Something Has to Happen Next

                     

 

& Full Catastrophe Living    

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Reviewed by John Findura 

A teaspoonful of the matter that makes up a black hole would weigh more than the visible universe, and may weigh more than the un-visible universe as well. Black holes have little in common with contemporary American poetry, except for the fact that for most people, both are invisible. Some poets, however, have something in common with the phenomena: they are able to take a little bit from here, a little from there, and compress these bits into poems of few words that still carries the weight of something much larger. Andrew Michael Roberts’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning “book of small poems” (as he has called it) Something Has To Happen Next certainly contains poems short on words but big on the necessities of life — humor, liveliness, emotion, and profundity. Though this first effort at times feels ethereal, it quickly gains weight as the pages advance.

The opening poem of the book’s first section, “dear wild abandon,” brings notice of what’s to come:

            you little

            time

 

            bomb.

The white space between “time” and “bomb” acts as a buffer, slowing the countdown to the “bomb” going off:

            if I bite

            and swallow, would you

 

            explode in me?

The sexual allusion may or may not be there, but there is no escaping the fact that yes, there will be an explosion.

Other poems in the collection do not need the fireworks. An example is “the moon,” which in its entirety reads:

            all the other moons

            get their own names.

The obvious information here is reinforced by these two short sentences floating isolated against the white page. Roberts makes good use of the white space to create aesthetically pleasing poems. Not only is each line break perfectly placed, but the pacing is sure. Take for instance the next little poem in the collection “what i know of the moon”:

            i am only half myself.

            the other side’s

            a dark idea

            i like to believe in.

What is most interesting here is Roberts’s notion of the beauty of the dark side of the moon, the “dark idea” he likes “to believe in”. It brings to mind the duality of man, the need of that dark side to keep us whole. Striking too is the fact that the poem preceding it, also about the moon, is only half its size. It’s almost as if this half-moon has doubled its size to four lines and now is not just a reflection of the moon, but has become inward looking and no longer in need of a label in order to exist.

While Roberts is busy distilling the universe, the other 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize winner, Zach Savich, is carving out his poems from solid earth in Full Catastrophe Living. The “toothy stars” of Something Has To Happen Next are replaced by scrapings on exposed strata and the “smell of black walnuts crushed on the road” (“Black Walnut Adoration”). Like that smell, these poems are full and rich with a deep flavor of earthiness.

Savich likes to stretch out in poems like “Don Quixote,” “Fool,” and “Poem for My Wife If We Are Married” but it is in “Serenade " where this lengthening of line is most effective. While it is certainly not surprising to find Degas or Caravaggio turning up in poems, it is refreshing to find:

            My friend the trumpet player emptied his spit valve onto pigeons.

            He watched a woman climb onto her fire escape, nude,

            her husband cursing form the window. I gave up on

            the biography. I left the rave. Ann held her head.

Ann holding her head reflects nicely on the beginning of the poem, where indeed

            In the painting by Degas, the dancer is not

            on a cell phone, but holding her head. I left the museum.

            Ann was sick.

Does this count as art- reflecting-life-imitating-art? Regardless, the final two lines clear everything up by leading us from a darkened room to one where everything is still obscured: “I put on some shoes I found on the bridge, then left the bridge. / Ann bruised. Her mom showed up. It was July.”

Throughout Full Catastrophe Living, Savich intersperses shorter poems and sonnets, nicely breaking up the denser texts. The short poems, however, never reach the level of the longer pieces. Perhaps it is the sustainment of image and metaphor in the longer pieces that works so much in their favor. Certainly, shorter poems like “Federal Case” are never given the chance to develop. Compared to Andrew Michael Roberts’ shorter pieces, and in relation to his own longer works, Savich’s shorter poems don’t hold up as well, don’t carry the same weight, and ultimately add little to the collection.

Both Roberts and Savich have put together volumes that are worthy enough to be read and may even require multiple readings. It is no surprise that both are issued through the University of Iowa Press — the Iowa Poetry Prize has definitely been showcasing exceptional work. If you happen to be the type of person who prefers to keep your feet on the ground while craning your neck to see the stars, it would be a wise decision to pick up both books. If you’re not that type of person, it would still be wise to track these down.

**

John Findura holds an MFA from the New School. A Pushcart Nominee, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives and teaches in northern New Jersey.

**

Andrew Michael Roberts is the author of Dear Wild Abandon, selected for a 2007 PSA National Chapbook Award, and Give Up. His poems can be found in journals such as Tin House, the Iowa Review, LIT, the Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast.

