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Poetry Reviews
By Carol Smallwood
http://www.cutbankonline.org/2014/11/cutbank-reviews-like-a-beggar-by-ellen-bass/
11-17-14
Like a Beggar
by Ellen Bass
Copper Canyon Press, 2014
ISBN 978-1-55659-464-9
paperback, 86pp., $16.00
It is daunting to review a poet and teacher of such stature as Ellen Bass who
helped
edit: No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women in 1973. The Courage to
Heal:
A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse in 1988 has been translated
into ten
languages. Her honors and awards are long and she teaches at the MFA program at
Pacific University in California. Her website invites contacting her which is
rare for such an
important poet.
Like a Beggar opens with the poem, “Relax” listing bad things that will most
likely
happen to you but ends with the lines:
Oh, taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
The 46 poems are not separated into parts like her last collection, The Human
Line,
2007. The charcoal and oil cover art is also by Carolyn Watts, and Copper Canyon
Press
is the publisher like her 2007 collection.
The epigraph is by Rainer Maria Rilke: “But those dark, deadly, devastating
ways, how
do you bear them, suffer them? ---I praise.” It applies to her poems. Her style
is direct.
Her strength as a poet in my view is her fearless look and acceptance as in
“Morning”
writing about her mother’s death:
Her long-exhaled breaths
kept coming against her
resolve. And in the exquisite
pauses in between
I could feel her settle—
the way an infant
grows heavier and heavier
in your arms
as it falls asleep.
Her very readable poems are mostly in a narrative style based on common events
and
places such as “Women Walking” but this commonality is wide; “Another Story”
includes
the television program NOVA and the size of the universe, Marlon Brando, red
fingernails,
and baby bats.
“Pleasantville, New Jersey, 1955” includes an unlikely mix of T-shirts, A&P
parking lots,
deliverymen, a pack of Camels, Allen’s Shoe Store, tweed skirts, and ends with
it all being
“…at the center of our tiny solar system flung out on the edge of a minor arm, a
spur of
one spiraling galaxy, drenched in the light.”
Quite a few poems deal with aging but “Ode to Invisibility” concludes “It’s a
grand time
of life” and the element of sex is a often mentioned. While the immensity of the
rings of
Saturn and the Hubble Telescope are topics, so are the smallness of flies and
wasps.
Bass describes the praise that a poet has for the onion in “Reading Neruda’s
“Ode to
the Onion”: “When he praises the onion, nothing else exists. like nothing else
exists in the
center of the onion. Like nothing else exists when you fall in love.”
My favorite is “When You Return” that begins:
Fallen leaves with climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes.
With the poems in this collection you will see layers you didn’t catch before
with
rereading. What looks effortless, requires much expertise to write—to make the
reader feel
the poet is writing just for them. She also has the ability to surprise with
such descriptions
as high heels on linoleum “distinctive as the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth”
and I am
looking forward to her next collection.
http://www.haggardandhalloo.com/category/book-reviews/
November 24, 2014
The Commonline Journal http://www.commonlinejournal.com/ October 8, 2014
Angles of Separation
Judith Skillman
Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Glass Lyre Press (2014)
ISBN-13: 978-0984035298
Buying a new poetry collection is like investing in a travel ticket—the
excitement begins when a book arrives with shiny cover and unexplored pages;
the cover art of Angles of Separation is Edvard Munch’s oil painting,
“Separation”
from the Munch Museum in New York. There is an epigraph from Osip
Mandelstam’s Tristia about separation; a dedication; acknowledgments. There
isn’t a foreword or preface and the fifty poems are divided into four parts with
a
page of Notes at the end, followed by an About the Author page, and a page of
titles by the poet. I avoid the back cover, blurbs, author page, until writing
the
review.
There is great energy in Skillman’s work, cosmic power as in “A Sliver of Heat”:
“At night the earth collided with comet hair/ and you wanted to tip the Milky
Way/
into your parched throat.” In the 3 page poem, “Thrum and Goad” are the lines “I
hunger for what is true” and yet the last stanza begins “I yearn for the
cessation of
wing beats.”
Some of Skillman’s work reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s meditative darkness of
modern life, his examination of time and meaning such as in her short narrative
poem where emptiness is echoed in the last line: “But when I return to the
kitchen,
nothing lives there, nothing fills the saucepans fitted like Russian dolls one
inside
the other inside the other.” This search for meaning is repeated in “Cause and
Effect” where things mock, cruelty thrives and there is a pattern of violence to
those who listen, those who want to hear and have enough courage.
This is a poet who bravely addresses the brevity of life and is a close observer
of nature from animals, birds, trees, the water lily, grasshoppers, and the
wind.
This American poet’s sweep is wide: from shingles on skin, eating tongue,
bluebells, starlings sitting on wires, seasonal affective disorder,
Shakespeare’s
characters—and her look is clear, economical, without sentimentality or
illusion.
And yet she also notes that the world has too much beauty to be understood.
I would have liked more on the back Notes page to explain words such as
Kore, the Judas tree, Macabee trap, geodes, and the passages in French; giving
the four parts names would have been helpful to me as a reader. I’m looking
forward to her next collection—the travel time with Angles of Separation, seeing
her landscape, was a memorable trip.
