E-Reviews

August 12, 2008

THE KNOT by Bruce SpangPosted by

Review by Allen Taylor

THE KNOT
by Bruce Spang

Snow Drift Press
P.O. Box 205
Bristol, ME 04539
ISBN: 0-9661678-3-X
73 pages, $10

Bruce Spang is gay. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It matters because he wants you to know, and he goes to great pains to spell it out for you more than once. The poems in The Knot are personal, revelatory, endearing, and full of human feeling. But they aren’t brilliant.

Many of the poems in The Knot suffer from one, or a combination, of several weaknesses. For the most part, they are too vernacular. At times, as when he is discussing the care of irises or looking for Spanish Fly in his father’s armoire, this succeeds, but those successes are rare treats.

Another problem with Spang’s verse is his tendency to rely on the unimaginative “I.” Only five poems are not written in first person. Considering that many of the poems in The Knot lean toward narrative prose, that doesn’t say much for his versatility as a poet. It says even less about his ability to transcend the circle of his own synaptic sparks and approach the universal, the traditional realm of the poet. Even confessional poetry needs to, from time to time, reach beyond self-centered tropes, but Spang doesn’t stray far enough from his own experience to encourage empathy.

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August 2, 2008

MORNING IN THE BURNED HOUSE by Margaret AtwoodPosted by

Review by S. A. Alfonso

MORNING IN THE BURNED HOUSE
by Margaret Atwood

Houghton Mifflin Company
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003
ISBN 0-395-75591-3
ISBN 0-395-82521-0 (pbk.)
144 pp., $16.00
www.hmco.com

Margaret Atwood’s collection of poems, Morning in the Burned House, could just as easily have employed morning’s homonym—mourning—in the title. The overriding theme of loss and some of its sources and consequences—aging, grief, death, depression, and anger—permeate this collection and, in particular, Section IV which is a series of elegiac poems about Atwood’s father.

The collection is divided into five sections. Section I opens with the poem “You Come Back.” This poem seems to look back on a life lived in a blur in which much was missed, as evidenced by the lines:

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July 27, 2008

IF NO MOON by Moira LinehanPosted by

Review by Marcus Smith

IF NO MOON
by Moira Linehan

Southern Illinois University Press
Crab Orchard Series
1915 University Press Drive
SIUC Mail Code 6806
Carbondale, IL 62902-6806
ISBN: 0-8093-2761-9
2007, 80pp., paper, $14.95
www.siu.edu/~siupress

Moira Linehan begins her debut collection, If No Moon, with a telling passage from Seamus Heaney’s “To a Dutch Potter in Ireland”:

To have lived it through and now be free to give
Utterance, body and soul–to wake and know
Every time that it’s gone and gone for good, the thing
That nearly broke you–

We sense before the first poem the book’s general trajectory and outcome–the poet will survive and transcend something painful. This is like knowing the plot of a play and watching it for the how not the what of its stagecraft. The what here–Linehan’s husband’s gradual death from cancer–we quickly learn, and as for the how, the poems keep mostly to a plain, sober course of grief and mourning. Along the way one can respect the depth of feeling presented, but frequently miss mystery, a feeling that often elevates competent poetry to excellent poetry.

This is not to say that Linehan isn’t very capable of raising her level above the literal and descriptive. Somewhat deceptive, in fact, in terms of the whole book, is the long opening poem “Quarry,” which does establish a tone of the unsayable that poetry has always depended upon for emotional depth. For instance, in this observed narrative about a body missing at the bottom of a quarry reservoir, the quarry serves as a symbol of personal uncertainty. While the speaker wants to “see this story/settled,” she knows that her own current history is deeply confused:

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July 18, 2008

SOME NIGHTS NO CARS AT ALL by Josh RathkampPosted by

Review by Sara E. Lamers

SOME NIGHTS NO CARS AT ALL
by Josh Rathkamp

Ausable Press
1026 Hurricane Road
Keene, New York 12942
ISBN: 978-1-931337-35-9
2007, 91 pp., paper, $14.00
www.ausablepress.org

The poems within Some Nights No Cars At All are poems of distance–the distance we have to travel to get to the person who resides within the same walls we do, the distance to overcome childhood bruises, to see things as they truly are and not as what they appear to be. They are poems that reveal the darkness of relationships, of the way we are apt to wound one another, the way we try to make up, succeed and fail, learn to muddle through and keep on going.