**

Zach Savich received a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he is currently in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a teaching assistant. His poems and essays have appeared in such venues as the Colorado Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, and the anthology Best New Poets 2008. He is an editor at Thermos Magazine.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

BOA Editions, 2008

Reviewed by Karen Rigby

Money is not evil. It is the love of money, or so the proverb goes—the pursuit among the hustlers and rainmakers, the hunger that inspired alchemists to try turning lead to gold—that leads to tragedy in so many stories. In Katy Lederer’s newest collection, the desire to distance oneself from the financial world is a recurrent theme. With its legendary robber barons and tumultuous history, the New York of these poems would set the perfect stage for an energetic series: panoramic in its breadth, sexy, and even damning, presenting glittering vices, a high-rolling playfulness, or a satirical critique.

Lederer, however, has chosen an unexpected and much quieter approach. Money isn’t turned into a grand idea. It is a means for describing the private exchanges in the speaker’s life—that bartering between “The brain pumped up with longing” and the soul.

These forty-five poems employ mostly linear, sonnet-like forms. They rely on a reflective, first-person voice. The images are simple and concrete, spaced throughout the book rather than forming densely woven patterns—they include “cups of breakfast blend,” “dark, expensive chocolates,” a “vial of Botox,” “emerald-green flow,” and a cello, among other objects. Many of the titles derive from the opening or closing line, or from a phrase contained within the poem. These plainer titles are in keeping with the poet’s sensibilities; there’s a strong sense that the message is often more essential than the manner of its expression, and that the poems, however cool in their atmosphere, are meant to reach the average reader.

One of the notable threads in this book is the difference between office workers and poets:

Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pristine light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash.
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they’ll be remembered after
death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.

The speaker is aloof, but does not spare herself from criticism. She doesn’t belong in these hallways and may even possess a small envy of those “unoriginals” who are free to write. Poets reappear in “A Nietzschean Revival”:

These poets speak of capital as if they had the least idea.
I ask you: what do poets know of capital?
Across this harp, their fingers play a Nietzschean revival.
I envy them their will to power.

And again in “The Dead-Level”:

The poets standing, one by one.
I lie here, shaking, all alone, the cosmetician in the hall.
Lord, let it cover me, this sheet.
Immaculate particulate.
I hide here in your cleanliness.
The poets standing, one by one.
What shall I make of them, beneath this light?
Their hair is white, their eyes are white, their skin is porcelain white.

A complaint is being registered about the nature of white-collar brainwork. In another poem, "Brainworker," the speaker writes: “To learn to keep distance./To learn to keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal/mind (19)."

The distinction between two modes of thinking could prove puzzling or even artificial for some readers: why doesn’t the speaker appear to entertain the possibility of disparate halves (logic + rationality / spontaneity + creativity) working in conjunction with each other rather than in opposition to each other? Later, the speaker expresses “this wish to be penniless, free.” Being“penniless” is almost a romantic hyperbole for a more poetic lifestyle. As the book progresses, the speaker says, “I am waiting, like an animal,/for poetry.” What was once viewed as the providence of those “unoriginals” has become vital. What seemed incomprehensible has become alluring. The transformation is critical to understanding The Heaven-Sent Leaf. Money may have served as the hook, but self-discovery and the pain involved in any difficult moment of transition emerges as the salient theme. An uneasy, ambivalent peace is finally reached between the spirit, mind, and heart in “A Triumvirate”: “Dilapidation of the spirit as the heart gives in, the mind gives in./These three, a triumvirate, laughing./This bitterness breaks me.”

Writing about office drudgery can sometimes result in a flatness to the language, or run the risk of reinforcing familiar views. While this series doesn’t entirely escape such problems, the ambition is nevertheless admirable and the topic is prescient. The title would appeal most to readers seeking affirmation of what it’s like to be trapped in the “pristine white hallways,” or for readers already familiar with the author’s previous work.

* *

Katy Lederer’s books include Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), included in the Publishers Weekly list of Best Books of the Year 2003. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner) and Isn’t it Romantic (Verse Press), among others. Educated at UC Berkeley and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble.

* *

Karen Rigby’s recent work appears in Meridian, Quarterly West, Canteen, and other journals. She is one of the editors at Cerise Press.

The Cosmopolitan by Donna Stonecipher

Coffee House Press, 2008
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling

Recently selected by John Yau for inclusion in the National Poetry Series, Donna Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan presents a vision of travel that encompasses an exploration of one's surroundings as well as the discovery of new terrain within one's self. Written as ornate prose poem sequences in which quotes from other texts are often embedded, the works in this volume use their hybrid form to document the emotional and intellectual states that are evoked by place. Just as the miniature travelogues are structured around newly unearthed insights, Stonecipher's poems gracefully depict one's inner life as governing the ways one inhabits the world.  

In conveying these themes, Stonecipher's use of such diverse texts as Franz Kafka's The Trial, Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to illuminate her own work proves striking. Frequently presenting the reader with memorable quotes arrived at through various author's literary allusions, the poems offer their speakers' small epiphanies as literary journeys in themselves. A poem entitled "Inlay 2 (Elaine Scarry)," which uses text from Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, exemplifies this trend:

If only our troubles were those of the town planner. Our freshly prepared grid, where to position the park, the town hall, the elementary school, the bored housewife fucking the plumber? The town is a given. The town waits like a fate for the town planner, who slowly reveals it with a blue pencil.

