Poetry Reviews
By Grace Cavalieri
MARCH 2016 EXEMPLARS
===
Ripened Wheat by Hai Zi, translated from the Chinese and introduced by Ye
Chun. Bitter Oleander Press. 191 pages.
XX: Poems for the 20th Century by Campbell McGrath. Ecco/ HarperCollins. 119
pages.
Poems: New& Selected by Ron Rash. Ecco/ Harper Collins. 192 pages.
Window Left Open by Jennifer Grotz. Graywolf. 47 pages.
Friends With Dogs by David Blair. Sheep Meadow Press. 75 pages.
99 Poems: New& Selected by Dana Gioia. Graywolf Press. 189 pages.
Winterkill by Todd Davis. Michigan State University Press. 93 pages.
+++++++++++
Ripened Wheat by Hai Zi,
translated from the Chinese and introduced by Ye Chun.
Bitter Oleander Press. 191 pages.
From “Swan” “…On my earth/ on birthday’s earth/ a swan is injured/ as in a folk
singer’s song.”
From “Ocean Overhead” “…In the lamplight it seems I’ve met her/She leaps into
the
ocean/and the ocean hangs over the barn/It seems the snow/ of my hair and my
father’s is
burning.”
From “May’s Wheat Field” “… Sometimes I sit alone/ in May’s wheat field dreaming
of
my brothers/ I see the cobblestones roll over the river bank/ The arched sky at
dusk/ fills
the earth with sad villages/ Sometimes I sit in the wheat field reciting Chinese
poetry to my
From “Autumn” “... Whose voice can reach autumn’s midnight and ring out there/
Cover our scattered bones—/Autumn has come/ Without the slightest mercy or
tenderness:
autumn has come”
Ye Chun, Hai Zi’s translator since 2000, writes that Hai Zi’s suicide in 1989
occurred a couple
of months before the Tiananmen Massacre: “His suicide has come to symbolize the
end of
idealism in the 80’s…”
Although psychology and behavior reveal themselves in poems, there is no
morbidity in these
beautiful lines that continue long after the poem ends. There’s a halo over the
burdens of life that
still speaks of affection. Hai Zi’s range of experience includes much lost love;
but beyond the
confines of pain are elements of perception I’ve not seen elsewhere. Each poem
evolves through
nature with its message. The devotion and intention articulated by Hai Zi stun
me as gold
standards of compassion and dignity.
Also capable of irony, Hai Zi writes a 12-part poem of tiny stanzas from 3 to 10
lines each. He
ends “This Thoreau’s Got Brains” with this verse, “… The sun is the bean/ I
plant. It pouts
its lips at me/ I unleash water across the river// This Thoreau’s got brains//
Thoreau’s
helmet/ —a volume of Homer.”
Narrative structure is consistent throughout the book, showing us a poet—however
young—who
knows the responsibility and consequence of good form. “Hai Zi has changed a
whole
generation’s writing of poetry,” says Ye Chun.
On a March day in 1989, Hai Zi laid his body on railroad tracks near Beijing; He
was twenty five
years old.
Thinking of a Past Life
Zhuang Zi is washing his hands in the water
a silence spreads over his palms
Zhuang Zi is washing his body in the water
his body a bolt of cloth
Clinging to the cloth are sounds
adrift on the water
Zhuang Zi wants to blend in
with the moon-gazing beasts
Bones grow inch by inch
like branches
above and below his navel
Perhaps Zhuang Zi is me
He touches the bark
and feels close
to his own body
agonizingly close
The moon touches me
as if I’m naked
and enter and exit
naked
Mother is a door, gently open to me
++++++++++++++++++
XX: Poems for the 20th Century
by Campbell McGrath.
ECCO/ HarperCollins. 119 pages.
McGrath’s not kidding. This is an encyclopedia that shows where we’ve been in
the former
century; and what McGrath thinks about it. In these 5 “books” long narratives
are made with
natural strength— charismatically and stylistically telegraphed into poetry.
Book 1 chronicles poems from “Picasso” (1900,) to “Wittgenstein; Letter to
Bertrand
Russell” (1919.) Book 2 starts with “Mao: On Conflict” (1920,) and takes us to
“The Atomic
Clock (1939.) Book 3: “Virginia Wolfe” (1940) to (1959) “William de Kooning;”
and Book
4: (1960) “Zora Neal Hurston: Enigmatic Atlas” through to 1979 “The Nation’s
Capitol.”
Book 5 starts at 1980 with “Two Poems for Czeslaw Milosz” to end with a 2000
“Prologue.”
