The Critic's Pen
(Scroll down for reviews, most recent on top)
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Senior Editor, in 2008. Posted in 2009
Line Dance by Barbara Crooker
Word Press, 2008
Barbara Crooker has constructed a rich exposé of the sometimes cheerless bounty of existence in Line Dance. She is wise to life’s trials and sadness, but in her clear observance of it she does not step away from something deeper: The temperature hovered near zero/ but the sky looked milky, benign.
Rumi provides the envoy to Line Dance, and his breath touches these poems as Crooker applies a point of view that is always a step removed. In the title poem, a wedding can be colored with a tone of broken love, tinged with the complexity of post-divorce relationships, a marble cake with swirls of champagne and silk, heartache and new love and the poet’s knowing gaze.
These poems are deeper and dryer than the poems of Radiance (Word Tech 2006). If her delicious language unfolds nothing new, in their cataloguing of ordinary life (a brooch on a dress or a nail in a barn) these poems comfort in their honesty. I find this sadness, the poems tell us, and I take another breath. An example is "Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton/ We are All Writing God’s Poem," a poem which is marked by the conspicuous absence of God. How can we get up/ in the morning knowing what we do? But we do. In a poem that is fine, restrained and without hyperbole, Crooker shows us that we are also nourished by the world.
She knows how to tell the truth and where it takes you. Always a nature poet, she has often found inspiration in the lush blooming world, finches and sunflowers, euonymus, and she does so again in Line Dance. But winter may lead her most deeply. In "Zero at the Bone," The scouring light of winter is the poet’s own eye. It scrubs whatever it falls on,/ the bright whiteness revealing/ all the small incursions,/ marks and stains of another year… Now we are at the heart/ of things, the bone chill/ of zero, the closed eye/ of the pond. No secrets. The poem concludes with snow, the heart’s arithmetic: nada nada nada.
Line Dance offers a treasure of language: "Ephemera" tells us, The sun, no longer last week’s griddle,/ casts us in a bronzy light, turns the air to syrup, and, from "The Slate Grey Junco," snow falling back/ on itself warping and woofing/ the scarf of the storm. The reader can identify with the junco pecking in the snow for the summer-steeped sunflower seed. Indeed, the whole book is a lucid story of our difficult and beautiful reality. Oh, how this/ world burns and burns us, yet we are not consumed.
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Senior Editor, January 2008
Future Ship by Kurt Brown
Red Hen Press 2007
Perhaps there is no present, and existence is built of the alterable past moving into the alterable future, and then through the opaque door of death. Or perhaps there is neither past nor present, as if the person were a ship on a journey through the perpetually mutating future. Kurt Brown’s collection of poetry, and the title poem, "Future Ship," highlight such convolutions of time. Brown is tormented by time. In the title poem he writes, The way out is the way in, and The deeper we move into the future the more we disappear into the past. Aware of the memories that travel with him, unshakable, he writes of family and friends, whole neighborhoods, villages, vast cities, or hunks of them… People haunt him. Like the deceased grandmother in "Grandma’s Rye" who is still demanding Get me my rye! It’s not a warm loaf of bread that she wants.
Brown’s language is informal, inviting, and very intimate. How surprising to read in a poem, There was a guy I knew in college.... Brown shuns formality without in the least diminishing the sense of poetry. An acquaintance serves as the instigator in "White Collar Crime." In the poem the acquaintance goaded him on in the perpetration of a rather violent mugging. It is dangerous to assume that the poem is autobiographical, but difficult not to. Some guilt never goes away. Feeling guilty is proof that you are a good person. So the reader may feel a growing warmth, a certain forgiveness for the human fallibility of the poet.
There is a distinctly feminine quality to Brown’s poems with attention to detail, as in "Who Knows Where," which builds a palpable mood using only the description of a 1948 Christmas tree. At the same time, a strong masculinity asserts itself in the less detailed barroom brawl, or the necessary [or should I say obligatory?] car fetish.
This poetry is intense in the best sense: It is honest, and deeply personal. Thus effortlessly it becomes universal. Most of all, Brown’s poems are characterized by their authenticity. There is no pretense, no weighty poetic device to get in the way of the clarity of what he must tell us. This is a book you will want to keep close by for a long time.
What Poems Say" tells us, All poems say one thing: death is coming… kiss your loved ones, say goodbye.
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Senior Editor, February 2007
Bully in the Spotlight, Docu-Poetry by Jane Herschlag
Pudding House Publications 2007
These are powerful, searing poems, carefully crafted and focused by a brave poet. With unflinching detail the poet relives her incest-ridden childhood. She shows how all of her experiences are colored by it. In many poems she redirects her anger toward the injustices committed against others.
In Bully in the Spotlight Herschlag says, "a minimum of artistic liberties are taken with the facts." She demonstrates exactly how angry she is for being a victim, and for many others who have been victims, before finding solace, which comes for her in the act of giving voice. The voice of resolution is somewhat overshadowed by the relentless examples and images of violence. on Christmas day/ an angered driver shoots/ my friend’s daughter --and my neighbor enters her lobby/ finds her college-bound daughter/ dying on a stretcher --and The moment I heard that you submerged/ all five heads of your kids/ in that porcelain womb/ I wanted you DEAD. --and Father paroled 6 Years After Torching His Sleeping Child, to quote just a few.
