Beth Browne

Review by Beth Browne

SACRED GRAFFITI
by Florence Weinberger

Tebot Bach
Box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887
ISBN 978-1-8936706-0-0
2010, 77pp., $15.00
www.tebotbach.org

In one of those small world coincidences that pepper my life, I first learned of Malibu poet Florence Weinberger when she entered one of the North Carolina Poetry Society contests I was administering. She had learned about our Caldwell Nixon Jr. Award (poems by adults written for children) from one of our previous judges when I suggested she promote it for us among her students and colleagues.

For a poet I learned about from one of her poems for children, I was expecting much lighter fare. Instead, I found this deeply fulfilling and engaging book full of resonant and profound poems. Each one is like a rich gem, leaving the reader satisfied but ready for more. The book is divided into five sections introduced by a quote.

The first section revolves around the theme of art and is introduced by this thought-provoking quote by novelist George Sand:

Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

From filmmaking to poetry, these poems reverberate with insight into various art forms, artists and life itself. The title poem, “Sacred Graffiti,” referencing painter Mark Rothko, is contained in this section and concludes with these haunting lines:

When some men brood and grow bitter, their tainted truths bleed
sorrow’s flowers. We must love them so hard, we grow calm.
O, smudged and smoking heart.

With a foray into the worlds of sculpture and music, there are also several poems about poets and poetry, my personal favorite being the more intimate “Out of Words,” recounting Weinberger’s experience writing poetry.

I used to finish a poem and have words left over
that I could eat the next day, cold, or recover

enough to brew a distillate, to which I’d add hunger,
the sting of single syllables, a pinch of rigor…

The section concludes with an evocative poem on the theme of cave painting called “The Birth of Art.”

The second section is introduced by a quote from the eighteenth century English author, Samuel Johnson:

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Starting with a hitchhiker and taking us on a journey from China to Texas with stops in North Korea, Europe and Andalusia, this section is far-flung and colorful. One of my favorites is “The North Korean Bride:”

She believes god
made her a woman,
clever with bones
so she might live.

Taught her to turn them
into savory soup,
adding little more
than vapor and spice.

Taught her to turn
the bones of her body
into dollars, pay a broker
to slip her into China.

The concluding poem, “Texas Synchronicity,” was inspired by Weinberger’s visit to a museum in Texas. The poem takes the reader many unexpected places, including this:

De Kooning went right on painting
after he’d lost his mind,
which doesn’t explain my presence in
Dallas, or why I looked down
Dealey Plaza, trying to guess
the distance from the window
to the back of Kennedy’s head.

Part Three is a surprisingly personal section, beginning with an intriguing quote from Victor Hugo, of all people:

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

The poems in this section are very personal with references to Weinberger’s childhood, World War II and both her mother and father. This section also contains my favorite poem of the collection: an unforgettable little thing titled, “Pots,” which a friend, upon my reading it to her, said gave her chills. The poem seems the opposite of many of the poems in the collection in that it takes a very simple thing and makes it reflect the most complicated of emotions. The other poems do the opposite very successfully. They take something very complicated–“Hebrew sorrow,” “Agapanthus, Jacaranda, Bougainvillea,” “A Present I Didn’t Know I Wanted”–and distill them into something simple, wistful and poignant, their very essence. This is the particular genius of Weinberger’s work in this book and possibly the goal of any serious poet.

