“Blind Date With Cavafy” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007, $12.50

“The Weary World Rejoices” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2011, $15.00

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title.

From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach… which fulminates in that appropriate title (snipped from a French Christmas carol, later translated by John Sullivan Dwight, an American): “The Weary World Rejoices.”

In “Miss La La” Fellner passes over a 1879 French circus aerialist memorialized visually by Dega:

Another of Fellner’s poem titles is “The Aesthetics of the Damned.” The title alone evokes the trope of a ship of fools or a set of the ludicrously dressed damned. One of Fellner’s speakers drinks straight from the bottle, another pretends to believe “fanged anorexic midget space aliens want to rape our pets,”–– the catalogue of speakers goes on from there: receiver of a suicide note, people waiting in line for God’s judgment, Satan “dressed in well-ironed khakis/and a pink Polo shirt.” It also comes up that we are one of the species “that has the capacity to fall in love with humans who look just like us yet strangely never love us back… that there may not be enough love in the world to write about.” Popcorn, Socrates, Li Po, Cliff’s Notes, Joice Heth, and Catullus get stirred into the mix.

Fellner likes epic scale. Consider these two sentiments from two separate poems which appear in different places of the book:

The Weary World Rejoices continues with Fellner’s highly terraced blend of pathos, cynicism, and romanticism. His songs of innocence and experience capture the homeliness of Birkenstocks. His poems – a kind of “Notes from Hell” ––include an uninspired childhood, the mall, hypochondria, and a styleless wardrobe and decor. There are poems that evoke a passed-around photograph of a deceased lover reduced to Internet bait, the U.S. mosque protestors, and oily birds. He is not one to subtlety evoke the muse and have her demurely pull back the veil of revelation. Rather, he has her throw aside the curtain like the Wizard of Oz dressed as a burlesque figure, hoist a tacky disco ball, and shout out across the heads of the audience, “One last round!” Of course it sounds more like ammunition than drinks. That statement is not condemnation –– but praise as ruthless as Steve Fellner’s poetics. In The Weary World Rejoices, Fellner braids together Walt Whitman, crystal meth, exclamation marks, Ritalin, car trouble, Matthew Shepard (half saint), Matthew Shepard (half lottery ticket).

Fellner is not sloppy. Nor is he a muddy writer, he separates the Absurd from the Surreal. The intentionally transgressive nature of his poetics is in-line with those of Jan Richman or Denise Duhamel. Not a racy as Tim Lui; not as romantic as Erin Belieu, Richard Howard, or Caravaggio. Though, in many ways alike, Fellner’s enterprise is less romantic than Caravaggio’s. One has a feeling he might refuse the final rise to metaphor and see, not the holy virgin, but—only the street whore-model; not the saint, but the untransformed sinner dolled up and posed. Fellner is oddly both Catholic and pagan – a bit like Blake with his songs of Innocence and Experience. One can also draw parallels to other poets: James Wright, Dereck Walcott, Alfred Corn, J.D. McClatchy, even Philip Larkin might be offered up. Fellner’s poems are a read for anyone with a heart, a creative eye, and a pang of sourness when faced with the broken things of the world.

In Fellner’s quest for merging the homily and the holy, I give him the last word:

“Train Dance” Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2011, 978-1-935536-14-7, $15.95

Train Dance may be a first book… but it is an inaugural collection by a seasoned imagination. With a touch of haunt, a pinch of surrealism, and heaps of good literary taste, Jonathan Wells’ poems pull out of the terminus: “An innocent scull rows, / sixteen knees and elbows, a fraction of a centipede going slow. / I wait there and the train plunges through me” (“The Dream Line”).

Train Dance is divided into four sections. The opening section is a haunted coast through “stations of the night when… the body still tingles with astonishment at what it has and hasn’t kept.” The poems have all of the urban haunt of Cavafy and the slight bitter-sweet melancholy of the well-adjusted immigrant. Two poems are actually comically based; one having to do with a GPS system which renders friendly voice prompts and is named “Ms. Magellan,” and the other having to do with Yoga… dog yoga.

The second section turns to more inhabited poems; the speaker of the poems laying claim to a ticket… a pass that turns out not to be just his ticket to ride the city’s train, but also his ticket in the lottery of the city. Couplets and a villanelle share the sun, city, and Hispanic and Hebrew rhythms of the streets. It is a city chorus of syncopated rhythms and intergenerational and international relationships:

My brother sleeps upstairs on an inflatable
mattress (that air was once my breath).

There won’t be time before he leaves at
dawn to recall the grapestand under

the stars near Kandahar, or our friend Joe,
emerald smuggler or Green Beret, seized at the border

with Iran, shouting, “I’m a Christian” as he was
led away by guards to the barbed wire enclosure.

… A summer squall leaves leaves few traces on the lake:
a little air still in the sails, an extra wrinkle in the waves.

(“A Visit”)

Section three moves further out into the geography of relationships. The transports are clear: father, son, grandson. The moonlit landscapes of boulevard trees, buildings, and urban fugues give way to nostalgic sunlight, trees, and Indian summers. The poems look backwards and forwards. The poet wrestling with time and oceans; is immersed in a consuming element:

Come to me. Say my name.
The sun made me ten stories tall
when I walked in the lines
of the labyrinth keeper’s rake. One story
made me wiser than I am and I could feel
the geese fly out of me although
they barely moved their wings.

(“Please, Hold”)

The final section of the collection moves in closer to the ineffable. Perhaps there is a dash of Yeats, a pinch of Heaney. Clearly, ceremony. There is a sonnet entitled “Speechless.” But what we are coming to is not the other terminus…but the caboose! Train Dance lets us disembark, graced and wanting more.

“Boy with Flowers” Ely Shipley
Barrow Street Press, 2008, 978-0-9728-302-6-3, $15.95

Poet Ely Shipley

Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers won the 2007 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. I remember enjoying it; reading it through the first time, thinking how if I had been asked to suggest art for its cover, I might have suggested one of the 1905 paintings of Picasso . . . either “Boy with a Pipe” (lanky, androgynous boy in blue with a crown of flowers) or the slightly more austere, red shirted “Boy with a Frilled Collar.”

Gender is not something we discover one day by looking down and seeing a protrusion of flesh. But rather by our looking back up and saying , “Oh, I am a girl” or “Oh, I am a boy.” Gender comes from a deeper catalog of possibilities of escape and expression. Gender identification begins more like a trembling root finding its way in a hazy dream-state. Something more along the lines of Mallarme’s sleepy faun in “Afternoon of a Faun.” In Shipley’s landscape, the dreamy faun sings while finding himself floating between two worlds.

Boy with Flowers embodies and disembodies with ease. The poems are clear and easily accessible. Images of masks and juvenile entrapments balance against a larger set of images — of stories inching forward: tattoos, scars, blood veins, underground rivers, wire, sutures, letters carved into a tree, the light from a car’s headlights washing over a wall, coils of smoke, fingertips and kisses stroking and brushing flesh, branches, roots, lightning, ice cracking, water falling, . . . even songs. Shipley also writes of being surrounded.

…I want
escape. My shirt opened…
and now when I close
my eyes, a music box stars up and my breath

is that lonely ballerina, spiraling
faster before her circular mirror. And she sees
nothing because it is dark
or because her eyes are only eyes
painted across a face. Yet for a moment
I swear I hear her sing
over the music, the city, my pulse—
but its only the high-pitched, slow churning
of her feet, that wood carved tightly
around a metal spring, the way
the whole world turns and folds
around its invisible axis.

(“Breath”)

In another of the poems, the meditation springs from an aunt having a scar… her neck previously sutured after a car accident:

…It is the map to a place
I will never enter but wish to
trail with my fingers, read the Braille of her, follow

this story as the needle that once
reassembled her dug deep – little silver
diver plunging into water, then

up for air, sewing itself between two
worlds, here and there, me
and her, to stitch

all that can only be
seamless in the dark.

(“Horizon Line”)

Shipley writes of the heart and lungs working magically away in the dark. Of the heart desiring to escape. The image of water freely lapping at the shore brings comfort.

Here, another poem, that is a meditation of entering and heard singing:

…The woman
in the movie falls
in love but still feels
trapped. I know because
one night she makes love in the choir
loft of an abandoned church. The roof

seems as though it is peeled
open and the camera
closes in so I can look

down on her. It begins to rain,
and when she comes
the noise she makes, breathing heavily

into the man’s hair, which is long and sways
like a curtain back and forth across his face,
sounds like singing.

(“In the Film”)

Shipley also writes of desiring to penetrate, of wanting to be inserted into another, of wanting to be surrounded, even engulfed, by another’s sensibility.

For Shipley, the oracular is related to the moment of letting go; where the ineffable gushes into the physical — making a sound:

…I’ve been
dreaming…
I wander from room to room and in one find
my mother’s heart…
My mother must have left it by mistake, here
on a shelf. I want to lift it to my ear and listen to its beating.
I’m afraid to touch it, afraid I’ll hear only silence,
and the silence will carry me into its sea. I could drown in this
love for my mother. Inside the garden, a stone
fountain floats, from which water pours endlessly
from the mouths of fish and gods.

(“Fountain”)

Shipley writes eloquently of the vastness of childhood… and of the “child just nearing the age of loneliness.” Beyond writing of the singularity of laying aside childhood and of slipping into instances of reverie, Shipley writes of the singularity of mortal being and needs:

…tonight, I only want to be
the mouth

of a guitar, hollowed out
and bodiless
except for the balloon
of sound resonating invisibly

through air, and go on
pressing my fingers deeper in
to the neck, as if I could find
a shape inside

its voice as I choke
out its notes, its high-pitched
scream, its pop.

Shipley’s Boy with Flowers is a keeper.