Still, Herschlag’s book is an education. We look into the mind of an inadvertent, angry victim as she documents her abuse and her healing. Rage/ you lodge in my bones/ pay no rent. Yet in "Epitaph" she also writes, I did not know that getting well/ would drag me through the flames of hell, concluding It is to me that I’ll belong. Herschlag finds friendship and understanding with an aging survivor of the Holocaust. In the final poem the persona turns to the benign, indifference of nature. In "Wind and Sky My New Sisters." she concludes, I am a new member/ of a diverse/ and large tribe/ always among family.
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Senior Editor, February 2007
Red Wax Rose
by Darlyn Finch, 2007
Shady Lane Press
Red Wax Rose, a collection of stories and poems by Darlyn Finch, and published by Shady Lane Press 2007. The collection is mostly poems, with three fine short stories included. Here is a delightful find, an appealing combination of simple, dark and wise.
These works are open-eyed to life’s tenderness and sadness—and the intersection of tenderness and sadness, which is the source of power in Finch’s writing.
A native Floridian, Finch was the recent writer in residence at Kerouac House in Orlando. Many Americans these days relocate often, but Finch lives in the midst of her history. In the poem "Hometown" she writes, "There are ghosts in the sanctuary,/ and our hometown is a place/ where we visit family/ alone/ on opposite ends of town."
"I {Heart} My Wife" is perhaps my favorite poem here. The voice of the poem imagines that the wife placed that bumper sticker on the truck herself, a message to "all women like me" who stop behind the truck, "who she surely knows are sitting/ at every red light/ in every town/ wishing they could one day be/ someone’s/ very best thing."
Finch’s writing is so fresh that it is as though she finds her reawakening on the pages of this collection, tracing difficult times and emerging cleansed and delightful. Lighthearted, she sings, "I wanna be a big-boned gal…"
Finch defines a moment of finding comfort within herself in "Mirror Mirror." In childhood she learned painfully that she must be modest and humble—must not love her reflection in the mirror too much. But years have given her wrinkles around her eyes, and she has come to love her reflection again. The poem concludes, "and I/ kissed her there in the mirror/ kissed her right on the lips/ kissed her fogging and smudging the mirror."
Because of Finch’s direct and intimate voice, because of her easy style, you come away from this book feeling as though you know the author as a close friend, one who can give good counsel when you need it.
--Peggy Miller 2/07
Reviewed by Peggy Sperber Flanders, Senior Editor, January 2007
Red Jess
by Judith H. Montgomery, 2006
Cherry Grove Collections: Lyre Series
Judith Montgomery is a master of sounds and observations about nature - both human nature and the natural world. Many of the poems beg to be read aloud more than once, for rhythm and song, as well as for sense and meaning.
Divided into several sections, Composition with Machete, Scarlet Box, and Blaze, with Apples the book invites us to use all our senses at once. The cover photo appears twice, both in photography and words ("This Lily")
Not cup, but vessel -- all
burnish, curve and curl
of lip, a slip of rose'd
bronze converging -- one
flung coil, tendril licked
in streams of sun...
"Gallop", in the first section, introduces us to a child's galloping heart, a dangerous fibrillation that will soon be remedied into a "walk ,,, an ordinary, one-two gait." However, the child has linked her inner spirit to the horse. She listens for "hoofbeats in her blood." She is afraid her companion will be lost forever and plots to follow him:
"...will he run into the sky
without her? His wild mane tangle in clouds,
and his hooves spark a starfall beyond the moon?"
"...When they open the gate to let him out
(this must be the secret), she will hold on --
she will gallop too."
The poet takes us through the seasons of the world and of her life where alliteration, rhyme and assonance join hands with narrative poems of blessings and grief. For example, the jarring sounds of pursuit in "Composition with Machete"
"...dead run right to left,
in flight. Pursuit."
culminate in both sounds and images of revenge. In between, they are tempered by the moon, "cool archer who plucks/the tides of blood..." and another heart as a box "packed with ink-stroked scrolls" as part of "Gretel's Spell." The poet moves us between the opening poem, "Aperture" -- unhooding the hawk and loosening "her red jesses" through the closing doors of divorce, drought and death.
For me, "Gallop" connected with "Cardioversion" in the last section. No longer a child, the poet describes the damaged heart about to be fixed or stopped forever:
"...your heart flutters
its leaves
as you would riff beneath your thumb
the pages of a book
that slips at sunset from your grasp..."
As the book ends, the poet finds an upbeat note for us to continue to enjoy the world of nature and mysteries, even in the midst of loss:
"Above, the stars replenish
their sweep, let loose one
shot of fire, perfect streak
extinguished in the black."
" ... boats stroke on a silk
that shivers moon and mountain
the name of every light
that flickers, and is gone."
I have concentrated on the natural poems because I am most drawn to them as a poet and editor. However, there is something here for everyone, both formal and narrative poems filtered through the heart and eye of a poet who displays both art and craft. I know I will re-read this book many times for its treasures. -- Peggy Sperber Flanders 1/07
Short review by MacPherson: Click here.
