Reviews
May 2017 EXEMPLARS of POETRY
Reviewed by Grace Cavalieri
+++++++
Exit, Pursued
By A Bear
by Joseph
Mills.
Press 53. 71 pages.
Kafka’s Shadow
by Judith Skillman
Deerbooke Editions. 68 pages .
Said Not Said
by Fred
Marchant.
Graywolf press. 73 pages.
Quitter
by Paula Cisewski.
Diode
Editions. 59 pages.
Fast
by Jorie
Graham
Harper Collins/ecco. 84 pages.
Pink Mist
by Owen
Sheers.
Nan A.Talese/Doubleday. 83 pages.
Winters Come,
Summers Gone, Selected Poems
by Howard
Moss,
edited by J.D. McClatchey. Sheep Meadow Press. 197
pages.
Meadow
Slashes
by Joshua
Marie Wilkinson.
Black Ocean. 61 pages.
PLUS 6 other books of Poems &Best Perodical &Best Anthology
Exit, Pursued
By A Bear
by Joseph
Mills.
Press 53. 71 pages.
The
reason every poet is a change agent is there are no two exactly
alike. Poetry is the voice and the breath and it’s highly
personal. Some poets tend toward originality. Others achieve it.
And so we have Joseph Mills with a terrific idea. He titles each
poem with a stage direction from Shakespeare. Here are some:
Exit Romeo, Enter Juliet
Exit at another door with the
body of his son
Enter ghost
Enter prince of Wales
[Exit the Bastard]
In the back
of the book is a page with the source of each stage
direction—this poet knows his Shakespeare. The poem’s themes
spin off from their signposts to present-day references
(Budweiser’s, delis,
Google, Amazon boxes – and daily experiences ) Oh wait, there’re
also some classical poems. Altogether this book is original and
fun with smart poeting. The poem “Kate” begins :
“Before
the banquet had even ended, someone had uploaded / her
speech from an iphone, and it was being forwarded and /posted
and linked…”
The
poem “ Enter the
King in his nightgown, alone”
goes: “
She doesn’t know why he
seems familiar/until he launches into a soliloquy,/and she
recognizes something in his voice./He works at Modern Ford
across town,/and last year he had tried to sell her/a used
Taurus…”
Apparently the poetry stage always has room for new ideas. Mills
creates a unique environment in each poem and sees what others
cannot – because he is, well, Joseph Mills, and no one else is.
The functionality of using theater allows heroic moments, edgy
ones, and humorous ones – just as plays do; and each of his
monographs is different from the other. The Bard connects it all
and the titles for once make an important and vital part of the
poem. The extra pop is that Mills happens to be a
terrific writer – in
fact he’s the book’s best human resource besides Shakespeare . I
don’t want you to think there are poems that are not lyric, many
times Mills has words dancing without losing the melody; other
times he’s colloquial, narrative, improvisational. On a scale of
1 to 10 for this book? A definite 11. The blurbs on the back
cover are actual quotes from Shakespeare’s characters :
“…here’s the
book I sought for so.”—Brutus.
Enter Juliet
Later she would have
regretted the naked photos
and lascivious tweets.
She would have looked
through yearbook
pictures and shook her head
at the hair and clothing
and posing, at the sequins,
at how oblivious she was
to her own gawkiness,
at how she had thought
she knew everything
of importance.
Later. . .
but there is no later for her.
No stepping from a
shower in front of a mirror
and thinking,
My God, what happened to
my ass?
No dressertop of
expensive creams for her hands.
No nights sprawled on
the couch with someone
who, despite her weight
and wrinkles and gray,
feels for her in a way
that beggars description.
No waking, stiff,
together, morning after morning.
Kafka’s Shadow
by Judith Skillman
Deerbooke Editions. 68 pages .
I opened the
book and thought I’d read one poem then pick it up for the
morning –you know where this is going— I read and read and read.
Biographical historians may know what Kafka
did but only a poet
can show how he felt.
This is a record of sensibilities through every sensual gift a
poet has. It occurred to me that perhaps no one likes his/her
life’s work more than a poet does— how else could we receive
such proportions of thought and emotion, changing our lives with
craft and ideas. These poems are congenial pieces that get the
soul of Kafka as a feeling-thinker. I can’t imagine what started
Skillman on her search that resulted in such completeness. Why
does one writer become obsessed with another? The closer
Skillman comes to Kafka’s life the broader the scope and the
more she arrays his humanity. In this world we welcome a heart’s
work about literary figures who might otherwise be unfathomable.