“Birds for a Demolition” Manoel de Barros; translated by Idra Novey
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010, 978-0-88748-523-7, $16.95

Birds for a Demolition is a compilation of poems by the celebrated poet Manoel de Barros. Life on the rural Pantanal (the beautiful, tropical wetlands of Brazil, in the northeastern corner of the country, near Paraguay) lies as the center of this poet’s expression. The Pantanal is a unique landscape in that 80% of the 54,000 square miles are submerged during the rainy season. Little in the environment is considered stable, practical, or predictable. It is a sustaining, yet surreal and decadent eco-system. The physical landscape gives rise to a poetic portrait.

While Manoel de Barros’s country is Brazil, his language is Portuguese. He is the author of more than twenty collections. He has received Brazil’s highest awards for poetry multiple times: the Premio Jabuti (the “Tortoise Prize”) in both 1990 and 2002, the Nestle Poetry Prize in 1997 and 2006, and the Ministry of Culture’s Cecilia Meireles Prize in 1998.

The poems in Birds for a Demolition are bold, buoyant, and incandescent. Slugs crawl about, naked and damp. Rivers, flowers, piranhas, and birds traverse shadows and stones. The image systems never wander far from the wondrousness wealth of poverty and solitude.:

Meanderer in my swamp,
I arrive at a thicket of birds.
A man who studied ants and tended to rocks
told me in THE LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE;
only bother with the futile.

His language was a depository for twisted shadows,
verses covered with ivy and rusted gutters.

(from “Thrush in Darkness”)

The innocent wonder of childhood traverses the landscape with poetic possibilities. It, ironically, is the same landscape abandoned for lack of economic opportunities by millions of migrants to Brazil’s cities. What arises is a foolish and wise intimacy, a poetic deliriousness:

Dirtinesses recolor me.
I repose in the water’s composure.
It’s in the mummy position I place myself.
I won’t use theater props.
My fight isn’t for facades.
The sky’s design unfixes me.
The hyacinth’s vigor is my festoon.
Day’s end increases my unease.
At times I undergo defoliations.

Like a friar, I’m going to undie of stones.

(“Day Two”)

Idra Novey’s translation of these late modern poems are skilled and arresting. Translation is in itself a finely balanced art. The gifted translator ever looks simultaneously in two directions: back at the source language and forward to the language of the translation. Manoel de Barros’s talent is in good hands with Idra Novey.

“The Earth in the Attic” Fady Joudah
Yale University Press, 2008, 978-0-300-13431-5, $16

Poet Fady Joudah

Back in 2007, Fady Joudah’s first collection of poems, The Earth in the Attic was selected by Louis Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. It is a book that will long continue to warrant reading.

Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston. He is familiar with issues of immigrants and refugees. His parents were born in Palestine and, besides the United States, he spent formative time in Libya and Saudi Arabia. One biography notes, “Fady Joudah continues to lead a life of international engagement.” He has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur, with Doctors Without Borders; and presently he works in the emergency room of a veterans hospital in Houston.

The language of The Earth in the Attic is engaging and straightforward. Foreign, but not distant; much like a host of Southern writers – from Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey to Yusef Komunyakaa and Betty Adcock – that have written about their home as a far away psychological country. Joudah, like all good Southern writers, writes from the perspective of “Home is an epilogue.”

The landscape of Joudah’s poetry is made up of olive oil, tents, figs, sycamores, small bags of peanuts, squealing pigs, camels, hysterical chickens in the road, and sage tea. There are families with dreams and travel documents and a vision of life down the road (marriages, opportunities, states of emergency, and death). Unlike goats and ducks that may willy-nilly clog the road, people struggle with documents, borders, and heritage. Distances, seas, encampments, and land are all a part of the fluid landscape. Though the language of the poems is simple, they are often made up of small movements of non-sequiturs:

The carpenter
Dying of cancer in a hospital bed
… thought I was kind
And searched my nametag for a while

Then said: I know your people.
They’re good people they
Have suffered enough,
And the city is theirs—

The carpenter would be dead by morning.
And why

Did I think your hair
Would have turned white by now?
Like the Mediterranean, frothing at the shore.
And why
You asked for your hair back
Is why I kept it:

Like the city that is only mine
When I’m confused for another.

(“An Idea of Return”)

“Anonymous Song” tells of a person who refuses to evacuate his provincial village. Such is the abandoned state of some innocent, broken things of the world. Some of the poems take place in refugee camps – far from that part of the country where the best oranges grow. Refugee camps are places of rubber gloves, hired rifles, and latrine-malls.

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows,
They know what they love, milk in the grain.

…

Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land.

Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive

enough to eat.

Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks.

And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots,
Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets.

And you will keep your cool.
Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them,

Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.

(“Scarecrow”)

An endless struggle is taking place on the surface of earth, the watery and stony planet given us to farm. If Home is Joudah’s epilogue, Palestine – a piece of earth tucked away in the spider draped attic – is never very far away:

Earth in the Attic

In the calm
After the rain has bombed the earth

The ants march out of their shelters
One long frantic migration line.

… Did they know the wind
Would airdrop new rations their way?

It’s always two or three
Ants locking their horns to the acid end

Over nothing—it seems
More than an impulse,

The debris plenty for all.

(“Pulse, #10”)

“The Dirt Riddles” Michael Walsh
The University of Arkansas Press, 10-155728-925-5, $15.95

The Dirt Riddles, Michael Walsh’s first book of poems, has taken several awards. But it is interesting, and to the credit of Walsh’s talent, that the awards were not in contests reserved solely for first books.

The Dirt Riddles begins simply enough: a youth coming-of-age on a dairy farm. The family business is one of tending to animals and plants. First loves are great loves: mother, landscape (per the attention of the wonder of a youth), father, grandmother, radio, river, and green. One quickly filters in a quick wash of iodine, the smell of manure, the permeating smell of living and deteriorating, cow, and the hermetically sealed sexuality of childhood. Walsh takes his time and is deliberate in his tone and pacing.

The poems have clear titles. They seldom are longer than a single page. They are neat: extremely well lined blank verse, sometimes in single columns, but frequently broken into symmetrical stanzas. Walsh is attentive to music. He edits to effective, restrained, sensual triggers. Prosodically, while not fussy, Walsh is accomplished. His comfort zone is in the aesthetics of a clear, contained column.

As for imagery, this is family farming not factory production. Fields, verdure, manure, hay, and rusting equipment unfold. There are cows, ditch flowers, buckets, pieced quilts, a belt, barn clothes, work gloves, zippers, screws, and chains.

Emotionally, the poems rise in intensity and effect throughout the book.

There are four sections. The first two are pastoral, but not cartoon. This may be vernacular flyover life, but real people inhabit the poems; and they have a son who does his part in feeding, milking, de-horning:

These flatlands float murky as negatives.
So much hasn’t been exposed: sun

cindering each night in alkali dirt,
darknesses asleep inside white cows.

… ditch blooms swarm the open road.
Frogs hop the gravel where a car drove by,

their eyes wide and itching in the dust.

(“Flyover”)

Degrees of exposure and hermetic seals play their place in the subtle tensions of the poems. What Walsh coins as “anti-pastoral” energies:

“Like a good beast / I jerk hard on the chain” (“Evening Milkings”).

Those energies become more acute in sections three and four.

In “Quilt Rags” the grandmother practices her sacred geometry in disassembling “feathery” fringed old blue jeans. The tension in the language escalates to the poems arresting final simile as she:

…razors the empty legs

down to spare parts, squares
and triangles for her quick pins.
The awkward crotch she cuts last,
pulls out the zipper like a gizzard.

(“Quilt Rags”)

One fine poem, “Camouflage” is ostensibly about a boy leaving his glasses behind as he hops into a community shower. Again pressure escalates quickly in the balance of exposure and the hermetics of a sealed self:

…the other boys
soap themselves in the spray

until the light inside
their skin is shining.

Steam blurs them strange
as X-rays of angels…

Then someone
bumps my hidden body.

One touch and we startle
scarlet, hair frightened

ankle to ear.

In “Paper Flesh,” another poem, a young father saves a stack of seared comic books from a house fire:

He couldn’t leave these stacks behind.
But the bright covers were already half-cooked,
dark as negatives, heroes and villains
singed indistinguishable.
He never read them again. I do
not for the stories so much as the scorch marks,
the faint pictures of that boy.

In “Pinup,” a boy and girl flip through a fashion magazine. The boy projects himself, at first as one of the female centerfolds in the photograph, and then

… I got comfortable
on the page, male again,
and watched his shaking
hand undo each
cold, steel button.

Poet Michael Walsh

Junk fuses into other rusty junk. “You can’t tell fallen branch from axle, / barbed wire from the vine that burns / like a fuse through the tangle.” Deflated inner tubes stick like leeches to the dirt. The poet says of “a black flower” that he doesn’t know if “it belongs or invades.”

In the jumble of aphids and rust

serial numbers breed with beetles
and seeds, bond to topsoil, my skin.

Another minute and they hive.
Another hour and they empire.

(“Junk Garden”)

One doesn’t stay hermetically sealed; eventually the world invades, leeches, and permeates.  Eventually, in the tumult, if lucky — in whatever the landscape, whatever the garb — one may find that they belong.

“Cool Limbo” Michael Montlack
NYQ Books, 978-1-935520-40-5, $15.95

Poet Michael Montlack

One unique aspect of a gay sensibility is that of valuing things for their intrinsic presence or style rather than their assigned “socially invested” value; ie, if the pin sparkles and swirls, it may still be fabulous — even it appears to be gold and diamond and is only made with pot metal and paste. Long after the 1950’s gay men still snapped up pink and yellow pottery vases in the shapes of swans and pyramid-shaded glass lamps in the forms of sleek black panthers. A gay performing artist can create a costume out of just about anything . . . and be fabulous! It is an ever-shifting sensibility: many style-sensitive gay men appreciate what they see, the illusion / while also appreciating what they know is there. There is a connection to play and — like other socially pressured groups — survival by and admiration for a resilient attitude is also in the mix.