Reviewed by Ellen McNeal, Associate Editor, June 2006
Viewpoint
by Juli Nunlist, 2006
Hobblebush Books, Brookline, New Hampshire
"Just
Understand
Love
is
Never
(Understand:
Never)
Lost
Is
Still! There"
she says. This is Juli Nunlist's view. Each poem in Viewpoint establishes this. These are personal poems of joy and loss, mistakes made, the unsalvageable. These are poems of understanding spare and crafted. Through them, we know the poet.
From the title poem, we are invited into the view:
If you look
this way and that
you will see things
differently.
You will see the sky, most blue; birds and barriers; a potter,"the grey bowl" of his head like the objects he's thrown at the wheel. The language of these poems is precise, musical. Rhymes are: brilliant or subtle, always wisely chosen. Rhythms are varied or expected, often song-like. Juli's poems speak of choice: the cleaning woman's choice of background music for her work, the choice to forget. Or a girl's choice to turn a key to the "forbidden cabinet." In this poem, "The Parlor," we are introduced to family and secrets we meet in poems later.
The poems speak of freedom and pride, exposure, vanity and self-loathing. In "Unfinished," we pause. Are we finished only when we're wanted? A viewpoint? Meet Luiz Moran, the vintner the hermit who comes to church; "The Butcher," an artist with parsley and paper. Meet farmer Bai Iordan, who goes to the opera, returns to the village with a song in his heart. Meet Noah's wife, woman of intent and humor.
And the Kate poems. From "Letter to my daughter Kate,"
in the end I think love, if it be love
rejects the big things: declarations
betrayals
tragic errors and confrontations
and remembers
only the little things
Love is what carries her through the "loss" of Kate. A storm coat or a sweater becomes the longed-for hug, the connection. Rejection and longing, and wanting to be heard take us to "Villanelle for Kate, " formally spoken, a plea.
And the husband poems bring us a review of a long marriage, changes. Still, love. We see lunch before the televised news, we sit in "comfortable orange chairs," witness failing health and anger. Juli examines sight and fear, dread and hospitalization, a move. And death. She calls time and weather a "merciless pair." In these later poems, there is rhyme. And resolution.
After reading the final poem of this collection, return to the title poem. Reread, understand: "Love is still there." This is Juli Nunlist's viewpoint, shared. Ellen McNeal, Reviewer, 6/06
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, May 2006:
Fullest Tide
Poems of Ann Silsbee; edited by Gray Jacobik
Custom Words, 2006
Fullest Tide, published by Custom Words and edited by Gray Jacobik, is Ann Silsbee’s posthumous collection of poetry. She died unexpectedly in 2003 at the peak of her poetic creativity, with hundreds of poems written and many never reaching the page. In the last few months of her life she had begun to receive recognition for her poetry when two books were published, Orioling (Red Hen Press 2003) and The Book of Ga (Custom Words 2003). [see below]
The poems in Fullest Tide are lucid, but they are not to be read quickly. Rather, they are meant to be considered at length, to be savored. Indeed, their language, calm and open, leads one to a more unhurried reading. Here are love poems wet with rain, and so deep you will wish you had been their object. The first section of the book begins with the love poem "Rain," which concludes:
There is no grief we cannot drink. We hold out tongues,
we open our cells, like roots, like leaves, like earth.
Lie close, lie warm. Let our four feet tangle.
Rain will fold our bodies in.
Ann was uncomfortable with borders between herself and the natural world. She walked out frequently from her home, across meadows through the wild woods and along the stream where bird calls, rain, wind and the scents of nature moved through her. Ann’s nature poems are alive—her identity dissolved into forest and hill. Nothing else exists in the purity of her observing. In "The Hawk" she writes
The hawk calls from the telephone wire,
his harsh voice thinning over the meadow.
Hunching, he waits, wings folded
while the mountain slides slowly under mist
trailing a thread of stream from its shoulder
and a gleam of willows.
The poem ends with her persistent sense of frustration over her separateness: "I am left here,/ rooted in this reaching of my body." After a poem like this it is hard not to go in search of my own mountain in a world whose wild spaces diminish daily.
Maybe there is a patina that blots out objectivity, that rises with the wrenching thievery of death, a vacancy that we will never understand. Or perhaps Ann Silsbee’s poems are as fine as I believe, rich and calm as the clear voice of the woman I remember. I have been familiar with Ann’s poems for years, a fortunate participant in her Day Group, and a witness to her creative process. On alternate Wednesdays we shared a light lunch and a feast of poetry in Ann’s homey kitchen, six women in a pressure cooker of poetic focus. Many of the poems in the Fullest Tide crossed the table at those meetings.
Memories of Ann return when I read her poems—the way, for instance, that she worked her tongue, restraining it behind her bottom lip as she wrote. The woman in "Walking Poem" is surely Ann herself...
A woman leans on her elbows writing.
her mouth twists with concentration,
the pen gropes along the paper.
