Arranging The Blaze

Arranging The Blaze
by Chad Sweeney
Anhinga Press, 2009

Reviewed by Edythe Haendel Schwartz

Chad Sweeney’s recent collection, Arranging the Blaze, offers a harrowing yet hopeful view of life in the 21st century. With keen perception, seamless shifts in tone, musicality, and figures at once precise and expansive, Sweeney probes the individual’s attempt to structure and sustain a sane and grounded life in a world rife with injustice and hypocrisy. And whether Sweeny addresses history, tradition, work, faith, identity, or concerns about the future of the planet, he does so while exploring the power of language to tell and to heal.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the short lyric “White” which serves as a map for poems to follow. Consider: “The foam of the sea is white // gypsum scowling the hillside, / the sun-bleached bones of crows.” Here we see land ravaged by mining, loss of habitat and life– not a pretty picture, yet the speaker quickly alerts us to the issue’s complexity: “White is neither yes nor no.” Perhaps the speaker intends to calm us, but only briefly, as he soon commands: “Look at the rim of your thumbnail,” suggesting we have had a hand in what has happened to our planet. Finally, “White is not kind. / Look at the cotton opening its seed.” The image recalls the numbing work of slaves, the stubbornness of racism, but also opens the possibility for growth and change.
Many poems in the collection bridge the personal and the universal. The long poem, “Genealogy,” offers not only a fine example, but also a clear sense of Sweeney’s breadth and technique. In the first two tercets, Sweeney grounds us in his experience:

Along the streets
the candelabra
in amber points of sun

reflected,
Car glass, arc-of-roof, antenna.
It is in me.

In line three, the echo of “ America The Beautiful,” foretells the poem’s direction. We soon learn of incidents troubling to the speaker’s family, incidents that impact the speaker still. The incantatory refrain, “It is in me,” works to sweep us into the speaker’s observations. Here, they reflect on faith:
Mother before she was my mother,
Sherryl hung
By her knees from the redbud tree

allowing the white Sunday
dress to flow over her head,
allowing

her hair scented with lye and faith
to comb patterns in the dust,
recording the day upside down.

Upside down, Sherryl sees “the smart white house of Mary’s father, who emerged in his Sabbath “black to cast / a look of such contempt // and hurry his daughters into the car.” She feels shame that stings into adulthood, and the speaker again intones “It is in me.”
In the stanzas that follow, the speaker shifts locale, first to the natural world, where he observes “Color roots spoke to turtle eggs // and asks, “Is it jade? Is it flint? / Did waves grind it / in a mill? It is in me,” then back to family, his grandfather’s death in a tractor accident, his father leaping “down from that tractor / to bury his own // boyhood, eleven years old and Irish, / fatherless, godless, barefooted boy[…,]” and finally to the role of art and language in human history. Celebrating his heritage as a maker, Sweeney recalls “the first hand to blend / pollen and clay against the cave wall, / mother //of Lilith, Harjo and Levertov, / mother of jasmine clutching at cliff ledge. “
Other poems that explore the evolution of humans as makers are “The Welders,” and “The Arc of Intention.” “The Welders” places the reader in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, where the speaker watches welders build a carousel. In tercets built with short lines and startling images, Sweeney creates the sense of physical strain, allows us to taste the grit – the welders, “angular on one knee, atop a ladder, amidst flame and their own private cloud // of dust or smoke.” By placing the enjambment after “cloud,” Sweeney alters the pattern of intonation and stress, thus stretching meaning. The poem’s speaker sees the welders as “magicians” who use their skills to forge connections. The speaker reminds us such connections have sustained us “wherever theory / or bone // needed binding.” Examples follow: “iron / among malachite, / Irish among their dead.” Iron must be extracted from malachite to be useful. People must be rooted in culture to survive and thrive. But there are costs.

scars beneath the breasts
where the coal train crosses.

As in “White,” we observe the scars to land and people. End-stopping the line with “crosses,” intensifies the word and raises the specter of burial, a subtle reminder to care for our land even as we use it, and to care for the people who work it. The speaker continues:
Civilization
depends on this,
this math
at the wrist, at the mouth.

Yes. Civilization depends on problem solving to build connections, be they “math” at the wrist as in welding, or “math” at the mouth, as in language. The cadence of this striking metaphor returns the reader to the welders, “laughing now”/ […] holding the cold beer // against the vein in their neck.” The carousel is built and running. The poem is finished.
In “The Arc of Intention,” the speaker shares insights gleaned from leading a San Francisco poetry workshop for youth from Central America, many of whom have likely known the trauma of war. In a series of melodic couplets built of clipped lines, some with only one word, we join the students in acts of naming, in the joy and challenge of articulating the world in a new tongue. The students write, “fixing the light of their gaze // inward / where the pencil is a scorpion, // a storm, / a glove. ” Again Sweeney contemplates the insubstantiality of language, the way a word has no reality beyond itself, yet insubstantial as it is, the word enables us to name our world. As the poem moves forward, we find the students at the windows observing freighters in the bay, gulls–
[… ] to name
this world with the awkward
words, the borrowed words,

yet they are naming,
and through the windows the city

rises to meet them
fire escape, goldfinch […]

The speaker tells us “they try on the new // syllables like oversized robes, /
some soldier’s lost boot,” as they let go of an old life and prepare themselves to negotiate what lies ahead.
In this way the words are tamed,
even loved, […]