Michael Montlack’s “Cool Limbo” is a first book. The list of titles invites: “Liz Taylor in Levittown,” “Baby-sitting on Mescaline,” “My Sister the Drag Queen,” “Venus Doesn’t Glitter When She Stands Next to You,” “Uncle Mame,” “Nobody’s Glamorous All the Time,” “Lilith: Pre-PreNups.”

What Montlack keeps at bay in his poetry are snide voyeuristic irony, prurient gestures, and vain exaltations. There are poems about sisters, friends, and Long Island neighbors who all seem to be at home in rentals in neighborhoods where they can’t afford to buy. There is lots of forgiveness in the texture of Montlack’s poems. Sisters may wear too much makeup or over tease their hair when completing the look they have deemed for their outfits; but, what makes other people wince, Montlack fluidly allows in nature. Almost all of the poems in this collection are written from the point of view of the spectator. They also tend to be written with a “Used to be / Now” differential. Once upon a time the poet was a tender boy, a youngest, sensing his way along; eventually his fluid familial fitting has to find a firmer role, a firmer “place of being” as a “gay” man. The book is a little like what one might have, had young Cavafy come of age living in a house with protective sisters, in modern suburbia.

Or me—…
We’d sit on the living room’s gold velvet sofas
and practice rolling my rrrrrrrs
while upstairs Tamika added more tears to her jeans,
rearranged the six silver studs lining her left ear,
powdered away her olive complexion.
Come on, Michael, she’d call before reaching the bottom step.
Let’s bolt—in no rush but always desperate to leave

(“At Tamika’s”)

Before one can have a desperation to leave, they have to have a sense of being somewhere; and perhaps an awkwardness with staying, perhaps a place where sisters’ makeup gives way to Halloween Indian war paint. In “boy witch,” the poem’s speaker sees a young neighbor with brothers who is caught — like him -– in shifting gender expectations:

but at seven there was no more
fabric to let out—and maybe
too little charm left in her [his mother’s] eyes.
what a miserable cowboy you made.
an Indian would have been excuse
to paint your face again.

But the speaker sees around him what building without a foundation can come to. If he is to emerge from his own shell, who will he become? Where will he find shelter for his imagination? Places give way to other places. In one poem, the speaker helps a friend move—to the perfect place:

But last night, she wanted me
to help her move: cd-crammed milk crates,
crooked clothes rack, beer-stained mattress…
She tugged me, breathless.
It’ll be one-two-three. Promise.
It’s the perfect place. You’ll see.

(“Between Apartments”)

In the poems places give way to other places: Levittown, Long Island, San Francisco, Manhattan. In one passage neighboring parents telephone to report they have assigned their eldest straight son’s ashes and are traveling home:

Her voice not fucken foul,
just bare
like the shore where he was strewn
or his apartment
packed up.

—He lived like a bum. A bum.

Especially compared
to her own spotless house.

—But it’s done. We’re on our way home.

(“Dis Here’s Josie”)

The speaker’s hungers and senses of urgency are gentler than many of those around him. He sees clearly that things give way to other things. There is a deep and abiding sense that real estate and rentals can give way to personal possession. Elusive glamour can give way to lucid grammar. The poems evolve as the speaker of the poems comes out of his shell.

No
more willingness to be trained,
the young man forgoes dinners
for midnight sugar rushes.
His taking always balanced
with some resistance,
his own quiet sentence:

Indulgence is my craving.
As if to say Look. Look.
I can almost see who I am.

(“Triptych”)

The two fixed stakes in his pantheon are his sexual identity and his admiration of a protecting female principle. (Montlack is also the editor of My Divas: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, 2009).
Much like the Hummus Sexual in one of his poems:

He loves cock and balls
but is certain god is a woman.

The cool fluidity of “Cool Limbo” gives way to Michael Montlack’s clear flash of being.

“Isaac Murphy, I Dedicate This Ride” Frank X. Walker
Old Cove Press, 2010, 978-09675424-3-0, $16

In Isaac Murphy, I Dedicate This Ride, with great care, Walker considers the story of Isaac Murphy, legendary American jockey.

Born in 1861, Murphy was the son of a slave. Within his next 35 years, he rose to the top of thoroughbred racing in a career that brought him international acclaim. He won an unprecedented 44% of the races he entered and was the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby three times: 1884, 1890, and 1891. Part of the lore surrounding Murphy’s racing legacy was his penchant for not using a whip.

When folks find out I’m him
they always want to know what I say to ‘em.

…I rub my hands against they neck
lean into they ear, pretend I’m the wind an whisper
“Find yo purpose. Find yo purpose” and hold on.

(“Murphy’s Secret”)

The poems follow Murphy’s rise to glory. His youth in Lexington, Kentucky, his time spent with horses and his training at the tracks, his encounters with racial violence in the post-Civil War South, his destiny and burial at the early age of thirty-five.

Unlike Walker’s earlier books embodying York, Murphy’s saga is not shared in a single voice. Early in the collection, Walker gives Murphy’s mother and father voice. His father, who does not return from his service in the War Between the States, has two songs early in the narrative. The givens and the stakes are very clear:

In Kentucky, it was no short row
to volunteer up for the Union
even with the promise of bounty.

The first violence we met
was at the hands of hostile white farmers
and not their angry Gray army.

… When they passed the law
freein’ wives an children of enlisted men,
escapin’ the yoke was so desirable

even hard-ankled colored women
up and married soldiers,
just to get some of that freedom for themselves.

(“For Family and Country”)

Throughout, there are also songs in the voice of American Burns, Murphy’s mother:

My son walk the straight line I drawed,
but a good mirror for daughters
was E. Belle Mitchell from Danville….

There be no derbies for colored women.
But if Miss Mitchell was a horse, I’d stand
in line all day just to watch her eat grass.

(“Finer Womanhood”)

Eli Jordan, Murphy’s trainer, appears. As does Lucy Murphy, Murphy’s devoted wife. Lucy’s destiny has its own ups and down; even beyond death. Murphy died in 1896 of pneumonia. He was originally buried in the African Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky. His remains were later relocated to the Kentucky Horse Park. Lucy Murphy’s body was left behind; today, her burial site is unknown.

The poems not only trace Murphy’s rise to becoming America’s most famous jockey, but they also trace a more complex relationship with racial injustices and discriminations—with “the sting of race and sport.” Bitterness is sublimated and injustice and anger are never very far away in the poems.

They call me mechanical, stoic and all business
at the track, but riding a horse fast is easy
compared to my toughest job—holding rein
over the large, angry, bitter colored man
that lives inside.

(“The Power of Sports”)

Those energies are offset by other moments of affection and happinesses based in the things that money cannot buy. There is one charming moment when Murphy tells how Lucy can dress up and behave just like a fancy lady, “like any daughter or wife of money:”

But her real gift is how she can catch the eyes
of the white-gloved dark-skinned servants

invisible to many in the room,
cakewalk with them across the floor
without even leaving her seat—

sending them back to the kitchen singing
Mrs. Isaac Murphy is one of us.

(“Looks Like A Rich White Lady, But”)

And in a jubilation of self-possession, Murphy proclaims:

…a good trainer or jockey could make
enough money to buy and race his own horses.

Now some say that’s rich. But Granddaddy Murphy
taught me any man who owns himself is rich.

So down the homestretch, I feel like I own Isaac,
I own the horse, I own the race, and every time
I cross the finish line in front of all the other riders,
I even feel like I own the whole day.

“Or Consequence” Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen, 2010, 978-1-59709-476-4, $18.95

Poet Cynthia Hogue

In Or Consequence, there are Études (short studies) on love, power, karma, listening, trust and memory. The poetics ply less the trade of deep image and are more interested in pushing the envelope of ontological thought. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped or related within a hierarchy. Hogue — with other poets who share this interest — has a penchant for the words language, mind, desire, and memory.

In this frame, the imagination seeks (and often struggles) through/with language to resolve contradictions. Vulnerabilities are often expressed and the imagination seeks shelter in the larger landscape of the “Not-I.” And ultimately, it desires to establish contact and meaningful exchange with the world and the perceived inhabitance of that world: communion. There is something fundamentally erotic in the enterprise. (There is something fundamentally erotic in the enterprise of writing a poem—perhaps in the enterprise of writing altogether.) Hogue never digresses. The stakes of her poems are too high (and too disciplined) to allow for digression.

Or Consequence is divided into three sections. The first cuts to the chase in establishing the means will be philosophical – but the subject will be love. The pursuit itself will have something to do with the measure of change:

…without a clear
aim in mind in

fact the mind feeling not clear
as if at the bottom of a lily-
pond, not the blue and
white nénuphars Monet painted going blind

but the mucky bottom with long green stems
in nubilous, light-flecked water.
Do we all go through
this floating from time

to time when the self cannot see
the self so close in its need
to control, which is the urge
to have nothing

change? This desire
surfaces with various
losses…

(“Étude (On Love)”)

When Hogue uses an image, it is clear and pointed. She is painfully aware of the universal charges firing helter-skelter in the world. She often uses enjambment as a creative device to keep the poems from settling:
<

…Of course
there’s no recourse with large
bodies of
righteousness on the horizon,
giant tomatoes tall as houses.
Once alone
we can see the ripe though dust-covered
disagreements rolling across the desert
about to quash everything-

the sun, mountains, world
disappearing beneath them.
Who can say no to such mayhem?