Picasso (1902:) “…Yesterday walked across all of Paris in the snow/ with a
pastel rolled
beneath my arm,/ a pastiche of doting bourgeois mothers and children/ with a
vase of
flowers, no less, utter and complete/ artistic prostitution…”
Orson Welles: The Stage (1935: ) “ …Cast against type, I stand outside of time,/
forger of
destinies, smelter of ore, / my voice like storm-wind swelling every sail…”
The Death of Edward Hopper (1967): “…not afraid of the body but more at home/
with
sunlight infiltrating empty rooms,/ the veneer of bleached calcium on oyster
shells,…”
The Ticking Clock (1971:) ” Snoop Dogg is born. Julian Assange is born. Already
it is
coming,/ already the new century—…”
Nelson Mandela (1994:) “ …The earth is a single homeland,/ one resting place for
every
ancestor. // Beneath the skin we are indistinguishable…”
Poets like to speak and have their say about history and it’s refreshing to have
one who, A)
knows history; and B) knows how to structure a narrative in the fullness of a
speaker’s voice.
Some of these are persona poems creating the dynamic of theater with character,
situation and
plot. I recommend reading 5 poems day to see the making of society through the
eyes of artists
and thinkers. Some pages are punctuated by calligrammes by artists, cryptograms,
and things I
couldn’t figure out. But boys just like to have fun while writing a
historical/poetical treatise, I
guess. Yet in any church, this is High Mass.
Voyager I & II (1977)
Now we begin to speak for you
To greet, entreat, declaim and argue.
The voices we carry are yours, of course,
your melodies and genetic sequences sourced
and etched into our golden cores.
Like spores
from a broken milkweed plant
we float past planet
after planet, their parabolic array likewise
among the elemental designs
we display. Imagine the moment
of contact, in whichever quadrant
of whichever time-lost galaxy,
when they happen upon us and we
rehearse the tale
of how we first set sail
upon these silent interstellar seas,
replay the encoded dreams and histories
which impel a species
to step into the darkness, to leave
the only home it has ever known
in the hope that it is not alone.
Let there be others, in the great night,
we whisper. Let there be light.
++++++++++++++++++
Poems: New and Selected by
Ron Rash.
Ecco/ Harper Collins. 192 pages.
These are the Appalachians you never hear about except in Ron Rash’s books—the
woman who
falls asleep at her machine, taken away covered in blood, returning to work the
next day wearing
a wig “She never fell asleep at work again.” These are the people: the little
boy sweeping at the
mill whose head is shaved because of all the lint. Rash’s folks are shown at
their chores with
grueling jobs stretching beyond capabilities—yet, why does this book read
without bitterness?
It’s a quantum field of reverence and gratitude... “Work, for the Night Is
Coming” “…but he
will not follow his father / from the field, not until this/ end row is finished
with what/ light
windows from the farmhouse,/ where supper cools on the stove…the harvest his
father will
reap alone. “ In the line” death-clothes scarecrow a bedpost” is a cold truth.
What we take
away is a calculus of appreciation for living, with whatever life brings.
A lesser poet would sentimentalize, or idealize the life hard won in Appalachia
but Rash doesn’t
elevate poverty, farmers, and workers, he simply shows us a picture and we’re
the ones who see
the chivalry and the dignity. “July, 1949” “… She is dreaming of another life/
young enough
to believe/ it can only be better—/ indoor plumbing, eight-hour shifts, a man/
who waits
unknowingly for her, a man/ who cannot hear through the weave room’s/ soft
click,/ fate’s
tumblers falling into place, soft as the sound of my mother’s/ bare feet as she
runs, runs
toward him, toward me.”
From the mills, from the mountains, the bottomland, the hay “Belt-buckle high”
comes a human
anthem, a tapestry of folks- in debt and in sickness—somehow who get it right.
This is because
Rash effortlessly shows beauty, without complaint, in focused moments. He leads
us to believe,
without persuasion, that this is our country’s best DNA.
The Trout in the Springhouse
Caught by my uncle
in the Watauga River,
brought back in a bucket
because some believed
its gills were like filters,
that pureness poured into
the springhouse’s trough pool,
and soon it was thriving
on sweet corn and biscuits,
guarding that spring-gush,
brushing my fingers
as I swirled the water
up in my palm cup
tasted its quickness
swimming inside me.
+++++++++++++++++
Window Left Open by Jennifer
Grotz.
Graywolf. 47 pages.
