December 10, 2012

Review by Barrett WarnerMeeting Bone Man by Joseph Ross

MEETING BONE MAN
by Joseph Ross

Main Street Rag, 2012
P. O. Box 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227
ISBN: 978-1-59948-355-9
2012, 90 pp., $15.00
www.mainstreetrag.com

Not all of us know our fathers. Joseph Ross knew his for fifty years. The 94-year-old combat veteran passed this year, a few months after Ross’ debut poetry volume Meeting Bone Man was published. In his blog post eulogy, Ross noted, “It’s hard to find photographs of my dad by himself.” Ross’s poems are a lot like his dad. The Washington, D.C., poet writes in clusters. His poems travel together like old friends. Darfur, Civil War dead, Disco Dan, Buddha, Basquiat, Haiti, and “Bone Man” himself, are a merry gang helping us to laugh and cry away the horror of our fragile mortality.

Bone Man, like his close cousin, the Mocko Jumby—a cultural icon of the West Indies—pantomimes the dark hereafter in an out-of-context college with the living present: “He’s an accordion/ of clicks and scrapes,/ the glow-in-the-dark/ skeleton from childhood’s/ Halloween parties/ come to life./ Though not exactly, to life.”

“Meeting Bone Man,” “Bone Man Loves Parties,” “Bone Man Goes to the Beach,” and “Bone Man Is Not My Friend” begin each of the four sections of the book, bearing the reader through layers of politics, metaphysics and sadness. Ross writes at the conclusion of his title poem: “we all lie down in pieces,/ in dry and tilting disarray.”

At first glance, the Darfur series looks to be that dangerous school called “poetry of witness.” These poems are about witness, but Ross is sensitive enough that what he observes is secondary to how he identifies on many levels with what he sees. The victims in this series are all children: “A boy, seven years old,/ very old for here.” Most are about the same age as Ross in his oldest memories of his dad. His job in the camps is to wash the corpses, wrap them in shrouds and wait for the UN truck to collect the bodies. In “Darfur 3: The Girl” Ross writes, “She just appeared/ as if by magic,/ this girl of twelve or thirteen.// One moment the date palm/ stood alone at the edge of the camp./ The next moment,/ she stood under it.” None are able to console her. She weeps into her rice:

She was declared “healthy.”
A strange declaration
for a girl, twelve or thirteen,
who has cried ceaselessly
for five days.

The doctor knew
the inadequacy of the declaration.
He wrote:
Visible wounds: none.
Psychological state: mutilated.
Cause of injuries: unknown.

Ross’s own mutilated psychological state is suggested in these lines. Grief is his invisible wound, but Ross is that rare poet capable of a genuine smile in spite of a busted face. In “The Genocide Choir,” a large group of children meet one night a week to sing, “their own voices/ and skinny handclaps/ keep them from turning to dust.” Ross has great eyes. He can find an image in any light, but he’s very effective at turning the interesting image into a metaphor, a class many recent poets have skipped. In “The Witness Trees 1,” the speaker is given a tour of Gettysburg by an elderly volunteer: “He had skin like brown construction paper/ and eyes like blue river stones,/ smooth from all that had rushed over them.” Eyes like blue river stones is the unique image; smooth from all that had rushed over them is the metaphor. The guide regularly walks with the dead, but his focus is an old cypress tree which is similar to the date palm standing alone at the edge of the Darfur camp:

a witness tree.
That’s a tree that was here even then,
it saw the battle, saw the burials.

One of death’s horrors is its anonymity. Ross’s will to live is a will to have an identity. In another Gettysburg poem, Ross mourns a grave monument: “the words Unknown 425 Bodies/ are carved neatly/ into its blue-gray face.” Now that Ross has his metaphor he begins to extend it so that the metaphor overtakes the narrative thread of the poem:

The original stone
would be furious if it could see
the use the carvers made of it.

It would have strained
and struggled to get away
from becoming

the announcement of this much misery.

By writing his poems in clusters, Ross re-strings his narrative, which would otherwise be unraveled by such strong thoroughness in his metaphors. The Gettysburg cluster is followed by the “Cool Disco Dan” cluster. Dan is a graffiti artist, similar to the grave monument carvers except that Dan’s easel is “the concrete canvas soon to be/ coated in a turquoise dream/ of letters wrapping and rubbing.” And, like the guide in “The Witness Tree,” Dan “knows the fatality/ of language.”