Everywhere in “The Arc of Intention,” we find the joy of language– in the experience shared, and in the poet’s skill to tune and love the word.
“Dolores Park,” a San Francisco landmark, is the setting for one of this collections most complex poems. With diverse poetic strategies -- Whitmanesque anaphora set against one word lines, neologisms, oblique reference to writing, and playful spacing-- Sweeney propels the poem toward hymn. In so doing, he gives voice to the microcosm of the world that is San Francisco:
“Dolores street leaps from its map a living thing
crossed, relined, alert or livid eye,
Leading Tierra del Fuego to New York, barefoot and tired,
Old Man Road–

The poem’s speaker observes people on the grass, the grass itself:

In grass grown soft but not to itself soft
soft only to the woman supine in office clothes mutejoydown
and soft to the lovers lying close and naked despite their clothes
and soft to the carpenter who rests carbuncular in dreamsmile beside
his hammer
and soft to the shadow of clouds without syntax clean and empty of
water[…]

As the speaker moves us through the poem, we find each space reflects on the human

crisis below the image. So too does each word define experience for the people who inhabit “Dolores Park.” The poem continues with the speaker repeating small words as if awestruck:
The palm trees toe their hill
and now and now: and: and: now is: and: and memory tree
and material tree: each of a weight:
and the church tower says forever above the butterflies
and the street erupts from ideal and real equally
and cars grind up the hill against the chains[…]

Under the grinding of the cable cars, the poet-speaker reflects on his world, on the

made thing, and his own place in the cosmos. The final stanza brings us to the close of day:

After work, the hour of dogs:
a beagle hunts the tennis ball with original glee,
all else dim beyond that wet star:
life as composition in drafts, approximations […]

While “Dolores Park,” celebrates the word and the world, the poem closes with a stark image of the risk faced by our planet and its inhabitants. The speaker rests on the grass, observes the city, “in weightless ideal / in line and dome / like history to the safe, / soft as thistledown, / the bombs falling quietly into a summer dusk.” This poem is at once leisurely and urgent, joyous and disquieting, as is this fine collection.
What ultimately makes this book a must read is Sweeney’s ability to make us care about the private and public challenges of our time. And with exacting craftsmanship, Sweeney gives us pleasure as he speaks to our concerns. Both technically and imaginatively, there is nothing cautious about “Arranging The Blaze.” In taking risks to achieve a fusion of form, tone, and meaning, Chad Sweeney gives us a finely wrought analogue for the natural and human world of the 21st century.

*
Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) -- as well as the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the journal of poetry and translation, Parthenon West Review. Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, Barrow Street, Runes, Verse, Volt, Passages North, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, the poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

Star in the Eye

James Shea
Fence Modern Poet Series 2008--Winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series
Fence Books(Distributed by University Press of New England)
80 pp.
$15.00 Paper, 978-1-934200-14-8

Reviewed by Zach Savich

James Shea’s first book of poems, Star in the Eye, has lots of lines that cross the wires of proverb and punchline. Sometimes, such lines come without context, like the bumper stickers of an odd sect: “Easy to cross the river if you are part river,” says one section of “Dream Trial.” Another: “I am the opposite of a solipsist.”

More often, such announcements accrete, forming coherent scenes from declarative statements that have discrete integrity. The leaps between such statements can be excitingly large—“That’s the remarkable thing about me. / I am not a hawk that can swim” (“Runaway Model”)—but Shea’s voice stays steady, moving through propositions with clipped glibness.

Despite its cleverness, this voice is less cheeky than thorough-going and frank, suited for the poems’ strange and necessary labors. “You are the performance artist / who charges people to leave,” begins “Around the Wind.” In fourteen lines, this poem has the speaker landing a plane on that you’s street, a distance it’d be hard to traverse without Shea’s gift for bursting across surfaces.

Many poems in the collection have similar catapulting starts, jolting forward from an initial scenario or problem: “I just realized my recent error: no space/time” (“The Yellowstone Revolution”); “I dropped my soulish thingy in the parking lot” (“Runaway Model”); “You are not free to enjoy the nostalgia” (“Panopolies”).

Frequently, the sequential statements that follow are stitched together with startling and restrained pathos. “I live once supposedly,” concludes “Mechanical Foliage,” one of many poignant sentiments Shea delivers with the flatness of transcribed song lyrics. In the book’s opening poem, this approach makes cartoonish elements feel harrowing:

They gave me surgery on my mouth.
My eyes were packed with feathers,
and my whole face was painted flat.
An expert told me I was probably a joke.

(“Turning and Running”)

Elsewhere, Shea’s pieces show off their seams more, serving less as translations of pseudo-linear monologues than as compilations of linked utterance. “Storms,” for example, seems written by a language student whose only fluency is phrasal, evoking the book’s frequent themes of language study and travel (“The yukata is beautiful. / These are eggs. Those are eggs. / Who is that girl? This is / my bike.”). In “Haiku,” Shea makes a self-portrait out of potential haiku titles.

Upon Kissing You After You Vomited.
Upon Walking You Home and You Pissing
in Your Pants. Upon Asking a Complete Stranger
about Our Situation. Upon Reading Issa’s
Prescripts “Issa in a State of Illness,”
“At Being Bewildered on Waking” and Realizing
the Haiku Poets Were Not So Laconic and How
Could They Be?

