E-Reviews

October 30, 2013

FANS OF MY UNCONSCIOUS by Krista LukasPosted by

Review by Juneko J. RobinsonFans of My Unconscious by Krista Lukas

FANS OF MY UNCONSCIOUS
by Krista Lukas

The Black Rock Press
University of Nevada
Reno, NV 89557-0224
ISBN: 978-1-891033-62-9,
2013, 100 pp., $14.95
www.blackrockpress.org

I am a reader: one who appreciates poetry, a philosopher with deeply existentialist leanings, a lover of the sound of words, a middle-aged woman who finds herself ever preoccupied by the meaning of life and my connections to people in my past, as well as a person who cherishes the experience of being able to glimpse into the hearts and minds of the writers who enrich my world. Krista Lukas’s Fans of My Unconscious is a wonderful collection of poems that fulfills each of these facets of mine with an economy of words that belies the truth and profundity of her insights.

Throughout the first section there are existential musings about time and eternity, existence and non-existence, and the kind of existence that ties one to others.  The collection begins with “Letter From My Ancestors,” a meditation on one’s contemporary preoccupation, as a writer, with the past from the perspective of one’s hardscrabble ancestors:

We wouldn’t write this,
wouldn’t even think of it. We are working
people without time on our hands. In the Old Country

What is bequeathed by one’s ancestors is not so much the familiar litany of mundane things such as “Dad’s gift of gab” or “Mom’s people-sense,” but rather “the luxury of time” as Lukas writes; time to daydream, time to reflect on one’s existence, “time to write about us.” Lukas invites us to ponder the many ways in which we are connected to the past and to the future, a theme she oft repeats throughout her collection. This necessarily involves yet another recurring motif: of the circular movement from the situated personal to the eternal and back again. On a camping trip, sitting by a campfire, Lukas writes:

I want it simply to be fire
not to feel the need
to say something,
but for it simply to be
fire without my pausing to recall
it’s an element, as in
earth, water, air, and …

But we are meaning-conferring beings who, in moments of quiet introspection, are painfully aware of our finitude, which is inextricably tied to our sense of the passage of time. As such, we can rarely reflect upon an object as elemental as fire without assigning deep significance to it. Despite our desire to remain ignorant of its existential import, fire universally represents both life and destruction. However, Lukas draws our attention away from the more common associations of fire with warmth and sustenance to its cosmic significance as a thing that ties us to all those, throughout eternity, who have sought to harness its evanescent power, to control the sources of life and death, time and time again. Transported by the flames, Lukas wonders about others who have sat ‘round the fire and we, in turn, wonder about the countless others whose thoughts likely led in the same direction, in infinite regress.

This awareness of cosmic time and eternal repetition harkens back to “Letter From My Ancestors” where the perspective of one’s lineage, from the long-view of human history, serves as a simultaneous reminder of how much the generalities of human existence remain much the same, even while the particulars of the world have changed:

to a point where
I consider it a vacation to cook
over open flames and sleep on the ground.

This recurring movement from the personal to the universal and back to the personal again necessarily implicates the duality of mortality and eternity and these themes run throughout several of the works in Part I. In “The Day I Die,” Lukas echoes the sentiments of many an existentialist philosopher by pointing out how it may very well be that, on the day she dies:

There will be messages, bills to pay,
things left undone. It will be a day
like today, or tomorrow—a date
I might note with a reminder, an appointment,
or nothing at all.

The final verse in particular reverberates with echoes of the oft-repeated conundrum within existentialist philosophy that, while we are, apparently, the only earthly beings who anticipate our own deaths, “we” are also not “here” to experience our own deaths first hand. Dying is not the same as death. The fact that I might note the date of my demise with a reminder or an appointment does not mean that the date will be at all meaningful to me. It might be a day that is insignificant to me because my death is unexpected and, even if presaged, it would still fail to rise to any level of significance to the thinking-feeling-living-sentient-historically-grounded-me because, once dead, there will be no experiencing-I to reflect upon the fact of my passing: neither to mark its significance, nor its mundanity.  In this sense, the ambiguity of the final verse, “or nothing at all,” reflects one of many paradoxes of our uniquely human situation.

Indeed, the truth-revealing power of Lukas’s work stems in large part from its ambiguity. For existentialist philosophers, our uniquely human situation is characterized by ambiguity owing to the fact that we are comprised both of unfettered intellect and a body that is utterly dependent upon its expiration date. We are also situated beings whose existence is deeply entwined with that of others across time, although none of that necessarily determines our lives. We are the border, the threshold, the doorway between brute physicality and intellect, freedom and dependence, past and future. We are simultaneously alone and connected and not just on September 12, 2001. (“Everything Was Oddly the Same”). Again and again, Lukas’s poems echo this existential concern with our liminality by writing from the perspective of our distinctly human tendency, in the face of environmental cues in the present, to ruminate about the past and worry for the future, and she incorporates this perspective into the very marrow of her work. In “Losing Teeth,” Lukas writes:

I miss the gap.
Something gone
where something was,
and the feel of the sides
of the neighbor teeth

Given our inherent ambiguity, we are the gap, the space that lies in between. For Lukas, the missing tooth is emblematic of the threshold of hopeful expectation that she once perched upon as a child. The loss of teeth is symbolic of two distinctive periods in one’s life:  of childhood and senescence, of the distance between being youthful enough to desire the upending of the past and old enough to want to keep the future at bay—for as long as possible.  “I miss the second chance, the in-between,” Lukas writes. This is juvenile tooth loss from the perspective of an adult longing for the sense of anticipation that childhood once held for such banal events, when the shedding of teeth represented the unfolding of a blossom still in bloom, rather than the decline of one’s health, senility, and death.