(“To Be Of”)

And in “Étude (On Power)” one can picture any structure of power: the walls of the “ivory tower,” the masculine world, the demands of a language:

and hear, I will decide what’s best for you
(one I , many you’s)/
This I’s behind walls, bricked-up. Looking out.

…You think: There’s peace here

if I say nothing

but
yes.

“New Orleans Suite,” the second section of Or Consequence, comprises three poems based on historical events. Themes of unmarked possibility and erasure seem to be marked on the white spaces of the pages themselves. A historical figure pursues legal liberty, insists through, and vanishes. An era and a place channel the dreams of the values of the Enlightenment into America and is almost lost. A city endures levels of erasure. Moral, historical, firm, poetic ground is established; and as quickly gives way. Hogue is a poet who understands that dialectics both sharpen and blind us. She evokes the notion of “being there” and quickly follows with that of “not being there.” Meanwhile, she never ceases to ask “Why is this here? And, what does it mean? “New Orleans Suite” is both a minute and vast range for the imagination.

France plays a role in many of the poems. In many ways, it is an emblematic place of poetic struggle for universal virtues: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is a place of poetic dignity. A place of poetic pilgrimage. A source that once “dreamt of” and then “opted for” change; and, as such, becomes an expression of consequences.

The third section continues explorations of linguistic and ontological domains. The poems in this third section continue to explore personal and historical consequences — and change. There is a poem for a “Green Card” beloved. In a poem taking place on a walk through the Loire Valley, the speaker is suspended between a glance back and a glance forward:

Gold filigree wears off the markers of my fingers trace.
The names on the wall and the flat courtyard stones,
the graves on which I walk. I draw close
the shawl of rain, the hand catching mine cold so
cold I turn.

(“Étude (on Memory)”)

Even not having the language of the place keeps Hogue in existential suspension. But the certitudes of life are much like the castle and war sites one visits, “to which all come but none stay.” Trust and hope may seem like little to ease some; but in Hogue’s pantheon of virtues, they are – they must be — enough to sustain her on her travels. The conveyance of real intimacy is in their balance:

your silken
voice rustling the curtains of

your eyes closing and you now
unmoving. Looking out.
I thought to say, Come out of it, come
to your senses, where

are you come back?
Your true colors—
that azure (as you’re)—bleeding
through was hard

to miss. But let’s talk for the moment about
how to convey that sense
(you’d almost forgotten) is no stranger
than touching.

(“Behind the Curve”)

“Letters to Guns” Brendan Constantine
Red Hen Press, 2009, 978-1-59709-138-1, $17.95

Letters to Guns is a first book. It is not uncommon for inaugural books to run high risks of ambition. But too often, those risks seem arch or manipulatively over-reaching. They are too often executed with high doses of self-indulgence; the taint of investment, gratuitous expectation, or a cloying aggrandizement which smudges the poetry. If wrenching together a couple of seemingly incongruent metaphors is good, why not throw in an island in the pacific, the kitchen sink, and a flaming blue paper umbrella?

Letters to Guns is laid out around eight short surreal letters from objects to firearms. (Don’t turn away dismissively; thinking this conceit could not possibly be your cup of tea.) Absurdity, when done right, can build a deafening argument and be the source of great freedom. Brendan Constantine arches, but he understands: the greater the restraint, the greater the freedom. He knows absurd movements are best served up without gratuitous histrionics. His style, while highly theatrical, is poetic, impeccable, and clean.

Constantine’s imagination takes possession of the present and the historical world in ways rarely seen. In just 19 lines, a creation myth poem (“One Million Years BC”) can rocket from oceans, jungles, and oozing to:

…Cats
with knives for teeth stalked
themselves under skies crowded
with sharp birds calling “Oh,
baby!” At night nothing walked,
the moon hissed at the ocean,
and the stars held each other
at gunpoint.

The world is part material, part apparition; ever fully created. Sometimes a television broadcasts in black and white; sometimes in color. iPhone screens lie just around the corner. Ghosts make it into parallel realms; but not their garments.

Ambrose Bierce said all reports of ghosts
wearing shrouds were unreliable. Whatever
powers of apparition might bless the flesh
could hardly be expected of cotton, silk,
or wool, otherwise we ought to see
old clothes appearing on their own
from time to time.
…The first shrouds
were blankets, then ropes on boats. Now
they’re the skins of spaceships, allowing
them to leave the earth & return cool
as night birds. The cries of whippoorwills
sound like mourning. At sunset, they fly
over the bay, an arrow of empty shirts.

(“Shroud”)

The faces of missing children on milk cartons dissolve into a nature photographer’s scent. In one poem, fingers block the frames of photos, and the subjects of the photographs give way to a larger, more abstract process.

In a poem about woodpeckers, “The Flickers,” the final movement of the piece brings the fabled gesture round to the human theater:

…But a pale man
from the college …studied the holes,
& declared them proof art was genetic.
I still don’t know what to do with that,
as I say, it isn’t my reason for wanting words.

…Whoever you are
out there, tell me I don’t need to go on
about the trail of holes I’ve left, the buried
books and boxes, the hands of lovers held
to my ears that I might catch a whisper
of something like Come in.

When poetic exercise has metaphysical balance; it allows us to be world conscious. States of movement, harmony, and correspondence glint and weave. But such an undertaking is not without high artistic risk, as evidenced in a poem entitled “Unsung Cheeses”:

O cheeses of legend, cheeses of Nazareth, cheeses that pray
openly in public because everywhere is God. O cheeses
of the forests and steams, cheeses of industry, cheeses
that turn with the gears of commerce, making and breaking.

…O stories of cheese, I memorize you for my unborn children.
O cinema of cheeses, revived at midnight in university towns,
O cheeses that languish in books like the lyrics of lost empires,
this mercy, this forgiveness, these hands describing love.

Yes, Letters to Guns is risky from cover to cover.   Braiding ink to gunpowder, Constantine is a winner. The poet does not “suffer” history; he “creates” art, and his smart first book heralds vast hope for the future landscape of American English poetics.

“then, we were still living” Michael Klein
Genpop Books, 2010, 978-0-982359419, $15

Michael Klein’s new book, “then, we were still living” (2010), is a second collection of poems. Klein’s first appeared in 1993. (Between the two books of poetry, were two memoirs.) The two collections of poetry span the American landscape across surviving A.I.D.S. to surviving in the decade after the crashes into the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Klein’s “then, we were still living” is appealingly simple in surface; cleverly complex in relief. Altogether, the poems create a persona of romantic hysteria. That is not offered as a pejorative. Romantic hysteria, as in — had Peter Tchaikovsky been inclined to understatement about his most fundamental fears and joys:

My mother used to go. In hers.
The light in the room
down with the sun in the cloudy glass of water
or gone the other way: hesitant burn
on her sheets (still in bed) in the afternoons.

“…we learned to open that still gives us the world
and what my mother called a waltz of desperate music”

(“The pact”)

The reader is left to wonder about the “hesitant burn;” perhaps a slow cigarette fallen on sheets, the moistness of fever, the ineffable oxidizing of blood in the veins.

There’s always just a little
blood on the towel, the sheet, the yoga mat – proof
that something broke and I thrived at the edge.

The sight of it: a drop – not a collective.
Its function life – not that I died.
Its clarity:

Its fixation.

Its cruelty.

(“The series“)

The stance of the poems is consistent: the innocent love of a son – and brother – grieving in the light of romantic fantastications for real ruins in the physical world. The straight Wally Cleaver family gives way to the misanthropic abandonment of a father; a mother (after two marriages) sunk in isolation and a depressive stupor; and a twin brother’s death in midlife.

Klein’s protagonist neither floats in amniotic fluid nor familial security. While searching for a new place to be in, he has an ear or an eye for body music:

My friend Frank calls it looking for the body music—the
music my mother heard.
At the end of looking for the body music …

(“Looking for the body music”)

Michael Klein

Throughout, his memory serves toward searching for the body music of each lost member of his primary family. Some of the searching for a new place and the looking for the body music leads to some dark places. But — if we believe Blake — innocence gives way to experience, and experience gives way to organized innocence.

And even through the gauzy expectations of vaudeville, television, the computer screen, or American cinematography (silent movies, talkies, or gay porn), an anti-heroic protagonist may stumble upon meaning:

Dr. Frankenstein kept his new life from slipping around a spiral
threading science and then darkening down into the village.
And rising from the middle
of those wavy white bolts he cooked up – rising from those electric

cords that passed back and forth like early television in the air
of his wavy life-after-death lab – rising from the final shock it took
to make the monster black and white – was ancient love.

Love made the air visible – made it
so those bolts didn’t escape the poles that made them current.
And burn up the place.

(“The movies”)

“Ancient love” burns underneath all the poems in this collection. Even a poem about war ends far from nationalism, far from the mannered ruin of hate and nihilism:

Men having nothing but what they have in front of them and
have nothing.

Some people are in love with those men and the enemy.

(“What war?”)

Double valences return as music; they steep the listener:

Or just before: the American parades clashing down two avenues
when Charles Ives would stand somewhere in the middle so
he could listen to two different kinds of music steep into the same
sky because they were both his life.

(“Was America ever the world”)

By the last poem in the collection, the original disembodied voice that considered being alone, has learned to parse being in the world, being in love; has learned positioning. The final poem in the collection is set in constructive domestic light.

Klein is never coarse; even when bawdy, he is subtle, self-deprecating – and loving. Klein dares us. And for the few minutes we are his reader, we are fortunate that he is in our world; fortunate that, for a few minutes, he is our twin.

