Book Reviews

Due a backlog I am not currently accepting any more books for review.

*****

A review of Deborah Bogen’s X.J. Kennedy-award winning collection, Landscape with Silos, is forthcoming in Rattle’s E-Reviews section.

*****

A review of Alex Grant’s Chains & Mirrors (winner of the Randal Jarrell prize, HarperPrints 2006, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award) is currently up at Rattle in their E-Reviews section. It is also still forthcoming in a future issue of Poetry Southeast.

***** 

Review of Diane Lockward’s What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006)

Diane Lockward’s second book, What Feeds Us (winner of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize), is chock full of tasty poems; fresh, delectable poems; poems that drip blue juice that runs alluringly down your chin as you read.

What feeds us here is desire: desire for love, for a lover, for a lost child, for a lost parent, all this desire projected onto objects that one can sink their teeth into: a singular artichoke that grew against all odds; blueberry pancakes; a pear; an avocado. Each of these edible objects represent something to the speaker: a father walking out on the family; a mother lost and found and lost again; the redolence of reticence; the persistence — no, insistence — of self, and self-reliance.

The opening poem, “What Feeds Us”, a poem in seven sections, effectively sets up the major themes of this collection:

	I brought the things I really need –
	two books I love, a laptop,
	clean white paper, a radio
	in case I get lonely.
	I packed two issues of the Hungry Mind Review
	and just enough clothes.
	Vitamins, ginger tea, a Gauguin cup.
	I carried three almond croissants,
	one of which I have already eaten.

The speaker, in indicating that she has brought only the things she needs, has deliberately distanced herself, and it is this distance that enables her to find a way back in to her tender subjects. In the second section of the poem, she walks into a deli and spots a cookie: 

	… and right away I start thinking about Joe
	and the story he told about Darlene,
	the one girl he really could have loved back
	in high school, Darlene with the long yummy legs,
	when Joe was a short, fat-assed kid
	with zits. He’d sit in the cafeteria
	and watch luscious Darlene nibble
	a cookie, and he’d dream that one day
	she’d sashay to his table,
	hold our her cookie like a valentine,
	and he’d take that cookie, and Darlene’s lips
	would be all over it.

The other sections of this poem present us with an abusive father, a return to the imagined love affair between Joe and Darlene, and, in a nod to Lockward’s first book, Eve’s Red Dress, a walk with Eve out of the garden, who carries an apple with her because “(s)he didn’t know where she was going / but she knew she’d need something to eat.”

Fruit is returned to again and again throughout this collection. The noteworthy poem “Organic Fruit”, a shaped poem in praise of the avocado — a “strict individualist” — describes its subject as “schmoo-shaped”. Schmoo, satirical comic book characters created by Al Capp for the Lil’ Abner cartoon series, purportedly reproduce asexually and require no sustenance.  

Though not all of the poems include food as an ingredient, many of them do, employing food as a metaphor in surprising ways. In looking up the etymological beginnings of the oh-so-edible avocado, this reviewer found that it arises from the word testicle, finding reciprocity in “The History of Vanilla”, a sort of lullaby which reveals the evolution of the word vanilla as having its roots in the Latin vagina. 

In the very fun “The Best Words” Lockward explores the tantalizingly forbidden encapsulated within ordinary everyday words “…that put a finger to the flame but don’t burn. / Words like asinine, poppycock, titmouse, tit for tat, / woodpecker, pecorino, poop deck, and beaver.” These are sensual poems; ripe, verdant.

The poem, “Meditation on Green” begins: 

	It comes to me as a commandment:
	Thou shalt meditate on green,
	And because I am obedient
	my thoughts turn to grass, blades
	crushed under my feet, tiny green
	grasshopper grinding his broken song.
	Thence to the lime for it is a tart
	fruit and hangs from trees without
	causing any woman to fall. Green
	for the novice, the inexperienced,
	the not-knowing-any-better.
	The pickle, repeatedly tempting me
	to devour its green obscene shape.

This poem –  beginning with a simple meditation on the color green –  becomes more and more substantial with each turn of the line. Food may be the jumping off point, but these poems have depth. These are mature poems dealing with mature subjects, even tackling formal verse, as in “Love Test: A Ghazal”:

	“The sign on the wall read: Test on love
	coming soon. “My God,” I thought, “a test on love!”
	I felt the familiar panic,
	the tightening in my chest. On love
	I’d be lucky if I pulled a C-.
	I’ve always made a mess of love.