The second section explores relationships: new ones, healing ones, lost ones, broken ones, and their detritus.  There are many poems here that will cause the reader’s heart to lurch with pain and recognition (as in her piece about her grandparents, “Leone and Ben”), though there are also works that are smile-inducing or that contain intimations of healing and the cycle of rebirth. The third contains musings about parents, childhood and, again, the themes of time, both in terms of finitude and eternity, mortality, lineage, and repetition re-emerge. The sometimes tense, sometimes loving strands that link one’s relationships to one’s grandmother, mother, father, grandfather, husband, boyfriend, niece, other people’s children, other people’s parents, students one has taught, and the decision to remain childless are palpable throughout the remainder of the book. In “September” Lukas informs us:

Some must have boarded, or will,
ahead of their mothers, and some together,
but as far back as we can see
each of us has gone in order, each
taking the place of the last.

There are shadows in these later works, cast by many of the earlier poems. The shadow that maternal death casts over an acquaintance in a gym class is a subject of awe and understandable fascination for a child (“I Forget Her Name”). However, her probing curiosity—like a tongue searching for a loose tooth—and delighting in the satisfaction of it finally giving way, clearly borders on the cruel, reminding the reader of a stanza from “Losing Teeth”:

the final tear
And then the soft spot under:
pulp, not-quite-blister,
smooth, almost sweet to taste.

A snapshot of mom as a hard-gazed preadolescent serves as a harbinger for what would become a fractured parent-child relationship and a broken marriage (“On the Staircase, 1961”). In “True is What You Remember” we catch an all-too-real glimpse into the fragility of family life on Christmas morn from the perspective of a placating little girl whose innocent banter triggers an overwrought outburst from her mother. This piece is particularly haunting both for its realism in the mode of the best of novelist Richard Yates, and for the fact that we will catch multiple glimpses of the undoing of this woman and her relationships—with her children and her husband—over the course of several poems.

The fourth and final section’s works contain reflections on motherhood and childlessness, and the world of work, along with a handful of delightful pieces inspired by her young niece.  Yet, despite their differences, each section is, like the relationships and experiences these poems depict, bound to one another.  There are echoes and reverberations of the past impinging on the present and the present influencing how the past is regarded.

To be sure there are far too many favorites to review here, but, lest the reader be concerned that this is a dark and unwelcoming collection, let me emphasize that Lukas’s poems, clear-eyed, brutally honest, and heartbreaking as they are, are equally eloquent and playful. Although this book is a quick read, these poems invite the reader to linger with their implications. I found myself returning to this collection again and again. It rested on my nightstand for weeks and often found itself in my backpack when I would go hiking or in my purse on long car rides. The fact that Lukas is able, so successfully, to cover such vast ground in such a short format and to marry such different tendencies in her writings is a testament to the strength of her instincts as a poet and lends a heightened realism to her work. I feel as if I have come to know and appreciate this writer in a way I never have before:  no need here, for any “Contributors’ Notes,” as Lukas ruefully examines in her work by the same name. This is a strong and beautiful collection that reveals what is most important about Lukas as a writer: her humanity. Should she ever lose sight of what artifacts she has left behind for her readers, we, as “fans of her unconscious,” should only be too glad to help her gather them up and cheer.

__________

Juneko J. Robinson has written book reviews for Film-Philosophy and Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts, and an essay of hers appeared in Fear, Cultural Anxiety, and Transformation, edited by John A. Marmysz and Scott A. Lukas (Lexington Books, 2008). She is also the recipient of the Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship for Distinguished Minority Scholars through the State University of New York at Buffalo and her illustrations have appeared in The Path of Philosophy: Truth, Wonder, and Distress by John Marmysz (Wadsworth-Cengage Learning, 2011).

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October 25, 2013

BRACKISH by Jeff NewberryPosted by

Review by Karen J. WeyantBrackish by Jeff Newberry

BRACKISH
by Jeff Newberry

Aldrich Press
1840 West 220th Street, Suite 300
Torrance, California 90501
ISBN 9780615705637
2012, 102 pp., $14.00
aldrichbookpublishing.blogspot.com

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and poet Jeff Newberry is from northern Florida, so at first glance, it may seem a bit confusing as to why I knew the world depicted in Newberry’s book, Brackish. However, when I opened the collection to the first poem, “To Come of Age in a Mill Town,” I felt that I was standing on the bridge that divided my little town in two, staring at the morning fog, smelling the sulfur infused air that drifted from the paper mill town that rested seven miles north from my childhood home. In his first full length collection of poetry, Newberry takes the reader into the towns that rest in the panhandle of Florida—a land far away from the tourists of Disney World and the sandy beaches filled with bronzed bodies and bikinis.

The poem “Childhood” establishes both the tone and setting for the collection. In this poem, we learn about a blue collar family where a young boy spends his nights listening to his father’s “snores echo down the dark hallway.” His home is nestled in a paper mill town, as explained by the narrator who describes the paper mill smoke stacks by metaphor: “Some nights, they are missiles. Some nights, the smoke unfolds in mushroom blossoms.” This world invades his home: “My room reeks: the factory-churned sulfur, pine wood/ mulch, the ever stinking mill.” Even as a child, the narrator feels stifled in his world, almost as if he is suffocating: “I wake up & want to scream, but my father has to work/ tomorrow.”