While she sought solace in her walks, she didn’t always find it. In "Walking Poem" the persona feels vulnerable to the world’s pain. She wants to be open to nature, searching for "trails of beauty," but finds instead "bloodied/eyes of a dead crow, chunks of hillside/ jumbled leafless at the base of a caved-in hill." And she finds human ugliness and violence. The poem’s ‘walking’ comes upon her anger for acts of destruction:
neighbor boys… found out her family was away
and climbed into the barn through a window
with their father’s gun, shot pigeons in the lofts
until dark came, left piles of shattered glass
and bloody feathers…
"Why," the poem asks, "can’t she just sing about an ordinary day?" But her exploration leads her again toward torment, and the poem ends:
"…her friend who curled up
in bed after her husband died, refusing
to speak to anyone for weeks. Our woman
wanted to comfort her, but didn’t know how."
The poem is not pessimistic, not saying the world is filled with only misery. Ultimately it’s a poem of acceptance. If she loves this life, she must see it just as it is.
Gray Jacobik has arranged the poems thematically in untitled sections introduced by epigraphic quotes from Ann’s poems. Poem after poem is fine, and with each I wondered if this level of accomplishment could be sustained. It is. In "Contemplation" the poet watches a hornet crawl up her leg.
…Fine hairs
on my knee rise toward her like grass
lifting from beginnings of a breeze
and nerves that line the follicles of skin
cry out their tiny silent warnings.
We have in this volume a collection that creates a rich, complex portrait of the woman. Here is music, myth and politics, history, body and soul, every facet of Ann’s life in the context of her gentle philosophy and her clear presence in the moment. Here, on every page, Ann honors existence.
Ann’s poems sneak up on you like the hornet, their passion couched in musical rhythms, impeccably phrased. Ann was an accomplished composer, and it is often said that this is why her poems are musical. I don’t hear that, but rather I hear her wonderful use of grammar honed into the music that is English at its richest—intricate but not labyrinthine. Simple phrasing belies the powerful interiors of these poems in a way that is reminiscent of Ann herself, a small quiet woman filled with gracefully restrained passion for life.
From among her vivid images, something else emerges: modesty. The lines are never out of focus, never overwritten. They are honest, direct, unpretentious. Ann demonstrates awareness of the complexity and torment of existence, and its joys too, and in her comfort with language she can say "see-through" and "The whole yard spilled-over-yellow."
Ann was, in her husband’s words, "an inexhaustible source of wisdom, passion and creativity. She shared her zest for life freely, and expressed her love through her art." Bob Silsbee observed Ann’s "astounding ability to find meaning and metaphor everywhere in the miraculous world around her." After her untimely death he dedicated himself to putting her works before the public eye. We, readers and lovers of her poetry, are fortunate that he worked tirelessly, going through files and notebooks; we are fortunate that he contacted Gray Jacobik to compile and bring out the work. Jacobik accomplished the job well. Fullest Tide is a book to be treasured. Peggy Miller 5/06
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, November 2005
Radiance
by Barbara Crooker
Word Press, 2005
The poem "All That Is Glorious Around Us" opens this collection, promising to show us radiance, though Crooker’s radiance may be black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s bright glaze. Her radiance may be the shattered rainbow of oil in a parking lot puddle. This book rejoices in life’s ordinary things, but Crooker never forgets the darker moments, and in the dark moments, never forgets the shine. Her mother breathes with difficulty. She writes: we never think about the glories of breath, oxygen cascading down over throats to the lungs, simple as the journey of water over rock.
Crooker is wise. While in "Red" she tells us that at the heart of each cherry there’s a pit, a stone, an architecture of bone, the poem does not end there, does not come to that conclusion. It closes: In the grass, fireflies rise in their sultry dance, little love notes that flicker, that burn.
In poem after poem her lines unfold like stirring, compassionate gifts:
the landscape of our bodies under the quilt
and
the borders of the world constrict
and
a pile of sorrows yes, but joy enough to unbalance the equation
Many of Crooker’s poems float in the surroundings of a classic 1950’s upbringing. Clothes hung on the line, Elvis, home economics, antimacassars and diagramming sentences. If you happen to have grown up then, as I did, these images are heavy with corporeal overtones. But while the poems often begin in the comfort of past familiarities, they are grounded in the concrete and not-so-idyllic present. One poem begins in the Union Free School in upstate New York, a place filled with the joys of accomplishment. But it comes to this: Years and years later, with a child who doesn’t talk,/ hyperlexic, echolalic—what did I know/ of how to build a language brick by brick. (Crooker’s autistic son figures prominently in many pieces, for example, "Autism Poem: The Grid," which was recently broadcast on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. This is an honor Crooker has received several times!)
These are beautiful poems. But far from whitewashing reality for the sake of the poetry’s beauty, Crooker wields her talent with grace, so gently and plainly that the reader may well find herself not infrequently staggered, not only by the poem, but by the living actuality it opens. She evinces a quality of writing that Ted Kooser describes: "The reader peers down through the clear floor of the poem, down through the page upon which words have been printed with type and ink, a page now magically gone transparent, into a fascinating realm revealed by the poem." Exactly! As in the poem "Sunflowers":
when I drive by a wheat field
turning ochre and amber …
something in me rises, makes me look
for a scrap of paper, a pencil nub,
even as the hot wind lifts,
blows the dust we are, carries it away—
Crooker fulfills her promise. Radiance is rich and light-filled and a deeply satisfying book to read. --Peggy Miller 11/05
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, October 2005
Embellishments
by Virginia Chase Sutton
Chatoyant Press, 2003
Virginia Chase Sutton is the author of Embellishments, a book of poems written with steady gaze and breath-taking clarity. Her accomplished poems are characterized by their rich and delicate language, and by a mesmerizing directness.