Such conceits are fun, though I’m most impressed by the poems that use accumulating compression to stab with mischievous, imagistic clarity, not just create continuity or collage. The forty-five short poems in “The Riverbed” do this with dazzling range and scope; I wish they were printed on coins.

Italian Riverbed

Gathered along the riverbed,
She walked among us
Like a cameraman
At a wedding.

Riverbed on a Leash

The leash moves
Around the sitting dog.

Origami Riverbed

A child made a riverbed
Out of paper.
Then he laid it
On the river.

Baby Blue

After the movie
About riverbeds,
You said, I wonder
What it would be like
To be married.
I said, Yes!

The humor in Shea’s collection makes you cock your head, not guffaw. Continually starting and stopping, the morsels of this long poem—I’m tempted to quote many more—have a measured pace, highlighting how clipped statements, for Shea, are less quirky sloganeering than expressions of his willingness to be dumbstruck. In mixing reticence and exuberance, his tone is pleasantly odd, but not at odds with tenderness and awe; it conveys an amped-up sense of earnestly “defending everything from everything else” (“Idea of a Mutiny”).

Without such earnestness, it’d be easy for a poet with Shea’s ear and wit to be a sort of solipsist, entertaining us with an off-kilter interior view, but, being the opposite of a solipsist, Shea uses these techniques to express old fashioned emotions in original ways. In “Poem,” for example, we see self-consciousness blossom into self-awareness as Shea considers “how the world protrudes out at one:”

I was sad I was not the young boy
who passed me each day the way

water carries a ship, but I was happy
I saw him and this contradiction

saddened me, but I was pleased with myself
for having noticed it.

The self, in Shea’s poems, is composed as it speaks (“Whoa, I said, you hear everything you say,” concludes “University of Air”). Such composition requires slapdash improvisation but also has high stakes for its language—I love Shea’s subtle mulling of phrasing, such as in a section of “Dream Trial” that says, in its entirety “No, no, it’s alright. // Hey, no—it’s alright,” reminding me of Frost’s experiments with sentence tones. The difference between those two statements is enormous. Attentive to how tones grind against each other, Shea helps us hear it, and stop, but not be stopped by it; his is a minimalism unafraid of wordiness, that doesn’t collapse on itself but folds into an origami boat that floats on to further observations and memorable lines. For many poets, such lines occur only at the beginnings and ends of poems; you wander between them waiting for the rhetorical microwave to ding and say you’re done. Shea constructs an entire book out of them.

*

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, James Shea teaches at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University. His poems have appeared in journals such as jubilat, The Canary, American Letters and Commentary, and Columbia Poetry Review.

*

Zach Savich’s first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has recently written reviews for Boston Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Kenyon Review Online.

Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, & Ruth O’Toole, eds.

Ragged Sky Press, Princenton, N.J.

145 pages, paperback

Reviewed by Jane Dobija

Clothes are the poems that we wear. The billowing skirts, sculpted suits, and scruffy t-shirts in which we parade around tell even the slightly attentive observer about our histories, our hang-ups, and our lies. The subject of costume’s power, universal and unchecked, struck the mother lode with Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, and nearly one hundred more accomplished poets, who contributed to a new anthology from Raggedy Sky Press called Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. In their allotted pages, these writers explore the meaning of dress as symbol, history, and personal fate. They do so with a wit and wisdom that makes usually bitter truth telling palatable.

Only the dullards among us read costume literally, as Janis Butler Holm proves in a delightfully humorous piece called “If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry” that reads like this:

Cute.

Shoes.

Me.

Cute shoes.

The rest of us are all disturbed by the dissonance between what clothes promise and what they deliver. “Living in Bodies” by Claire Zoghb reminds us that the hospital gown, with its “… single knot/at the nape” … “was sewn/to survive only so many/washings, so much bleach.” Diane Elayne Dees, for her part, reads the message young girls might not see in designs borrowed from the military. “In my dark visions,” she worries, “pre-teens slog through the desert/in Little Mermaid combat boots,/ … they load theirM-16s.”

Some accessories and undergarments are examined here as pure symbols. The “thin black ribbon/of customary bombazine” is a “badge of ruin” for the husband and wife who sit shiva for their child in Daniel A. Harris’ “Attire.” The double entendre of Mary Langer Thompson’s “My First Pink Slip” suggests that being female might not be unrelated to being laid off.

Other pieces of clothing are symbolic on an historical scale. The “White Cotton T-Shirt” in Margaret Atwood’s poem exposes the disconnect between the costume of The Sixties flower children and its source. “It made its way to us from the war, but we didn’t know that,” she apologizes before admitting how this “vestment of summer” actually “had been washed in blood.” Maria Terrone’s “Unmentionable” recalls tragedy, too. “A frayed label says/Triangle Shirtwaist Company,” the speaker of this poem notices about the antique lingerie that lies in her drawer. It calls forth images of “smoke, locked doors and fiery dives,” as well as a final question: “Did she hang by a thread for days/to die, or survive...?”