As Isaac
No anguish in the
offering.
Hermann Kafka’s already
lost two sons.
This third one’s not
quite up to snuff.
Hermann tries with the
old stories,
then the insults, table
manners, rules.
Nothing eases the
burden—Franz
will be unruly, wild,
stubborn
in his refusal to take
his place
in the family business.
No angst, and less
suffering,
God’s will be done.
Yes, let’s
sacrifice a boy who
leaves
synagogue before the
service is over.
What matter that letter,
sitting on the bedside
table,
unread?
The boy is as if dead already.
Get it over with, he
mutters to the ass
who guides them along
the ancient path crevassed with ruins.
Said Not Said
by Fred
Marchant.
Graywolf press. 73 pages.
The writer is
a laborer, and an experimenter:
Marchant is as well, and an expressionistic storyteller.
He lets language make weird combinations
(in a good way) and
yet they flow. He’s audacious (in a good way) as in the
prose poems,
“WOD–OR.(Indo-European root for water.) “
poem “pollution”
features sperm;
“well well,” the vulva;
“oil”
Armenians; “gulf” mother’s bosom, yet it works because
Marchant’s loyalty
to language shakes it all out to metaphoric sense. Sometimes his
poems feel like journeys of a dream or dreams of a journey but
filled with life energy. That’s why they keep coming at us so
strong (or bigly as The President would say.) Marchant invents
himself every single poem making each word catapult and count.
Ghost Ranch
Slits in nothingness are
not very easy to paint.
-Georgia O’Keefe
Ram’s Head
a horn curved like a
petal
layered into a flute,
the bone made to sing
what is hiding in the
hollows.
Hollyhock
my friend says
a poem is a column of
air,
or a sorrow-flower,
a yellow-white star.
Little Hills
the brown earth listens
to what the red earth
says,
angry clouds gather
like the Lord’s left
hand.
Night Sun
after the killing
a search light
the color of bone
to sweep us clean.
+++++++++++++++++
Quitter
by Paula Cisewski.
Diode
Editions. 59 pages.
Glamorous
mysterious Paula Cisewski
is in the present day but seems from another time –
classical, still colloquial. She sweeps into a line with a level
of emotion that moves with complexity. Her language singes with
introspection and beautiful brooding. She’s like a stage
presence processing space with each note – intensity and
interior power beneath every
important line – She had me at the beginning : “
I’m afraid/that there is
a prison/at the heart of everything…
“ and then she proceeds to break through it picking apart
stimuli toward song.
She’ll give you chills the way she delivers like an opera
singer singing the blues. I’m talking soul.
My Crow-Wife, Rene
Descartes
I wanted awareness
and then my third eye
popped out.
A crow was right on time
to scavenge it.
Hey! I said
feeling territorial.
We’re married,
Crow said, so
this eye is half mine.
She popped out
her own third eye and
exchanged
her inner vision for
mine, as if two rings.
Then she swallowed the
third eye
that had been mine, and
I saw
her inside out.
When she flew
away, something inside
me
felt like a jetted
seeding,
like it started being
flowers underground.
Fast
by Jorie
Graham
Harper Collins/ecco. 84 pages.
You have to
read this slowly. Even in an MRI machine Graham knows more words
and thinks more thoughts than any volume on your desk. The book
is about the human body and its medical surveillance – the way
we must relinquish ourselves to those helping us, who we hope
are pure and strong. This book is a passionate commitment to
what houses the life force and how we’re to let it go. It’
heroic because no one delivers like Jorie Graham –
relentlessly—line after line, chant-like prayer, interior epics.
