifelong writer of religious poems from a Judeo-Christian perspective, I’ve been especially drawn to the works of contemporary Jewish poet Yakov Azriel. When I first researched his poems on the Internet, I glimpsed a lively mix of devotionals, prayers, humor, and poetic forms in his series of books, each of which relates to one of the five books of the Torah.
Eagerly I received a review copy of Beads for the Messiah’s Bride, the poems on the book of Leviticus, then immediately wished I’d read the full books in sequence. For example, Genesis, the first book of the Bible, contains a synopsis of the basic plot for almost every story on earth, giving ample opportunity for an eclectic mix of comedy and tragedy. Exodus continues the story of God’s people as they leave behind captivity, while Leviticus lays out the rituals and laws to which the Levitical priests had to adhere.
As you might imagine, Leviticus and levity do not necessarily go together. In this more somber section of the Torah, readers learn about their offenses and what they are to do about them as they bring to God, through the Levitical priests, their cereal offerings, peace offerings, wave offerings, thank offerings, sin offerings, trespass offerings, and guilt offerings, the latter of which might be given, say, to offset a rash oath.
However, healing and cleansing also occur in Leviticus, for example, in chapter 14 when a person has been cured of leprosy. On such momentous occasions, the Levitical priest was to dip cedar, scarlet, hyssop, and a living bird into the blood of one slain. “And,” in verse 7, “upon him that is to be cleansed, (the priest) shall sprinkle seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.”
With such celebratory acts, offerings, and rich priestly heritage from which to draw, Beads begins with the sonnet “Sacrifices Made” as the speaker brings “no oxen, cattle, sheep or goats” nor “choice offerings of barley, wheat or oats/ To burn on altar-fire, while Levites sing.” Instead the “I” of the poem declares: “I sacrificed those former-truths that might/ Have been my guiding truths and ruled my youth.”
As the sacrifice becomes an offering of poetry, the next sonnet, “The Burnt-Offering,” asks God to take the “mumbled, crippled prayers,” because “You comprehend/ The inner sense of all the sounds You hear;/ Send down a ladder made of angels’ rope/ From Jacob’s dream, and let my words ascend.” The next sonnet, “The Meal-Offering,” asks God to bring bread for the meal, while in “The Peace-Offering,” the speaker says, “I have heard that contrite prayer/ Constructs a sturdy bridge, a meeting-place/ Where God and man may meet, for You declare/ How near You are, my distant Lord, how near.”
Like the Bible itself, these poems relate to matters of faith and one’s relationship with the Most High God. My own relationship, however, seems about as opposite as a Christian woman in the South can get from a Jewish man born in New York, but is it? In the church, for example, devotees may join holy orders or give up their names at baptism, and at 21, Gerald Rosenkrantz did something similar when he changed his name to Yakov Azriel and moved to Israel to be closer to God and His Word.
As happens with many of us though, distance from “my distant Lord” occasionally occurs as expressed “Within The Temple Courtyard.” In this double-sonnet, the speaker admits, “Sometimes I want my money back, the price/ I’ve had to pay, my God, is just too high;/ The Sabbath suit You ordered me to buy/ Is thread-bare, and its fabric full of lice.”
Levity bursts forth unexpectedly, too, in “Last Year, on Yom Kippur” where “I dug a grave/ For the old ‘me’,” whom the speaker stabbed, hanged, shot, and poisoned but still witnessed “a resilience of his own,/ Rising up every time.”
Old habits, old selves, and old stories of the Bible rise up in this book, often from a fresh perspective. For instance, “Orpah and Ruth: Two Roads Diverged,” does not tell the familiar Naomi-Ruth tale but, rather, a free verse view of Naomi’s other daughter-in-law who stayed behind in Moab. Similarly, “The Prayer of the Lame Temple-Priest” shows how Levitical laws might affect someone who was born into the priestly Tribe of Levi and devoted to God yet not allowed to serve. In “Ruth Gleaning in Boaz’s Fields,” the field-hands just do not see the divine hand in this ongoing love story.