The most recent books of this multi-award recipient are: The Phoenix: New &
Selected Poems 2007-2013 (Dream Horse Press, 2014); Broken Lines—The Art
and Craft of Poetry (Lummox Press, 2013). Some of the poems in this collection
have appeared in: Prairie Schooner; The Aurorean; Athenaeum: Best Indie Verse
of New England.
http://writersmonthlyreview.com/book-reviews/
February 28, 2015
http://pinkgirlink.blogspot.com/search/label/book%20reviews
January 13, 2015
http://www.newpages.com/books/book-reviews/item/27991-the-long-blue-room
December
2, 2014
http://www.haggardandhalloo.com/2014/12/18/book-review-of-the-long-blue-room/
December 18, 2014
The Long Blue Room
Poetry by Joan Gelfand
Benicia Literary Arts, January, 2014
ISBN 978-0-9703737-2-4
Paperback: xii; 87 pp. $12.95
Review by Carol Smallwood
Ms. Gelfand searches her own motives with a touch of whimsey while probing
for hard answers which makes her wide knowledge of humanity evident. She
is a poet that has visited abroad and traveled her own country to give her a
sense of contemporary life that is grounded in realism but also is presented
with a delightful wit that’s penetrating and wise. She observes the rhythms, the
good and bad of what is about her but maintains the appreciation of small
things—takes time to thoroughly taste fruits like peaches and pears and
wonder about them.
2 Smallwood The Long Blue Room
The Long Blue Room, the third poetry collection by Joan Gelfand, is divided
into: Section 1. The Long Blue Room; Section 2, Ars Poetica; Section 3.
Taste; Section 4. Sex, Death, and All That Jazz; Section 5. Scraping Dead
Stars Off The Pavement; Section 6. The sections have poems well chosen for
each equally divided. Practice. It has a Foreword, Introduction, and Epilogue.
The two page foreword is by Renate Stendhal, the author of Gertrude Stein: In
Words and Pictures. The title, The Long Blue Room, is from an oil painting by
Vincent van Gogh which appears on the cover. In one of the poems bearing
its name, the poet observes that the artist painted it three times until he got
it
right. The epigraph is a quote from “Ars Poetica” by Czselaw Milosz. Gelfand,
an American writer, is the Past President of the Women’s National Book
Association and a regular speaker at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference.
She has appeared in numerous national, international magazines such as The
Griffin; Caveat Lector; The Toronto Quarterly and in anthologies such as
Broken Circles: A Gathering of Poems for Hunger Anthology (Cave Moon
Press, 2011). Also by Ms. Gelfand is: Seeking Center (Two Bridges Press,
2006); A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams (San Francisco Bay Press,
2009); Here & Abroad (Cervena Barva Press, 2010); Transported (Daveland
Studios, 2011).
3 Smallwood The Long Blue Room
The first poem in the collection, “Good Morning, America, Where Are You?”
questions America’s position after the recent economic crisis: “The party’s
over the game is played/The bad boys took off/With the cache.” p. 14 The
questions are central to our contemporary life. Greed’s the topic of another
poem, “The Money Shot” regarding plundered rainforests.
Another look at contemporary life is “Mother’s Day”: one appearing to have the
good life in New York City ends her life in front of a train on 42nd Street. A
poem about Sylvia Plath is also a woman who also ends it all.
“Bach Flower Remedies” using the narrative style is a humorous, 3 page look
at 5 types of natural medicines bringing up questions one surely would have
about small brown bottles of: Agrimony, Aspen, Impatiens, Elm, and Chestnut
Bud coming to about $100. The reader is taken on a shopping trip having
many aspects that will be familiar, one that they will laugh also.
“Cobra Sonnet” does not follow the traditional number of lines of sonnet or
follow the rhyme scheme but does finish with a couplet providing a conclusion.
4 Smallwood The Long Blue Room
It uses humor, knowledge of plants, irony, to craft a poem 26 lines well worth
reading and rereading.
The tanka poems, traditionally using thirty-one syllables, are on such varied
topics as: lime, maple leaves, and praise.
“Ode to Toast” is praise to roasting toast and the humor evident with:
“Raise a glass in honor of skinny wire coils/That heat out bread’s best.” and
also “Let’s toast the aroma that rouses a dog/From its coma….” p.42
“Paris Whistling” ends with the appealing lines:
“When did it become passé
To share a tiny slice of happiness,
Wear your heart on your sleeve?” p.40
Her poems have aspects of a cosmopolitan and a naturalist, a combination
that makes her poetry so grounded. The Long Blue Room is a collection to go
back to again and again as it is a conversation with a friend with wit and
understanding: one who writes not to confound or puzzle but to share the
extraordinary lurking just beneath what is all around us. Ms. Gelfand finds
inspiration in Monet’s paintings, William Carlos Williams poems, letters in the
5 Smallwood The Long Blue Room
Hebrew alphabet , movies—but mostly from what she has experienced, what
is within her as a contemporary American woman worthy that is of being
shared.
Carol Smallwood’s most recent books include Water, Earth, Air, Fire,
and Picket Fences (Lamar University Press, 2014); Divining the Prime
Meridian (WordTech Communications, 2015); and Writing After
Retirement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Carol has founded, supports
humane societies.