These secrets, my father says,
will never leave this house.
Sealed under every threshold and sash,
we cradle our safety behind curtains
rosy with ruffles. Mother sleeps
on polished sofa cushions in a wash
of urine, ice cubes invisible
under the coffee table…
Here is the story of the child of an alcoholic mother, the victim of paternal incest. Portraying a doubly tragic existence, her poems are neither pitiable nor lewd. They trace an astounding survival.
No matter what I remember, I know
I’d ride my bicycle to a vacant house,
lingering afternoons in that tranquil Georgian
with impossible angles and square rooms,
a caretaker, I thought, while waiting for something
to happen. I imagined everything.
And yet, inevitably, horror seeps into wisps of dark behind her poems:
Tall lilacs teased the ledge
with compact buds, so thick with fragrance
I couldn’t see the ruin of sharp twigs
While the poet has not shied away from the complex details of dysfunction, it is not as you might imagine, a standard tale of one damaged and living in the ashes of existence. Sutton’s vivid, individual moments jumble with the common objects of life—vacation, mother’s filigree compact, father’s rolled socks, the stuttering fluorescent light in the bathroom, the roses blooming in the side yard. Sutton writes of objects that seem to have the bare honesty of photographs, but the objects have been stained with unspeakable secrets.
It could be any summer evening.
Mesh screens in upstairs windows
bulge with the day’s last heat,
lean toward roses in the side yard.
We read of life’s familiar places and episodes—motorcycle boyfriend, clothes shopping, barbecue, peonies, ballet lessons (those careful dances…all design, glaze,/ random dazzle—the only hope we knew), home permanents. Here are pieces of time inside of which she pushes to build an innocence she never owned.
On the back of a motorcycle, I leaned
into every highway curve. My body melted,
almost slipping face-first to gritty pavement
while holding him in my rapt arms. I argued
against the wind that rolled me toward asphalt,
but the air kissed me down, gluing my belly
to his polished back. You have to learn to bend.
Does she believe as a child that the only reality is her own, and that everyone’s life is like that, or does she believe that hers is the only private hell in a development filled with utopian lives within picket fences that close her out? She believes both. I long to fill this review with every wonderful poem, to show you Sutton’s unflawed skill. But you will have to read Embellishments for yourself. Nor will you escape from this book unchanged. -- Peggy Miller 10/05
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, May 2005
Duties of the Spirit
by Patricia Fargnoli
Tupelo Press, 2005
Patricia Fargnoli’s Duties of the Spirit, Tupelo Press 2005, is her finest collection yet. These poems are written with serene grace—poems that take you deep into their souls, each one expressed through cultivated attentiveness. She gazes quietly at the plain burdens that weigh us down through our years, by what she titles The Undeniable Pressure of Existence. Yet she seeks solace again and again in people and in nature.
Fargnoli knows that
What you have left behind
will forget you
soon enough.
And:
Happiness arrives for one moment
and then flees past the sheep, down the lane,
toward the village where the bells
are always ringing for someone.
Perhaps she speaks for us all,
crazy as we are to believe in hope
at a time like this one. Crazy and necessary.
Fargnoli has found a striking, poetic voice that is above all deeply honest. In Duties of the Spirit she has come to terms with life and she brings us along. The reader feels intimacy, cannot resist being drawn into her heart and her wounds. These are the facts, she tells us, but however difficult, the facts have a comforting patina of age and experience. Duties of the Spirit represents a significant contribution to contemporary literature. -- Peggy Miller 5/05
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, May 2005:
The Pest Maiden
by Penelope Scambly Schott
Turning Point Press
Who knows what happens to the mind after the severing of the prefrontal lobe? Between 1936 and 1954, Schott tells us, 50,000 people were the victims of this mutilation.... Whose fault is the evil/ done by mistake? she asks.
There is a frightening, intense connection between the poet and Jean, whom she never met, who was the victim of lobotomy. One poem asks,
[Mother] When I had my breakdown
When for six months
I wouldn’t look at you
did you think of Jean?
Mental illness was never spoken of in families. Schott didn’t even know of Jean’s existence until her great aunt, Viola Paradise, died. Viola had been Jean’s guardian; Schott found out about Jean when her mother took over the role of visitor. Relying on family records and interviews, letters, the historic record and medical information, Schott explores her close bond with Jean as she reconstructs the tragic life. I am with them all who are whirling and writhing
writing the linked stories, the separate choruses
of lost names,
the pain of Jean who spins and spins
in this thickness of dark music.
This chilling story is superbly organized, building intensity through a barrage of voices and incidents. Schott exposes the world of madness that was hidden behind locked doors, the meager fragments that remained of family ties. The poems are characterized by a deceptive simplicity that gradually reveals deep underlying compassion.