Occasionally the poems rely on insects as metaphor, as in “Fear”, where they are “…wasps / poised over your head, abuzz / while you sleep, or don’t sleep”. A mother’s hatred and loathing for anything that threatens her child invoked in “Invective Against the Bumblebee”:

	I despise you for you have swooped down
	on my baby boy, harmless on a blanket of lawn,
	his belly plumping through his orange stretch suit,
	yellow hat over the fuzz of his head.
	Though you mistook him for a sunflower,
	I do not exonerate you.

In yet another, the speaker finds herself amazed at her friend’s ability to charm a bee from her lunch bag without getting stung, while in the “The Bee Charmer” a lover succeeds in convincing her of the necessity of bees, and, by extension, acknowledges the necessity of adversity in our lives, if only to provide contrast for the sweet.

What Feeds Us is a feast: frequently messy, but always delicious. You may be tempted, but you cannot eat this book.

You will want to read it again.

 

from Poetry Southeast

 

*****

 

Five Terraces by Ann Fisher-Wirth (Wind Publications 2005)

In Shanxi province, China, there is a mountain, Wutai Shan, which means “Mountain of Five Terraces.” It is said that Manjusri, the bodhisatttva representing wisdom, resides there, centered between Buddha’s eyebrows. 

So it is not insignificant that the poem for which this collection is titled, “Five Terraces,” occurs almost dead-center in the book, for wisdom is what you find at its heart, its center. Consider some of the subjects she explores throughout this collection: the complexities of love, the death of a parent, the death of a child: all of these imply a circumnavigation of the heart, and an excavation of it.   

Five Terraces is divided not into five sections as I had imagined, but seven. This initially surprised me, but I have come to see the opening and closing sections – both titled “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll” – as sort of  beginning and ending punctuation. But rather than end-stops or exclamation marks, they act as ellipses for thought that begins before you enter the book and continues after you have set it down.

This is very much in the spirit of the scroll’s title. According to the end notes, the title of the room-length horizontal scroll by Ming Dynasty artist Wu Wei, Le Grande Fleuve a perte de vue, “Translated from the French translation from the Chinese, the title means, approximately, “the great river as far as the eye can see,” or, more evocatively, “the great river to the loss of sight or view.” 

 In an interview with the Southeast Review, Ann Fisher-Wirth references a Buddhist metaphor for the universe as “mountains and rivers without end,” which is how she sees the scroll, and her poem, which both contain an expansiveness, an openness, that paradoxically draws the reader in.          

	You could be the man in the small house making tea, or one of the friends fishing off the footbridge of the river.
	*          *          *
	You could be that aspen, that cedar —
	or the woman we do not see, who spins thread or boils silkworms
	in the house below the boulder, the house
	of which we see
	an upper roof corner, and another, then the rocks surround it.

“Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” when encountered as the last section of the book, appears in reverse order, and has the effect of lifting us gently back out, but as an opening sequence, it zooms us in:           

	And look, here someone rides home –
	or is it a squiggle —
	up the path to a terraced house.
	Then a village fading in fog,
	on the watery side of a mountain.

As the observer is drawn in to each individual scene on the scroll, we are drawn in to the house, the village, the people in that village.

Wu Wei, in addition to being the artist referred to in the title, is also a major tenet of Taoist philosophy, which means, roughly, Wu (without) and Wei, (action). But Wu Wei  does not imply apathy,  but rather an instinctual kind of control, summed up best by the phrase wei wu wei, or action without action. It has also been described as the art of letting be. So “Walking Wu Wei’s

Scroll” can be taken as both the literal walking back and forth the poet did while admiring the scroll, and also the precarious ropewalk of “the art of letting be.” 

Grief, no small topic, appears and reappears throughout. Here is an excerpt from “Anti-Elegy,” which appears in section IV:           

	(…)I’m willing
	to say death’s a gift. But how lonely, to wait –
	then afterward, to shift and mumble grief’s bones.

And, then, “But the Bodhisattva Comes”:</span          

	But the bodhisattva comes
	to teach us the path through suffering.

So here is the wisdom borne of grief, of suffering. She explores this theme further, alongside others like sexuality in the face of aging, in the section titled, “The Trinket Poems.”