A number of poets in this anthology find whole chapters of their lives woven into the clothes that have been left behind. James Richardson’s “Family of Ties” always are “…Listening at the backs of doors, frozen/against the walls of closets.” The silky strands might be remembered as disguises that have been cast off, but then, one is slipped beneath a collar “…and we are dismayed,” notes the narrator, “to find that that they fit. Just when we thought/we had changed….”

In “How It Is,” Maxine Kumin portrays a woman in mourning who uses a piece of clothing to renew contact with a deceased life partner. She dons his jacket, searches the pockets, discovers a hole, a ticket stub. “My skin presses your old outline,” she tells the absent loved one. “It is hot and dry inside.” The notion that she might have saved him occupies one stanza, but finally there is unwilling acceptance of the loss. “I will be years gathering up our words,” she admits from inside “the dumb blue blazer of your death.”

For Maxine Susman’s empty nester, clothes represent both a loss and a rite of passage as she watches her son “Packing for College.” Her ambivalence would ring true with any mother:

Part of me says I’ll do your clothes

Forever if you’ll stay with us. Part says

Here’s your own jug of detergent….

It pains this woman to see that, “What seemed a closetful of everything/squeezes into one bulging duffel.” Susman leaves her in the semi-emptied bedroom to contemplate the loosening of her maternal attachment, “… the come and go between us.”

Dresses of all colors – little black, red, white wedding – frequent this volume’s poems about women. The writers are leery of the power of frocks and gowns to which their female narrators frequently submit. In “The Blue Dress,” Deirdre Brennan considers Henri Matisse’s intention toward a female subject, whom he paints in “voluminous sleeves/and rhapsody of frills….” The writer concludes,

He had to hate her to paint her

Out of existence,

To cancel her out, imprison her

Within great folds of cloth.

Lynn Wagner casts “The Little Black Dress” as a suspicious bitch that takes over one woman’s life. Anthropomorphized, this iconic piece of clothing “goes to cocktail parties” where it “titters and flirts” until “Anyman takes her home/ … in his red sports car.” The next morning, the costume is cast off, and its wearer finds herself calmed by the night out. The little black dress might have been in charge of the evening, but the narrator did not object. The poem leaves her with “voices quiet,” suggesting that, while wearing the sheath, she could act out her fantasies.

The wedding gown is seen as the most insidious of all the clothing culprits. For Lynn Emanuel, “The White Dress” is a “shroud/on a hanger” and “an eczema/of sequins.” Like the little black number, the white one has a plan of its own. It waits, “lonely, locked up/in the closet” to take possession of the “bouquet of a woman’s body.”

In the title poem, “Eating Her Wedding Dress,” Eileen Malone examines this ritual garb through the eyes of a spinster at her baby sister’s nuptial feast. The ceremony is over, and the young woman’s gown rests on a chair where “delicious damp fingerprints” sprout mushrooms on its velvet. The spinster sister devours it:

I release my tongue, lick salt

…

sliding all denial and neglect

like colorless afterbirth

down my slippery throat"

The older woman is conscious of seeming the “old hag” but decides, “—no matter, I no longer fear/I might be what I seem.”

A collection of poems about clothes would not be complete without a tribute to their opposite, nakedness. Billy Collins provides one called “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” in which he meticulously records the disrobement of the author unlucky enough to be bound by 19^th Century fashion. “…I proceeded like a polar explorer/” his narrator reports, “through clips, clasps, and moorings/ … Sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.” The journey leads, naturally, to both sex and danger embodied in the sigh Emily heaves when her last hook is loosened. To make sure we understand the risk the poetess has taken by discarding the feminine uniform of her times, Collins immediately shifts her wonder back to his readers, reminding them that he also has heard them sigh …

… when they realize

that Hope has feathers

…

that life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

But if one can get past the threat, the loss, the personal shame that clothing carries, one might, as Anca Vlasopolos suggests in “Loosed Garments,” find solace in one’s wardrobe. Annoyed by “zippers become perverse/and buttons … out of reach of loop,” her narrator, definitely a mature woman, probes the depths of her closet to find something she might wear. During the search, she discovers things cast off, “an old silk shirt/…shining/like polished silver” and “an outfit you’d forgotten/…sending sparks.” She tries these items on and finds they fit “like skin,” so “your girth now seems/positively svelte.” Comfortable with a somewhat fuller figure that suits her full life, she opts for a flowing outfit and finds that it gives her wings.

The varied takes on clothing in Eating Her Wedding Dress will send many readers scurrying to their own closets to discover what material, for poetry and for life, lies buried there. The truths told in this volume surely will enrich the search.

***

Writer and journalist Jane Dobija is best known for her reports for NPR from Warsaw during the last Polish revolution. She is the editor of Corridors Magazine (www.corridorsmagazine.org) and is at work on a novel about Poland called In Solidarity.

The Bitter Withy

Donald Revell
Alice James Books, 2009
$15.95, paperback

Walking Through the Halo: A Review of Donald Revell's "The Bitter Withy"

by Brett DeFries

For a while now, and especially since his 2003 collection "My Mojave," Donald Revell has rarely strayed from what some might call a myopic devotion in his work to God, Heaven, and redemption. Not only that, but his poems are overt enough in their attention to these subjects, that the real miracle might be reading a Revell poem that does not at least reference in some way God, Jesus, Heaven, Prayer, or Eternity. Indeed, his newest collection, "The Bitter Withy," is no exception.