Schott has produced a gripping collage that traces voices and fears and facts, history and heart break to reconstruct a broken and lost life. Read it. ~Peggy Miller 5/05
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, January 2004:
The Book of Ga
by Ann Silsbee
Custom Words 2003
Ann Silsbee died on August 28, 2003 shortly after learning that The Book of Ga would be published. Ann was recognized by many as Ithaca’s preeminent poet. She was a woman actively engaged in writing with the mastery and wisdom of many years of dedication to the creative process. Ga was Ann’s grandmother of whom she remembered very little. She remembered Ga’s silky hands. And she remembered stories—how as a young woman and the mother of two small sons (Wheeler, Ann's father, and Chuck, his younger brother) Ga lost her husband to typhoid fever. She was a strong woman who somehow raised her family well.
This collection of poems blossomed from family myths and was fertilized with snippets of fact found in a box of letters and newspaper clippings and old postcards discovered in a family attic in Urbana, Illinois. The discovery was made in 1986 when Ann and her sisters were cleaning out the attic after their mother died. Ann rebuilt and invented the wondrous life of her grandmother relying on all she knew. It seems to have been a world that existed in her, that waited all her life for the right time to be released.
Out of curiosity and great need, but equally out of admiration, Ann built a full and fascinating life in this collection of poems. Ga came alive for her and time melted in her hands, and we, her readers, profit greatly. Ann writes with vision and with mastery. Here are poems you can climb into bodily. In fact, it was very much through her body and her physical connection with nature that Ann found poetry. Often she would walk out into the woods on the hill across the road from her house, walking among the trees, listening to the birds and wind and burble of waters until a poem rose up. Antiphons in the voice of the river punctuate the collection.
Seek me upstream in mountain creeks
north to swamps and spring-spongy dips
in any farmer’s field downstream
to where two waters meet in Marietta…
and later:
When cold thickens
look for me
Wherever you are I am
The seep of water
under mountains under ice
…I ooze downhill
When you are thirsty
cup your hands.
How generous nature is! One is struck by the depth and strength of the river’s voice—knowing at the same time that this is the strength of Ann Silsbee; this is her wisdom. Here too is a hint of how deeply Ann’s musical background is instilled in her poetry.
While the voice of the river returns, like a Greek chorus, to ground us with each antiphon, the importance of the river to the life of Ga is found over and over in poems titled "The First Fish" "The Boy’s Flood" "What the River Brings" and "The River Won’t Leave Us Alone." There are so many beautiful and deeply emotional poems here that I cannot say any single one is my favorite. But it is "Ask The River" that I return to because I hear Ann’s own voice most clearly here, her anguish and truths, her gratitude for this life, her intimacy with nature.
River
read me your lessons, how you flood, ebb, shift
shoals, carve the lie of your bed, keep on being
yourself, no matter how the season changes. Speak
in dreams, tell me how to ease through chutes,
slip over sunken ships, and when it’s time to push.
Here is the poem that unites life with the river, Ga with nature, while doing the same thing for the writer herself. Here we see the poet as she discovers and strengthens what she believes most deeply. No mistake that Ann used the wording when it is time to push and its parallel with a woman’s waters, a woman’s labor to bring life into the world.
As she traced the life of the grandmother she admired and knew in her bones, Ann unfolded herself, her own values, principles and inspirations, the parts of being that she found most dear. This is a book of blackberries, pickerel weed and tunnels, rivers and rain and praise. It is a book of living capably and close to the fiber of nature. Ann instilled into this rich collection of poems truths that few of us can articulate, but which we all need. The Book of Ga begins with the poem "What do you mean Praise," which first appeared in the Comstock Review. The hard truth of death will come, but of life, she said this:
It’s enough for now/ that our son’s on the phone, telling us today’s
griefs, yesterday’s joys. What matters is to tug
lightly on the thin line of his voice, stretch it
over the hills and woods—what pulls between us
will not break.
Though Ann’s life ended unexpectedly, her poems were never unaware of death, and solace came through the understanding that Life goes on after any death.
With what seems uncanny prescience of her looming death, the voice of the river speaks, the book’s final antiphon:
I’m tired
Flatlands slow me down I widen
spread my calm among the dunes
People pack me underground
dike my flow Every molecule of oil
I have to swallow Shells thin
Frogs mayflies fish
gone No heron nests here now
Where there are tides
I am no longer river
Everything I’ve eaten on the way
I am Everything I am
I give to the sea
Ann’s poems reflect her life—one filled with light and generosity and wisdom. She led a quiet, humble vegetarian life in her lovely country home in Ithaca NY. She was close to her two sisters, the poet Margaret Weaver and the artist Miriam Baker, to her three sons and their families, and she was the dear companion to her husband, the physicist Bob Silsbee. Ann served as one of The Comstock Review’s editors, and we feel the immensity of her loss. -- Peggy Miller, 1/04
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor. June 2003:
Big Back Yard
Poems by Michael Teig
Foreword by Stephen Dobyns
Winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
BOA Editions, Ltd, 260 East Avenue, Rochester NY 14604, publ. 2003
Michael Teig’s poetry is a masterful blending of innocence and complexity such as I have never seen. Do not expect Big Back Yard to be easy reading—but count on satisfaction. Sometimes his poems cling to meaning with the barest thread. They mosey. They veer and skid on the page threatening to fly away—and a few do indeed escape. (I wish them a glorious journey!)