People today often say, “I love it when a plan comes together,” but this book gives a glimpse of how the plan of the Most High God begins to come together. Yet, even the Bible includes weighty words, and so does this book, especially in the rhyme-pounding poem “The Exile” where, for over two printed pages, singularly rhyming words hammer with an insistence that, for this reader, became overbearing. The rhymes also marred the sense and syntax, which might have been held in check by, say, a villanelle that would allow for repetition while whittling down words to what most needed to be said. On the other hand, the free verse poem “The Canaanite Slave” seemed to me to be the brief synopsis of what could be expanded into a very interesting historical novel.
The poem “Beads” has the bead of a novel idea too, which could make for interesting fiction. From that poem also comes the title for this book and, perhaps, the life theme of the poet as hinted in the words of the speaker: “So what can I present or show/ To justify my life?/ May songs I write be brought as beads – / Beads for the Messiah’s wife.” Likewise, the sonnet “Credo” ends the whole book with a profound statement of faith: “And I believe that God alone is King./ And I believe the Torah nests His word/ With echoes of His voice. And I believe/ In hours of grace we hear the Torah sing.” For those of us who add an “Amen!” this book (and most likely the entire five-book series) comes highly recommended and most highly favored.
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Mary Harwell Sayler is a freelance writer, poet, poetry editor, and student of the Bible in almost every translation. Since 1983, she’s hoped to help other poets and writers through her poetry home study course, critiques, blogs, and websites, www.poetryofcourse.com and www.thepoetryeditor.com.
February 25th, 2010
Review by Mary Sayler
DUST AND BREAD
by Stephen Haven
Turning Point
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, Ohio 45254-1106
ISBN 978-1932339024
2008, 100 pp., $17.00
www.turningpointbooks.com
Conventional wisdom in reading and writing contemporary poetry consistently encourages us to enter into the experience of a poem, so that’s what I aimed to do in reading Dust and Bread, the latest book of poetry by Stephen Haven, which drew me on several levels. For one thing, his familiarity with life in China appealed to me greatly since the closest I’ve come is once naming a beige Chow puppy “Beijing.” Also, he’s an Ohio man, whereas I’m a lifelong Southerner who’s resistant to being belled. More importantly, he teaches a MFA program, while I’m a self-taught student who began studying and writing poems as a child.
Duly drawn by an exotic culture and the poet’s impressive credentials, I came to this book, wanting to be taught, wanting to learn, and, especially, wanting to experience the poems. Neither the often-exquisite lines nor my reading disappointed me, but—oh, I’d better get it over with—my experience of Dust and Bread occasionally made me feel, well, annoyed. To be specific, those annoying elements included the title, an out-of-context line, and a couple of words to which I objected.
To start with the title: Reading through lenses well-grounded in Holy Scripture, I could not help but see the biblical connotations rising from the Dust and Bread. In the pre-Christian era, for instance, repentant people sometimes showed remorse by covering themselves in dust and ashes, while, by contrast, the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father in the New Testament requests daily forgiveness and daily bread. So, right away, I began to wonder who would forgive whom and for what and why.
In addition to Eucharist or communion where church members receive bread as the representation, reminder, or actual presence of the body of Christ, inherent with forgiveness, the biblical expression of “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” refers to brevity of life. On a secular or physical level, dust occurs daily and just is. Similarly bread represents the daily sustenance needed to live, calling to mind our bodies’ need of bread and water to survive. So what do these contrasts between life and death, between the secular and the religious, between well-crafted, often gorgeous lines, and a mundane title have to do with this book? Frankly, my dear, I’m not sure.
Until you experience these poems yourself, however, everything I say may seem abstract, so let’s look at one of my favorite pieces, “Willow.” This book-opening poem begins, “All China a green-gold row of them./ When you walk through – / delicate, skirted, light-limbed/ and yellow, swishing their loveliness/ in the wind – they brush the whole of you.” I’ve now read those lines many times and each time truly experienced the grace of that moment and musicality of that scene where “one single tree” becomes “the parasol of thousands.” Although the next line adds “of years of poetry,” I preferred the initially-evoked image of people, who could be from any willow-friendly place or culture, experiencing the passage of time under that exquisite parasol.
