March 10, 2009

Review by Maureen Alsop

THE WHITE BRIDE
by Sarah Maclay

University of Tampa Press
401 W. Kennedy Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33606
ISBN: 978-1-59732-042-9
2008, 84 pp., $12.00
http://utpress.ut.edu

A mesmeric music that “starts inaudibly, as all music starts…” (3) within Maclay’s The White Bride moves not only from poem to poem, but from outer ear to inner throat. The arc of the book is a crescendo of image and silhouette guided by a voice with one leg in the city and one leg in another century, past or future–one cannot be sure. The voice, delicate, whispers calmly as the reader engages the motion of waves while standing at the edge of a cliff.

Elegy isn’t even elegy, but something deeper: this is what they touch. It is the only music but it is not really sad. They do not cry, they do not have to cry, they are the same wave. Later they cannot talk about it, say the wrong things; make promises they cannot keep or promise not to promise. Anything they say flattens into ribbons, curls away. It is this simple: start by asking her about her day, start by asking him about his day, and then begin. Listen with your fingers. The sea is dangerous they say, but not if you’re the sea. (3)

Maclay’s voice is the sea, and a reader is quickly catapulted by the marvelous waves of The White Bride’s musical language.

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January 5, 2009

Review by Maureen Alsop

ODALISQUE
by Mark Salerno

Salt Publishing
P.O. Box 937
Great Wilbraham
Cambridge PDO
CB21 5JX United Kingdom
ISBN: 9787774 578737
56 pp., $14.95
www.saltpublishing.com

Odalisque is the book to be read on a rainy night with a good bottle of Shiraz after being swept into the flickering black and white images of a classic noir film and thus overcome by a subdued appreciation for windy alleyways and femme fatales. In the poem “Gaze” Salerno writes: “…because my subject is directional it includes/ desire and attendant clatter beating on someone’s door/ all day and all night beside the Cahuenga newsstand… “(21). These lines exemplify the urgency and mood of the collection.

Odalisque is eloquence and earth, possessed by syntax without beginning or end. The poem “It Was Not,” like many of the poems in the collection, reads as one long sentence, and mid poem Salerno writes: “she was correct to be the air in someone’s lungs/but how far out of Kingstown did you expect to get/with just panty hose and a cinderblock way of thinking…” And by the poem’s end, “it might as well have snowed could have snowed did snow/ if I kissed your footsteps as I have scrupled to aver” (24). Salerno’s poetry moves as if the grammatical structure cannot be anchored by punctuation, thus compelling the language to drift from convention.

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