There’s a sweetness in Grotz’s open window through which we see the natural
world. Grotz
begins her poems in conversation as if each is “by the way;” then she deepens
the image to its
designation and raises the sights of what can be seen in a peacock, apples,
poppies. These poems
are aspirational—how life looks rinsed off with clean rain. I believe the best
communicator is the
poet who speaks to us directly; and Grotz is gifted in her ability for colloquy,
unleashing the
assets of the poem. (Snow) begins : “Rising as much as falling more mesmerizing
than fire”
then in part 3; “…in its tiny throes smaller even than mine lizards fire ants/
snakes and
groundhogs that lived underground/ but I never saw snow didn’t see rust only saw
green
imitations// of moss hot-glue-gunned on mother’s cuckoo clock…”
Her imagery comes soft and then deepens, (Snow Apples) “There’s a
stinging/sensation of
cold on the skin, a singling/ realization, a stuttering that outs itself, has it
out/ with itself…”
moving to conclusion “… sad as the stones/ on the lake shore, pink or gray
sandstone,/
granite, rusted iron, eroded tale-smooth and uniform regardless—“Every poem is
an eye-
opener shared with the reader. A dialogue about how poetry sees. Nature is her
paradigm. It’s her
emotional calculus.
The Whole World is Gone
Driving alone at night, the world’s pitch, black velvet
stapled occasionally by red tail lights
on the opposite highway but otherwise mild
panic when the eyes’ habitual check
produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror,
a black blank, now nothing exists
but the dotted white lines of the road,
and the car scissors the blackness open
like the mind’s path through confusion,
but still no clarity, no arrival, only Pennsylvania darkness,
rocks, cliffs, vistas by day that thicken to black. It’s
sensual, though, too, and interestingly mental. What
I do alone, loving him in my mind. Trying not to
let imagination win over reality. Hurtling through the night,
a passion so spent becomes a fact one observes. Not tempered,
just momentarily out of view by the body that perceives it.
So that if it desires, the mind can practice a prayer,
The one whose words begin: Deprive me.
++++++++++++++++++
Friends With Dogs by David
Blair.
Sheep Meadow Press. 75 pages.
Blair is a poet of the unexpected, making a difficult process look simple with
his spontaneous
soundtrack of thoughts. This only works because there’s fluidity and grace. The
poems look
conventional at first sight— the vertical, the stanzaic— well, the title poem
does experience
space differently, but generally, the forms look familiar. Then something
interesting happens, the
poems become actions and sensations. Robert Frost once said that it doesn’t
matter what
information we have if we can’t ‘swing it.’ Blair swings in a free-wheeling way;
so we never
know what’s coming next. (On Water & Land” (1) Life Forms) “All of us are
organs/ of one
body/ but some of us are flippers/ while others cut up. We are determined/ by
sight of each
other reductively/ as lumps of meat/ turning rudimentary circles/ on ice, with
the shapes/
created by vocabulary.// The flippers have the humors. / The others secrete
their moods…”
There’re many ways to achieve tension in a poem. Blair delivers words vigorously
and gets
intensity from his juxtapositions—(Formerly :) “… that a possum waddled under
his legs in
the darkness, the umbrella still up over the table, the drink turned to water in
his glass, the
daylilies not out yet.” And non-sequiturs within the line, (Collies & Sheep :)
“We saw two
dogs on a beach, collared, / …the older one game with a limp./ Maybe the dogs
had just
met. / Sure, we all screw up at times. / We also found a sheep skeleton…”
Casualness is central to his message, and Blair’s implementation strategy is to
write with ease as
if he can’t take credit for any of this because he’s enjoying writing it too
much. We call that
tone; and each author has his own. With Blair, it’s word choice + style =
originality. (Formal
Feelings:) “Who put all these trees here, / and then soil, bulbs sending up
their hard, /
automatic mixers, // so I can’t wait for moonlight on bodega red awning?”
Poem About An Indian Restaurant Downtown
The fewer the details, the more universal the figure of lunch.
Stepped on sidewalk cellar doors eaten away by rust. And then glass blocks
lit somehow with some of them smashed. Eating lunch alone in an almost
empty buffet—the fewer the diners, the denser tandoori chicken, the
turmeric.
Some people leave you all alone with breads. I am one of the people who do
that. Yet I complain too. The sweeter the mango, the more salt on my lips
and pakora.
Late snow falling into crocuses and in between daffodil leaves and stems
on the street, and in the garden, and on the common. The fewer the details,
the stranger and more ginger. The blue god sits bare-chested and vested
among the gopi; blue, the people on their way through the park.
++++++++++++++
99 Poems: New & Selected by
Dana Gioia.
Graywolf Press. 189 pages.
A closing line in his closing poem reads “…What must be lost was never lost on
us.” This could
be an imprimatur for this current work. Gioia, in the mechanism of service, has
always raised the
bar of poetry with his intellectual brand of firepower. This compilation—the new
work—includes the truest personal narrative we’ve had to date. Craft on Mt.