That apt word and many other fitting descriptions aid the beauty of this book, even when it’s not a pretty sight. For instance, “Skunked” offers a clear picture and dry wit in the second verse: “But how strange to carry, on your body,/ a small piece of the highway,/ white-split blacktop/ signaling the world to pass.” How quietly clever and just right! Similarly, there’s the just right observation of the unborn child in “Ultrasound” as “Your mother sings, not exactly to you” and how the soon-to-be-parents “looked in to see, five months early,/ you, floating in your beginning./ The peninsular pieces of yourself.” Anyone who has had the joy of viewing a similar picture via ultrasound knows the rightness of that description and even the look somewhat like “The dry black husks of watermelon seeds” scattered on a “slab floor.” No matter how poetic and descriptive though, those seeds seemed to be disembodied from the historical diversion of the “one boiled goose egg” in the previous verse and the moon refusing to show itself in the verse after, thus evoking my second experience of annoyance.
It’s as though the popularly poetic intent of high compression had squeezed the words into something mystifying, rather than mysterious, which mainly annoyed me because I truly wanted to know more. For instance, I really wanted to hear “another echo too,/ some silence stuffed/ down your mother’s throat.” Since the poem is dedicated “To my daughter, five months before her birth” in China, one might presume the silence to regard the coming of a girl-child, who, reportedly, would not be welcomed in that country at that time, but the collage of past, present, and future images collides, making it difficult to separate what from what.
One of the more accessible poems, “Waxing,” raises questions, too, when “seeds are for swallowing” and “when no one leaf formally finishes itself,” but I found this poem enticing, unified, and not at all annoying. Indeed, the brevity, beauty, and believability of the poem drew me to read the lovely lines aloud several times, each time experiencing the pleasure of interesting thoughts and credible imagery, for instance in the ending where “The moon exists from all sides at once:/ Blind eye, sinkhole, searchlight.”
Similarly, I read “Blue Flame” again and again, each time being let into the poem by the clarity of the opening scene until jolted into my third experience of annoyance. The line, “I know we live under the light touch/ of heaven’s scam” lost me with the word “scam.” Yes, I admit that, as a person of faith, I found the word wobbling toward the offensive, but that wasn’t my problem. As do people in general, poets have the right to believe whatever they want. They do not, however, have the right to charm me into entering an early morning scene between a father and son as they leisurely begin their day only to throw a scam on the table with the oatmeal. The abrupt change of mood and tone gave me a whiplash and broke the sweet mood, which the poem then resumes in the next verse as “The day comes soft shoeing,/ all doe-eyed, the womb’s wonder/ of the sky.”
My complaint about that poem continues in the final annoyance experienced in the word “conjugates,” when, again, the mood, tone, and, now, imagery reel from the adverse effect of a clever, showy word choice over a quieter one that would cooperate nicely with the line. i.e., “Somewhere,/ half a day and half the world away,/ the red flag of morning snaps/ at half-mast above our own/ holy fire as it conjugates itself/ across a cross-less altar.” But, having expressed my negative reaction, which I cannot take back without altering the actual experience, I’ll now turn to the response that comes from looking up an odd word or, seemingly, out-of-context word a poet selects. In this case, conjugation as “a class of verbs with similar inflectional forms” comes last in Webster’s, even though its connotations may continue to rank first for readers in general. Regardless, the word used is, in fact, conjugate not conjugation, and in this, the poet selected a word meaning to couple, yoke, or join, which immediately makes a connection between the world in America and the one left behind in China and between a Christian and a non-Christian environment too. Again, though, my objection is not based on religion and the rights thereof, but on the strain to treat perpendicular lines as parallel, especially if those lines intersect in the child in the room.
Despite the “scam,” I will not keep holding this poem over the “Blue Flame” since a dictionary reminder of true meaning and a little more information in the remaining lines doused my annoyance. For instance, the poems gets on with life and the day as “everything slips/ to its opposite. Cold burns.” Yes! And I can attest to this today on an unusually frigid morning in Florida as the temperature rises in the 20’s.
Also, as I write, a New Year has just begun with resolutions to slow down, write more poems, and experience each day more fully. “Blue Flame” touches on this, too, as “The morning’s hot celestial wax/ drips into the seal of our/ rushed footprints.” Like most of the poems in this book, that one makes me want to know what else the poet has to say and how well readers will conjugate the experience. If the veil lifts from the lines and the dust begins to settle, I suspect the poetry of Stephen Haven will be received as bread and experienced with the warmth of a blue flame at home and in Pulitzer circles.