In addition, Weinberger exhibits particular skill with words, no excess, no misstep, just the precise word to evoke the exact tone and feeling she wants to convey. Whether she’s talking about her father “fingering” a cigarette, or the “purple umbrels of agapanthus,” the reader is instantly delivered to the exact image of what Weinberger is trying to impart. The poems are not full of unnecessary or overwrought words, but she has a knack for producing an unusual word, perfect for her purpose. I’m sure Weinberger took particular care in the arrangement of this book, with the heaviest, deepest section in the middle, easing out of it with the following section, prefaced by this quote from Henry James:

Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

But the transition is not abrupt. Weinberger seems to sense the reader’s need to be brought up gently, so the section starts with the melancholy musing on a butterfly trapped under the eaves, not dire and savage, but slightly sad, with a hint of hope. Easing along with poems about thirty-six cents and humming in a supermarket, Weinberger exercises her sense of humor, which is self-effacing and understated. But the book is not a humorous one, and the poems quickly revert to Weinberger’s usual seriousness. A particularly plaintive one being “Landscape with Wounded Bird” :

In this other life I live,
I pick up the bird and bring it home –
it nestles near my heart as if it could
assume the beat –

The section ends with a classic Weinberger, “Honeydew In Season”:

How can I hold a ghost of what is falling away, passing
from a full mouth into a swoon of ripe happiness.

From here the book sails on to its satisfying conclusion in the final section prefaced with this concise quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

It is time to be old…

A section that seems to be about both love and aging, two concepts which often seem to be mutually exclusive in our frantically youth obsessed culture, these poems are frank and often startling, as in this one, my friend’s favorite:

Young people think
old people having sex
is funny.

Sometimes it is.
Very funny.
Other times it is sublime.

Sacred Graffiti is not the work of a novice, but rather a highly skilled wordsmith, meting out her lines with careful precision and creating a work of soulful pleasure. Ms. Weinberger is surely a force to be reckoned with.

_____________

Beth Browne: “Why do I love poetry? Because I could never get that damn wheelbarrow out of my head. That and the plums. Because my grandfather composed poems on his prescription pads and my father wrote limericks on cocktail napkins. Because I still have them and because I can still see the rainwater and the chickens.” (womenswrites@inbox.com)

Review by Beth Browne Wheelchair Samurai by Lee Rossi

WHEELCHAIR SAMURAI
by Lee Rossi

Plain View Press
P.O. Box 42255
Austin, TX 78704
ISBN 978-1-935514-15-2
2011, 98pp., $14.95
http://plainviewpress.net

Four years ago, I was once again resurrecting my sleepy writing career, perusing the latest issue of Pedestal, having met founder and editor John Amen at a local writing conference, when another familiar name swam to the surface of the screen. Huh, I thought, I used to know a man named Lee Rossi. His wife and son were in my daughter’s playgroup back in L.A. before we moved to North Carolina some six years before. I dug around and sure enough, Lee was Lee and we’d known each other on the other side of the country all those years ago.

I think he was as delighted as I was to reconnect. I had forgotten he was a poet and when we’d known each other; I hadn’t yet considered writing poetry. We kept in touch, exchanging news of the kids and finding common friends in the writing world. When he found out I was doing interviews for The Main Street Rag, he asked if I would review his latest book, Wheelchair Samurai. Now, this is a sketchy prospect. An interview is a completely different animal than a book review and although I have been on the board of the NC Poetry Society for years, I am no English major. And besides that, what if I really didn’t like the book? What would I say then?

Happily, I read the book with great pleasure. Divided into three sections, the first one, “Blood Litany,” begins with a bang. With flashing details, the first poem, “Underwood,” ends with this stunning revelation:

And when after hours of pecking and hunting,
I showed my aunt, she marveled, disarming me with praise,

afraid, perhaps, that when combined, those letters
might transcribe the molecules of the future, and I, boy

alchemist, might uncover other secrets, the sadness of adults,
how everyone betrays the child she used to be.

The section moves on at a spirited pace, with several character studies, including my personal favorite, “Yakuza In The Jacuzzi” which begins with the memorable line, “I don’t know what my sister sees in her mobster,” and continues with laugh-out-loud humor: “I’ve seen him/floating like a walrus in the giant/redwood crockpot behind their house.”