Painkiller, Patricia Spears Jones
Tia Chucha, 2010, 978-1-882688-40-1, $15.95

Painkiller is Patricia Spears Jones’ third collection. The Weather That Kills (1995), her first, introduced us to Jones’ consideration of what can happen to joy and decency in a hostile environment. Jones’ Femme du Monde (2006), straddled the Atlantic to explore the destructive trail of war, the fragile rebuilding of lives and cultures, the promising principles of the Enlightenment, and the on-going vigilance of liberty (some poems about great U.S. movies stirred into the mix) through the eyes of a sensitive and sophisticated African-American woman traveler. Jones, herself, was born and reared in Arkansas, and migrated to New York City in the ‘70’s. She is imaginative, but her poetry is grounded in commentary, as she aesthetically and morally parses her experiences into poetic revelations. Painkiller – both generous and elegant, at the same time – continues that legacy. The landscape is post-Katrina and post-September Eleventh:

Roses candles heartfelt messages

All across downtown Manhattan modest memorials bloom
in front of churches, fire houses, at Grand Central, police stations, on fences
––the Misericordia of modern life—how different from the harsh
calculus of private hatred
and military precision made manifest on a September day of startling beauty

(“A Lost Key”)

In “All Saints Day, 2001” Jones cleverly aligns three questions; the sentence structures fluidly shifting from transitive to intransitive and back again:

Shall we gather the names of lost
then watch them float like feathers on the dirty wind

Shall we gather at the altars of old gods
and whine about our lives

Shall we watch the shadows watch us back

Jones takes on the persona of a flaneuse [a stroller,] in that she grapples with understanding, participating in, and portraying the city. And the city is a living metaphor for everything the flaneuse can tell us about pain, murder, political calamity, erasure, voluptuousness, and passion.

Painkiller opens on The First Cities, but quickly identifies Paris and New York as primary valences: tower to bridge, west bank cafés to Starbucks, French nuns to North American chanteuses, the tenth arrondissement to Harlem and the bland buildings of Second Avenue, Ile de la Cite to Manhattan.

Passion is more rawly explored in this collection than in Jones’ previous two collections. Ancient or Old World storms often correspond to Gulf Coast Hurricanes. The killing of Amadou Diallo and the subsequent acquittal of those involved arouses political passion and cold reality. There are poems seeking justice and reciprocity. There are poems to the beloved:

On nights when stars brightly pattern the Brooklyn sky
I search for your hand and find a drift of wind.

(“What I Have Not Done For Love”)

In a poem simply titled “Spirit”:

troubled or calm
spirit remains
velvet on skin
voluptuous hurricane

The final movement in “Aubade” is matter of fact:

Now your mouth is dry from all that tasting, all that wine.
This morning both our faces rough from poor sleeping.
This is the slow unraveling, the backslide we knew could happen.

Your face has quieted, the boy more present than the man,
and my heartache diminishes, more woman than the girl.
Fooling around in the dark, ours is a music of mutual solos.

By dawn’s light we begin again to practice wisdom.
My neighbor’s radio screams bad news.

You leave.
I go to work.

In a poem dedicated to Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and political figure (who at times, himself, sojourned in France), verdant earth – much like earlier walks in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden – is engulfed by desire:

How nature surprises each of us
Peach taste
Fish Flapping
Hurricane reshaping North Carolina’s Outer Banks

Moss, flowers, ferns erupt those walks across Isla Negra
Voicing a verdant earth encircled by desire

(“Era Verdad Aquel Aroma”)

In “Last Day of Passover, April 2006” all of Painkiller’s themes come together:

And why am I listening to Milton Nascimento unfolding a silk curtain
of sounds Brazil, the late 1970s the world dreams a freedom
for Africans in the New World,
north and south and Milton is one
to sing those dreams to me. Oh Saxophone. Oh Trumpets.
Oh rhythms Southern African Indian the New World honored.
Oh first kisses and last goodbyes.

*Painkiller can be purchased here.

Burning of the Three Fires, Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Boa Editions, 2010, 978-1-934414-40-8, $16.00

Burning of the Three Fires is Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s third book. The overriding characteristic of Beaumont’s poems is their exuberant exploration of poetic possibilities; i.e., variation. Beaumont is interested in the modal possibilities of poetry, she is no dabbler. Her interest is smart, abiding – and, ultimately for the reader, rewarding.

All poets have an abiding interest in language as being the medium in which poetry exists. But, for some, that investigation can become an overarching — even reductive — interest. Language can combine with grammatic, rhetorical, and metaphysical possibilities in a far more nuanced modal expression. Beaumont consistently expresses a playful, clear, and abiding interest in poetic modality, and she does so with an air of inclusiveness. Her poems are joyous and smart play. There is nothing confining about Beaumont’s voice, her vision, or her poetry.

Burning of the Three Fires is divided into three sections: “Trinket,” “Alteration of Girl,” and “Rites.” Birdbaths, flowers, oranges, dolls, postcards, and trinkets gleam in the opening section; the imaginative fire of innocent mysticism burns across trinketry:

Plink, plink, plink onto the tabletop (imitative?)
Does any thing fit?
Appearing as from a magician’s trick cabinet—

a triad of pink piglets
a trivet too dinky to be of use
triplet kittens linked by a minuscule chain

a three-car train to ring the rink of the rail set
third-rate stones that blink from an anklet
(clink of junk jewelry, e.g., a trinity of bracelets?)

And here’s a thin pen with three tones of ink—try it.

(“In Pursuit of the Original Trinket”)

In “Alteration of Girl,” the second of the fires, the poems are grounded more in domestic perseverance and self-control – and in one sad case, self-denial:

Same damaged goods
the source of Schadenfreude.
Shocking. Her show of shards.
What a lot to shoulder.
Shut the shutters, shadow lady,
shut the shouting out
(ah, but not the shame)
the stab of an age-old jeer
that seems to call your name—
Cheap shoes! Cheap shoes!

(“Poor Shoddy”)

And in “Rites” the fire in the poems radiates from mortality. Sometimes the mortality is metaphorical, as a cut flower:

Soon, soon you will bend
and perform your Salome act,

unloosening your rainbow of veils.

… Oh tulips, you make grand company.
Who will throw you out at the end,
pick up your petals like severed tongues
from the shelf, dab the golden pollen
that was your final excretion?

(“Mixed Tulips”)

And at other times it is entirely human and unveiled:

It’s not hard to imagine a body
rocked on a stretcher, hearing fading out,
because he’s long practiced, to imagine
the self all gone, or everything else.

(“As If Nothing Happened”)

Beaumont may possibly be the bright side of Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. But she is certainly the well-adjusted niece of May Swenson, Marianne Moore, and William Matthews; the playmate of Catherine Bowman, Deborah Bogen, David Trinidad, Amy Gerstler, and Mary Ruefle. Reading Beaumont, one concludes that there is a principle by which a good poem is its own exhilaration.

*Burning of the Three Fires can be purchased here.

Chinese, Japanese, What Are These?, Nick Carbó
Pecan Grove Press, 2009, 978-1-931247-64-1, $15

In a scene in the 1982 Ridley Scott movie, Blade Runner, Rachel, the lovely android replicant, corrects her human suitor Rick Deckard, “I am not in the business; I am the business.” Nick Carbó is a tricky author. His work is not about hybrid; it is hybrid. That is not meant in anyway as a condescending diminution of Carbó’s English poetic force. To the contrary, Carbó’s poetic energies are radiant and fierce.

Chinese, Japanese, What Are These? is Carbó’s fourth collection. The previous three books are attractive and built around three very different valences – but all reference the Filipino–American experience. In his new book, there is a continuity that runs its own gauntlet from native insight, colonial enrichment, colonial degradation, to popular culture and high art. There are fundamental effects of shifts in language, food, religion, sexuality, finances: survival. As if walking cemetery stones: To the colonizer, all of the colonized look the same, Chinese, Japanese, what are these? But for Carbó, the cultural landscape is not only a concrete and abstract mosaic, it is also highly personal, as he was adopted by a prosperous Spanish speaking family.

To help the reader deal with such a vast range in terracing, Carbó’s new book is divided into three sections. In the opening poem of the book Carbó segues from a reverie of Yoko Ono in her Central Park West condo giving away Halloween candy to a reverie of the poet’s mother declining from sterling silver dinner parties to Alzheimer’s disease. The poems move on to war torn Europe, where a granddaughter shreds the pages of her grandmother’s manuscripts to make soft bedding for the fat white chickens in the back yard. Things are layered on top of other things. Things sink away and are lost. A winding staircase in Orvieto refuses to remember Hannibal’s victorious army marching on Rome. A French woman is Joan of Arc; but she is sporting a Ferragamo handbag instead of a sword.

In the second section, even the poetics get slippery. Poems are deliberately flat and faux didactic. Some of the poems read like fairy-tales or ethnic myths. One poem in the section, “Why the Rainbow is Bent Over,” pits Rainbow (who is having a clandestine affair with the Wife of Wind) against Wind and Lightning:

Another poem in the section, “Why Some Filipinos Have Flat Noses,” makes its revelation:

There are also poems about dogs, and one about scrap meat at a French butcher shop. In another, Carbó tilts full force:

In section three, there is a lovely poem about the death of the poet’s father near the French trail taken by pilgrims to the Spanish shrine of Santiago Compostela, and another arresting poem about the love affair of Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé. The Rilke poem magically ends on Rilke’s epitaph: “Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch” (“Rose, oh pure contradiction.”).

Nick Carbó has been a galvanizing presence in the Filipino-American community, and his fourth book is a direct continuation of that record.

Beautiful Country, Robert Wrigley
Penguin, 2010, 978-0-14-311837-4, $18.00

Robert Wrigley’s newest book is entitled, Beautiful Country. (It is Wrigley’s eighth book of poems.) The title is drawn from a quote from John Brown, the American insurrectionist. In Brown’s reference to “country,” perhaps he was talking about the countryside of Charlestown, Virginia; perhaps he was talking on a larger scale about the sprawling national identity of the United States, itself. Wrigley, too, likes to work on a terrain that can shift from remote instinct to one’s sympathetic thread in the larger weave of human justice.