What I like best about Graham is that she never hides herself
away in her language, although there’s a lot of it – and she
never holds back. She doesn’t stop until we hear her. This
instructs the reader that each emotional connection is true. The
poem “With Mother In The
Kitchen” is energized with dialogue, interior monologue, and
narrative. It becomes all of us. Every one of us has the same
mother in the same kitchen in this poem. Another poem that must
be read is “Mother’s
Hands Drawing Me.” In this five- page poem she moves like
liquid gold down page after page, not structured, but channeled,
held in performance with an emphatic ending:
. . .
afternoon, just slipping,
no one here to see this
but me, told
loud in silence by arcs, contours,
swell of
wind, billowing, fluent—
ink chalk
charcoal—sweeps, spirals,
the river that goes
nowhere, that has survived the
astonishments and will never
venture close to
that heat again, is
cool here, looking up at what,
looking back down, how is it
possible the
world still exists, as it
begins to take form
there, in the no
being, there is
once then there is
the
big vocabulary, loosed, like
a jay’s song thrown down
when the
bird goes away, cold mornings,
hauling dawn away
with it, leaving
grackle and crow in
sun—they have
known what to find in
the unmade
undrawn unseen unmarked and
dragged it into here—that it be
visible.
Pink Mist
by Owen
Sheers.
Nan A.Talese/Doubleday. 83 pages.
Three young boys in
Bristol grow up playing war, and when in their teens Arthur,
Taff, and Hads – from dead-end jobs – go off to Afghanistan to
fight a real one. They come home different men and this book is
in their voices, dramatic literature in verse. If you can read
without your eyes stinging, you have excellent armor. ‘Put a
face on war, ‘people always say, ‘put a face on collateral
damage;’ and Owen Sheers does. The three women belonging to
these men figure in the dialogue: a wife, a mother, a girlfriend
who then become war victims as well.
Arthur, one
day regrets drawing his buddies along with him to service.
Arthur: “But
the seed was sown. /There in the
Thekla’s hull, with the cider inside us, /and Massive on the
system. /I didn’t say nothing to Hads right then, /but I knew, I
did. /He would come to… Three boys off to Catterick./A suitcase
each, a couple of cans./Off to war, like boys always
have./Boarding a train, leaving home,/off to Catterick, to reap
what I’d sown.”
Hads loses
his legs.
Hads:
“I still feel them sometimes. /I’ll wake and my ankle’ll be
itching, /or I’ll need to scratch my toes. It’s frustrating,
/cos I can’t do nothing can I? Just got to griz it out. /But
yeah, my brain still thinks they’re there.”
His mother
speaks of her son’s first tattoo,
“ …That wasn’t Hads. But
then, nor was this. A living lie –/This boy in the hospital
bed,/dried blood below his ear,/the sheet going flat/a couple of
feet too soon,/just nothing after his thighs….”
Arthur as
narrator later
speaks of Hads after the I.E.D explosion:
“ Every time./He
lies there a moment, recovering in its wake,/his heart slowing,
before moving on his side/to try and get some kind of
rest./Let’s leave him now, as he curls up under the sheets,/or
does what he can./Hads Gullet, twenty-one, half a tall man
trying to sleep,/ holding what’s left of his legs to his
chest,/as he tells himself,/on hearing his family come through
the door,/that of the half of them gone and a half of them
left,/it isn’t the cursed he should count, but the blessed.”
Arthur speaks
of Taff who blew up civilians, maybe a child, like his own
child:
“…Take this street he’s
walking down now, /deserted, empty, Sunday–morning
dead./Harmless./But all Taff’s feeling is the threat. /The echo
of when a village went like this back there, /when the women and
kids melted away. /That’s what he’s trying to keep at bay,
/plugging in his headphones, /turning the volume right up… ”
Taff’s wife,
Lisa speaks, of PTSD and what happened
that night “Blue on
Blue:” Taff was blown off a wall and broke his back in the fall.
Lisa: “’Friendly
fire.’”/That’s the one still makes more sense to me. /Being hurt
by those on your side, /by those meant to protect you, /those
meant to love you.… The drink, the shouting, the lives./The hand
on my throat while I slept,/the reaching in panic for the
bedside light./The boy you married/lying by your side but
somewhere else –/shrinking, out of sight. “
Lisa: “Pink
mist. That’s what they call it. /When one of your mates hasn’t
just bought it, /but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
/A direct hit. An I. E. D. An R. P. G. stuck in the gut./
However it happens you open your eyes/and that’s all they are./A
fine spray of pink, a delicate list/as if some genie has granted
a wish…”
Arthur comes
home for R&R but returns for just one more month, just 4 weeks,
he tells Gwen—but for a roadside LDE he could not have foreseen.