'Daydreaming originates in the volitional' (15).

In this passage, the poet presents Elaine Scarry's statement as an insight arrived at through a journey of intellectual inquiry, suggesting that travel remains a dialogue between oneself and the literary and cultural texts evoked by a given place. As the piece unfolds, this travelogue of consciousness ultimately obscures the reader's ability to definitively locate the speaker, privileging one's ability to trace oneself emotionally and intellectually.

Likewise, other works in The Cosmopolitan question the extent to which one can journey through the world without unearthing an undiscovered aspect of self. In this respect, the poet establishes reciprocity between one's inner life and surroundings. She writes, for example, in "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell),"

The group of students touring Chartres was told by the bespectacled guide that the stained glass pictures were not merely pretty, but actually scripture for the illiterate. Years later, one of the students would remember this while reading at a desk facing a window and think: What beauty isn't born out of the missionary position? (29)

Here Stonecipher forges unexpected connections between the character's memory of the cathedral and the manner in which he or she perceives future works of art. In many ways, the poet suggests that the character's past experience of Chartres enables and validates later insights about beauty and artifice. Like other works in the collection, "Inlay 6 (Mary B. Campbell)" depicts one's experience of place as complicating one's experience of self, suggesting that the two remain, in some respects, inextricable.

Moreover, Stonecipher uses this complex relationship between oneself and one's surroundings to offer incisive cultural commentary, highlighting the dissonance between one's inner life and the exterior world. Frequently juxtaposing the narrator's intellectual journeys with an increasingly commercialized travel culture, the poet often hints that a lucrative industry resides behind many individual's desire for such introspection and self discovery. She explains, for instance, in "Inlay 12 (Owen Jones),"

One loved; one did not love; goods changed hands. She was looking for the seed pearl dropped off the scale in the middle of the vast outdoor market. At the airport, he reached into his bag for his cyanometer — which of the fifty different kinds of blue was this particular sky? (50)

In this selection, just as the character in the poem attempts to empirically determine "which of the fifty different kinds of blue" that the sky is that day, characters recur throughout The Cosmopolitan who treat the world as a "conquerable entity," which can be subjugated through travel. Although acknowledging the prevailing (and frequently consumerist) approach to exploring one's surroundings, Stonecipher depicts her narrator as still "looking for the seed pearl" that has been lost amidst the commercial fanfare, striking an optimistic chord with the reader.

All points considered, Donna Stonecipher's new book is a meditative, philosophical read. The Cosmopolitan refashions the time-honored form of the prose poem while raising fascinating questions about travel and self-discovery. Highly recommended.

**

Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poetry: The Reservoir (Georgia, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance, 2007), and The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House, 2008). She also translates poetry and prose from French and German.

**

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVOX Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Kristina has also written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

The Halo Rule by Teresa Leo

Elixir Press, 2008
Reviewed by Amy Schrader

Given the lush stained-glass art on the cover of this volume of poems, I was relieved to learn in an opening epigraph that The Halo Rule is not a new age directive for living, but rather a sports term. The title poem tells us that the halo rule “intends to protect/ a return man by two yards.” Indeed, this rule—in effect from 1983-2003 in NCAA football games—gave a two-yard circle of protection to punt returners. The idea was to save the returner—who must look up in order to catch the ball—from a jarring full-speed tackle. Leo’s poignant observation follows:

Not so
elsewhere. For us, it’s

sideswipe, no berth, the
deference of play to hurt,
rough lust. (19)

Indeed, in this collection, Teresa Leo writes not about the spiritual, but the physical — the violence that “rough lust” enacts on our bodies and minds, and the ways that our biological urges can (and will) destroy us without hesitation or warning. Desire is the primary concern of The Halo Rule, and appears in most of the poems in some way, even if only to mark its absence or its transmutation into a closely allied urge or feeling such as despair. Recurring tropes here are addiction, possession, hunger, and the color red — all common metaphors for sexual desire. Incendiary images are numerous:

The kiss, if not gasoline, then turpentine, // or two red peonies in a cardboard tube… (4)

I won’t say I’m fire and in it… (4)

“…Come find me at night // and we’ll go up in flames.” (37)

…you said my hair was a creature
unto itself, a dark and dangerous thing
that could set the world on fire. (42)

Leo divides her book into four sections, each of which examines a particular phase of a sexual relationship. The narrative arc of the book begins with the end, and the first poem we encounter is entitled “P.S.”

The end is not near. We’ve passed the end, and it’s so far back
it’s like the tit of a cow in a field of poppies, a dot in a field…

Not only are we already at the end, we’re long past it! Appropriately enough, Section I deals with the final throes of a turbulent relationship: “We’re flatlined, sandblasted, / pummeled, untoward (12).” We meet two lovers, each seized in some way by sexual addiction and violence. There are glasses thrown against the wall, punches, jabs, chokeholds, “come-heres and fisticuffs (6).”