The book is not divided into sections. The complexity of the book accumulates with the pitch of each poem. The marvelous and the murderous each take their place from animal calls to a poem about the ambivalence of ballistic power. In one poem the poet questions the notion of “progress”: how one used to “have to pry the disk of wax” deposited when sealing the mason jar of homemade apple butter before dolloping it on his toast with a long-handled teaspoon. … “but the jam this morning comes in those tiny single-serving jars sealed with a stirrup of foily paper.” The poems dip back and forth in time—the wiser now weighing in on the callow. Where can the new configurations of the practice of writing arise if not from the same shadowy landscapes? Much like the previous searches in America for Cibola, El Dorado, or Heaven in the American Wilderness – and after so much “progress” — where is one to look for the “Beautiful Country?”

One of Wrigley’s greatest abilities is to stay inside his own field of instinct and human knowledge. The subjects of his poems are often animals – or the odd terrain where humans and animals observe or encounter one another. Wrigley is not a sloppy new-ager or a facile metaphysicist who transcendentally can wring magical mileage out of the noble animal world. He is an artist grappling with human Truth. The truth is found in his poetic marvel of the animals; in the poetic marvel he has for his own nasty and marvelous humanity. The animals are the object of his reverent attention. (What W.H. Auden would call an expression of Dame Kind.) When that same existential attention is turned on his fellow human creatures, Wrigley avails a populist sympathy… and for those he allows closer, an erotic charge — the listener is allowed to hear song of his own inner life:

Wrigley is a subtle and generous writer. The poems stay in the physical world. But there are influences and affinities for the educated reader; literary discants of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, Richard Hugo, James Dickey, A. R. Ammons, Seamus Heaney.

An eighth book is an achievement for Wrigley. A gift for the rest of us.

****
“Beautiful Country” can be purchased here.

Bar Book, Julie Sheehan
Norton, 2010, 978-0-39-307217-4, $24.95

Bar Book, Julie Sheehan’s third title, is a concoction of poetry and prose. Sheehan centers the book around the voice of an American barmaid; and what unfolds is a narrative of lost comfort and security–both emotional and financial. Life does not always go as one planned.

More devastating is the barmaid’s sense of pain and struggle to hang on to giving focused love to her daughter while struggling with her own lacerated senses of self. Her sense of being worthy of love has taken (and rendered) a hit in an infantile divorce scramble. The poems, footnotes, charts, and prose passages fall into three cleverly titled sections: “Lunch Shift,” “Swing Shift,” and “Night Shift.”

Sheehan is artful. Sometimes poems are delivered in the voice of cocktails. The cocktails seem more successful with their boundaries than some of the help or clientele. The ingredients of lives behind and before the bar seem to fare better when more gently stirred than meanly shaken. Sober labor, ceremony, and privilege give way to entitlement, entrapment, and stealth.

And here is another bar side dish:

In bar recipes, what’s mixed is not unmixed. And if a barmaid vigilantly does her side-work and stocking in advance, she does not have an erratic shift full of deficits and sideline surprises. But life’s recipe may be a bit trickier. The barmaid will have to bootstrap her way through to a more complex justice.

In “Swing Shift,” the second section of the collection, disappointment and lost possibility give over to bitterness, exposed desperations, and cruelties. But the rage is always hinged—and directed. After all, the barmaid has a daughter to ground her. Perhaps she recalls having read a famous question from Oscar Wilde: “Who, being loved, is poor?”

“Night Shift” roams all over the map. The barmaid even takes a literal swipe at ex-President Bush as the patriarchal warlord. Fierce, Sheehan makes it fit and stays inside of Bar Book’s frame. The collection is chocked full of wisdom for the spiritually thirsty: careful with the stout; careful with the sweet and oily froth of cream. Laying out a life takes foresight and trust: a little transport—and a careful sober look at investment and consequences.

“The Last Skin” Barbara Ras
Penguin, 2010, 978-0-14-311697-4, $18.00

The poems in Barbara Ras’s new book, The Last Skin are as fluid and graceful as those in her previous two collections: Bite Every Sorrow and One Hidden Stuff. The Last Skin is an extension of the metaphysics laid out in those first two books, and Ras’ poetic stance is that of someone who values life. Her long lines, long sentences, and artful syntax peel back the secret meanings of the diurnal, the life of the imagination, and the state of the soul.

The Last Skin is organized in three parts. The subject of the first part is the loss of a mother. In moving through the stations of grief and the misery of one’s own anxiety, Ras evokes wishing, love, and sorrow. Anxieties are expelled and poetic clarities are achieved:

All year, death, after death, after death.
Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky.
. . . . the moon turning half its body away,
holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen
until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief
breaks over you when you’ve already given all you’ve got
and hands you tools you don’t know how to use.
(“Dark Thirty”)

Dreaming, reverie, and death are frequent topics in poetry, but they are not subjects that lend themselves to easy success. Ras handles all with pitch-perfect dexterity. Avoiding romanticisms, she stretches and bends metaphor into teasing language, before breaking it open into poetic meaning:

Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying
on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water
lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst
from someone we love?
(“The Last Skin”)

The second section of the book is a short collection of poems based on Lake Titicaca. (The lake is on the border of Peru and Bolivia.) And while the subject of the section is a shift, the voice is ever tender toward existence:

… my camera captures the boy posing in front of his house,
thinking about this tourist lady, and what could she possibly know
beyond a door, the color of a little bit of heaven
with some darkness added, and the right amount of oil
to make it shine.
(“Blue Door”)

The final section returns to departure from the misery of one’s anxieties. Several different landscapes are employed. There are poems about irises in Krakow, an evening with vodka is glasses with waists, taking a drive in Texas, an oxcart and the aroma of hazelnuts, a palm reading, and a mysterious elephant. Without sugar-coating, Ras always turns the speaker and reader back to the realization that loss is connected to valuing something properly. When we lose something, it is because we fail to value it properly.

I’ve forgotten how we freed the falcon in your backyard
stuck between the fence and a bush.
Wasn’t it strangely easy, despite the bird’s desperate flapping,
how with no hesitation or wound, we helped it
fly away?
(“Dear C”)

Barbara Ras is one of the finest poets working today. Her third book is stellar and a welcome to the shelf. It is one of those books one buys in multiples and periodically slips into an envelope and sends to friends.

A Pilgrim into Silence, Tiger Bark Press, 2010

Karen Swenson’s newest title, A Pilgrim into Silence, is divided into four sections. Each of the sections explores the life journey of an urban American woman—a woman of a generation and a class perhaps tinged with theatrical qualities of pomp and circumstance; a lady propelled by notions of religion and reason.

The privileges and joys of such a woman are no less real; her observations, no less driving and unremitting. Nor is her will spared in any way from the stifling rigidity of role expectations. Griefs are sedated and finally deadened with alcohol. The metaphysical places of beauty, desire, and love are dished out with heapings of loss on the long road to self-possession. Early on, love and despair become traveling companions in this collection.

Sonnets and villanelles are employed, and the lives of animals often serve as metaphors.  Sparrows are quarrelsome in spring:

But come a warm June evening, rancor gone,
brown pinstripes smooth, one holds the rail, his soft
throat feathers pulsing song, just as my wrist
beats my blood, in the mindlessness of beauty.

(“Sparrows”)

After an operatic evening out on the town, the voice of one of the poems drifts into an instant of third person disembodiment:

At intermission she [a neighbor] leaves in her mink. But
I know the score. While Violetta has
her last ecstatic moments, my ghost, home
alone, holds her pose before her claque of empties.

(“The Phantom at the Opera”)

In an unexpected leap in the section, in a food court somewhere in a more modern Teheran, girls giggle across tables at the close of a sonnet:

. . . even
a Tex-Mex. An isle of adolescent liberty,
where boys stroll by to look at faces that leaven
dreams, creating divine and political difficulty.
The essence of adolescence is invariably heathen
and totally in opposition to religion and reason.

(“Teheran, The Food Court”)

The second section of the collection is composed of poems that take place in or near Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. Ironically, it is not only a home for the hopeless, and those with more privileged, languishing spirits also abide.  In their service, they find life among the death.

The poems oddly dovetail with the poems in the opening: the themes of need and an abandonment of maternal love; infantile—even animal—survival instincts; again love and despair. But even here there are small gestures of collegial cooperation in a world of almost Darwinesque competition and unrelenting denigrations. It arises between two foreign women volunteers:

In Holland
a psychiatric nurse, here she’s bemused,
as I am by how habit-forming
it is to wash the clothes and patients, their
skin crackled–sun parched, river mud.
We shop, lunch with our fellow foreigners
on meat, not dahl. We move with ease
from the Dead to the Oberoi Hotel
at night watch Rambo videos
or else read Indian philosophy.
Returning in morning air, sour with exhaust,

we find a white wrapped shape . . . The
nurse and I agree, it feels as if we almost
have a life here—a white-wrapped gift from Death.

(“Two Foreign Volunteers”)

In another, the will to live is animated:

. . . no, not pity, rather astonished admiration
for the sheer willfulness of life—a blind
and cornered cat slashing at Death’s dogs.

(“The Austrian”)

The third section is an account of the poet’s pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash—a holy mountain in the Himalayas. Still the journey of exploring will, sacrifice, and discovery.

Had this book ended with the third section, this reviewer would have set the collection down feeling the book’s promise fulfilled—the arc of a journey of discovery to the edge of self-possession. But the last section—poems returning to the themes of motherhood and urban scenery—made the collection feel less artful and more valedictorial and willed, an unnecessary bringing of things full circle. An outstanding sonnet about an aging mother’s demise, “Driving,” could have served as the sole closing poem for the book:

When she picked up the hitchhiker Death,
that beggar’s first demand was the alms of her eyes,
the cataracts were the blur of his breath,
his exhale shrinking her boundaries without reprise.
He shut her highways, lowered his border bar
till the only way out was on his road, in his car.