Later, we learn more about the narrator’s father who is a butcher. Indeed, many of the poems in Brackish are dedicated to exploring the narrator’s relationship with his father and his father’s world. In “At the End of the Day” we see a physical description: “He grows old, his skin fades/ to the sterile white of Styrofoam/ like the trays he uses to wrap/cutlets in cellophane.” In another poem, “Pay Day,” the speaker describes his father at home: “Stripped of his butcher’s white/ he still stinks of steaks & blood.” The son examines his relationship with his father through several other poems, including “The Butcher’s Son” where the main character …

wants

to lay out memories in neat rows
like flank steaks. He wants to open

the past like butterfly pork chops
& wrap them tight in cellophane.

Still, it’s important to note that it’s not just work that rules this narrator’s world. Several poems are devoted to playing music and fishing—obviously two activities that are very important in this setting. Often these poems investigate the relationship between the narrator and his father. For instance, in “My Father, Fishing” we find out why fishing is so important to the narrator: “I know my father only in shadows/ before work” and “These quiet trips to the water’s edge.” In these moments, the narrator mimics his father in silence, dropping his own line “into darkness.” Other poems chronicle the father’s love of music: “He twangs & twists, wraps his hulking bulk/ around the six-string strained body.” The narrator, who is not allowed to touch the guitar, still wants to find connection with his father: “I try to match his hummed/ tones, tune my voice to his whisper.”

Newberry does more than just write personal narratives; he goes to great length to explore this world of blue collar life. Often, these stories are told through other people. We have the paper mill world represented as a physical presence, but also in such part of family life as depicted in “Factory Boy,” where a father comes home after second shift smelling of “paper & ammonia.” We also learn about the past; for example, in “Share Cropping” we learn about his mother: “My mother told me cotton burs tore/ her fingers open, pocketed wounds/ that bled for days after.” There is no doubt that the characters in this collection have ties to the past as they struggle towards a dubious future, and that the present world is teetering on the edge, threatening to collapse, class lines drawn through mud and old fishing line and oyster shells. Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is “After School, I Never Walked Home,” where the narrator drives with this mother toward the west part of town “where trailer parks/ squatted in afternoon heat & asphalt/ gave way to oyster shell & sand.” The mother’s effort to separate her son from the other children is fruitless as the young boy looks at the children in the buses and sees those “my mother called them & I called we.”

Reading Brackish, it becomes clear that place is not just a setting, but its own character in this book. Indeed, through several poems with titles such as “Poem for Wewahitchka, Florida,” “Poem for Apalachicola, Florida,” and “Poem for Destin, Florida” we see elegies disguised as odes for gulf towns and cities. The most heartfelt poem is “Elegy for Port St. John, Florida,” where a driver is addressed in the second person point of view:

Your father said it would be this way
you’d miss this place, this sea walled
village by the bay, where you once
prayed for anything to take you away.

In essence, Brackish is a coming-of-age collection. Through personal narratives and stories told from the past, readers watch a young boy growing up to come to terms with his place in this world. The landscape found in this collection is so vivid that when I was done reading, I could smell paper mills and fish. I could taste the salt of the ocean. I could hear music, a folksy hum that is not quite in tune. I could feel a fishing line between my thumb and fingers, a thin line tugging me, pulling me back in.

__________

Karen J. Weyant’s work has appeared in Cave Wall, Conte, Copper Nickel, Spillway, The Sugar House Review and River Styx. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag’s 2011 Chapbook Contest). She lives and writes in Pennsylvania, but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She blogs at www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com

 

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October 20, 2013

SKINNY by Carolyn HembreePosted by

Review by Mary BrancaccioSkinny by Carolyn Hembree

SKINNY
by Carolyn Hembree

Kore Press
2102 N. Country Club Road
Tucson, AZ, USA 85716
ISBN 978-1-888553-50-5
2012, 70pp., $14.00
www.korepress.org

I like reading poems that play hard to get. I want to sit on the porch with them, take in their scent, ruminate over their words, wonder about their silences. You’ll find me in the poetry section of small bookstores, prowling through the stacks in search of another tantalizing chase. My most recent obsession turned up as a staff pick in Crescent City Books, deep in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans. What a thrill it’s been.

Carolyn Hembree’s Skinny is a burlesque fan dance of challenging poems. Yet, despite her sparse lines and experiments with syntax and diction, her poetry haunts. Uncanny fascination propelled me from poem to poem, and I steadily formed a loose, narrative arc that helped me string together this ambitious first collection. Hembree uses vivid imagery and taut language to create an unforgettable emotional landscape peopled by eccentric and universal characters that struggle but often fail to maintain dignity. I found myself thinking, I know these people. Who are they?

Hembree’s gift for melding knife-sharp observations, multiple voices, enjambments and lyricism creates a tapestry of a fraught family history. While Skinny attempts to fly to freedom over and over again, Mamie’s terminal illness tethers her to the South, a return that unleashes reverie, guilt, rebellion and ultimately love. The collection is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a quote from a silent movie – the Perils of Pauline, The Poor Little Rich Girl and Stella Maris—offering both context and wry commentary on the poems that follow. The final section, which encompasses Mamie’s death, begins with a line from Stella Maris, “Then – the woman in her died and she became a Thing …” Other characters enter the poems: “Old Sweetheart” “Bird,” “Horse Head” and even a first cousin with a knack for self-defense. The range of forms in Skinny—character portraits, lyrical elegies, narratives with lyrical elements, language poems and even two ekphrastic meditations on Picasso’s Guernica—highlight Hembree’s prowess and allow for many points of entry. Yet there’s a patience required. I had to court these poems, to live with them for days, even weeks before the layers dropped away. Even then, Skinny leaves much to the imagination.