In April, 2002, the University of Mississippi assembled an exhibition featuring memorabilia from Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams’ career. It was during this time that the university put on a production of his little-known short play titled “The Mutilated,” which featured Ann Fisher-Wirth as Trinket Dugan. The experience of playing Trinket proved fruitful, resulting in a chapbook-length series of poems that draw us in to the actor’s life, both on and off stage, as she becomes Trinket. There is a sometimes sweet, sometimes crude, frankness to many of these poems. Here are the opening lines from “After Many Years She Returns to the Stage in “The Mutilated,” by Tennessee Williams”:          

	She runs her fingers over the cheek and down the throat
	and slender chest of this boy
	fuck age-appropriate
	fuck that she’s a professor it’s not specific to him anyway
	she arches her body against him and moans
	when he orders her be my slave and God she has
	climbed inside delirium

As she moves deeper and deeper into her character, the transformation begins to overtake her, as in “Small Interlude, Still, Where She Argues:”          

	Hang on to the real, she said to herself,
	this is getting full of gods and Sailors.
	You can’t just admit they’re college kids,
	you’re an English professor and mother of five
	slumming in satin, fake fur, and grease paint?

Each section is self-contained. Some poems in this collection haul up the detritus – stuff that most of us would rather have left buried – and turn it into something shining, something sharp, worth holding on to even if it hurts. “Mississippi,” a poem in eight sections which takes us away from the speaker’s home in order to lead us back, opens with:        

	Since Friday a small white cat has lain on the sidewalk next to Inside
	Oxford. Ants crawl in its fur, ichor pools around its nostrils. Soon, that
	sweet smell will rise as it bloats in the heat and stiffens further. Drive by
	it, drive back at the end of the day. No one has removed it. Drive by
	again next morning, then, in the evening, walk up close to look at it. Its
	eyes have spread from temple to temple, as if someone had laid the blue
	wings of a Morphos butterfly tenderly across it.

This is the stuff we cannot look away from. There are things we cannot defy, or define, as in the poem, “Rain:”         

	She has words for the others. Husband, friend, child… But what do you
	call a man you love, a man who loves you, who is not your husband and
	not – because of your husband, his wife – your lover? Not my love, and
	not my other love either. Not sweetheart, she doesn’t quite dare. Not,
	God forbid, my temptation. Though she’s been tempted.

To return to “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” there is a particularly resonant line:          

No climax, no conclusion.

We are in the gallery:         

	And half the people walking the scroll
	here at the Grand Palais on the 21st of June
	move left to right, and half move right to left.
	It doesn’t matter

Of the poem, Ann Fisher-Wirth states in her Southeast Review interview: “I like to think that, like the scroll itself, one can enter the poem anywhere and find it sufficient and complete at every moment…” The same can be said about the whole of Five Terraces.

I am writing this on the 21st if June.

 

from Poetry Southeast 

***** 

Wintergreen by Dr. Charles Bennett (Headland Publications, 2002)

In my hand I hold a slim green volume of poetry. On the cover is an amazingly ethereal painting by Giovanni Segantini entitled “The Punishment of Lust” in which we see bare-breasted women floating through an icy channel against a backdrop of snow covered mountains. It is titled Wintergreen, by Dr. Charles Bennett.

Dr. Bennett lives and works in and about the U.K. where he runs the Ledbury Poetry Festival, “the best poetry festival in the country” according to Andrew Motion. Several years ago I was lucky enough to hear him read during Writers Week at the University of California, Riverside, near my home.

Throughout this debut, a collection of startlingly fresh lyric poems, Dr. Bennett employs language that is evocative, revelatory, and steeped in folklore that acts as mythical sinew, connecting these poems to the bone of a narrative structure that draws us through a landscape bristling with the mystery of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The title poem evokes the bright flavor of wintergreen with crisp imagery, then seamlessly turns from the literal to the metaphorical beginning at the fourth couplet, ending the poem with:

Somewhere close at hand
you are hiding until I find you:a remedy for solitude
a prickle of white in the wood.

These poems, saturated with a longing the reader can almost taste, seek to satiate that longing with searching. Most are oblique love poems, addressed to an un-named “you” as though letting us in on a private conversation. In “The Unicorn Diaries” the speaker claims:

I have put you together from pentagrams of sugar
and salt, from the bones of eleven miceThis invokes, in this reader’s mind, not just a snippet of pagan ritual, but the desire to create that which cannot easily be obtained. When the speaker says:I wondered if the smell was viburnum
or phosphorus, if the featherswere swans or doves, if the dimpled sheets
of your bed were the toad’s pale underbelly ,or fallen hawthorn blossom,

the text seems imbued with a glow, a sweetness; a softness. The swans and doves and hawthorn blossoms, symbolic of monogamy and fidelity, are countered in the penultimate couplet by the unicorn’s slow dismembering of a wedding dress. She then runs off, leaving a bath full of milk, a trail of hoof-prints in the snow.