Let Me Open You a Swan, Elixir Press, 2010

Upon reading Landscape with Silos, Deborah Bogen’s first award winning book, one could recognize authentic, accomplished poetics. In her new book, Let Me Open You a Swan, Bogen again lays out a moving constellation. The girl who once kicked a can down the road now reconstructs a landscape and lays out the architecture of a mind. In increments, Bogen’s poetry moves from images of the superstitious augury of animal parts to images of the scientific dissection of a body. All are in the metaphorical service of contemplating an enigmatic imagination.

The poems are divided into four sections. “Landscape,” the first section, introduces the harshness of Bogen’s beginning. Memory will be joyously referred to or suffered. Observations give rise to (and are the basis of) poetic creation. Hinging the concrete to the abstract is often the creation of metaphor.

The need for fuel fires the imagination in a depressed father’s suicide, a young girl’s escape out of a “two-horse” town, the car of an amorous man who has a fat wheel of pool-hall winnings stuffed in his jeans. This is the landscape of a restless Dakota child, of God-fearing generations, of butterflies pinned to a mat, and of a grandmother hanging sheets like sails that can’t catch the wind. Fuel has a connection to transport—and where there is transport, there is escape. Somewhere in a distance, a political monk strikes a match and fires a lethal protest. At the end of one of the poems, the poet evokes night skaters and croons:

The second section of the collection is “Religion.” The transport from locus (place) to logos (word) expands. Children making snow angels give way to a girl transported by a Hell’s Angel, give way to heavenly angels, the colicky messengers of God (and the announcers of resurrection). Escape gives way to eros and ethos and grief. In one poem in the section the poet evokes the lyric of a long-dead sister:

“Migraine,” the third section, is a mixture of suffering pain and hosting transport:

Is the archer aiming for “the swan?” And if struck, might the swan break into its final song? What sort of augury abides in this constellation, this collection, of poems?

In “Art,” the final section of Let Me Open You a Swan, the gentle adjuring of the poet “to allow her” to allow us to witness the autopsy—or dissection–in the title comes around full circle. But the poet, too, as witness, is auspiciously transformed by the rite:

Birds of Hoboken, Orchises, 1995
Not Till We Are Lost, Louisiana State University Press, 2004

Birds of Hoboken was published in 1995. Not Till We Are Lost, William Wenthe’s second collection, was published in 2004. The two books, end to end, read as a testament to craft and seasoned poetic vision.

Both books use birds as vehicles. Poetic flight has long fired somber divinations and lyric contemplations. In Birds of Hoboken the vehicles give way to soliloquies concerned with time and cause and effect on a human scale. Landscapes are expressions of human abandonment, passage, or remoteness. The artfully measured lines of these poems move from ornithological and fishing observations, (in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City) to Dante and more philosophical questions of love and god… from observations of the “remoteness we haven’t killed yet” to a choir of “ungainly voices positing an idea of harmony, in need of something large enough to embrace us all, imagined out of our stunted love.”

The notion of a balance between hope and time hovers near to the center of each poem. Oddly, in one poem about composing a wedding invitation, the moment is laced with a “spell of doom”:

photo: WT Pfefferle

Wenthe is aware that along with philosophical and romantic bonding comes risk: there is no intellectual enterprise, no romantic journey, no physical ordeal without some possible encroachment of danger. Wenthe may be hopeful, but he is also an observer of the pattern of the physical world. One may faithfully pledge one day; but, another time, one may hopelessly surrender. One gate may be labeled RECOVERY, another DOOM.

In Not Till We Are Lost Wenthe is subject to some dislocation. He departs from his familiarly labeled geographic landscapes and moves into the more austere terrain of West Texas. Lubbock, neither lush nor florid, has its own beauties. In the new landscape, there are new names he must learn for birds, flowers, and fish; and there are still the poet’s private reveries drawn from art inspired by picturesque landscapes and death daubed Audubon illustrations.

The voice of both of these collections, line by line, is quiet and observant–– elegant in every way. But the poems of Not Till We Are Lost are more clearly poems of aftermath. Self knowledge has been honed by several personal tragedies. The poet’s experiences are not simply romantic transforming energies, they are real events with physical consequences. No one escapes suffering. But the poet’s emotional precisions have been tempered:

In one particularly beautiful poem in the collection, “Bluebird and Comet,” the poet departs from the self-deluding, self-destructive March hormones of a blue bird and cosmic mechanics to a meditation on the decline of his parents:

Persistent Voices, An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS, Alyson Books, 2010
Theory of Devolution, University of Illinois Press, 2002

Philip Clark and David Groff have just joined forces and edited an anthology of poems by poets lost to AIDS. The collection is entitled Persistent Voices and has been published by Alyson Books. Some of the forty artists featured are Tory Dent, Melvin Dixon, Tim Dlugos, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Essex Hemphill, Leland Hickman, David Matias, Paul Schmidt, Karl Tierney, and Assotto Saint. The span of voices is smart and exhilarating.

Eight years ago Groff’s own first book of poetry received one of the National Poetry Series awards (selected by Mark Doty) and was published by University of Illinois Press. Groff’s Theory of Devolution appeared at a time when poetry was finding its expressive way beyond being elegiac or politically shrill. The finding was of something that resisted erasure. It was equally of something that would access vitality. Groff’s collection hit the right note, and for those who might not have picked it up I offer a few observations.

*

From Fire Island and the tide waters of Baltimore to facing east into the Pacific near Big Sur, the ocean certainly makes ebbing and flowing look easy: easy come, easy go. David Groff’s Theory of Devolution is a collection of meditations that run the poetic scale from molecules of sweat to exploding stars. The poet is searching for an original elementalism beyond guises and formulaic schemas of fact: vegetable, bestial; races, nationalisms, clothes; the living and the lost. Each individual seems rapt in a borrowed body: a calf’s placenta, a discarded umbilical cord, delicate bodied crabs, a kicked open pumpkin, a miscarried brother, the unharvested eggs of a lesbian friend with cancer, fish. And how can one who seems oneself to be a tenant be “possessed” by another?

In human gambles and adventures, none seems higher risk than that of human affection. For Groff, such attempt at coupling is the “jet propelled elastic band of Wile E. Coyote.” Human beings collide and are locked together as mysteriously as oceans. But it is not how particles of an element mysteriously lock together that is at the center of Groff’s attention in this collection.

This is a mediation on later…when an element is unlocked and set adrift. Either, cut off—as in cut off and adrift beyond escape, or as a reveler cut off full of grief and adrift with inescape.

Drifting is everywhere. There is smoke, carcasses of horses in a flooded river, a dream of drowning, a floppy penis beneath a hospital gown, a glide that turns to bobbing, falling, the religious calling of a father, and the romantic reverie and grief of a someone who finds it strange to be calling himself a man:

There is real human terror and inspection of the beloved as carrion. One poem is about what function to find for a death mask stored face-down on the speaker’s nightstand. Also in these poems are brave passes of the angst of reaching for the lost element. And there is sadness:

But Groff is neither provincial nor maudlin. A poem about laundry—the small demand routinely met–is one of the strongest in the book. His universal mind is also one that gives voice to wit and comfort:

The Raft, Dutton, 1989
Moving and St Rage, University of North Texas Press, 1999
The Charm, Zoo Press, 2002
Lip, Eastern Washington University Press, 2009

Kathy Fagan’s Lip is great new addition to anyone who has a growing Fagan shelf in their library–or is a great find for the newly reading. The poems in Lip take a lot of their energy from the Drama of Poetic stance–not Rhetorical stance, but Poetic stance. Fagan is a sure-footed poet. Poetry is her place in the world and she has a lot to say.

In 1989, The Raft, Kathy Fagan’s first collection of poems, was a National Poetry Series selection. It was then published by Dutton.

In 1999, Moving and St Rage, Fagan’s second book, won the Vassar Miller Prize. I was asked to review Moving and St Rage for “Barrow Street,” and in my review postulated: “Fagan not only moves sights and historical events around; she moves sounds and temperatures around as well. The artful choice and use of the images serve the soft burn of the poet’s keeness. The poems are musical, refined, and highly sophisticated without being arch or flexing. . . . Rather than our eyes and ears growing used to the world, art–like the songs of unseen birds–actually serves to take us beyond the schemas of our meaning that inure us to life. Fagan sifts for consolation . . . . “

*

In 2002, Fagan’s third collection The Charm stood out in its celebration of the rational and the irrational.

After all, aren’t those both valences that can find their home in poetry? Rather than our eyes and ears growing used to the world, Fagan’s art serves to take us beyond our usual rubrics, beyond the linguistic zones of diurnal comfort. Her poetry draws at a turn from the language of historical fact and the language of faith. Consider these three examples of the former from poems in The Charm, the world of the character who can type 65 wmp and eats a soft-boiled egg from a cup:

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, for example
there were 48 professional Elvis impersonators.
… by the year 2012,
one person in every four will be an Elvis impersonator.

9/1/14: Martha,
the last passenger pigeon,
dies at the Cincinnati Zoo.

In 1906 the owners of Luna Park
… electrocuted one of their herd of working elephants.
It took ten seconds.