Beyond that, "The Bitter Withy" has exposed a few of Revell's new favorites: rainbows and hummingbirds, which make numerous appearances in this collection:

Just at dawn the full moon
In its coin of rainbow
Called my name.
(TOOLS, p. 3)

The birds knew, and the rainbow too. I was looking.
(MONTEREY, p. 4)

Walking across the ocean,
Walking on flowers nowhere to be seen,
I walk on gold.
So says the hummingbird.
(CAN'T STAND IT, p. 6)

Sovereign of my heart,
I am shouting at nightfall:
Bats above me,
Hummingbirds skittish below the bats,
Almost like dragonflies.
(AGAINST CREATION, p. 44)

What I find remarkable about Revell's work, then, is its ability to keep strange his world of God, heaven, rainbows, and hummingbirds—a world that, in the hands of any other poet, wouldn't be inhabitable even by Hallmark.

Take, for example, the final stanza of AGAINST CREATION:

Adam's fall invented the future.
He tied the bats' wings onto dragonflies.
Nature, even as it dies, abhors imagination.
What men call Extinction,
I call Home.

Here the reader finds a world in which imagination is not only unnecessary, it is abhorrent—an offense to the already strange world the speaker observes. For Revell, the poet's role has less to do with invention than it does with adequately reporting what is already there.

AGAINST CREATION also illustrates Revell's subtlety—a must in a book of such obsessive thematic recurrence. Removed from their context in the poem, the final two lines might read as a lament regarding death's ever-present shadow. Within the context of this poem and the collection as a whole, however, these lines point to Heaven—or "Home," as the poem puts it. What keeps this closing from becoming saccharin, though, is the presence of such unexpected words as bats, abhors, and Extinction—all in the final four lines.

While all of Revell's recent work deals openly with his Christian faith, "The Bitter Withy" is interested in how such a faith alters how we confront our mortality. The approach of Death and the promise of Heaven hover over each and every one of these poems, but here are a couple of my favorites

FOR LUCIE

That would be bread.
That would be a table.
This would be death, but it moves
Only one way;
And so the bread escapes,
And the table along with it,
Easily—as easily
As water spilling from a cup
All over the ground.

Now that I come to it,
Why agree to it?
Every quarter of the wind is bread.
Every blade of grass is a table.
We are walking beside deer through a halo.


AFTER ROUSSEAU

The mountains are nude
But not cold.

I shiver.
I believe in death
Now that death believes in me.

What I find both moving and fresh about this collection is that it handles its subject matter with a simultaneous severity and lightness. It is quite clear in this collection that poetry, for Revell, if not prayer itself, is certainly composed of the same stuff. That being said, we never perceive even the slightest hint of didacticism, nor does Revell take hiimself too seriously in these poems. This balance keeps the work buoyant despite its deep subject matter. Also working in Revell's favor is the fact that he is as concerned with joy and the blessing of providence as he is with shame and those "dark nights of the soul"—inevitable for any serious Christian. Says Revell:

As with eternal life and the love of God,
What makes actual human happiness
Nearly unbearable is its reality,
Its mass.
(A PAINTING OF CEZANNE'S, p. 36)

If anything can convince us of this, it's "The Bitter Withy."

***

Poet, translator and critic Donald Revell has authored ten previous collections of poetry. Winner of a 2008 NEA Translation Award, the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Revell has also received fellowships from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is Poetry Editor of the Colorado Review.


Brett DeFries’ work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Laurel Review, Memorious, Diagram, Phoebe, and West Branch and elsewhere.

Reading Novalis in Montana

Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny

Published by Milkweed, 2009

96 pp., U.S.$16.00

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

An Intuitive Measure of Nature

In-between re-reading the last few poems and embarking upon this review, adjectives such as “erudite,” “sensitive,” “distilled” and “deft” keep recurring to me as approximate words for rightfully describing Melissa Kwasny’s third and latest collection of poems, Reading Novalis in Montana. The title poem, which opens the book, is a well-envisioned summation of the experiences that Kwasny will evoke throughout the book. Embedding fictional voices with real thoughts and dialogues, the poet inserts brief quotes in a light yet welcoming manner that directly illuminates her intimate correspondence between scholarly interests, an inner world, and the nature that surrounds her in western Montana:

The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.

Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.

Then, the brutal intervention of sound.

All that we experience is a message, he wrote.

I would like to know what it means

If first one bird swims the channel

Across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.

In the end, the modernists must have meant,

It is the human world we are weary of,

our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.

(“Reading Novalis in Montana,” p. 3)

.

A later poem that echoes this is “Reading a Biography of Ezra Pound in the Garden.” Also inspired by the literature she was engaging in at that point in time, Kwasny keeps her eyes fully attentive on delicate details of life, which spring out spontaneously in her immediate world. Nature’s fragility, coupled with tenacity, touched her as she mused philosophically about her seemingly trivial quotidian life:

Wet, limp, as if just born, the five petals unstick

from each other. I have blundered always,

said Ezra Pound. The hot winds of Venice

blow past my bare ankles, a cat sprawls on its side

across the lawn. I don’t know how humanity stands it,

the heat he might mean, too much going on

and much of it boring. He writes: I am homesick

after mine own kind. The zucchini, everyone

knows, is prolific. While my guests come and go,

pilfering my time, it offers one green fruit a day,

and these flowers like lap cloths unfolded.