Section II takes us back to the beginning of this relationship with a series of poems about a modern Narcissus, poems exploring the chase, seduction, the art of wooing, and, of course, self-love. Yet even as the two lovers are meeting for the first time, Leo calls out a warning: “The woman // stood and turned. He was already thinking/ of the beautiful and various ways he could leave her (21).”

In Section III, we see the two lovers in the middle of their relationship, and their dynamic is clearly about sex and not much else:

After we fuck, he comes to himself,
back from a scattering of parts and phrases,

pulled from a starkness too violent to remember
(though fragments jostle in the back of the eyes

in a furious attempt to make it)
and says, “I can’t do more than this.” (41)

Finally, Section IV brings us back to where we started, forcing the reader to experience for a second time the couple’s goodbyes and leavings. The last poem in the book, “Aubade”, is a fitting end, bringing us full circle to dawn—a signal that the lovers must now part.

As I read the book, I found myself wondering if Leo strove for such unwavering thematic content; it feels more as if she happened on it incidentally, organically. As a poet, I understand the drive to write our obsessions again and again. By the end, however, I had more of a reader’s-eye view of how consistency can become slightly tedious over the course of an entire book. Pair that consistency with Leo’s fairly uniform (albeit very well-crafted) poetic style/approach, and there could very well be a little bit of reader-fatigue by the end of the collection.

That said, even if I occasionally found myself wanting a poem that looked or sounded just a little different than the others, Leo’s obsessions happen to mirror my own, so I was more than happy to immerse myself in the dark minutiae of this unraveling sexual relationship. The strength of the book lies in the strength of the individual poems. They are well-crafted, and Leo clearly delights in language and well-turned phrases. One of her techniques is to simultaneously present two conflicting realities:

...the way I didn’t see the curve ball coming,
the one that clipped my left hip as I swung the bat,
missing and not being missed. (3)

…the long, slow torso of a woman bent back, seeing / and not being seen. (6)

Thus, the reader must consider both x and not-x; they are somehow both equally true. This is what good poetry should be able to do, to look at the many facets of a complicated situation and recognize the truth of them all. Similarly, Leo is interested in adjacencies, which strikes me as an interest in metaphor.

…How, if at all,
does adjacency fit in, the militant but not mindful,

his four: lust, luster, lash, then less and less…
my four: drugged, deranged, demonized, damaged. (27)

This type of sound-association also shows up in the book as near-rhymes separated by slashes, which is a sort of violent, unvarnished way of making comparisons. Without putting the words into a full sentence, Leo mushes two words together, puts them on equal footing, and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions from their proximity. One of the poems describes this method as “the bereft/theft rhyme of desire and seizure” (26). Throughout the book, Leo also gives us baroque/throat (22), read/delete (24), famine/feminine (28), and

the estranged/deranged
call and response,

off-key, off-kilter,
an intersection of streets

where Wood meets Division,
Hope meets Power,

the mute improvisations
of a love-sick blood. (68)

Since this collection had the occasional tendency toward repetition and the “expected” view, I particularly enjoyed the off-key notes in The Halo Rule. Ultimately, the poems’ physical presence and honesty allows us to appreciate the collection for what it is:

…Just a book of poems

in a stark white envelope, little disclosures
that sway into oblivion the way bamboo floor boards
give suddenly under the body, its weight. (28)

**

Teresa Leo's poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has received fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She currently works at the University of Pennsylvania.

**

Amy Schrader received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, and Filter. She lives in Seattle.

Superfecta by Clay Matthews

Ghost Road Press, 2008

Reviewed by Joshua Robbins

Every so often one comes across a first book of poems that radically shirks off the normative first book formula which says, “This profound stuff happened to me and I’m going to tell you what it means.” More often than not, the product of the first book equation is a poetry that meets our expectations (however low they may be), but fails to address the urgency of our times. Thankfully we have Clay Matthews’s first full-length collection, Superfecta, to prod and admonish us, to remind us that poetry can have something to say in the face of American vulnerability, mortality, late capitalism, ubiquitous pop-culture clutter, and urban sprawl. And for readers willing to risk betting even just a little time and effort, the payoff they receive will far exceed their meager investment.

For Matthews, who has previously published two chapbooks, Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books), the concept of a payoff is integral to the arc of his book, the title of which is derived from the world of parimutuel horse race betting. When betting the superfecta, the bettor must successfully predict the order of the first four finishers in a race. Picking a successful superfecta involves complex combinations and sequences at long odds. The winnings, though, are correspondingly much higher. The same goes for our experience of these poems.