He knows his very name
can be covered over
in one night if
he actually sleeps.

Because of this mortal knowledge,
learned in the dark,
Cool Disco Dan baptizes us
in three dimensional words
so that when we die
our names might be saved too.

The poems in the first section of “Meeting Bone Man” all want to answer what it means to be a poet. It means sadness, singing, being a guide, a talking stone, a midnight vandal painter. The last poem, “The Universal Artificial Limb Company,” answers what it means to be poetry: “Its name, painted in clean/ gold and black letters,/ arcs across the front window,/ announcing the ancient art/ of remembering what has been/ dismembered.” Poetry is a storefront in a strip mall of boarded-up stores, “not even sophisticated enough/ to call its product prosthetics” while “Whole Foods and Starbucks/ hover across the street/ waiting, plotting, maybe even grinning.”

Ross balances Bone Man’s Rice Crispy motion—snap, crackle, and pop—with the spiritual motion of his Buddha cluster. In “Buddha Breathes,” “Buddha Stands,” and “Buddha Bends,” Ross presents the ideal he aspires to be as a poet, breathing so that “every cell/ organ and drop of blood/ spins and shivers/ in ecstasy.” He writes:

So he bends,

in a way that shows
he knows the craft

of bending. His hand
reaches down and

Caresses the dirt,
rubs it,

adoringly, as one
lover does, carefully

preparing a place
for the other to sleep.

There are four pieces of advice an MFA has given me, pearls for which I’ve taken out student loans which will ensure I’ll die with a pitchfork in my hand as I work and work to pay them back. The first, cloches don’t wash. The second, save the adverbs for politics. The third, prepositions, like children, are best seen but not heard. The fourth, avoid using words like “love” and “crying” or the love and crying police may ticket you. Joseph Ross got a better education than I did. He learned the rare moments when these rules should be broken. Rules of any kind are irrelevant to this Eurydice who tirelessly wanders back and forth between the dead and the living, and between concrete reality and the spirit world. Meeting Bone Man is a poet’s gospel, and a blessing to all of us. Even the last poem in the collection “When the Dead Stand Up to Sing” is a kind of hymn: “At one moment their voices/ are bright, like light./ At the next, they drop like darkness./ These singers have fallen and risen,/ they have gone through/ and come out…it’s the music of light/ breaking through every crack/ in every stone.”

Ross’s political engagement and his obsession with mortality reveal a man who has evolved from liberation theology towards liberation poetry. For him, getting out of your own small town has to happen even if it has a population of four million. It isn’t about the economy. It’s about the empathy. Just reading this book makes you want to go and do something nice for someone.

____________

Barrett Warner is the poetry editor for Free State Review. A compulsive reader and reviewer, his occasional poems and U. S. Poet Laureate lampoons have appeared in Gargoyle, Common Ground Review, Southeast Review, Slipstream, and elsewhere.

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September 30, 2012

Review by Barrett WarnerEveryday People by Albert Goldbarth

EVERYDAY PEOPLE
by Albert Goldbarth

Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, MN 55401
ISBN: 978-1-55597-603-3
2012, 187 pp., $18.00
www.graywolfpress.org

The twinned weeks of Easter and Passover are a good time to read Albert Goldbarth’s Everyday People on a farm. It’s a time of mythic liberation and re-incarnation, but it’s also a time of nitrogen, cutting ground, seeding, and rolling. “The truly interesting halves/ of Hercules and Jesus are everyday people,” he writes in “Most of Us.” The grime of the everyday can be a beautiful muse and Goldbarth seduces us with its charms. This collection is a hymnal for those of us whose lives get dirty with what we do:

Worlds shake. There is gnashing, there are hosannas.
Even so, if the “condition” is “human”
it also must attend to Neil
losing at online poker tonight.

Maybe Goldbarth is a pretty good poet, but he’d have made a hell of a farmer too. His eye that sees everything and discards nothing, his thinking out loud in quiet places, the always present hum of instinct–the fight/run, fight/run bugle of his line breaks–all this would have made him very comfortable on the back of a horse. Goldbarth is also quite at home as a poet, one of the hardest working man in metric feet, sending out oversized envelopes each month, licking his stamps, and broadcasting his poems to everyone.