(“Reading a Biography of Ezra Pound in the Garden,” p. 24)

Interestingly, after concluding the first part of her book on this note, Kwasny delves into a 12-sectioned long poem entitled, “The Waterfall.” This lends a different weight to the general structure of her work and gives a new color to its entire narrative arc. Mythic metaphors and references from the indigenous culture are many and recurrent; they are subtle but evident. On the other hand, line energy also builds itself up until it reaches the eighth segment (“The giveaway dance”) in which speed and intensity syncopate in a drumming and organic oral appeal:

(…)

Here is a jar of wild chokecherry jam

Here is a pouch of Old Red Man Lucky Strike

Here is a dollar bill for each of your fifteen grandchildren

see how they dance with empty hands

Here is the fish tank the rest of the bannock

toilet paper army jacket a Pendleton blanket

Here in the old days grandpa gave away the car and the furniture

and finally he gave away the house

Here in the trailer house on the reservation

Here where the ragged last of the tribe come with ribbons

Here where the medicine man hangs them in the bundle

and sets the bundle swinging with a stick

Now since the black spades of aspen have hit the ground

Now because the drumbeat has not changed and has not stopped

We hold the gifts behind our backs and the snow field darkens

(“From “The Waterfall, VIII: The giveaway dance,” p. 37)

As if to sustain the rhythmic rigor and lyrical density, the poet continues into the third part of the corpus, presenting yet another major work, “The Directions.” Sequenced in a lucid coherence, each of the twelve segments has a straightforward title, which in turn furnishes a direct key to its central landscape or theme: “Creator,” “Soul,” “The Ceremonial,” “The Old Ones,” “Animals,” “Shooting Star,” “The Poles,” “Light,” “Rock,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “Herbs.” In a similar vein, the book ends on a textured tonality, for Kwasny has chosen yet another sequenced poem, this time, a 9-sectioned prose piece: “The Under World.” Darker, it evokes several losses and contains lingering traces of solitude, isolation as well as uncertainty. Questions and doubts hang in mid-air —

Up in the air. A peculiar phrase. What does it mean that nothing’s landed? (…)

Seed by seed, the working up through the soil. But is time really accomplished

without us? The dark bud unclasping? The stirring of air? The sex-cluck of the

robins at the butter dish?

(From “The Under World, VII,” p. 75)

All in all, Reading Novalis in Montana is a positive and delicious read. It represents Melissa Kwasny’s consistency and conscientiousness in creating layered yet intricate lyrical poetry. She dedicates herself to expanding beyond a mere descriptive depiction of episodes and energies to a wider world. Living side by side with nature plays a vital role in molding a quiet, meditative quality in her distinct poetic voice. With this, she thus strikes a balance with robustness by constantly pushing each line breath, experimenting with form and scope.

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Born in Indiana, Melissa Kwasny is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Archival Birds and Thistle, winner of the Idaho Prize. She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, and has authored two novels, Trees Call For What They Need and Modern Daughters of the Outlaw West. She lives in western Montana.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is an editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). Her book of poetry, Water the Moon is forthcoming from Marick Press in Fall 2009. She lives in Paris, France and New York City.

Orpheus on the Red Line

By Theodore Deppe

Tupelo Press, 2009

Dorset, VT

www.tupelopress.org

ISBN: 978-1932195750

paperback, 96 pages

Reviewed by Mike Walker

There seems to be something about working in health care that turns people into writers. A number of poets and journalists come to mind who have been nurses, doctors, or researchers in the biomedical sciences, with William Carlos Williams being probably the best-known of those who were poets. For Williams and other poets perhaps being a physician (in William’s case) or other careers in health care offer both the secure paycheck that poetry lacks plus a wellspring of inspiration via seeing people at the crossroads of life and death, the junctures of disease and health. The healing arts, in turn, have noticed the benefits of the literary arts for professionals and patients alike and a number of hopsital-based arts in medicine programs make extensive use of writing as a form of therapy. Moreover, a number of journals exist that cater to publishing the creative writing of health care professionals and patients.

Theodore Deppe has had a long career as both a poet and a nurse, and his new collection of poems, ”Orpheus on the Red Line” speaks to his experience as both. To any cynic who would imagine the poetry of a nurse to only be filled with tales of suffering, Deppe’s work is a refreshing change of mind as he explores the nuances of human experience in a variety of ways. Like all but the youngest of poets, Deppe deals with age and the passing of time in his work, but often in a novel yet very realistic way:

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Out-of-date almanacs, boxes

we never unpacked from the last move,

reminders to see a dentist who

died five years ago—

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begins his poem, ”On the Natural History of Possessions”, which continues with a variety of historical, literary, and personal references. Yet in that first introduction of unpacked boxes, Deppe has us hooked: the ”dentist who died five years ago” reminds us of the paperchase that connects us in modern society with those insurance agents, doctors and dentists, kid’s teachers, and others who in one way or another play needed roles in our lives. How many notices from the dentist, the veterinarian, the physician have we all found in our mailboxes and how many are packed away or lost for whatever reason? These are communications given to a proper life in a small, finite, span of time but Deppe demonstrates how they take on a further life of their own until finally the silverfish eat away at their paper and they become dusts. Much of Deppe’s writing in ”Orpheus” is along such lines, reminding the reader of the variants of means of communication and connection in our lives. When Deppe writes in the poem above that ”for half a year, I walked around Ireland with a small rucksack” he makes clear the choices involved in living life, the sense of mobility versus the sense of possession.