Teig can let a drop of sweetness show, as in "Since We’ve Hardly Met /All This Waving is a Poor Goodbye." An entire love affair is born (or imagined) and ends in six couplets. I promise, he says, if we don’t need food,/ we don’t have to get dressed all day. The poet honors human nature. In "Report to the Bishop," his message is rich for its subtlety. To say goodbye I’ve counted/ at least thirty ways and more for hello./ A chicken or a simple wooden chair will do. In "Quilt of Clouds," perhaps feeling at a loss, or lonely, or guilty for not being a man of the woods, he says, I’d like to start again. And so he does: It is a fine northern evening./ I am a fine northern man.
Every poem is a surprise, and a new world in itself. Some of his poems end at the end, and some end somewhere else, somewhere powerful. "Milkweed" dares to define beauty in an age when beauty in poetry has often turned crass; this poem ends: a neighbor I barely know/stuffing leaves into the leg/of his scarecrow’s trousers. The detail, disguised as mundane, is not. It has been carefully, subtly elevated. Teig is telling me how to love the simplicities of my life, that I should take note of the beauty of ordinariness. The key is how he coveys his uncluttered messages: in a sometimes fractured (thus human) way.
In his foreword Stephen Dobyns says, " So many things have already been said so many ways." The challenge for today’s poets is thus extraordinarily difficult. Teig triumphs in new ways, in a recognizable every-day world. In "Further Notes on Orientation" he writes:
I have an inexpensive mind.
No planny-ness. No baubles.
No oil change or directionals.
Beneath my coat embassies
of incomprehensible advice.
I say try not to live without Teig’s advice. -- Peggy Miller, 6/03
Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, June 2003:
Orioling
by Ann Silsbee
Red Hen Press 2003
When I moved to Ithaca 6 years ago, Ann Silsbee was one of the first poets I met. She invited me to join an informal poets group she was putting together. Ever since, I have witnessed the birth of countless of Ann’s poems. She has long been recognized as a fine poet. While studying composition in the graduate music program at Cornell University, Archie Ammons invited Ann to work on her poetry with him.
Ann’s poems are generous. They reveal a deep comprehension of humanity, a wisdom we hunger for. She begins "Bonsai" this way:
A woman’s learned to hunker down with drought.
You could write so much about the implications of such a line. The uniting of nature and human nature. The juxtaposition of comfort and suffering. Ann’s facility with language is seamless—effortless. Perhaps because she comes from a musical background, there is music in her poetry. In the middle of "Listening for River in Urbana" she writes:
a half remembered poem with a rolling
mother rhythm lurches unsaid through the restless
arteries of night,
That is gorgeous, but the writing goes on, ratcheting up the pole of intensity. Read it again with a little of what comes after:
a half remembered poem with a rolling
mother rhythm lurches unsaid through the restless
arteries of night, humping pillows,
rooting under hip bones, ribs,
spine, working in toward the mute
throat.
This is gripping poetry—rhythmic and vivid. Baron Wormser says of Ann’s poems that they "seem in their fullness to have existed forever." These poems will be found in her first full length collection, called Orioling. The collection has won the Ben Saltman Award for Poetry from Red Hen Press, and will be available some time in July.
-- Peggy Miller, 6/03
Reviewed by Peggy Sperber Flanders, Managing Editor. June 2003:
Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace
by Sylvia Forges-Ryan and Edward Ryan
Publisher: Kodansha International,
575 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Copyright 2002 ISBN 4-7700-2885-7
For those of us who find haiku the distillation of the spirit of poetry and for those of us who find meditation a form of inner poetry, Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace is a treat. Haikus by Sylvia Forges-Ryan are paired with meditations and questions by Edward Ryan. Even the preface and introductory notes are not to be missed.
Sylvia, former editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America, has won numerous prizes, including the most prestigious haiku poetry awards. Edward, an Associate Clinical Professor of Clinical Psychology at Yale, has studied, practiced and taught psychotherapy for over 30 years and has served on the Board of Directors of the Insight Meditation Society.
Take a Deep Breath…is broken down into 4 sections based on the seasons of the year, beginning in summer. The reader is led forward and backward, encouraging exploration of paradox and sufficiency – sometimes at the same time -- through the natural progressions of life. Sylvia’s lyrical haiku are not strictly formal, so syllable counting does not get in the way of the reader’s search for spirituality. Instead, her words convey the essentials of description, much as we experience in the translations of haiku masters.
One can focus on the image of an instant captured in time in the haikus or choose to visit the deep currents of life brought to consciousness in the meditations. The format of the book encourages both. Haikus are tastefully framed on the left; meditative statements and questions on the right
Reflections on suffering, growth, connection, death and rebirth are artfully explored in, at times, deceptively simple language. This is a book to be slowly revisited as the year spins its cycles, as the reader’s life changes The authors have provided us with words and images we can use as tools to find tranquility in everyday life. Small artistic graphics enliven the book and the hardcover version includes a ribbon to bookmark your progress through the year.
-- P.S. Flanders, 6/03
Reviewed by Ellen McNeal, Associate Editor, January 2003:
Dumb Luck
poems by Sam Hamill,
ISBN 1-929918-25-9
BOA Editions, Rochester, NY, published 2002
In his latest volume of poetry, Sam Hamill takes the reader across continents, across eloquence and simplicity. Masterfully, Hamill shares what he sees, his practice of Zen, his understanding of what's there, what's here, a moment either way.