Goldbarth learned how to move with Norman Dubie, Marvin Bell, Lerry Levis and that whole generation of writers who mastered how to carry metaphor threads across the country and into the next century without breaking them. Each of these close cousins found his unique way to push metaphor over so much space and time. Levis did it by meandering. Dubie did it with dramatic monologues. Goldbarth does it with a storm of words, an ocean of language. He writes:

The oceans are dying. They require a hero,
or a generation of heros. The oceans are curdling
in on themselves, and on their constituent lives,
they’re rising here, and lowering there,
I swear I’ve heard them gasping.

These lines in the book’s title poem are a call to arms and awareness. Save the oceans. Save the language. The speaker’s friends are too busy “brooding over who their kids are playing with on the streets” and are “exhausted disputing how many angels can trample the truth from a twelve-dollar overcharge on a cell-phone bill.” It’s worrisome, the ocean problem, the language problem, but there’s also “the tumor and the marriage and the alcoholic uncle.”

Paranormal readers take note; the ghost of Auden haunts these lines. Consider Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts:”

About suffering, they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
            Walking dully along.

When our lives are busy–busy with “pomp and accomplishment”–they are not our own. We need the reflected moment to carve ourselves out of the “heavy communal block.” For Goldbarth, the right to assemble is less attractive than the right to be alone, dreaming his dream of “falling through a buttonhole into the lives of everyday people.”

One such spill takes him into the heart of Darwin. “I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwin/ who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle/ no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises.)” This was Darwin’s everyday life, as it was Einstein’s to sit on trains. We need experience and reflection in equal measure to gain the breakthroughs, and too many of us are all one and none of the other: “I tell you/ we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs/ of the minutiae of our own lives.”

Goldbarth’s key moments arrive when he lets the reader in his own button holes, writing close to the everyday parts of himself. Anyone’s mind is capable of forming associations, but the heart is less inventive and this is the important middle ground we should seek in creating art:

When I heard the sounds
that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night
I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one
she’d have been the happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,
and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. […] And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,
someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in.

It is a shame that “The Poem of the Little House at the Corner of Misapprehension and Marvel” has to end. But in many ways it doesn’t. Anyone as prolific as Goldbarth will tend to write poems in clusters. Each poem in this collection feels like it begins in the middle of the preceding poem, as if each new poem were another branch of the former poem’s possibilities. Here are poems meant to be read as a whole group. The narrative thread and its voice change often between these eight clusters but this is a man who’ll grab at anything–a stone, a club, an insult, a joke, an idea—to hurl at the Busy Monster, to save the ocean, “–of course. What else is there to write about?”

In this way a poem whose middle confides “of lung: 300 million alveoli, that ‘if spread out flat,’/as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, ‘would come to/ 750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house’” and ends “breathing you in” results in the next poem, “Miles,” about his mother’s lung cancer. This is much more cohesive than clever arrangements. Consider too this cluster having begun with an ocean gasping. In “Miles:”

The Anderschorns were the first of our neighbors to get
an RV, and from that day on we saw them only
at Christmastimes. “They travel around the year!”
My mother said with a kind of wonder
in her voice, as if they’d snapped the chains
of ordinary living.

The poem’s tension is anchored in the riddle of time. His mother who suffers air panic hasn’t too much left. She cannot snap the chains of her ordinary dying. The famous Anderschorns make their annual biblical appearance. He writes, “And distance is tricky—not all of it yields/ readily to our gauges and itemized lists.” Time and space, our path to understanding relativity, seem like brother and sister. “Distance is slippery./ One of its tricks: it masquerades/ as time” and “The clock: how many miles?”

The miles in the plum, in the turbot, in the caramel filling.
[…] The miles of nerve
if they were unbundled out of the boy,
is how many miles? A hummingbird is how many miles?
The long trek from the ovum to the grave.
I once said something to a woman I knew
that traveled through the death scenes in the Iliad
before it left my lips.