Unlike the Graveyard Poets and many contemporary poets also, Deppe is not concerned simply with mortality and tangible humanity, but is more concerned with the ways that human experience demonstrates itself in memories, dreams, and communication. He spices his poems with references to communication via song, birds also singing their songs, random distant sounds, letters and conversations. In my mind though, his greatest poem about communication and probably of the whole book is ”Misremembering the Classics” where Deppe details his efforts to calm down a violent adolescent patient in a psychiatric ward. I won’t quote this poem here, for it’s best served to read it in full, and however powerful a quote might seem it would only slight the depth of Deppe’s work in this instance. While it is not surprising that Deppe brings his combative young patient to try writing poetry himself over the course of the day following his outburst, the details of this journey and the honesty found therein are what make the poem powerful. No complete ending nor promise that this patient will make better of himself, but the thread of hope that he in fact may is all Deppe provides. In one poem we are given a rare glimpse into both what it must be to work with the mentally ill and what it must be like to actually be such a pateint. The poem is not all-emcompassing nor pretends towards such, but it carries a gravitas often missing in even the best writing about clinical experiences with patients.

Having worked myself in both lab-based and clinical medical research, I know that we encounter in health care things seldom seen elsewhere in life and many of these experiences can translate to powerful writing, however, too often such writing comes across as trite due to the same emotions and even the same situations being brought up time and again. Deppe has masterfully avoided this when he writes of patients, as in the poem ”Misremembering the Classics” and brings us instead writing so fresh it made me feel, even as someone who has experienced similar things in real life and then tried to write of them, that I was ecountering something truly novel and unique. Never does Deppe write lugubriously or in a way that tries to ground the poem in emotion alone: in his poem ”Sebald” we travel from Poland to China and then back to California all while following the leitmotif of the sparrow, but in this case sparrow not as metaphor but as real bird affected by the whims of human thought and human action. Deppe tells us of a man feeding sparrows and another, Chairman Mao, determined to kill them (Mao mistakenly thought that sparrows were consuming a great deal of grain and thus ruining the crop of wheat for starving Chinese). The tales of humans and their actions, for better or worse, are obviously enough fuel for writing and Deppe allows the human to be human and the sparrow to be sparrow.

In his poem ”Orla”, Deppe addresses head-on his topic of a woman who is in the hospital, without overtones or metaphor. This stark approach tempered with touching details provides a portrait as clear as a good photograph. What is most essential in writing about a patient and their plight? To make them seem human (which they of course are), to make them seem ill (which they are, also)? Or to allow latent details and masterfully-crafted words turn these moments of their lives into real and honest views? I would take the latter, and the latter Deppe provides. Like his previous book of poems, ”Cape Clear”, Deppe works with human emotions in a manner that is both deep and refreshing. His poems, while short in length, read long: The sheer amount of detail and the feeling of true travel comes across as he shares even simple narratives. It is rare to see such a strong ”narrative” approach in poetry that neither aspires to be epic nor bending towards the arena of fiction.

Of books of poetry I’ve read thus far this year (and I’ve read my share) Deppe’s ”Orpheus” is one of the most original and his voice is clearly unique. I suggest it highly to all interested in contemporary American poetry and poets and also to those interested in writing by health care professionals. While the lion’s share of the book is not directly concerned with health care, those poems that thus enter Deppe’s other career are to be valued for their voice and insight. A truly impressive book.

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Ted Deppe was born in Minnesota, and grew up in Indiana. He worked for many years as a coronary-care and psychiatric nurse and has taught creative writing in high schools, universities, and graduate programs in the United States, England, and Ireland. His previous books include Children of the Air and The Wanderer King (Alice James, 1990 and 1996), and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2003). He currently teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland, where he now lives with his wife, poet Annie Deppe.

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Mike Walker is a writer, journalist, and poet. His original research and other academic work has been published in: AirMed, Goldenseal, EcoFlorida, BrightLights Quarterly, the ATA Chronicle, Multilingual Computing and Technology and other journals. His journalism in: The Florida Times-Union, The North Florida News Daily, Satellite Magazine, Twisted Ear, and other publications. His poetry in: Meanie, the Church Wellesley Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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Self-Portrait with Crayon

By Allison Benis White

Cleveland State U Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781880834831

Paperback, 63 pages

Reviewed by Kathryn Stevenson

Above all, Allison Benis White’s collection of poems Self-Portrait with Crayon teaches us the simple, unforgettable maxim: pain is reach.

The collection begins with what is gone: “The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother’s skirts and shoes, where the legs should be” (5). Without a body, clothes outline lack, their shapes marking boundaries between body and disembodiment: “The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress” (5). The image of the mind reduced to a hook does not speak of pain, but we get it.

Here, the thing gestures toward an idea, a non-thing, one cannot otherwise hold. In this sense, the thing—a closet, a dress, a hanger—allows connection, a sudden narrative snap: “People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon” (5). This reach—the move to connect loss to a moment, a kitchen, the smell of a pink-bodied fish—rises from the compulsion to anchor ourselves in the material world, ground ourselves in the sediment of objects, and attach to some small, real thing before we are capable of consolation: “I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address. It is common to know very little, if anything” (5).