For an epigraph, Matthews quotes from Emily Dickinson’s #254:

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

While hope is certainly a theme for Matthews, reading poems like “Poem with a Forecast at Either End,” “Self Help for the Lost and Found,” and “The Prayer Mechanism” among others, one recalls Dickinson’s other famous words, “Poetry dwells in possibility.” Sometimes these poems harness the potential of narrative and the saving grace of memory. Sometimes it’s landscape and place. Other times these poems express what feels like a renewed religious faith struggling with what remains of doubt. Consider these closing lines from “Eternia”:

I'm lonesome sometimes
again. I've been coughing up the evils of the universe
in the sink and watched once more the other night that movie
about He-Man. Look at that name. What a strange film
there is covering the window. It looks like everything
outside is blanketed with the saddest glass in the world.

In the phrase “the saddest glass in the world,” there are faint echoes of Biblical scripture and the Apostle Paul’s statement, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” Matthews’s spirit seems equally sanguine and forward-looking — though doused with a heavyheartedness as he surveys the world.

Matthews’s poems possess a unique melancholy in which the trappings of America’s tradition of optimism are juxtaposed with imagery from America’s cultural clutter. This is a place where the individual’s voice becomes “nothing more / than a warm little praying machine” (“The Prayer Mechanism”). It is the place where video game arcades and “Two-hundred Pac-Man machines / with hundreds of three-letter initials” call into question “the essence of [the] subjective self” (Self-Portrait in a Chewing Gum Wrapper”), and even the DeLorean from the film Back to the Future compels us to wonder if we should “try to save the world or just try / to save ourselves” (“Self-Portrait in a Hollywood Car”).

Referencing pop-culture icons and even brand names has become a fairly fashionable tool in recent years for poets seeking to rough-up their listless imagery or to inject an ironic sensibility into their lyric. Very often these poems feel contrived. What enables Matthews to avoid sounding like a phony is that his allusions to pop-culture are connected to more pressing existential concerns. Here is the opening of “Mercy Mild”:

At the supercenter we were waiting
for the big televisions to go on sale,
which is to say we were waiting
for a larger version of The Price is Right,
in full color and spread across the screen
the way Antarctica stretches across
the bottom of the globe like a pair
of tight white underwear, the kind
my father used to wear in the bathroom
when he shaved his face each morning
and banged the razor rhythmically
on the side of the porcelain bowl.

In these opening twelve lines, we encounter several things we don’t normally expect to come across in poems: the supercenter, The Price is Right, Antarctica, a man’s tighty-whities. Also, it should be noted that we hear a nearly regular accentual beat. Aside from his highly crafted line, Matthews’s progression from the supercenter into memory is not necessarily poetically surprising in its movement. It does, however, allow him to tackle the bigger issues, to call into question the relationship between the self and commerce, the self and memory, the self and place, because “In the supercenter there are three versions of reality” and supercenters themselves “are no version / of reality, [they are] only an image of reality.”

Matthews’s work is refreshing because of its honest voice and his willingness to confess simple facts: that we all hope for “another day of absolutely nothing better to do” (“Self-Portrait as an Aging Human Type”); that in something as simple as a pickle jar “you see / every greed you have ever possessed / or been possessed by” (“Regarding My Sentimentality and Love of Hole-in-the-Walls”); that any kind of bet “is just another structure tugging away at our sad existence” because

Asking the American
middle class not to gamble is like asking us
not to breathe, to place our small, tired hands
over our hearts as some young girl in white sequins
over-sings the national anthem to which at least one
old man in the crowd will weep.
(“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”)

Many of the poems in Superfecta stayed with me, their images reverberating in my consciousness long after I’d set the book down. With their complex tones and the mixture of pop-culture, the honesty of Matthews’s voice, his attention to the details of the everyday, the poems in Superfecta oblige us “To bet on what we believe won't happen, / but hope for / nonetheless” (“Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose”). Clay Matthews is certainly a poet to put some money on.

***

Clay Matthews is the author of Superfecta and two chapbooks: Muffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (End & Shelf Books). He currently lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. Visit his blog at http://claymatthews.blogspot.com.

***

Joshua Robbins received his MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a doctoral student and lecturer at the University of Tennessee where he serves as Poetry Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. A winner of the James Wright Poetry Award, his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New South, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, the anthology Writing By Ear, and elsewhere. Visit his blog at http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com.

NOW AVAILABLE: CutBank 70, Winter 2009

Featuring fiction by Ingrid Satelmajer, Justin Quarry, and Daniel Doehr.

Creative nonfiction by Rebekah Beall.

Poetry by Carlos Villacorta, Olivie Clare, Chloe Garcia-Roberts, Haines Eason, Michael Levan, Christopher DeWeese, Michael Peterson, Trey Moody, Cara Benson, and Ashley Seitz Kramer.

Photographs by Aimee Lewis.

Copies are available here.