From "Dumb Luck," the poem itself, to "The Orchid Flower," spilling resolve and tenderness along the page, he conveys to his reader lines that want a second chance, that provoke a "yes, this is the way it is."
Hamill uses haiku like a cutler uses his own tool, each glimpse sharp, honed to shine, to reflect a truth, a simple fragment. "Fifteen Stitches" is especially exquisite in sweet sharpness. Read "Awakening," "Winter Solstice," "Assay." Think of another poet, another plum.
It is often with humor that this poet approaches the page, amused at himself and with his fortunes, with his own "Dumb Luck." Wonderful, sometimes witty, always wise, these poems stay, ask to be remembered, to be applied. It is much more than dumb luck to find them.
-- Ellen McNeal, 1/03
Reviewed by Michael L.C. Morgan, Senior Editor,
First review on Comstock Review web site
Sonnets By Degree by Robert K. Engler
What do we know about the sonnet form? We know that we are dealing with a fourteen-line poem of set rhyme scheme and movement. In the English language, the sonnet is written in heroic verse, i.e., iambic pentameter.The earliest sonnet was the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, so called after Petrarch, its earliest major practitioner. English writers were never really satisfied with the Italian form. The Italians developed an octave which stated a proposition followed by a sestet that contains the resolution.The classic Italian scheme would read a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a in the octave and c-d-e,c-d-e, or c-d-c,d-c-d in the sestet. The Italian sonnet made its advent into England in the early 16th century. The English sonnet has become known as the Shakespearian sonnet, so called because Shakespeare was the greatest writer to use the form. Rhymed a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d,e-f-e-f,g-g, it usually retains the Italian ate break between octave and sestet, with the force of the final couplet being so strong that it can influence the whole character of the poem. It is possible for the break between the 12th and 13th lines to become the main thought division of the poem.
Having said all of this, by way of introduction, let me introduce you to Robert Klein Engler’s Sonnets By Degree. Some knowledge of the sonnet form is helpful to the successful appreciation of this unique volume.
The book’s 36 poems are divided into 2 sections of 15 sonnets each and a middle third section of “other rhymed” poetry consisting of 6 poems. It’s a well-planned format.
Part I is aptly titled “Diverse Sonnets.” It begins with a wistfully poignant “Day To Night,” a love sonnet recounting an other than conventional physical experience. It’s a competent opener. Highlights include “Bistro Sonnet” with its lilting touch of melancholy, “Angels And A Man Converse,” with its taut, crisp finishing couplet and “A Dream,” which ends on an absolutely stunning couplet.
Because, even today, the sonnet is more closely drawn to emotional expression, “On Hearing Solzhenitsyn’s Speech,” a political / religious editorial, doesn’t strike me as entirely successful. It’s out of step with other poems in the section, especially when placed on the opposite page from “Two To The Tenth,” an excellent love sonnet using basic mathematical terms in its construction. Of special note is the first section’s last poem, “What Follows On The February Air.” Its classical reference to Dante and Beatrice and the weaving of the image in another of the author’s sensitive love portraits is memorable.
Part III, “Sonnets By Degree,” the section from which the book takes its title, has to be read to be believed. The 15 sonnets in this collection are the best of the form that I’ve seen in over a decade. Put quite simply, it’s a tour de force! It deals with homosexual love, which has no bearing on the quality of the poetry. In fact, the writing is so strong and the construction of the poems’ sequence so well done that the sexual orientation theme is quite incidental.
The first two sonnets lay out the problem--unrequited love. The third sonnet is a philosophical reflection; the fourth sonnet, a lament. The fifth sonnet is a highlight of the sequence; the sixth holds the key line of the whole collection, “But what of those who love beyond the rules?”
Again, there is deep reflection in the seventh sonnet: even contemplation of death is no distraction from this love that might have been. The eighth sonnet suggested to me that if the author couldn’t achieve the objective in reality, at least there was solace in fantasy. The ninth sonnet explores a spiritual dimension, and the tenth sonnet still expresses the hope that this lost love cannot be forgotten. The eleventh sonnet is almost an elegy on consolation, while the twelfth is a reflection on Divine justice. The thirteenth sonnet is a skillful variation on “judge not lest ye be judged,” and the fourteenth sonnet is a hymn of resignation: all right, it didn’t work out, this time, but it’s not the end of the world. The final sonnet is an unusual and literal composition of the other fourteen sonnets. I don’t want to say more than that or I would betray the author’s point. Let me just say that the fifteenth sonnet is a brilliant summation. It is an elegant apologia that leaves one exhausted for the mental and emotional journey just completed. Overall, this book is a stunning achievement by Mr. Angler. His reputation as a poet of the first rank is forever assured. The book is a “must” read for students of the sonnet form and a “should be read” for the rest of us.
The volume is perfect-bound. The typeface is large and easy on the eye. The poetry fills the page quite nicely, considering more of the poems are only fourteen lines in length, Sonnets By Degree is from Alphabeta Press, 1086. It is printed by Morkunas Printing Co., 3001 W. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60629. No price is suggested; but then, how do you price the priceless?
by Michael L.C. Morgan, first review on site
|