Rossi’s sensibilities are keen and his insights surprising. As a parent who used to live in Los Angeles, I appreciate the poignancy of “Elegy In an Elephant Graveyard,” a thoughtful and wistful recounting of a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits with his wife and children: “Every day, they say, another species is lost./Tonight my children will dream of beauties we’ve destroyed/to keep them alive.

In “May Day, 1975” Rossi’s evocative turns of phrase such as this:

Somewhere it was still winter,
the wind’s serrated teeth gnawing
granite and gneiss,
but here the cherry trees unfurled
their fragrant labia.

reverberate with harsher realities as the poem continues:

And then across the vast green I saw a friend.
He was drunk and depleted, a soldier
who’d emptied his clip into the jungle,
frightened by something he couldn’t see…

The final poem in the section “Underground” was one I read over and over, making more of it each time and loving it one line at a time and as a whole.

In the next section, “A Boy’s Gift for Error,” Rossi slows the pace and turns to dreamy introspection such as this from his poem “Borrowed Light”:

…I don’t care if the sky is just a bowl filled with static.
It has a job to do, clearing a space for night
so the moon can burst forth, a flower riding a stem of light…

It seems to me that Rossi is somehow apart from the rest of us, but also very much one of us. His perspective is so unique, his insights fresh, yet both somehow universal and timeless. Although we may not have experienced a spelling bee, we can relate to the crushing sense of failure of the poet in the poem by that name. Also, in “To the Teenager I Nearly Hit On Fairfax,” the cascade of feelings will be familiar to most people: the terror rising into unrestrained anger, held in check, but barely. The poems in this section swing from nature to the schoolroom to vintage cars, but always lending a keen vision and a revelation.

Rossi has a knack for bridging separate concepts and making them into a seamless whole. In “Camping on the Big Sur,” the poet muses not on the landscape, but on the “steaming liter of piss” he carries to the toilets. When it brings to mind the prisoners at Auschwitz, the reader is easily borne with poet to the desperation of the concentration camp and then just as easily to the birth of a daughter, the fluid carrying the thought without effort over the landscape of the soul and coming full circle back to the woods and the birds.

The last section, “Recipes for the Afterlife,” begins with tongue firmly in cheek in a brilliant pantoum entitled “Pantoumime.” Bringing Hollywood into the mix, it moves through several road poems before landing elsewhere in “Space Walk With Turkeys”:

Motel sex, no matter how good with your own wife,
is better with someone else’s, the ghosts
of all those horny strangers, a cheering section
of lingering sweetness, infecting the sheets.

Like many of Rossi’s poems, this one seems a kaleidoscope of visual impressions, death and destruction, guilt and gratification, ICBM’s and turkeys leading the reader on an unexpected and wholly satisfying journey. From South Texas to Japan, this section moves to surprising places, revealing an inner life well spent. Or not:

He has a boy’s gift for error
and hope. He fiddles with his glasses
as if disappointed in what he sees.
No matter how strong the prescription
he knows he will never find the necessary
quiddity. There is truth, though, in
this other glass, chalice filled
with scotch, collecting all that is gold
in the twilight into its chill self.

The sweet poignancy of this poem, titled “A Poet,” carries it to its gentle ending:

(the dead) eye him
tenderly, as if remembering his sweetness
as a child, his gentleness with pets,
the way he guarded his sister.
They are waiting for him to join them,
waiting to gather his immense and frustrated love
into the darkness pouring into the room.

Lee Rossi has poured his immense and frustrated love into the darkness of this world by way of this marvelous book. With its varied subject matter, flawless grasp of language, meter and tone, this book has something for everyone. I can hardly wait to see what he dreams up next.

____________

Beth Browne: “Why do I love poetry? Because I could never get that damn wheelbarrow out of my head. That and the plums. Because my grandfather composed poems on his prescription pads and my father wrote limericks on cocktail napkins. Because I still have them and because I can still see the rainwater and the chickens.” (womenswrites@inbox.com)

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

July 30, 2011

April 5, 2011