Not all of us like to admit that we are poets. Goldbarth takes every opportunity. How many poems begin “I was reading” or “I was writing”? Maybe one-in-two, or five-in-ten, as Goldbarth might say, given his tendency to size up rather than down. In “A Story” he clears his throat aand restarts his poem: “I call it/ the life poem: you know, first this happened and then/ this happened too. We write so little/ about the gods anymore–when was the last time Zeus/ assumed an animal form in a poem?” “A Story” navigates its way into a taco joint where the speaker, presumably waiting for his chalupa, sees a Palestinian funeral on the television which reminds him of the Sabbath service: “there was weeping enough,/ and raised-fist vows of violent reprisal enough,/to make the stones of the desert moan in pity./ I saw this. I saw this.”

In other words, you don’t just fall into a button hole. Sometimes you jump and dive into it. Once we get to know other everyday folks, to see the beauty of our shared forms–“scattered creatures into one majestic pattern”–our minds grow even more curious. Button hole jumping is just another way to say “get out of your routines” to know yourself and to see beyond the routines of others. In this, Everyday People is a book of identity and consciousness. While we can solve our own problems, like our grieving and disappointments, no single person ever has an identity that’s tall enough or a consciousness that’s broad enough to keep the oceans from dying. For that we need all of us and the help of a God or community.

I drive back home, eleven city blocks
is a million miles away.
[…] Spectroscopy: we know more now
about the composition of the stars than, say, what constitutes
an act of love in the house across the street.

Identity and consciousness shape perspective and in Everyday People we lose and find perspective many times until by the end of a poem miles are on the clock face and time is the distance you travel. A “poem” is a “story” and classic poetic form is something borrowed only for the moment. Desire and memory cross paths with war and rage and shouts so that consciousness and identity are a romance which may end in tragedy for some, marriage for others, a magical flock of geese, an airplane crash in Iowa.

Goldbarth’s “Perception Poem” is composed of three sonnets more or less stacked and each preoccupied with the seen and unseen. The first stanza takes up vision itself: “The limits of our range…[t]he stars that welt across the sky appear from Mystery and disappear in the sea in a balancing Mystery.” The second stanza is an urban legend-styled bar story describing an attractive woman who enters a bar and climbs on top. “She just stared ahead./ She didn’t make eye contact with anyone.” The woman “bared her pussy; and from out of it she fingered/ a diamond…it was a ten carat diamond,/ And none of us ever learned more than that.” In the final stanza we’re in a cave, submerged with sightless cave fish, who in spite of being blind find numerous ways to busy-up their waxy-white albino slivery lives:

Somewhere in there’s a metaphor
for us, and what we’re blind to, what enormity
we’re blind to, and how surely and emphatically we still
conduct our daily selves. The difference is: they don’t know
what they don’t know. Ours is an awful awareness,
filled with itch and wonder.

Goldbarth’s point is not whether evolution happened, but why has it stopped happening? Evolution, or change through time (or change through distance if you believe the poet), means nothing when it ceases. There must always be change. Creation tilts towards destruction when we stop imagining. “Extra! Extra!” Goldbarth is saying, snapping gum and wearing a ball cap. “Creation is our future! Read all about it!”

____________

Barrett Warner is the Poetry Editor for Free State Review. A compulsive reader and reviewer, his occasional poems and U. S. Poet Laureate lampoons have appeared in Gargoyle, Common Ground Review, Southeast Review, Slipstream, and elsewhere.

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May 5, 2012

Review by Barrett WarnerA Little in Love a Lot by Paul Hostovsky

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT
by Paul Hostovsky

Main Street Rag
PO BOX 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
ISBN 978-1-59948-303-0
2011, 90 pp.,$14.00
www.mainstreetrag.com

Journeyman poet Paul Hostovsky is lucky that Major League Baseball doesn’t drug test poetry. The piss in his collection, A Little in Love A Lot, is full of steroids. His poems begin so easy and innocent, but then the juice kicks and Hostovsky plugs in another amp. In the sonnet “Pop Flies,” two buddies hit pop flies to each other. A bully comes along, walking his Doberman Pinscher:

He asks me gruffly for a turn at bat, and the Doberman
growls…silently surrender
the bat and ball. A wind dies on the schoolyard.