Initially, Hembree’s poetry suggests the strong influence of John Berryman, especially in her evocation of Southern dialect, which oddly works with her experiments with inverted syntax and the grammar of pronouns. Some poems read as hermetic, though there are glimpses of skin, so they create mosaics that form nuanced portraits. Above all, Hembree’s knack for using details to ground her characters soars, as when she describes “First Cousin’s morning menthol/ filter waterlogged in Mamie’s pink soap dish” in “Skinny’s Nativity and a Bird’s Quietus,” or “Mamie supine in the back room – L’Airs du Temp/ and cherry wood, her slender carved bedposts and bed doll.” I find myself recognizing details that give away class, gender, region. Hembree’s poems powerfully evoke the Southern life I knew as a child in Virginia:

Mamie’s trash burning

                onto dead bird peach can juice slow as hot lye

Fish fry

                smoky caverns inside, out: fast dancing, holiday lights, wintry
                spotted swimsuits.

Skinny’s world is simultaneously familiar and alien, and her journey reminds me of my own efforts to leave home. Its landscape mirrors the central speaker’s own stasis between an agrarian world she has outgrown and the New York theater world she aspires to join.

Despite Skinny’s often tragicomic tone, I was floored by heartbreaking moments of recognition, as in the second half of the poignant “Still of Mamie and Bird”:

Chair full of holes in the shower holds her body up,
a chair water runs through like memory and is lost.

Stand in her mirror, turn it right side out
then step into your grieving like a shift, Skinny.

Suddenly, I was in the shower bathing my own dying mother. Skinny’s love for Mamie is never in doubt, though there are moments when her mother’s love appears claustrophobic, as in “Skinny’s Nativity and a Bird’s Quietus.” As Mamie cradles her daughter, she says, “You wouldn’t, Love -/ Bug, goes the mother through capped teeth,/ on us dare turn.” Inverted syntax slowed my progression through the last line, allowing the creepiness of smother love to resonate.

“Guilt – is Sorrow – thinking –,” writes Hembree in the second of “A Couple of Odes on Her.” Her experiments with language and her urgent wordplay masterfully controlled my pace, focusing my attention on important clues. Taken as a whole, the collection follows the dramatic arc of a narrative, though individual poems often battle through sonorous emotional waves.

“Remembering is/ like putting a feather underneath/ the skull,” writes Hembree, “remembrance of trailer,/ and the high hard wind to lift it.” Reading Skinny took a willingness to momentarily live with disequilibrium, but my effort was rewarded. By its final pages, I knew the emotional toll of Mamie’s demise and her daughter’s disappointing life in New York. More importantly, her book led me on a journey through that difficult terrain of sexuality, obsession and desire, the unspoken legacy mothers bequeath to daughters. I may never fully know Skinny, but I’ll be forever glad to have spent time peering through her looking glass.

__________

Mary Brancaccio is completing her MFA in Poetry at Drew University. Her poetry has been published in Adanna, Naugatuck River Review, Lake Affect Magazine, Chest, and in Farewell to Nuclear, Welcome to Renewable Energy: A Collection of Poems by 218 Poets, which was published in Japan and America as a bilingual edition. She’s worked as a broadcast journalist and a public school English teacher. Currently, she’s an assistant professor in the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies at Drew University.

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October 15, 2013

IN THE KETTLE, THE SHRIEK by Hannah StephensonPosted by

Review by Anne ChampionIn the Kettle, the Shriek by Hannah Stephenson

IN THE KETTLE, THE SHRIEK
by Hannah Stephenson

Gold Wake Press
5108 Avalon Drive
Randolph, MA 02368
ISBN-10: 0985919124
2013, 82 pp., $15.95
goldwakepress.com

I have always been attracted to the notion of poetry as prophecy, shamanism, or spirituality. As Percy Shelley famously said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” As a young writer, I would go to poetry readings and hear the rhythms and cadences of haunting truths that made me nearly fall to my knees in worship of the writers. I am reminded of this when reading Hannah Stephenson’s first collection, In the Kettle, the Shriek. She is a shaman of words, a poet of consciousness. She journeys into a deeper reality with the aid of language, bringing back energy and healing through poetic acts and the shapeshifting of physical objects and landscapes. In Birth of a Poet, William Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic calling: “O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession, the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize! Shamanize!” Stephenson accomplishes this with a visionary and magical sense of clarity, producing a collection that explores longing, loss, and want through a “cornucopia of deterioration.” With curiosity, precision, and awe, Stephenson’s “I” transforms into the collective body; her “I” is an eye, a keen observer of the world.

In “Telepathy,” the speaker engages in an interesting sort of poetic engagement with the reader that I have never encountered before. The poem begins as a familiar game: “Pick a card. Picture it.” However, it takes an appropriately magical turn when it says:

You’re at the volcano, grinning big, I mean
really big, with your eyes totally open
in surprise because someone is standing
next to you with his arm around your shoulders.
Who is it. Who do you see. What does he do
when the ground starts jostling against your feet.