Surviving in the Flickering Lights of a Spiritual Quest:

Things On Which I've Stumbled

New Directions Books, 2008

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Making the desert empty. Bloom, purging soil. As though it needed a little
more room. All the toil, come from countries: “Waste not, want not” once
its pride. Now its eyes for the world are wide. And nothing it does upsets
us. There’s no apartheid in its midst. There’s no lie, we need the fence….
Wandering though the land like Christ. Take that village along the ridge.
Who on earth could bring it help? Ethnic cleansing, Scripture says. Slowly
but surely. Staying strong is hardly wrong; our forces do what must be
done. Nothing that they do is fun. Living along this seam. Where is, in fact
is what it seems. If you will it, said the prophet. It is not a dream.
(From “What Has Been Prepared, Part III: What Intimation Is There,” 80)

Reading Peter Cole’s memorable poetry volume, Things On Which I’ve Stumbled, with the assault on Gaza raging, is an emotionally charged and revealing experience. Dense, coherent, confessional, and prophetic, his writings explore an archeology of mystical fragments, from poetry manuscripts unearthed in an old Egyptian synagogue to uncensored personal thoughts and observations about the political plight of modern Jerusalem. Even the arresting book cover — a Joel Shapiro woodcut of a disjointed black swastika — is in itself a telling political commentary. Indeed, writing about the identity of a nation and people in the context of Jerusalem and Palestine is both sacred and political, as demonstrated in this concise poem now oft cited and remembered:

Israel is he, or she, who wrestles
with God — call him what you will,

not some goon (with a rabbi and gun)
in a pre-fab home on a biblical hill.

(From “Israel Is,” 50)

Most of the poems in this collection are allegorical and meditative. Often, the titles are illustrative. Consider these: “The Ghazal of What He Sees,” “Proverbial Drawing: How Far, A Right Angle Supports Us Here, The Line, It’s True, The House The Cloud, The Wrong Angle Righted,” “The Ghazal of What Hurt.” From open-form lyrics and sestinas to ghazals, lineated prose, and prose-poems, the variety of forms and modes in this collection is both refined and rich. Cole has boldly incorporated an Arabic cadence into his well-composed English syntax, sometimes seeking more of a musical cadence than a strict adherence to metric feet in his prosodic eloquence. Much of the twenty-three-page title poem, “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled,” for instance, contains a visible architectural elegance and clarity that renders an incantatory touch to parallel words and refrains, as well as illuminating blank but breathing spaces:

These are things I could not fathom,

………. your sons
……………. your ways
……………………..your …….

Plunders of a people
………. in darkness (24)

how what is smallest could loom so large,
how what is best could miss what is finest
….

and how what is fine
and wine

could be crushed by a blindness

Tell me, what is man
If not dirt and a worm,

his life is only vapor…

caused by a brightness

Tell me what man is
but flesh and blood that’s warm,

reaching the margins

of what it is

whose life is only vapor… (28)

Despite their experimental forms, all of the poems are clear and accessible in their messages, paying close attention to linguistic nuances and techniques. Cole creates a range of lyrical episodes, either expressing a single narrative voice or a multivocality in which voices from different time periods intersect. I found many lines irresistibly ludic yet resonating, despite their seeming simplicity:

No! It’s all in the picture,
which this one echoes:

“I want, I want,” said Blake.
“I can’t, I can’t,” said the fake.

(From “Proverbial Drawing, Part I: How Far,” 51)

In the poem “Why Does the World Out There Seem,” the poet states, “Poems, as Williams wrote, are machines.” Peter Cole joins the ranks of poets such as Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg and Bei Dao who articulate serious questions about the place of poetry in a darkened and dubious world. Things On Which I’ve Stumbled asserts a union between language and meaning in the context of a specific culture. What stands out clear to me is that one cannot read this volume without acknowledging its moral seriousness, its historical and cultural references. While savoring their many and layered musics, I have also enjoyed the verses as a combination of Cole’s emotional and intellectual responses, whether as poet or translator.

**

An acclaimed translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, Peter Cole’s previous volumes of poems are compiled in What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998. His several translations from the Hebrew and Arabic include poetry by Taha Muhammad Ali, Aharon Shabtai, Yoel Hoffmann, and others. Awards and fellowships include a PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, a TLS Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Jerusalem, and is co-editor of Ibis Editions.

**

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) publishes poetry and non-fiction under her nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Her forthcoming poems can be found in Broken Plate, Caesura, Santa Clara Review, River Oak Review, Istanbul Literary Review, etc. Also a harp concertist, she lives in Paris, France.