In another poem, “The Mermaid Room,” written in the voice of a mermaid, the speaker states:

I am the voyage you will make alone
in a small, unstable, open boat
for the rest of your life…further reenforcing one of the major themes of this work: the deeply human quest for all that eludes us. We find ourselves adrift, almost floating from one page to the next, until we reach the final section: a series of linked poems titled “Lost.” Here, on a Wednesday night, we find the speaker wanting to learn how to spell abracadabra — a conundrum, of course, because as he is spelling out this desire, he is spelling out the word.This is the trick that is played as we read these simple and elegant and mysterious poems: in searching out a remedy for our own solitude, we find that we’ve had it in our hands all along.

from Galatea Resurrects 

*****

Locket by Catherine Daly (Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2005)

Catherine Daly’s Locket is sheathed in gold with black script, the flourish of an L a swooshing swirling metaphor for one particularly troublesome four-letter word. Yes, these are love poems.

Lashed with lust, lush with longing, luscious as a labial-lingual kiss, Daly pulls us through a landscape rippling with heat, bristling with the riddle of that ‘same old song’. These are poems that are as straightforward and unapologetic as they are sweet and circumspect.

Love’s a huge subject. I can’t tell you that Daly has anything new to say about love or its effects of consequence. It’s how she goes about saying it that makes this worth your time, with language that is sharp and clean and smart and funny. Take these lines from the third section of the poem, “Osculate”:

Our two, worth their maximum and minimum,
perambulate, perform. Parabola, ellipsis, ellipses:
I would like to mention discontinuity at this juncture.
It slices our pair from the earth’s mantle.

Out of context, this may seem like gobbledygook, but within these paper walls it makes perfect sense. This poem, in three sections, directly corresponds (in ascending order) to the Roman words for ‘kiss’: Osculum, a greeting, an air kiss; Basium, a direct lip-to-lip kiss between lovers; and Savium, a ‘deep kiss’, known nowadays as ‘french’. Slipped in between these ‘kisses’ are references to mathematics, Jimi Hendrix, and WWII. Now consider that this poem, “Osculate”, uses the word ‘vacillate’ in the penultimate line, and is followed by a poem titled “Oscillate”.These poems are thick with images, references, word-play, making each a rich read. Daly uses language like a child uses blocks: she builds it up to knock it down.

Here is her poem, “Couple”:

               “many a slip between cup and lip”Two tipple tea, tupple, Tippacanoe,
sumptuously sip, sup, supple.Two pull and tamp
their ample mutual appeal.

Two grasp two apples, oh,
to journey from Tampa to Tupelo.
Two peel their clothes.
They put and place, topple,
tumble, not duplicitous, pillowed, paired,
duplex, circumspect, slumber together.
Dual and singular, nuptial bells peal.

Throughout I have found lines that seem particularly resonant. In the poem “Grain” the narrator states:

My love is a crop circle hoax,
has trampled all my grain.

Such a terrific metaphor for love’s crush, that something thought to be so miraculous and out-of-this-world can be flipped, becoming so real it turns fake, false.

Here is a line that I absolutely love from “American Beauty: Night”:

Comport yourself within this machinery of want.

‘Want’ is just that: a machine propelling us toward–something–that will (hopefully, temporarily) satisfy. But it is a messy, undignified process.

In “Endnotes” there is so much language-play that it almost becomes nonsensical, but it is joyful nonsense.

She scatters her words with Arabic numerals,
Superscript or superior, a supertitled opera,
supernumerary, numinous, superfluous, fluent.

Love may be her always implicit, sometimes explicit, subject, but it is the way she skips and dances around it that makes this book such an engaging read.

In “Footnotes,” on the facing page, there is a line which I think sums it up best:

If the ride’s pleasurable
it can be followed

Locket is a lovesong. If I were to locate one flaw, I would say it is in the seeming predictability of the narrative arc. But that can also be considered an asset. On all levels, Locket is pleasurably riddled and referenced; a reverberating read.

from Galatea Resurrects 

*****