Suddenly and surprisingly, the speaker forces the reader into deep self reflection, plunging us into an imaginary territory where we must admit who we love most, who we want protecting us, and how they succeed or fail as the world begins to shake or crumble. Additionally, Stephenson does not use question marks for her questions (a technique that is continued throughout the entire book). Normally, I would find this annoying, but Stephenson’s purposeful use of it made me thoughtfully pause over the questions more than I would have with question marks present. I began to see that our questions themselves are so revealing that they are not questions at all: they are facts and truths about humanity.

Some of the most potent commonly shared human experiences are loss and death. The collection thematically coheres by meditating on grief in many poems.

In “Seasonally Affected,” the images allude to death throughout: daylight “drains away,” branches are described as bones, plant life remains but does not grow. The poem ends with these lines:

Tell your cells
that this bulb is the sun transformed into
a potted plant. They may or may not

fall for it. There will always be
darkness in you. What can you build
with it, with your sensitivity.

I found these two stanzas tenderly poignant. They point to the way that we try to deny grief, rationalize our way out of it, trick ourselves, often unsuccessfully, into not feeling it. However, ultimately, our sensitivity, our hurt, our darkness is engrained into our DNA.

In fact, even Stephenson’s titles reveal how interested she is in exploring what is most common among people. Many of her poems are titled after common clichés or phrases, in which she trumps the reader’s expectations by turning the cliché on its head. Some examples are “Little Black Dress,” “Five Second Rule,” “First Things First,” and “Serious Stuff.” In one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Dot Com,” she addresses the millennial age of the internet:

We cannot touch
meaning, but we can gesture
toward it, point at it, point it out
for others in the room so they
can share with their grandchildren
what it was like, beauty dot edu,
a great calm dot com. #Amen.

While the use of hashtags and dot com in poetry can be read as humorous, I believe this poem is actually a profound exploration of the notion of spirituality, connection, communication, and community in contemporary society. In fact, I often wonder why poets don’t talk about texts, emails, hashtags, facebook, and dot coms more often, as that is the real world that we remain deeply submerged in on a daily basis. In this poem, Stephenson explores what that immersion means for our traditional ideals of love and connection.

Similarly, Stephenson examines serious topics such as change, death, life, and mortality in a poem titled “Fraction,” which responds to a tweet by Jimmy Kimmel: “One day, my heart will stop beating. (Not everything is a joke).” The speaker then begins to imagine a world without herself in it. The objects owned are dispersed, the celebrities change, the friends are all dead as well. She states:

Feathers fill the pillows, and teens
and preteens take the risk of placing
their tongues in each other’s mouths.
Forever, you will never come back.

Here, we see that in death, life is not that changed at all: the cycles of love, risk, and the daily pleasures of life remain. Life changes, and we change, but life also stays exactly the same as it’s always been.

Hannah Stephenson’s first collection is soul food: it’s heavy and it sticks to your ribs long after you have consumed it. She’s tackling big game in this collection, carefully examining notions that may seem beyond our grasp. She looks at topics that terrify straight in the eye, and the originality of her images exposes a clarity that is difficult to pull off, but her risks are well worth the reward. I’ll end this review with my favorite lines from “Reciprocity;” they beautifully embody the themes of loss and memory that anchor this stunningly prophetic book.

So it is with cities that we go away from.
That which we leave

Swipes slimy fingers over us, slipping out.
What we hang onto

gets compressed, layered. Remembering
destroys a place,

obliterates whatever does not glitter, makes
a new thing for us

to miss.

__________

Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Pank Magazine, The Comstock Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of the Academy of American Poet’s Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a St. Botolph Emerging Writer’s Grant nominee, and a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop participant. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and received her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College. She currently teaches writing and literature at Emerson College, Wheelock College, and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. (anne-champion.com)

 

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October 10, 2013

BAR NAPKIN SONNETS by Moira EganPosted by

Review by Gregg MossonBar Napkin Poems by Moira Egan

BAR NAPKIN SONNETS
by Moira Egan

Ledge Press
40 Maple Ave
Bellport, NY 11713
2009, 32 pp., $9.00
ASIN: B003N35YGG
www.theledgemagazine.com

Picking up a good book of poetry is akin to entering a new world. Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets takes the reader on a bittersweet, sexy, and comic jaunt through the bar scene, being middle-aged without a partner, romantic without a golden cloud, and narrated by a 40-something who’s out and about. Yet, with her handy humanism and hardy lust, this poet in this poetry sequence keeps going to the bars for more adventure and, yes (maybe, well probably not), love. These humorous, endearing, sometimes lonely sonnets all are expertly done: conversational, contemporary, metrical, with occasional rhyme, and paint a short story in snapshots. Overall this chapbook is both a technical accomplishment and simple pleasure. As Egan writes in “Sonnet 22,” parenthetically as if talking to herself:

(I want to fall in love, but not forever.
Is that the truth, or am I still confused
where love’s concerned? Or am I simply used
to Solitary broken by Whoever …

Bar Napkin Sonnets will appeal to the metrical reader of contemporary poetry and also to his or her brother, spouse, or nephew who does not read poetry (but might try it). Why? These sonnets incorporate action, something not seen often in contemporary American poetry but which did appear more often in Modernist verse, from the rural narratives of Robert Frost to the metaphysical journey-stories of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “Magi.” Plus, these stories are impactful. They are not highly tinctured, confessional navel-gazing. Rather, these concise sonnets feature just enough story to create a scene, set up some suspense, and turn a conclusion. Further this chapbook’s unity permits these poems to resonate. It is a significant effect in today’s poetry publishing marketplace with 60-page-plus and 100-page books, as if poetry was a grandpa who never shuts up. Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets won the 2008 Ledge Press Chapbook Contest, and this sequence also appears in Egan’s more uneven full-length collection Spin (Entasis 2010). I prefer the chapbook because of its great design and its more complete resonance.