The Usable Field by Jane Mead

Alice James Books, 2008

Reviewed by Dora Malech

In Jane Mead’s latest collection of poems, The Usable Field, the field in question is not theoretical (not “open” nor “unified”) but physical and actual, a living and tangible landscape made of “vines and poppies,” “the dust and the grasses,” “grit on the wind,” “yellow thistle,” and “the far shore/and the cliffs beyond it.” This is as much a literal place on earth as it is a metaphorical one. The poems don’t concern themselves so much with theory, but with a more private kind of discourse, wrestling with selfhood, the dead, and the natural world that binds past and present generations together where “the vineyard/and the grave are one.” The poems in The Usable Field ground themselves in a particular landscape, a place that takes on a life of its own as it bears witness to the human cycles of loss and grief (with brief flashes of joy and agency) that occur within it. The poem “Sister Harvest Brother Blues” declares:

The main force is the usable field
or sun on the useless bunchgrass,—

alchemy that spells and spells us
just as the weather spells us
and the good earth field. . . .

If the book is engaging in a public conversation at all, it is simply finding a voice in the centuries-old conversation about the quiet, self-effacing power of the lyric poem (“I do not know much/about beauty,” the speaker says, “though//its consequences/are clearly great”) reaffirming the ways in which faithful meditations on the particular have the capacity to echo into the universe, the universal. These are “personal” poems, but they never rely on effusive sentimentality or voyeur-friendly “confessional” narrative. It is the language itself that feels personal, even hermetic, in the most positive—and physical—sense of the word. To me these poems build themselves around the reader in the act of reading, using language to create enclosures—but not defensive walls, by any means—in which to meditate on their beauties and burdens. This is a book that one must visit again and again, each time becoming more a part of the “us” that the alchemy and weather “spells and spells” throughout this quietly extraordinary collection.

The Usable Field is haunted, though the poet presents the dead as so much a part of the place that they seem like natural phenomena (as opposed to supernatural). In the first poem of the collection “The Dead, Leaning (in the Grasses and Beyond the Trenches,—Like Oaks)” Mead begins:

In the high and mighty grasses
the dead lean on the living
like nobody’s business,—

they think we are their mission.
Thus the rain, whereby they say
Now wash your eyes and pray.

Pray for anything but forgiveness.

Again and again, the dead appear; the speaker tends to them as she tends to the land itself, and to her poems. This burden seems to inform the making of stanzas and lines throughout the book, as “form” and “content” (for lack of better words) feel exhilaratingly inseparable. There is an intuitive sense of cadence and composition throughout, not “form” per se, but a definite formality, calling to mind Dickinson’s “formal feeling” that follows “great pain.” The repetitions and shifts of the natural world (wind, water, seasons) appear as anaphora and incantation, point and counterpoint, caesura and enjambment paired to ensure a reader’s careful navigation of syntactic possibility. The poem “Three Candles and a Bowerbird” seems to speak to the necessity of this kind of “intuitive formality”:

I do not know why
the three candles must sit
before this oval mirror,

but they must.—

In this poem, and indeed throughout the collection, Mead uses precise images as touchstones to explore the ineffable; even the most revelatory endings have an elliptical or gnomic quality as in “The Dead, Leaning (in the Grasses and Beyond the Trenches,—Like Oaks)” which ends with the lines: “if there is death between you/and the oak, there is no oak.” These koan-like endings feel like anchors; in their mystery they moor the reader with their declarative and definitive cadence, often pentameter and often iambic, though sometimes folded over two lines. The poem “We Take the Circus to Another Level—” ends “The odds, by definition, can’t conspire”; the poem “Three Candles and a Bowerbird” ends “And in the mirror/also, there is joy”; the poem “Point and Counterpoint in All Things” ends “. . . there is/a single blossom—called commence.”

Although death and grief seem to bind these poems to the land, the land also seems to provide the possibility of release, or at least a coming to terms. The collection ends with the declaration “Also, I am here of my own choosing” — the paradox of finding agency through tending and committing to a place of inherited sadness. The precision and vitality of language and image and thought and feeling throughout these poems reacquaints us with one of the age-old paradoxes of the lyric: the pleasure it gives a reader to linger in and return to a solitary and grievous place made of uncertainty.

**

Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, A Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California and teaches occasionally.

**

Dora Malech's poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently a Teaching-Writing Fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Retrospective: Disclamor by G.C. Waldrep

BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007
Reviewed by Michael Levan

In G.C. Waldrep’s remarkable second collection, we are asked to deal with what comes after war — the troubled peace that can leave us disillusioned. Waldrep forces us to examine how it is that we cope with these reminders, which so often result in us losing connections to each other. Waldrep’s skill, though, is in mitigating the harshness of the world we inhabit, as well as finding ways to remind us that we can and must do better, especially for our descendants. He “craves the aftersilence” (“Cloud of Witnesses”) and feels a duty to give us hope or, at the very least, some assurance that we can still hope, even after being confronted with the tragedies war brings.  