Olympus raises
very good dust added to bold emotional sentiment and declaration. Gioia always
sees poetry as a
noble cause, but each book taps into something richer. These poems are more
aware of
impermanence, magnifying new strength in the writing. Memories play a central
role and I
especially like “Homecoming,” a 15-page 9-part poem that has the making of a
personal epic.
Gioia is our modern day wanderer seeing the world as a text to be discerned. In
“Shopping”
“…But I wander the arcades of abundance,/ empty of desire, no credit to my
people,/
Envying the acolytes their passionate faith. Blessed are the acquisitive,/ For
theirs is a
kingdom of commerce.” And able to draw from every venue , (Men After Work)
“…waiting
patiently to ask for one/ more refill of their coffee/ surprised/ that even its
bitterness will
not wake them up./ Still they savor it…”
There are eight parts to this book. The section STORIES could teach fiction a
thing or two about
person, place, and thing— our powerful friends. Plus authentic dialogue. This
book is a
marriage of values: writing done exceedingly well; and a heart deeper and
stronger than ever.
Gioia has earned his stay in poetry’s future.
Cold San Francisco
I shall meet you again in cold San Francisco
On the hillside street overlooking the bay.
We shall go to the house where we buried the years,
Where the door is locked, and we haven’t a key.
We’ll pause on the steps as the fog burns away,
And the chill waves shimmer in the sun’s dim glow,
And we’ll gaze down the hill at the bustling piers
Where the gulls shout their hymns to being alive,
And the high-masted boats that we never sailed
Stand poised to explore the innocent blue.
I shall speak your name like a foreign word,
Uncertain what it means, and you –
What will you say in that salt-heavy air
On that bright afternoon that will never arrive?
++++++++++++++++
Winterkill by Todd Davis.
Michigan State University Press. 93 pages.
“ Without bird song how would we know the sun is the cut skin/ of an orange
rolled into a
circle and laid flat, last fading hour pinned/ to a pine before any star allows
itself to be
seen?...” (Whip-poor-will)
Todd Davis teaches us mindfulness in the way he envisions each moment. He makes
a passionate
connection with nature—\with every deer, treetop, crayfish, brook trout,
cattail, Kentucky
warbler. His panorama is also occupied by family, son, parents—a father we meet
before and
after his passing. (Cenotaph) “ I dream my dead father/ spends most/ of the
afternoon’s
hours/ stacking rocks he gathers/ from the dried riverbed… (end stanza) “… He
calls
them/monuments to dearth, to lack’s own beauty/ and what it allows/ him to
make.” And
Davis notices the smallest indentation to each day: (Sulphur Hatch) “… In this
half light, our
boy is walking/ home across the early June hay./ Each step he takes/ leaves a
shadowed
space/ we’ll see come morning.”
Everything in the world becomes a poem that never ends. Davis’ terrain is the
rural land where
chaos and traffic have not yet invaded, and so the poems feel like extensions of
a meditative
mind. We don’t imagine him approaching each morning with a mission to document,
and
catalogue; instead he has a natural centering, connecting every living thing
from earth to heaven.
It’s an exuberance for the mountain, the groundhog— everything given spiritual
equity.
Buddhists would call this “the practice of pure perception;” critics might say
his is a
reconciliation of thought and form; scholars would praise his knowledge of
flora, fauna, biology,
zoology; poets will see the metaphors and aphorisms in nature.
There is death as well as life detailed here, human and animal. There’s illness
and suffering, but
overriding is a wholeness in being alive –we might call happiness. This is
seasoned writing,
deeply literate, with expertise in the environment. I say we make up a Poet
Laureate of the earth
and have Todd Davis every day capture his humility and awe of the natural world,
with its
inhabitants—then pass it around like a good, very good, virus.
Self Portrait with Fish and Water
In the world underwater, near the cattails where bass patrol
their spawning beds, early summer light clings to the turquoise sides
of pumpkinseed sunfish, so named because of the shape
their bodies take, not the coloration of their ctenoid scales, tangerine
stippling that stony blue, giving way to a yellow that seeps
to the base of the pelvic fin, an aquatic canvas as if painted
by the artist who cut away his own ear out of love, leaving
a blackened hole the sounds of his joyous screams rushed into,
a coal-dark flap like the one at the side of this fish’s face,
which shows me the world is always receding, fleeing
the shape of my shadow as I walk these banks.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Grace Cavalieri is producer /host of “the Poet and the Poem from the Library of
Congress” for public
radio. She celebrates 39 years-on air. Her latest book is a memoir:”Life Upon
The Wicked Stage” (new academia/scarith.)
All reprinted from the Washington Independent Review of Books.