But Fagan, in the latter language of faith, is equally arresting. In her “Visitation,” the divine visitor does not come in white or brocade and does not unfurl in a late Vermeer March––rather, “Tuesday, mid-November—sunstruck clouds with winter in them”––and it is not a winged angel that sets the world into a tumult, but the surprise of birds paddling into trees:

The charm of finches lifting from a ditch
can surprise you with a sound like
horselips, and paddle toward the trees
beautifully, small,
brown, forgettable as seeds,
but they, too, must sing on earth unto the bitter death––

(The poem ends expansively with a double dash. Not a period.) Fagan weaves in and out of science and rational communication. She almost irrationally folds in a gesture of mystical evocation or an arresting numinous encounter. The poetry swims with the marvelous and the murderous; praise and awe are intertwined with the rascalous joy of an invective list or a set of “misfortune” cookies. The Charm is lively. Its poems call us both to the things of this world and—with an ear and inner eye for the poetic––to the worlds that might be found inside of the world. Fagan excavates within the possession of language and poetry itself for a strategy that demands a kind of testing and a kind of wakefulness. Poetry, sometimes jolting forward and sometimes prayerfully turning back on itself, does not “nail down,” it lives, keeps thought moving. The train cars jolt and jostle. The ride is exhilarating.

In 2009, we have Lip, Fagan’s new book. While it extends the themes and strategies established in the first books, it artfully pushes the relief of the images against the artful resignation of the poet’s maturing stance and voice:

Bears bed below my window,
as do the doe and her stiff stiff fawn.
At dawn their ginger ears flick off the dew,
the sun. They look me in the eye
as if I’d drawn a gun, and then do lumber,
and then do canter, but never
do they wonder.
Never.

(“Lament”)

The terrain of Lip is more chiseled. The voice is still void of romantic histrionics and is clear. The stance of the poet is modest, ruthless, and courageously ordinated — still offering lip-service to the world. Sometimes there are glints of Baudelaire, Mother Courage, Medea, Stein. To close one’s mind does not improve one’s faith. . . . it goes the other way.  Her coronation is a ceremony of one out walking among maple and beach trees toward a row of leafy mayapples:

In that rare atmosphere,
I will walk a path like powder underfoot
Through leafy mayapples—those excellent witnesses—
A cardinal ahead, the three queen mothers, my subjects’ limber
Backs, lovely hair, a roar that dies down dies down,
And in awful light, I will accept
My scepter. The usual
Fanfare, the pink embellishments. Bells, trumpets.
Then will I be anointed by no one,
And serve him well.

(“Diadem”)

Fagan steps forward to balance the fastidious parsings and theatricalites inherent to speaking with a plain authenticity not found often today. Genuine, distilled poetic observations artfully delivered up. Fundamental, modern observations. The stage is set, Lip is in the light—the awful light.

In the poem “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum” Fagan ventriloquizes Penelope:

. . . . Not that I own a TV.
But in a way, I am TV.
All stance & no (sub)stance.
Nothing to feel & everything to comment on.

Jack Paar, Jack Kennedy, Michael Jackson,
Jack Off, a box of boredom with a toy
surprise,,, ~:>)
Which returns me, always, to poetry.

This is not a pantoum.
It may only be a shroud.
A Stein is a Stein is a
white space around the box

& the ______that is the sea
raveling, unraveling.

In another poem, after cataloging a long list of the plastic and mylar things at a cheap roadside memorial, the poet concludes:

This crap from Wal-Mart could outlast us all,
which in our grief is no small com-
fort, since death lasts so much longer, and has no form.

(“Road Memorial”)

Day Mark
Lee Briccetti, Four Way Books, 2005
1-884800-67-X, $14.95, 92 pages

New York City is presently sighing with relief as Poets House, after a long sojourn in boxes, is unpacking and setting up shop again to serve writers and lovers of poetry. Manhattan is fortunate to host this institution. The new facility–now located at 10 River Terrace–is architecturally full of space and light and, though shiny and new, still retains a smile of welcome.

Lee Briccetti is the director. She is a grounded, affable woman; herself, a remarkable poet. With much of the focus being on the new, one also takes a moment to reflect on what New York City and the people dreaming in the city have experienced. The new Poets House is actually a stone’s throw away from the site of the September eleventh attack on the World Trade Center. A few years back Briccetti—one of those dreamers— published her own love letter to the resilient city she lives and works in.

“DAY MARK”–One’s Wondrous and Terrible Worlds

Lee Briccetti’s first book, Day Mark, awaits–and deserves–lengthy and subtle reviews. The aphoristic glints of the poems’ images resist category and corral––but what they do give is poetic pause and shimmer.

The opening epigraph is from The Tempest. (Peter Greenaway making a movie out of “Day Mark” is an interesting notion to entertain.) At the end of the book, the poet notes:

Day Mark brims with physical and literal aphorisms of Western Culture. There are parts of cities. Rome conjures the idea of the wondrous and the terrible. (It is, among other things, the location of the death of the great and venerated English poet John Keats.) New York City conjures the idea of the concrete and imaginary wilderness, of walking in the western night. Both Rome and New York––like Herculaneum and Pompeii––are cities of promise . . . and ruin.

Day Mark is also an elegy. Angels arrive from the Old World and terrorist commandeered airplanes arrive in the New. In one of the poems, a poetic footnote is employed:

Day Mark is a literary celebration. H.D.–eyeing domestic kitchen implements hanging in bombed out London apartments–and Djuna Barnes are spiritual mothers of Day Mark. Briccetti herself evokes Marie Ponsot in one of the epigraphs. She also evokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Hopkins, and George Eliot. From Americans, she elects to evoke Melville, Dickinson, and Robert DeNiro. She veers into Italian poetry for Pasolini.

Day Mark is also a book about dreams. There is the Stendhalian dream from the Old World–that love is about seeing and being seen:

Like the Egyptian museum in Torino, Day Mark “extends…to the limit of a (visible) ceiling.” The conglomeration is conceived to be greater than any one poem. Curiosity, patience, and introspection have amassed a personally charged and eccentric collection. The shelves are open. Reward awaits the willing visitor.

Weapons Grade
Terese Svoboda, University of Arkansas Press, 2009
1-55728-906-9, $16, 96 pages

“WEAPONS GRADE”–Notes from a 21st Century Sybil

The Oracle and the Sybil are moments somewhere along the way in history that mark institutional attempts at the preservation of the tradition of wisdom and truth telling. Neither is directly transparent. In 2009, Terese Svoboda’s throws a new set of her poems, Weapons Grade, into the mix.

The book is divided into four parts. The poems in the first section are overtly political, very dark, and very impressive. In one, there is a convoy of body bags. In another the litany of O’s weave from Suzie Wong’s nipples to nooses—but in fact are the zeros of records of African-American GI’s secretly executed by American Forces in occupied Japan—assumedly for the crime of rape. There is a conflation of history. King Henry’s dogs tracking in the blood of hanged men balances with the white gloves of American GI MP’s. The gloves are as white as the record of executions is blank.

In another poem, “Code Name: 731” Svoboda spells the connection between the almost unbelievably, horrible Japanese science experiments of WWII and the Tokyo lab, which in the 1990’s distributed AIDS-laden blood for the transfusions of unknowing patients. Our darkest corners are not mirages; they are gruesome historical facts. The poem begins with a land developer unearthing one of the grizzly WWII 731 labs. Files follow. At the close of the poem, the notions of secrecy and the horrible nature of things buried away hitting the light of day are jarringly simple: How much cold can a body take? / How little liver? / The boys’ bones turn up in the Tokyo lot.

Svobda splices a line: Say Can You See? what the century is made of.

In the first section of Svoboda’s book heartland patriotism and bravado are flaunted by a provincial adolescence. It is a macabre song of misguided innocence:

In another poem, the tone is more prayerful, more plaintive:

The poems of Sections II, III, and IV shift away from the military themes of stealth, abuse, and fear and into a question of balance as set into a personal landscape, or as Svoboda references it—to the glen of the heart. In Section II, the theater is marriage. There are tracks in the snow and messages in the camp ashes. Intimacy get misplaced and recovered in the balancing of the equation of X and Y; the day’s / global position ratchets / into place with a purse click. The balance of power languidly dreams while the colonial teapot gleams and steams.

The poems in Section III shift to domestic issues of the nuclear family—the mystery is love not fear. Grief, damage, and fear, as a kind of death, re-surface in this section. In one poem, a woman loves her beater. The kitchen and abuse conflate. Things appear—and disappear. “The fury and majesty of a mind’s death” is featured in “the loss” of a brother. It is only the people with navels (“evolutions blind trajectory”) that have issues:

And in Section IV, grand design and doom join hands. In one poem fluid massing on the lungs appears as a warning of what is to come. In Section IV, there is a path, a widow, an evening of sailing on a lake, a glacier, and a bargaining:

There is also a road taken by two bicyclists who are overtaken by a car driven by Death. It hits–and disappears.

Svoboda’s poems are rewarding. She is brave–but the road she travels is not easy or for the faint of heart.

Tennessee Williams knew how
to mine the kinetics of cruelty.

Not the inverted and demure,
“I’ll roll over, and let you

ravish me, you he-man man, you!”
Forget Stella. No. It’s Stanley,

the shrieking infantile god,
who’s vicious; who’s had enough

of just “whistling Dixie;”
who finally succumbs

to being topped
by Stella’s transvestite

brother, who, in turn,
has had enough

of railroad Johns,
and of turning

hotel tricks
in the magical

and occupying
glow of paper

and red
glass lanterns

The architect of our party cuts
the pringá, is himself a directory
of pasos. On the wall behind him,
a mirror features a giddy Bavarian
floating in a deafening jar of beer.
He smiles in the froth. His chin floats;
likewise, his feathered green felt
hat. “¡Tome su copa con pajarito!”

Like being in Cadiz
and correlating Puerto Rico.
Or being in Granada
and thinking of Baghdad
or being in another point in Andalucía
and thinking of Texas.
We just as easily could be
in “The Quarter” of New Orleans;
but, of course, when friends
raise their glasses at Codornices,
they are in Seville.