A salmon dinner, a birthday card, a wrong address—these are the cold, hard things that punch, punctuating our otherwise amorphous and mass-less despair. Yet they are the details that allow us to articulate and imagine—here, though, sketch—what is otherwise unspeakable and unimaginable. White knows grief calls on us to represent loss in the details, to perceive boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary, to sketch rather than bullet, to reject chronology, to begin in the middle, and, yet to tell anyway, to narrate and discern and forge universals out of abstraction, to find yet another thing that might, finally, point at what to do next or what to avoid or what, simply, to accept: “People exist for as long as possible until it is too difficult to matter” (5).

On its own, the collection’s first poem “From Degas’ Sketchbook” offers the image of how difficult it is for a girl hidden in her mother’s closet to matter to someone gone and, simultaneously, how difficult for a mother “to matter”—both in the sense of being worthy or recognized worthy and in the sense of materializing, coming into being to embody the articles that, to a closeted, crouched child represent lack. Somehow, at once, a mother mothers as long as she can, and a daughter recalls her until it is too painful or too cumbersome even to conjure her in images, to bring back someone gone. Here, grief is a central interior impulse that reaches out, like the motion of a hand drawn to touch something untouchable before it retracts, repelled.

Together, the poems in Self-Portrait with Crayon are a study in mourning and melancholia, a grammatology of sadness—one which outlines the features of despair, the rules of mourning, and the shape of our efforts to live through it.

Despair, White understands, opens eyes to the things before us with an urgency that shackles us to images that might have otherwise been fleeting, like a cruel time machine in which there is no travel, only the unending awareness of time and an acute sense that past, present, and future are tidy, irrelevant categories that mislead, distract, and relieve those not mourning. Like this: “If I press my hand against the window, no one will die sooner or reverse directions” (8). Or this: “Before I was born, my dog buried a plastic frog in the side yard when one of her female puppies died—she needed somewhere” (9). We are not safe from what already came or what has yet to come; any minute we might feel every loss all at once—and not just our own, but through ours, we’ll feel the loss of others as well. And so we must attach loss, freeze it, give it “somewhere.”

From White’s poems, readers can glean recognizable, patterned responses to loss; mourning forces our focus on the particulars, for instance—which is to say that people mourning know what is not nothing: “I want to reach things I can keep” (54). Like wounded dogs, they need objects—to attach, to express themselves, to project meaning onto, to represent—as if to re-imagine or retool or redesign the shape of the interior, driving, unsettled mind.

People mourning outline impressions even as they suffer imprint: “When there is nothing left, everything is possible” (26). Or, perhaps it is that they deal with imprint by outlining impressions, as if to cast imprint off. In “Interior of the Rape,” for instance, White’s cutting characterization of human bonding is so sharply resonant it is, one moment, beautiful: “I will not let you sleep follows the pattern of most affection”; a step later, though, she tugs at the pattern’s brutality instead: “This is the feeling of a leash at the base of your neck” (25).

People mourning grasp for universals among the particulars: “We will live as long as we have someone to tell” (26). The reach for human patterns is the effort to seek solace in the omnipresence of pain, to find dull, pain-diffusing, trauma-abating normalcy in suffering—like this: “It is common to rock the sick in your arms. It is common to rearrange the body into a comfortable position” (23). And this: “It would be unnatural to place the arms at the sides, torso unprotected” (23).

Understanding fear overcomes us, White sometimes offers the patterns as instruction: “when you enter someone else’s room, it is important to whisper her name before you touch her, so she knows you are approaching, and does not become alarmed” and “If someone breaks into your house at night, my father advised, pretend you are dead” (28; 24). Here, advice exposes everyone—those who might break in, those who fear them, those who cannot do more than recommend we play dead. Readers sense White does not endorse an action more than she scorns our resignation to fear—ambivalently, though, while representing the lives of people who live by it.

People mourning consider what will be gone soon: “Whether we miss less what we know will disappear, I am tired of seeing” and “A sponge attached to a hand which is attached to an arm. Which is crucial. Anxiety thrives on the unknown. If her hand took the sponge away, there would be a cool empty spot on the child’s neck” (41). The move to reflect on what is here now but soon might not be is an exercise in taking the part away from the whole so that one might imagine another scenario and thus come to know the unknown—to treat anxiety with anticipation, essentially. Lives marked by a history of hard times know leaning on the cool-headed expectation that the worst is coming makes life better now. Because it means we will be less anxious and more prepared.

In “Horse with Jockey,” someone points “to an X-ray of his chest,” saying, “The human heart is an apple,” and someone else asks, “But what shape or comfort can I make with my mind?” Self-Portrait with Crayon is one.

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Allison Benis White's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is currently at work on a second poetry manuscript, "Small Porcelain Head," which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Literary Award for a work in progress from the San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. See more at www.allisonbeniswhite.com.

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Kathryn K. Stevenson earned her doctorate in English from the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches writing classes. She is obsessed with, and writes academic essays about, "adherence," or the bonds forged between peoples under duress--a theme that appears, magnified, in her fiction, non-fiction, and songs, which can be found at myspace.com/radiochord.