He tosses the ball up, swings at the exact second
that the Doberman, sniffing a game, jumps for the ball
and catches the bat in his head—suddenly there’s blood
everywhere, the Doberman’s seizing, dying…

What happens in the schoolyard tends to happen in the bedroom–a rumbling before each poem transforms choir boy into werewolf. Hostovsky skillfully uses both personalities, the night and the day of himself, to cut through the world’s barriers in order to feel empathy. He writes: “The way out/ isn’t under or/ over or around/ or even through./ It’s with. With/ is the only way out.”

Make no mistake, these are not dark alley poems, but Hostovsky’s fears of dying unloved and alone shade the Wonder Years neighborhood of these ballads, rants, and comedies. For most of us the great abyss is only the shallow grave. Hostovsky’s is the Grand Canyon. If you squint you can see him at the bottom working a shovel, digging the hole deeper. When he reaches Hell he keeps on going, laughing at times, yelling out his love songs: “the background music…/ so loud it was in the foreground.”

These urgent poems of desperate, funny, compelling observations are placated by the metaphor of love and sex in the author’s quest for empathy. True connection between spouses, lovers, friends, neighbors, demented aunts, fathers and sons is almost impossible for Hostovsky, in spite of an otherworldly harmony teasing him at every jagged turn. Porcupines mate after all. So do elephants. Even a turkey buzzard will raise its feathered hem and wink for love.

Move over Woody Allen. In “Love and Death” a couple makes love “on her all-encompassing couch” and afterwards, sipping tea, the speaker volunteers, “I love sitting here opposite you in our underwear,/ talking about death.” Hostovsky is just warming up. “I assert there really is no death, there is only// life, which has no opposite because/ it is all-encompassing.” His lover then tells the story of a relative dying of pancreatic cancer, three months of the kind of pain no one else could bear for three hours. The speaker gives her “a peck” and goes “into the kitchen to make more tea.” There, he watches the flame for three minutes waiting for the water to boil.

The characters in Hostovsky’s poems look out the same window but witness very different versions of life. Agreements are rare, polite arguments are plenty. People seem to work out a system of taking turns being right and wrong, giving love, receiving it. “The Debate at Duffy’s” begins: “She said that sex was a yearning of the soul./ He said it was a very compelling argument/ of the body.” The two argue the length of the baseball game being played on television while filling and draining their cups until she wins “in the bottom of the ninth.” Another poem, “Kiss,” takes place on a train “heading south/ all the seats/ facing north/ like the meeting/ of east and west/ our heads turning slowly/ on the headrests/ towards each other/ like two completely/ different ways of life/ coming together.” The poem ends with the suggestion of kissing: “exchanging aloft/ the moist and crumpled/ messages”–of our lips, Hostovsky wisely lets the reader suppose.

Opposites might attract, but they also might blow each other’s brains out. “We are all attracted to suffering/ and repulsed by it, too./ This doesn’t make the world go around exactly./ It isn’t a law of physics technically./ But it may have something to do/ with the relationships of bodies/ in the universe.” “Cholera” parodies magic realism. A lover has read Love in the Time of Cholera whereas the speaker can’t get past fifty pages without dreaming of cholera. He says, “I think cholera is one of those words, that,/ if divorced from its meaning, would make a beautiful/ name for a girl. Like Treblinka.” The lover “gave me a pained look in the dream then, and I wondered/ if it meant you didn’t agree with me, or if it meant/ that what you were eating didn’t agree with you./ Either way, it was plain to see that you were suffering.”

Hostovsky modulates this contrary world of apartness between intimates by offering several poems which convey the resemblances between strangers. In “Waiting Room” a woman with a portable oxygen tank stands in front of the exotic fish tank: “The woman looks like the fish/ with her bulging eyes and her yellow rain coat.” In “Uncanny”:

Bob Dylan in his late 60’s
looks a lot like my mother.
It’s partly the nose,
Partly the big hair.