In the Bar Napkin Sonnets, a speaker narrates her experiences and feelings, as in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Instead of addressing her true love, the Elizabethan norm, Bar Napkin Sonnets take place in absence. Here we have a femme-fatal female speaker, confident in her sexuality, yet insecure about making lasting connections. Quite typically in Bar Napkin Sonnets, the twelfth untitled sonnet in the sequence begins:

I don’t mind bar food, sit and eat alone
and read and write and listen to the hum
of voices wafting up like smoke, the drum’s
insistence, all those men in bad cologne.

Yet, at the end of the sonnet, two people emerge from the humdrum to spark a private dance.

In the sonnet on page 17, the speaker opens with an image of romance:

We pause in conversation and the air
around us stills. I feel as if a globe
of yellow light’s enveloped us, alone,
and everyone around has disappeared.

It turns out, however, that the lover is “only twenty-five.” The femme fatal has already established herself as middle-aged. Throughout this sonnet, there’s a sense of romance willed into existence—a self-created illusion—floated upon the evening’s dance. With the dawn, romance comes and goes in this sonnet “ephemeral as youth.”

In the sonnet “He says his last girl didn’t like his muscles,” the speaker engages in a carnal one-night stand. However in the next sonnet (“It’s not my place or his to want to fuck”), the speaker is both repulsed and attracted to a one-night stand with a married man. In the end, the female speaker values love as well as lust. She does not ask the reader to agree or disagree. As with most good literary art, the sonnet leaves such evaluations to the reader.

“Sonnet 15” also recognizes a more fundamental desire for permanence. However, the speaker does not believe in such permanence. This ambivalence does not stop the speaker of these poems from living life and enjoying others. This complex ambivalence is well-conveyed in Bar Napkin Sonnets. The speaker also is introspective in these poems, which acts sometimes as a chaser to her adventures. In fact, the speaker is a poet, writing catch-as-catch can. This fact also appears in the sonnets, but lightly, smartly, and indicating a desire for more depth than offered often in a bar.

Moira Egan, the author, is married and lives in Italy. Before she moved there, I first encountered Egan as a fellow poet in the lively Baltimore poetry scene. I even heard some of these sonnets read at a midnight poetry reading years ago, at a local artist’s loft space. I had a sense then that she hit her stride. I am glad to see it’s true. The sequence closes with the connection between love gained or lost, and the desire to embody it in writing:

Are love’s inscriptions like a form of art,
or injuries incurred from constant motion:
tennis elbow, carpel tunnel, arrhythmic heart?
And you should see my scars I sit alone,
a glass of wine, a napkin, and my pen.

On the one hand, with successful love, writing embodies it in “love’s inscriptions.” On the other hand with love lost, it resembles “injuries.” The writer is left with a Keatsian negative capability (“a glass of wine, a napkin, and my pen”), a blank introspection and emotional resonance.

Romantic British poet William Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, said that poems should provide pleasure as well as rely on colloquial speech. Wordsworth’s directive toward pleasure is not as often remarked upon. Bar Napkin Sonnets, simply put, is a good read. Its expert craftsmanship and storyline provide pleasure. The sequence creates a real window on the real world. That’s valuable.

Aristotle argued that catharsis was the key feature of Ancient Greek tragedy, the audience feeling the harrows of Oedipus’ fall without having to live its consequences. Maybe empathy is a key mechanism of lyric poetry, permitting the reader to travel with a poet and experience, at a safe distance, all that is encountered. Bar Napkin Sonnets is lighthearted, yet reflective, about getting older, and staying young. The sonnets take you there. Enjoy.

__________

Gregg Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River 2007) and Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009). His writing and literary criticism and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, Measure, The Lyric, Smartish Pace, and Rattle.

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October 5, 2013

HER HUSBAND: TED HUGHES & SYLVIA PLATH – A MARRIAGE by Diane MiddlebrookPosted by

Review by Paul-John RamosHer Husband: Ted Hughes and Syliva Plath - A Marraige

HER HUSBAND: TED HUGHES & SYLVIA PLATH – A MARRIAGE
by Diane Middlebrook

Penguin Books
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
ISBN: 9780142004876
2004, 384 pp., $16.00
www.us.penguingroup.com

Just like the Olympics, presidential elections, and the return of comets, literature goes through a time-cycle where every few years it must revisit the murky case of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.  The marriage of these two artistic landmarks and its tragic aftermath—Plath took her own life 50 years ago this February—have drawn levels of interest well off the charts, extending to people who would usually have no interest in belles-lettres.  It seems as if every intelligent person is familiar with them, is willing to lodge an opinion on them, and will go to extreme lengths to back up his or her argument.

The debate over Plath’s suicide at age 30 and the perceived guilt hanging over Hughes until his death in 1998 comprise one of those ages-old arguments that seem to defy the laws of physics: It is always resumed with the same brutal intensity and dropped because fistfights are ready to break out.  This, however, is in a context of the layman, the casual reader.  Things are a bit more civil but also more challenging in the field of professional biography, where researchers of Plath and Hughes are finding their area increasingly crowded.  Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, published in 1989, is thought of by many as the standard-bearer for anything on the life of Plath, despite its controversies.  Ted Hughes, largely because of the issues that have surrounded him and the unavailability of his private papers, lags behind, but was examined in Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet and is discussed whenever matters of Plath come up.

Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath – A Marriage is Diane Middlebrook’s effort to cover one of the last frontiers in Plath-Hughes scholarship by attempting a balanced view of the two poets’ lives, including that of Hughes in the years after their fallout.  It also bases much of its argument on one of the last remaining forbidden cities, the Hughes archive of 108,000 items that was made available for research at Emory University in Atlanta thirteen years ago.  Middlebrook, who previously wrote a well-regarded bio of Anne Sexton, timed Her Husband perfectly in that it was released during a media outburst caused by the film Sylvia with Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig.  Middlebrook’s biography fares better than Sylvia, which completely bends history, but the quick turnaround of its publication makes one wonder if this actually kept Her Husband from being a stronger book—or, in fact, a good one.

For a book that aims to rehabilitate Hughes or at least encourage public understanding of him, Her Husband is a strange kind of product that doesn’t really achieve either.  The now-late Middlebrook, a feminist scholar who willingly took on the challenge of biographing a condemned man, seems at pains to avoid dragging Hughes through the mud for another 300 pages.  His literary achievement, never in real doubt, is puffed up through repetition of core beliefs (based on Robert Graves) and often superficial connections between his verse and the shamanistic concepts that filled his thinking.  Middlebrook’s approach to the married couple also poses a built-in dilemma, in that Sylvia Plath, the American who overcame a suicide attempt to win her Fulbright scholarship, always strikes us as the more interesting person.  And indeed, Plath seems ready to jog off with the storyline time after time before Middlebrook decides to push Hughes back into the foreground.

Middlebrook thoroughly researched her subject, which should be a given for any kind of biography on Hughes or Plath to see daylight; her sources are some of the most already-handled in academia.  The one unique aspect of Middlebrook’s findings is the 2 ½ tons of provenance at Emory University that Hughes left for the public eye.  Middlebrook is probably the first scholar to engage in large-scale research with these sources, which include Hughes’s letters, manuscripts, and notes.  The documents shed new light on Hughes the man, though only in spots; part of the problem is that Hughes’s archive was his own carefully-arranged project in which he weighed the impact of every document that would reach outsiders (he offered an Australian scholar, Ann Skea, the job of arranging his collection but about-faced at the last minute).  For all of the papers that are now open to us, they seem to project the image of a henpecked widower that Hughes worked at while still alive.

Where does Plath fit into all of this?  Middlebrook, to her credit, tries to boost Hughes without taking crude shots at Plath and her history of mental illness.  The book is arranged so that Plath and Hughes have their lives followed in alternation and the marriage is portrayed as stormy yet artistically beneficial.  When it comes time to deal with the breakup and Plath’s suicide, however, Middlebrook waffles; we know Plath as being vindictive and having a streak of cruelty, but she gives few convincing examples that the poet was worthy of separation, other than unreasonable flashes of jealousy.  There is also a need to ram home the idea that Plath’s self-annihilation was truly unavoidable, but she fails to do this.  Middlebrook limply ends the pivotal seventh chapter with “Depression killed Sylvia Plath” (And what else could?  The steak she burned a few nights before?).

The main crime of this biography is that I felt even more disgusted with Hughes after finishing than when I started.  Her Husband is another biographical piece on Hughes in which the subject comes out of it badly; only this time it seems Middlebrook—I hope unwittingly—is a co-conspirator in glazing over facts here and completely hiding information there.  Highlights of this include no suggestion of the abortion that his lover Assia Wevill underwent and the recovery she made in Plath’s bed after her death, facts that avail themselves in rival biographies; no mention of the impact, if any, Hughes’s open affair with Jill Barber had on his second wife, Carol Orchard, during the late 1970s; and no defense against the fact that Hughes profited greatly from Plath’s work after that defining moment when he stranded her and their two children to be with Wevill in Spain.

Hughes had the disadvantage of outliving Plath by 35 years and being able to make several moves that were thought unsavory and intensified public criticism.  Hughes’s involvement in his wife’s legacy after 1963 has a vague odor to it and Her Husband is no exception when it moves into this stretch of time.  With Plath out of the picture, we read through the whole sorry affair of Hughes and his sister Olwyn managing her literary estate, including the publication of her letters and journals that Plath might never have imagined to be seen openly.  Hughes was particularly ambitious on this front after being hit with a large tax bill by the English revenue service in the late ’70s, seeing Plath’s archive as a bailout.  Defenders of Hughes have made the argument that marketing archival materials is a regular part of literary commerce; but this explains nothing about the fact that he piled up massive royalties from his wife’s work after leaving her in an isolated state with two children, fully aware of her psychiatric condition.

There is no question that Hughes’s efforts helped to cement the legacy of Plath but both came out of their often fertile relationship completely destroyed.  Had Plath survived, she would most likely be respected instead of world-famous, perhaps in the mold of Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, or Maxine Kumin, while Anne Sexton would be known to all for “that” suicide.  Hughes remained overshadowed by the marriage’s aftermath and the towering figure that Plath became.  During the ’70s, lubricated by booze, he managed a string of extramarital affairs that sometimes overlapped each other.  In 1984, he accepted the role of Poet Laureate, but only after Philip Larkin turned the offer down.  His considerable literary achievement will remain clouded until at least 2023, when a sealed trunk at Emory University containing the last of his archive will be opened.  Will it be opened to reveal Plath’s final two journals, one of which Hughes said he destroyed and the other of which he claimed was lost, or, perhaps, her second novel that has also mysteriously wandered off?  Anything, at all, to clear his name in public?  Hughes’s stained apparition can only hope.

