E-Reviews

October 25, 2008

THEORIES OF FALLING by Sandra BeasleyPosted by

Review by Jeremy Voigt

THEORIES OF FALLING
By Sandra Beasley

New Issues Press
The College of Arts and Sciences
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
ISBN:-10:1-930974-74-4
64 pp., $14.00
http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/

Theories of Falling is a book about the body and the spirit. The wordplay in the title sets up poems that are concerned with both the spiritual fall of man and the physical pains of living. The spiritual fall works as a central metaphor (and literally in titles such as “The Puritans,” “The Angels” and “The Flood”) as the persona behind the poems probes childhood and dysfunctional adult relationships. Beasley also presents the pleasure-pain principal with tremendous energy in poems full of strong images and wit.

In the title poem Beasley meditates on the cat’s ability to turn and land on its feet:

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October 20, 2008

DEATH’S HOMELAND by Dragan DragojlovicPosted by

Review by Mira Mataric

DEATH’S HOMELAND
by Dragan Dragojlovi
translated by Stanislava Lazarevic

Curbstone Press
321 Jackson Street
Willimantic, CT 06226-1738
ISBN 978-1931896-45-0
2008, 71 pp., $13.95
www.curbstone.org

D. Dragojlovic, as an author of 18 books, has been uniquely popular–read, sold, and reprinted multiple times. Among his many works, poems selected into Death’s Homeland have been acclaimed as the most poignant and moving collection of anti-war poems ever read. In an interview with Jennifer Kanyock and Bonnie Weikel, the author simply states: “Every war, civil wars in particular, mean defeat of all the participants.” He sees the religious motivations behind war as the most brutal and inhumanly appalling of all man’s actions, emphasizing the tragic enigma of how people who believe in a loving God can murder each other, all while claiming their belief in the deity of pure love, peaceful brotherhood and tolerance.

The first poem, “Stone of Woe,” sets the scene by painting a mental landscape of the locale denoted in the title of the book:

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October 15, 2008

CREATION MYTHS by Mathias SvalinaPosted by

Review by Josh Wallaert

CREATION MYTHS
by Mathias Svalina

New Michigan Press
648 Crescent NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
ISBN: 978-0-9791501-9-7
37 pp., $8.00
http://newmichiganpress.com/nmp

“In the beginning there was a pen that drew itself into existence.”

Thus opens Mathias Svalina’s Creation Myths, a chapbook of twenty-four alluring prose poems, or “myths,” that posit the origins of twenty-four alternate worlds. “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird / but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird / & this was confusing,” according to one poem. “In the beginning the only job was unwrapping the mummy,” later on.

The idea that a poem might write itself into being is an old one. This is the concept that animates Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck, or Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, or even, you might say, the Book of Genesis itself. It is especially familiar to poets, who spend their earthly days calling forth objects from the void. Svalina knows what it’s like to play the Creator:

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October 9, 2008

THE HEADLESS SAINTS by Myronn HardyPosted by

Review by Casey Thayer

THE HEADLESS SAINTS
by Myronn Hardy

New Issues Poetry & Prose
The College of Arts and Sciences
Western Michigan University
ISBN 978-1-930974-76-0
85 pp., $14.00
www.wmich.edu/~newissue/

In his second collection, The Headless Saints, Myronn Hardy, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, continues to develop and expand upon the aesthetic established in his first collection, Approaching the Center (New Issues 2001). His distinctive aesthetic is comprised of clarity and concreteness in image, attention to the harmony and dissonance of sound and wordplay, a focus on social issues, and the impressionistic hesitancy to directly interpret the content or subject of the poem.

Swimming against an American poetic history that praises the long, bloated, self-righteous manifesto (think “Song of Myself” or “Howl”), Hardy crafts lyric, minimalistic poems that recall Dickinson in their clear-eyed, concrete natural imagism. But instead of adhering to Dickinson’s strict rhyme scheme and meter, he prefers a more muted lyricism, a rhythm only loosely based on iambs and a Kay Ryan-esque ear for echoes of sound and slant rhyme or, as Junot Diaz has noted, an ear for language similar to early Cornelius Eady. Consider the web of assonance in the second and final stanza of the collection’s opening poem, “Dive”:

Jump into the sea swim until it
gets deep. Dive for chests of silver the lost
luck of pirates bankrupt empires.
What you find may feed this town forever.

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September 28, 2008

LICKING THE SPOON by Joanie DimartinoPosted by

Review by Linda Benninghoff

LICKING THE SPOON
by Joanie DiMartino

Finishing Line Press
PO Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324
ISBN 978-1-59924-160-9
2007, 30 pp., $12.00
www.finishinglinepress.com

The poems in Licking the Spoon are about women—women having children, women involved with men, and women–in some cases, generations of women–cooking. The motif of cooking runs through most of the book and is introduced with the quote: “’Not yet Americanized. Still eating Italian food,”’ preparing the reader for the vivid descriptions of food, and in some cases ethnic food, that will follow.

In the opening poem, the poet prepares onion soup and cornbread in a 1778 hearth: “The heavy iron/ peel scrapes across the brick hearth/ to its own rhythm/ a beat laden with forgotten melodies of stern/ women’s voices, ill children, and dread/ of the coming winter.” The act of cooking ties the poet to past generations of women. Whenever possible, the poet uses metaphors of food to describe people and objects. Yet there is also a focus on relations between the sexes, as in “Domestic,” where the poet, after having been attacked by her husband, wonders about “Restraining order[s]. Court order[s]. Custody order[s.”

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September 25, 2008

SCHOLARSHIP GIRL by Lesley WheelerPosted by

Review by Wendy Vardaman

SCHOLARSHIP GIRL
by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press
P.O. Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324
ISBN: 978-1-59924-226-2
25 pp., $12.00
www.finishinglinepress.com

Scholarship Girl is Lesley Wheeler’s first poetry collection, although Wheeler, Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, is the author of two scholarly books, and the co-editor of Letters to the World, a just-published anthology of contemporary women’s poems from the Women’s Poetry List-Serv. The chapbook displays a careful attention to craft, particularly to sound, a deft use of form, and considerable thought regarding some significant problems in contemporary poetry, especially the viability of the historical poem, whose devices, like description and personae, Wheeler demonstrates command of while simultaneously pointing, as a contemporary ethnographer might, to their limits.

Thus the collection opens with “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood,” a poem written in unmetered quatrains where near-rhyme and assonance replace the exact rhyme of the older historical poem, and personal content—here the mother/daughter relationship—is foregrounded against a particular geographical and historical background that comes in and out of focus throughout the book to form, along with family connections, the force that binds these poems together:

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September 21, 2008

THE FRATERNITY OF OBLIVION by Larry D. ThomasPosted by

Review By Robert Neely

THE FRATERNITY OF OBLIVION
by Larry D. Thomas

Timberline Press.
6281 Red Bud, Fulton
Missouri, 65251
ISBN#: 978-0-944048-44-3
48 pp., $15.00
www.timberlinepress.com

One of the hardest traits for a poet to find in his work is originality. Most must begin with not only something to compel the reader to continue, but to compel the reader to continue this particular collection over others. Larry D. Thomas provides just this in the subject of his recent collection, Fraternity of Oblivion. In Fraternity, Thomas features poetry on and about the outlaw biker, a subject he brings to light with both beauty and violence.

Thomas has not forgotten to start off with a hook. The first poem, “Rite,” opens the collection with a scene where an inductee biker must allow “his woman” to be shared with the brothers of the pack:

and their sheep-woman
rising from the dunes,
sown with the rich,
chapter seed
of blood brethren.

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