Sheers’
research was with British fighters “The Blues.” I’m apologetic
for ripping speeches from the pages, losing the arc, the
complete control and flow of this playwright/poet. If horror can
be illuminated by art, this book is its experience. In bringing
things to life through death Sheers is a virtuoso. If you’re a
vet; or a career military wife as I was, this book will break
your heart. Only good art can. In all cases, it’s worthy of your
best attention.
Winters Come,
Summers Gone, Selected Poems
by Howard
Moss,
edited by J.D. McClatchey. Sheep Meadow Press. 197
pages.
Most of us
knew Howard Moss as editor of the
New Yorker magazine.
There were standing jokes about lots of boats in the poems at
that time; and his own poems were sometimes featured. This
editor’s taste was evident – beautifully structured poetry,
often bucolic, always intelligent, conundrums, philosophical
thought but never breaking from accepted form. He chose poems
where he could see the mind’s work and understand the working of
it. He had a distinct idea what makes a poem last and it
certainly wasn’t deconstructed thought. Now we have a complete
picture of the man in this handsome collection and we see his
aesthetic nicely assembled. He’s Keatsian (read “A Winter
Come,”) he’s urbane: and— what was once considered necessary for
writers of poems— he was a cultured man. Knowledgeable in
letters, art and music, Moss knew something about love through
these; and here we find the spirit of his poetry. J.D. McClatchy
writes a thoughtful and detailed intro for Moss and it’s
helpful. I liked finding McClatchy’s taste and choices more than
anything else. Howard Moss is unlike many poets who discover who
they are through writing: Moss seemed to know all along. A great
and lasting strength remains.
Small Elegy
In the smart room where
Lennie lies,
French draperies are too
silk for eyes
That like their hangings
plain, like their ties
Thin-striped.
Lennie will no more arise
And go now where the
cocktail shakers shake
Their crystal energies
and pianists fake
Some lovelorn valentines
and, on the make,
Mirrored faces join, and
part, and break.
And since those wretched
limbs, not custom-made
But real, and common, in
the last charade
Crumble into peace,
who’s to parade
Up Fifth and down with
all his tricks of trade?
The chandelier, the
chiffonier, the waste
By-products of the
golden calf, Good Taste,
Surround his body.
To his Never-Faced-
Reality, gentleman, a
final toast!
Damn it, he had good
taste! That’s all
he had.
He knew the nearly-good
from the not-quite-bad.
Lennie wore the first
vest made of plaid.
Lennie gave it up when
it became of fad.
Goodbye, Lennie—fad,
plaid, and Madras!
May artificial angel and
high brass
Proclaim a high-fidelity
Mass
When you step from, and
into glass.
Meadow
Slashes
by Joshua
Marie Wilkinson.
Black Ocean. 61 pages.
Well there’s
no information about the author because I’d love to find a
context for this approach to poetry maybe by nationality,
geography, inclination or occupation. This is a book-length
poem. It’s not language poetry, it’s not constructivism, it’s
not lyric, narrative, or any form known to me. Maybe something
better—beguiling and mesmerizing – one line after another
nonsequential and deliberately unconnected – and the phrases are
pictorial, interesting and desperate in their continuance. I’m
interested in why authors make certain decisions and I believe
the drive here is feeling
as image because
that’s what excels—without reason. We don’t need a reason for
emotion. Black Oceans is the press that lets poets do what they
were born to do.
Up at Olive & Clark with
tea but
Silver Soul is on & I’m
back to it
covering my face with a
book, scaring some strangers.
I don’t yield out for
pity
just a question of what
we look like to ourselves
from the bit of future
we’re lucky enough to
endure.
So it’s night.
The shore’s lapping.
Heartbreak is having the
prepositions
pulse with slashers too.
Others /BEST BOOKS LIST
POETRY
Fifteen
Seconds Without Sorrow
by Shim
Bo-Seon.
Translated
by Chung Eun-Gwi and Brother Anthony of Taize. Parlor
Press.70 pages.
Treading on Footprints, I Head for the Future
They turn their backs
first of all.
The dearest things
aimed their guns at
memories.
Stay right where you
are, guys.
If you want to live, die
rather.
Disgusting, Sickening.
Why
are things that are said
to be eternal all like that?
I killed nine out of the
ten longevity symbols,
I can’t remember which
one was left.