__________

Paul-John Ramos‘s work has recently appeared in Hobble Creek Review, Atticus Review, Mayday, Hypertext, and Blue Collar Review.  He was also a finalist of the 2008 Black Lawrence Press Poetry Chapbook Competition.

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September 30, 2013

THE SILENCE TEACHER by Robert PeakePosted by

Review by Michelle BittingThe Silence Teacher by Robert Peake

THE SILENCE TEACHER
by Robert Peake

Poetry Salzburg
c/o Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher
University of Salzburg
Department of English and American Studies
Erzabt-Klotz-Str. 1
5020 Salzburg
AUSTRIA
ISBN 978-3-901993-37-4
2013, 32 pp., $7.00
www.poetrysalzburg.com

 

                 We inhabit
the shell of the world,
and carry it gently.

It carries us too,
the echoing stairwell,
the empty glass aflame.

          —Robert Peake, from “Piece Work”

When I first met Robert Peake, he was still in the early stages of mourning the loss of his infant son, James Valentine, to whom The Silence Teacher, his gorgeous new collection is dedicated. I was immediately struck by Robert’s depth of knowledge, quick wit and skill as a poet—a talented wordsmith with a deep emotional register and intellectual acuity—a writer capable of feeling much and wielding precise language in order to reveal the beautiful, wounded worlds spinning inside and around him.

The Silence Teacher lives up to this author’s reputation as a keen, sentient observer and is a heroic account of a father’s journey dealing with death. As the title suggests, silence becomes an element, like water or music, to measure and express the unfathomable grief of losing a child: “The music within me is quiet, but persistent./ One day, like you, I will return to being the song./ Beneath my eyelids, too, runs the sound of water.”

Peake deftly weaves this concept throughout the book, mining absence and anguish for the glittering trove it has to offer. As Nietzche once said, “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” and Peake knows how to arm himself for the battle of surviving the inconceivable, beginning with the literal silence of the hospital room and infant son the moment his tiny life ceases. From the title poem “The Silence Teacher”:

Grief’s small hands cupped before me,
reliving the news of our infant son’s tests,
his brain as quiet as her soundless sea,

and still as winter in a robin’s nest,
I did not say: I was the one who held him last
until the ticking heart stopped in his chest

or what that silence taught, and how it pressed.

Here, from the start, I was enveloped in Peake’s spell, listening with him to the sounds of silence, hyper-aware of the opposing tension of this bereft parent’s primal scream held deep inside as he attempts to carry on with the routine of daily life, “the hum of the living still buzzing around my ears.” Whether describing the image of deer prints left in snow when his wife was still pregnant, feeling the anvil-weight silence of friends and strangers who struggle, not knowing how to respond (What can one say? What words could ever address such gravity?), or the strange comfort of bright carp swimming noiselessly around a koi pond—silence is everywhere, and like his small son’s life, it is both dead cold and white hot, blazing up “like sun upon the sea.”

At times, I’ve known Robert Peake to exhibit a delightfully dry sense of humor, as well as an appreciation of games and small creatures—assets he artfully employs to aid him in understanding personal tragedy. In poems like “Traction” and “Runt,” I valued such wisps of humor—miraculously intact—and the smart way he reflects on past experiences with children and animals to help him claim ultimate allegiance to the life force that “flashes up like an Olympian bolt” even as he struggles to put one traumatized foot in front of the other.

There is a subtle arc to the mourning process in The Silence Teacher. A pivotal moment comes with the poem “Visitation of the Wild Man,” a master and novitiate-type confrontation Peake imagines with a savage, wise elder who helps the speaker wrestle his way into new frontiers of understanding and acceptance. The Wild Man, a persona energy of the author himself, says it all: “’Confess and claim—you need/ to express this mystery,’ he smiled, ‘and fail—but do it well.’”

At one point in Elegy, a book that deals with the loss of her grown son, poet Mary Jo Bang concludes that “life is an experience”—a seemingly oversimplified expression given such grave stakes. But this is no pat epiphany, and as with Peake, is rather an extraordinary, frightfully tenuous revelation the author claims through surrender to both the sensual fullness of the everyday physical world and what is glaringly empty and absent in the wake of loss. Stumbling forward through silence,  a parent must carry the excruciating burden of telling his story, of passing it on with vulnerability to the truth—not acceptance entirely; because, after all, we will never stop loving our lost beloveds—but with an ember of will kept alive to honor memory and keep going. Perhaps, in the end,  it is simply this that one is left with, as Peake, with breathtaking delicacy puts it:

Tie a message to my foot. I will assume
my place in the ariel formation. Let me
be a single snowflake in that flurry.

__________

Michelle Bitting grew up near the Pacific Ocean and has work published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, diode, Rattle, Linebreak, the L.A. Weekly, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Feature on Verse Daily. Thomas Lux chose her full-length manuscript, Good Friday Kiss, as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award and C & R Press published it in 2008. Her book, Notes to the Beloved, won the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Award and was published in 2012. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is proud to be an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon, and recently commenced work on a PhD in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor Phil Abrams and their two children. (www.michellebitting.com)

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