Hostovsky understands that gesture is essential to holding the doubtful reader at bay. He’s made a career out of it, working as a sign language interpreter. One of the hearing, his is a blended family of a deaf partner, and one deaf and one hearing child. Perhaps this experience is why a young speaker doesn’t just raise his hand for emphasis, he holds his “palm up in the air like one who is trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not it has started to rain.” Likewise, the co-ed in his German class has a charming defect: “I whispered Ich liebe dich into her umlaut—that pair of moles on her left earlobe.” Such fantastic detail and kinetic gesture would rival that in any silent movie. They keep the poems moving too quickly for the reader to dare jump off. It’s best to just hang on for the climax. Some poets like Billy Collins will gently lay down a reader in the soft bed of a poem’s ending and perhaps give the reader’s toe a wiggle pinch. Hostovsky often will leave us lying in a ditch, dashed and wrecked with enervating surprises. His brilliant seduction begins when we’re just coming-to after an unexpected turn. Hostovsky weaves the abstract and the concrete when we’re most vulnerable. In “Tree Poem” a father sits in a tree contemplating suicide after a day at work. He does this every day when he arrives home. After twenty lines of deliberation, “he climbed down from the tree in the car in the garage/ every time, and walked back into his life with a few/ leaves and twigs still sticking to his head.” Sticking. Nice, very nice.

“Miracles” also weaves the abstract, but also is one of those rare wildcards Hostovsky sometimes deals which explain the greater sum:

Spiritual texts are the most boring in the world.
None of them mentions a bicycle,
or a ferris wheel, or baseball, or sea lions, or ice cream.
They just lump them all together into “the world.”
The “world of appearances.”The “world of illusions.”
You can walk through this world and not
believe it for a minute…
And when the doctor comes in with his numbers
which are your numbers, you can
not believe that either. You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ear, pool on the floor where your eyes
and his eyes have fallen. He won’t
mention the bicycle, or the ferris wheel which is
taking up a lot of room right now in the little
examining room where a sea lion has clambered up
onto the table and is barking, and the baseballs are flying,
and the vendors are hawking ice cream—because he can’t
see them. He can’t perform a miracle.

A Little in Love A Lot is Hostovsky’s miracle, because finally, the miracle is not about sea lions or feeling detached from a lover or dying. The miracle is language itself. These are poems about poetry, each of them an impossible glancing shot, salted with nods to the masters. Writing about a graveyard where he steals quarters off “Naughton’s tombstone” which are left there by descendants, Hostovsky is writing about stealing from traditional poetry, getting it how he can, “because I need them/ for the parking meters/ when I’m driving…Naughton has plenty/ and doesn’t drive anymore anyway.” Alone in a Burger King, Hostovsky remembers Rilke’s commandment about making art, and guiltily believes he cannot call forth riches from his experience. Quite suddenly a family enters, “and while their parents order they play/ duck duck goose, touching all the tables,/ and all the chairs, the girl behind the boy/ following him, copying him and laughing/ louder and louder, because it’s all so wonderful/ here at Burger King, which they seem to have/ all to themselves, except for one man in a booth/ smiling, writing something down on a piece of paper.”

____________

Barrett Warner’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Comstock Review, Natural Bridge, Freshwater, Quarter After Eight, and others. His chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face was published by Tropos Press.

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March 25, 2012

Review by Barrett WarnerStone and Sky by Larry Gavin

STONE AND SKY
by Larry Gavin

Red Dragonfly Press
307 Oxford Street
Northfield, MN 55057
ISBN 978-1-937693-02-2
2011, 46 pp., $10.00
www.reddragonflypress.org

Larry Gavin is a fly fisherman who makes his home in the land of ten thousand lakes. The months spent tying feather lures; those long marches and paddles to the coldest, airiest streams; the snapping cast–all of these rituals are part of a very physical routine essential to discovery. Gavin is not interested in buying his images out of the freezer locker in the “Super America” store. He isn’t the sort of poet who waits around for something ironic to happen. Rather, he goes hunting for it, armoring up with his tackle, a compass, a pen, and setting out to find any tracks poetry might have left in the snow. His poems give us fantastic vision as seen through a steely eye which also manages to wink back at that world as if poetry and nature were accomplices in some miraculous and romantic crime.

Stone and Sky is Gavin’s third book in eight years from Red Dragonfly and at this point you couldn’t pry him out of that house with a crow bar. Maybe this had given writer and press some confidence to air it out, risking more of a psychological journey than the physical expeditions in his earlier work. “First Poem” charts the course: “Those faint tracks first noticed on new snow/ lead deeper into the forest behind/ the house as plain as the simple man/ keeps the secret happiness, and how/ that secret finds its way deeper into winter’s/ heart…Forming a history of the coyote’s quiet progress/ late at night.” Gavin’s keen sense of quiet progress pushes this book deeper and deeper, twenty miles at a time. After language—-“understanding words/ must find themselves to simply sing”–the poet’s most important tool is a clean and dry pair of woolen socks, not an iPad.