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Mary Harwell Sayler, a freelance writer and poet, began judging poems entered in the annual writing competition sponsored by www.writers-editors.com in 1999, but she’s worked with other poets and writers much longer than that, first through her home study course and now critiques and the website she recently revised, www.poetryofcourse.com.
February 10th, 2010
Link • E-Reviews • Leave a Comment
Review by Mary Harwell Sayler
SHARP STARS
by Sharon Bryan
BOA Editions
250 North Goodman Street
Suite 306
Rochester, New York 14607
ISBN 978-1-934414-28-6
2009, 102 pp., $16.00
www.boaeditions.org
Sharp wit, infinite energy, delightful word plays, and luminous insights shine in Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan. Not surprisingly, the book opens with a big bang in the “Big Band Theory” where “It all began with music,/ with that much desire to be/ in motion” and the “pulsing you feel before you hear it.” In this creative account of creation, “The darkness couldn’t keep still,” and so “it began to sway.”
Music, humor, and biblical references dance into the next poem, “Saying Things,” where “Adam was born/ blind” but “he could hear/ burbles, drips, trickles” and a voice in his head saying, “Open your mouth,/ let the words fly out.” And it was so. The good-humored poem leans slightly toward slapstick when the newly devised woman of the house sets an apple pie on the window sill. Yet the fun evolves a solemn side, too, as Adam struggles with not knowing, naming, and lying in the dark where his earliest memories of sightlessness return, bringing readers serious insight into the comfort we often feel in the presence of nostalgia.
Another poem, “Bicycle,” also offers serious brilliance in using music “where we all start,/ with a hum rising up/ through our bodies.” The lines continue, considering aphasic patients “who hear but don’t/ understand what’s said” and asking us to “see what happens if/ we set the words to music./” Then a simple melody like “Bicycle Built For Two” apparently can provide a means of communicating those everyday instructions needed for some semblance of normalcy.
With musical connotations and starlit moments, the poems often express the thoughts and feelings most readers have in common. This not only provides that prized connection between poems and readers but reminds us of the importance of humor in dealing with those annoying moments we all eventually experience. For instance, in “Barking Dog,” the poet/ speaker resolves, “After an hour of trying to write/ over the high-pitched yap coming/ from a neighbor’s yard, I decide/ to let the dog into the poem.” That decision pales, however, when “he goes on making the noise/ I came in here – into the poem –/ to get away from, the mindless/ whine of everything that has no/ words or music for its pain.”
Ouch! Those of us who write poetry know the push-pull of that pain until we find words to express the emotional episodes or exhausting events or physical pain we encounter. Sometimes we have the grace to work things out with prayer and humor, and, if we’re like Sharon Bryan, the clarity and insight to know “sorrow rises as if you/ were the well.” That poem, “Welling,” also returns us to the hum of music and the silvery stars as does “Sawdust” where “the air is full/ of small sharp stars/ pinwheeling through every living thing/ that gets in their way.” This might sound ominous were it not for the overall content and uplifting context of the book.
I kept looking, however, for something more to the title than the phrase in “Sawdust,” and “At Last” added an image where, without stars, we’d be “in our black box, no reason/ to stay, no place to go,” which brought my aha moment. Suddenly the black box and the musical references and the sharp stars collided into one of those old-fashioned music boxes I used to take apart. Inside, a thin cylinder or a shiny sheet of metal could be found, pierced with holes that made the music and, yes, looked like stars. Whether Sharon Bryan intended that connection, I don’t know, but regardless, I connected well with her fourth book of poetry and will be wishing on a star for her fifth.
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Mary Harwell Sayler is a freelance writer and poet who began doing poetry reviews as a means of supporting her habit of buying books and books of poetry. When she’s not writing, she critiques poems and other manuscripts through her professional critiquing service or tweaks articles on her ecumenical website www.www.poetryofcourse.com. She also judges the poetry entered each year in the writing contests sponsored by www.writers-editors.com.
January 25th, 2010
Review by Mary Harwell Sayler
WILD FLIGHT
by Christine Rhein
Texas Tech University Press
Box 41037
Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037
ISBN-13 978-0896726215
2009, 103 pp., $l6.95
www.ttup.ttu.edu
This first book of poetry by Christine Rhein drew me to write my first poetry book review, unless you count the quickies I sometimes post on Amazon. Other drawing cards included a general interest in narrative verse and, more particularly, in poetic treatment of WWII, which the poet addresses from the perspective of her father as a child, fleeing from his native Germany during occupation by the Russians then the Poles. Who knew, but somewhere in their own homeland apart from the infamous prison camps, two million German civilians died of starvation, exposure, or torture during the war.