Sure we’ve read poems that tackle these themes before, but it is the way Rathkamp presents tension softly and carefully, breaking the bad news gently that compels the reader onward. As in “June in the Desert,” where the narrative turns from the destruction “out there” to the cold facts in front of the speaker:

Last night my girlfriend said
that there wasn’t a burning
between us, nothing that would make
her tape her life to mine.

Yet the speaker clings to a strand of hope, explaining “but still we decide to wait/ for something to grow/ into something else.” And we sense the pointlessness but appreciate the honesty, knowing that any of us would try to reassure ourselves in the very same way.

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July 15, 2008

HALFLIFE by Meghan O’RourkePosted by

Review by Greg Weiss (email)
Halflife by Meghan O'Rourke
HALFLIFE
by Meghan O’Rourke

W.W. Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10110
ISBN: 978-0-393-06475-9
87 pp., $23.95
www.wwnorton.com

When you Google-search “Meghan O’Rourke,” the first result is the transcript of a 2006 interview with David Baker, the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. The interview was occasioned by the publication of five of O’Rourke’s poems in the Fall 2006 issue, and Baker’s questions range from accommodating to gushing. He never quite plumbs the depths of obsequiousness that housed courtside reporter Ahmad Rashad’s postgame questions to Michael Jordan—questions like, “Mike, that was an amazing game you just played”—but he’s no Tim Russert, either. The second Google result is a May 2007 article from Gawker.com, the media gossip blog, entitled “Why People Hate Meghan O’Rourke.”

O’Rourke, who serves as the culture editor of Slate and poetry editor (along with Charles Simic) of The Paris Review, evokes strong opinions. In relation to her poetry, these opinions are almost universally positive–Halflife, her debut book, is graced with blurbs by John Ashbery, Billy Collins, J.D. McClatchy, and Mary Karr, who compares O’Rourke favorably to Elizabeth Bishop. In April 2007, the New York Times Sunday Book Review treated Halflife to what could only be described as a rave. People hate Meghan O’Rourke because she accomplished—or was given, depending on your point of view–all of this by the age of thirty, ostensibly because she is connected, Machiavellian, and pretty.

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July 9, 2008

THE SECOND QUESTION by Diana Der-HovanessianPosted by

Review by Mary Buchinger Bodwell

THE SECOND QUESTION
by Diana Der-Hovanessian, 2007

The Sheep Meadow Press
PO Box 1345
Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY 10471
ISBN: 1-931357-45-5
105 pp., $13.95
www.sheepmeadowpress.com

In this book by Diana Der-Hovanessian, a poet of Armenian descent, the Second Question of the title poem is “How did you escape/ death,” which follows the First Question “where in Turkish Armenia/ were your people from.” The poem explains how the children of the women who had asked the second question now only ask the first. However, Der-Hovanessian will not allow the second question to be discarded. In this collection, she demonstrates—shows rather than tells—how death was and continues to be escaped. As one means to this end, Der-Hovanessian, a prolific translator of Armenian poetry, engages in dialogue with international poets. In a poem entitled “1915”, she writes: “The Israeli poet says/ even Satan has not invented a revenge/ for the death/ of a child…” She then poses the question: “And when there/ are not enough/ names for sorrow/ how can there be/ a revenge that/ will not cause more?”

This is a volume of difficult questions—questions posed by someone outside, an exile, a “foreign associate” who, for example in the poem, “For Luda Laughing”, snaps at Luda’s husband who has asked Luda to get him a drink of water: “Why don’t you get it yourself?” Asking bold questions is one way Der-Hovanessian insists on life and change; another is through humor. A sense of humor, often dry and ironic, streams through these poems like sunlight, illuminating, in its own fashion, how death is escaped. From pointing out how Emily Dickenson’s bread won first prize, while her poetry went unnoticed in her lifetime (“Emily Baking”) to “Seven Warnings in Search of an Armenian Feminist”, including the lines: “Beware the man who over-praises your cooking./ He’s going to invite his friends over,” Der-Hovanessian shines her laughing light on dark corners.

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