Gavin’s paradox is to learn how can he shed his own context—his personality—in the world of nature without losing his identity, his essence. In “On the Border” he writes, “My home is on/ the border, the contact zone, where/ things mix as they struggle to remain/ separate.” Part of his secret lies in embracing the disharmony, never judging it or impulsively falling in love with it but simply living with it, those long coyote nights. No matter how much more he gains access than we, there is still so much more out there inaccessible even to him. In “Remember: Friday Night” the narrator debauches himself at a dance hall, forgetting his faith: “I will fail again to inhale the smoldering/ scent of salvation.” He concludes, “I prefer the words/ of Saint Catherine of Siena who said/ All the way to Heaven is Heaven./ Perhaps she will appear from behind/ the bandstand and perhaps we will dance.”

Gavin has a “so what?” attitude that confesses experience. Being alone and dying alone and feeling broken are not so important after all. There’s probably a friendly country mouse scratching around the larder right now.

I switch off the yard light
and the stars emerge
from the shadows like mice around
a granary. They reason in dark
corners and scamper
on the edge of vision like tiny
meteors trail light
toward the horizon until light blinks
out.
            In the darkness these
creatures give meaning
to ambiguity. And
death like light also comes from above
in the noiseless whisper of an owl.
Questioning. But what is the question
anyway? Is it about day
breaking hours from now? Or about
dreams I’ve been having lately
figuratively filled with people
just like me that disappear in light.
“Think something,” I say to myself
and wander off to bed.

The action here is simple: switch off the light and go to bed. In between, we have a kind of infinity with just enough realness—some mice, an owl, a light in which people disappear—to give “meaning to ambiguity.” Gavin speaks in plain, simple voices about the most outlandish propositions. In “Where the Bones” he writes: “Where the bones come out of the earth,/ at the intersection of longing and desire;/ they don’t look like bones at all first,/ but on closer examination they measure/ the stories we hope to tell in some future.” Gavin is also lyrical in his very original images with phrasing such as “duck’s down sky” and “the wind dodged down/ the road like a small bird.”

One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Changing Owners”:

The blue sky is more vivid
like dreams become more vivid
as we age. They have a smell
almost a dream scent somehow.
Calling coyotes, if all is right,
to yip and howl up the hill,
and when all are gathered,
rush through the wood, owned
only by them, and into the deserted
streets of this town; that thinks it’s
civilized, and is owned too, by
the darkness and the dim glow
of a streetlight moon, and the sound
of something, a cottontail maybe,
or maybe a cat, suffering
for a moment before
it dies.

This poem is for coyotes who make their own calls to each other, their yips and howls. We can build a thousand houses. It is still not our world. It is not our sky. It is not our water. How do we begin to mend the harmony? Well, an apology would be nice. In “Tired of What is Beautiful” Gavin observes, “Three deer slowly eat their way/ through the garden. The Cooper’s/ hawk glares at me from a low branch./ Its eyes describe contempt for any creature/ incapable of flight./ I sit here watching/ for so long this afternoon/ I feel I might blossom. The truth/ remains hidden in time as it passes./ In the shade that moves/ with the sun measuring nothing/ that matters to the deer/ or the hawk, or the basswood,/ or me. I’m sorry is all I can think/ to say, sorry.”

Sometimes it helps to substitute a word now and then. It’s illuminating to replace “sky” with “poetry” the way one might replace “stone” with “life.” Gavin’s collection, Stone and Sky–perhaps other words for Life and Poetry–brings us closer to a world that is oddly right outside our door, yet a thousand miles away from our couches. And poetry, or “sky” as he calls it in the title poem, “is our only hope/ for what will pass as salvation./ It is the vessel eternity escapes/ into.”

____________

Barrett Warner’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Comstock Review, Natural Bridge, Freshwater, Quarter After Eight, and others. His chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face was published  by Tropos Press.

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