Fortunately, my father, a nose-gunner on a B-24 (aka “Flying Coffin”) escaped those days, and I’m happy to say the poet’s dad did too. Otherwise, “happy” is not a word that propels the reader or the diverse flight patterns in these poetic pages. Indeed, in section III of the V, the poet quotes her father, saying, “Happy is an American idea./ He seeks to be content.” One suspects the poet may be writing toward that end too. Nevertheless, flights of family story, memory, and news flash leap into such contemporary conflicts as Sarajevo where a librarian was killed “by shellburst as she tried to save rare books from flames,” even though surviving the winter took “two books to cook one pot of soup.”
Other victims or defeated ones pile up their poetic bodies—for instance, the old woman on a subway wearing “shoes wrapped with duct tape” and a “homeless man guarding his spot” and the welder who sells a kidney and the man whose “eyes question the camera” in a photograph taken after his family had been killed and his arms chopped off by a machete.
As the flight trajectory continues through these close and far encounters of terror, the theme becomes apparent in “Story Problems” where the poet quotes: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths/ a statistic.” Although I’d heard that oft-repeated thought, I did not know the words originated with Stalin. But therein lies the problem, perhaps, for a reader whose family came to America over 400 years ago—presumably long enough for me to be thoroughly indoctrinated in the pursuit of happiness.
Admittedly, I wanted more happy in this book. However, the poetic flights into inhumane conditions of human suffering express an excellent attempt to show the value of life and to elevate suffering into a place of honor. I commend the poet for this endeavor, but ironically, the emotional charge of countless horror stories comes across as that undesired statistic of which Stalin warned. True, he’s not the person from whom I’d most likely take advice. Yet a single poem or two or ten portrays tragedy with dignity, whereas too many weigh the reader down, shutting off the intended emotional impact. I consider this not a problem with the poems or the poet, whose work shows much promise, but with the process of deciding what to include. For this poet, who confesses to not knowing what to put in or leave out of her own waylaid books of poetry, less just might have been more.
In the final section of the book, an airline flight lifts a wing into “the place called making a baby happy.” And the next poem, “Hero,” again has a child rescue the reader by flying a “high bright red helicopter” with the “flight of fireflies, bodies glowing/ from both desire and defense.” Albeit brief, these flights of anticipation continue in “On Art,” which exhibits something akin to kenning in a “hope-yellow sky” or “blink-quick” chickadee who soars off with seeds, awakening a determination “to remember the pinch of tiny claws/ the flutter of something wild.”
The art of collecting and recollecting begins, of course, with event and observation, with life lived on the carpet or the sidewalk or somewhere in the air. In much of Wild Flight, the poems either express a cause for panic or evoke the sense of being pursued, rather than pursuing, but then “Our Twenty-First Summer, Chimney Swifts” calls forth creatures who, “Not built to perch…can’t land/ in the grass or on a branch./ They live mostly in the air/ even mating on the wing.”
Although the chronic flight of the chimney swift offers little hope of settling down into either a happy nest or happiness, the final poem awakens to an acceptance that borders on both: “So why not write about the strawberry finches/ building a nest outside my front window.” Why not write about the nearest thing with its “burden of a long, complicated twig” trying again and again to find a way “into the green” or “the work of weaving” and yes! Why not? This reader, at least, hopes the poet will continue to seek, to soar, to descend but also ascend, to fly and fly and find.
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Mary Harwell Sayler: “I began writing poems in early childhood but, as an adult, wrote everything except poetry. Two dozen books of my fiction and nonfiction have seen print and, yes, two hundred or so poems but no book of poetry. Why? Me! Every time I start to sort and arrange my poems, I get overwhelmed. Then I go write a novel or a life-health encyclopedia instead. True, I’ve critiqued the work of other poets for years and still do through my ecumenical website, www.poetryofcourse.com, but these student-poet-peers have not yet taught me how to put together a full-length book of poems. So I’m presently peeking over professional shoulders to see what I can learn from doing poetry book reviews.”