Is it a former
sweetheart or an ex-wife,
or my footprints left
beside them both?
They disappear first of
all.
The things I loved most
turned memories inside
out and all was just pitch black,
I become uglier day by
day.
I smell bad.
Treading on footprints,
I head for the future.
Let’s live by the river,
blistered feet!
Mean / Time
by Grace
Bauer.
Univ. of New Mexico Press. 72 pages.
Foundational
Make up your mind, we
say
When we mean:
choose.
decide.
Makeup, we call the
colors
some women wear to
disguise
what they see as
flaws.
(All the ads assure them
they have many worth
hiding.)
We kiss and make up,
which makes
light
of any anger or betrayal
we felt but now realize
is not worth
making too much of.
You made that up!
We’ll say
of a story so good
we envy the maker
for the convincing lie
they have constructed
and now
believe and live by
as if it really were
that way with the world
which
makes up the minds
we are all
made up by.
Where Is
North
by Alison
Jarvis.
Silverfish Review Press.75 pages.
Ask Me
You were not the kind of
man to take
coffee to your wife in
bed every morning,
but if I asked, you
would and it pleased me.
I didn’t do it often and
I always thanked you
in a formal way like the
kind of man you were.
One day before I
realized I had stopped asking,
you said,
I wish I could bring you
coffee—
Still each morning you
managed to make it,
leaning on counters for
balance,
kitchen quiet except for
the whistle
you need to cue yourself:
Now move:
One foot
in front of the other:
this is the way
you do it.
You tear open the bag
with your teeth.
Ampleforth’s Miscellany
by Michael
Karl Ritchie.
Winter Goose Publishing. 73 pages.
The Floating Library
(1967) A documentary on the Public Library’s outreach to the
Ohio River
community, especially during the flood season.
When public libraries sailed out to sea,
books shivered their spines at watery graves;
animals were a faint memory
in bestiaries bound by briny staves.
And none aboard went two by two, but roared
a plenitude of conflicting tall tales
for the Cornucopian ear of God
who snored atop Braille pillows force-wind gales.
From salt to salt the crew evolved a pearl
that pooled its evanescent skein of stars
and leapt an oyster’s tongue in onyx whorl
to dream from words the sounds that heal all scars.
For who knew where this raft of books would go
or which adults might find their inner child
within some scientific tract on snow
or some opulent Xanadu gone wild.
The
Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities
by Laurie
Byro.
Kelsay Books. 69 pages.
Virginia’s
Constellations
Whatever actually
happened at Yang–ping’s house
during that winter,
there were seasons before and after
in which nothing
happened. Rowboats skiffled along
rain-washed river
bottoms, rocky but not impassable.
There wasn’t always a
drunken moon or salty stars
in a black bowl of sky.
A heron followed the boat
seeking clues about the
lady in the wide–brimmed hat,
a blue ribbon trailing
at the wind like its mates feathers.
The tale of Scorpio
slashed the wild sky. The woman
blinded by icy stars,
could have been mistaken for all wizened
“Chinaman,” thousands of
years old. The silent river spilled
no secrets about
temptation or regret. The woman who navigated
these waters held a
conference that could turn her boat around,
change to any direction.
She planted her long legs solidly
on its wooden floor, a
book open and faced down
beside her written by a
man who traveled similar waters.
Many winters before, too
many to record in a hand–painted chart,
Li Po paddled a river,
his oars dripping stars.
Starlight &
Error
by Remica
Bingham-Risher. Diode Editions.73 pages.
Photograph
The mouth holds
a scar that trails the
temple
cheek and chin of a man
sometimes called father.
And when the man spoke
even in his right mind
my husband recalls
he’d rehash old
warnings:
I told you, you were
going to hate me
after the mother or
child
climbed the mountain
of his frame settling
near enough destruction
to trace it’s inward
part.
BEST PERIODICAL
Rattle Volume
23, No 1,
edited by Alan Fox.
The Rattle
Foundation. 91 pages.
BEST ANTHOLOGY
4:PM Count, A
Journal From Prison Campy Yankton,
( supported by the NEA.)
edited by
Jim Reese. 246 pages.
__________________________________
Grace Cavalieri produces “The Poet and the Poem from the Library
of Congress” celebrating 40 years on-air. Her new poetry book is
“WITH” (Somondoco P
|