The desire for consolation plays a large role in the book, especially throughout the “The Batteries,” a nine-poem sequence inspired by sea-coast fortifications along the northern California coast. The first, “Battery Rathbone-McIndoe,” reveals how hesitant Waldrep is, how awkward he feels being at one of these decommissioned gun emplacements. There are “so many ways [he] could begin,” but his perspective has not yet taken shape, he has not yet made up his mind to celebrate the fact that these sites have been turned into tourist attractions, or to lament that they were ever needed in the first place. This wavering keeps cropping up in the poem: “Can you believe I once stood for war? / (Can you believe I once stood against it?)” And when he describes a lone sailboat far out in the Pacific, we can’t help but notice the parallels:

  

It moves slowly, from left to right,
                             as if trying to say something
                                          very precise,
                             and then again, from right to left,
                                          as if erasing.

And yet, all this indecision fades when Waldrep recognizes:

I walked here, there were
                        no guns, no gates, now
                                   everything is permitted.
            No one had sold the sand in my shoes.
            No one has yet tasted his death
                                                              on my tongue,
                        this is before
                                       as there must always be before
             (just as what comes next
                                                              is after—)

Though Waldrep may have free reign in visiting the armaments, he still has a responsibility in capturing this scene in order to not let us forget how things could have gone differently. He serves as witness, then, and must speak, a sentiment played out at the end of “Candlemas, Vermont”: “Lear said / nothing comes of nothing. Speak again.”

Speech is what will spur action and, even more importantly, memories — both good and bad. This act of not allowing us to forget will hopefully save us because, as Waldrep notes when he sees the graffiti covering the walls in “Battery O’Rorke”:

 

What is written here fades quickly.
                     Faces drawn in chalk,
                                    names,
                                                                        the idea
                     of defense, of a beach
                                                ripe for landing.

         West, east, the longitudes of war.
                        This is no place for monuments.

The poet takes responsibility for making sure “what is written here,” this place’s ugly history, is recorded and examined before these mistakes are repeated. In a moment of doubt, Waldrep considers himself to be a “very minor poet,” which does not do himself or his work justice. He is much more than minor; he is “a poet of broken things” (“Batter Bravo, (first)”), a writer who can treat what is broken with both compassion — “They are trying to believe / something they have forgotten. / Or to make us believe it” (“Many of Us Identify with Animals”) — and deadpan humor:

AND THE GOD OF USA DECLARED
            I SHALL INCORPORATE WEAPONS
                               OF MASS DESTRUCTION
           INTO MY NATIONAL PARKS.

— This is not quite right. The weapons came first,
            mass, the destruction; then
                         picnic tables. (“Battery Wallace”)

The poems surrounding, or supporting, “The Batteries” show a different side of the poet. Whereas other poems in the collection rely on a collage of graffiti, personal observations, facts and figures, and research into Miwok tribal lore, these poems require close, slow reading in order to appreciate the quirky and oddly beautiful images:

What I never know is
when my life will change, or when the rain will stop
or at least assume a more congenial vector.
(from “Cosmologies of Zinniae”)

Currydawn dustworry. A blue tuning as from the south pond in colder
weather. Side to side to side to side to side. Like that. We are pleased.
As with the scalp of that other, spider-thin.
(from “Milton Highway”)

 

But “The Batteries” is where Disclamor truly shines and where the book ends: “I am not afraid of the story you ask me to tell. / (In any case it is no longer / my story.)” In fact, it has become our story, a mutual agreement that in reporting all that he has seen, imagined, and felt, Waldrep accepts us and makes us accountable as well. We must learn from and pass on the story of what comes after because we are witnesses now, too.

**

G.C. Waldrep received a BA from Harvard University in American History in 1990 and a Ph.D. in American History from Duke University in 1996. His first poetry collection, Goldbeater's Skin (Center for Literary Publishing), won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, and other journals. Waldrep spent 2003-05 at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2005-06 he was visiting professor of the humanities and social sciences at Deep Springs College in California. He currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Bucknell University.

**

Michael Levan received his MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Tennessee, where he serves as assistant poetry editor of Grist: The Journal for Writers. His poems and reviews can be found in upcoming issues of Nimrod, Third Coast, and CutBank. He lives in Knoxville with his wife, Molly.

Unwieldy Seriousness or Spiky Humor? Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy

Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.

             (from “I’m Over the Moon,” 5)

Brenda Shaughnessy’s new book, Human Dark with Sugar, opens with rather sensual language — smart, suggestive and provocative — mixed occasionally with dark humor and philosophical musings.

The title of her work derives from a question raised in the second poem, “Why is the Color of Snow?”: “Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?” Intriguing and original, this line offers us an imaginative lens through which to playfully explore human existence and its various emotional states (rage, sadness, hunger, jubilation, etc.) And when set against the title of her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy, whether intentional or accidental, the title signals a continuation of a certain structure and style.

Shaughnessy sprinkles rhetorical twists throughout Human Dark with Sugar, most of which are neatly arranged and deliberately crafted. Self-reflective questions such as “How long do I try to get water from a stone,” “Why do we only get two/years in exchange for three summers,” or “Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?” hint at more metaphysical or abstract concerns, even though the poet seems to take most of her subject matter from her own everyday life. For instance, the poem “Parthenogenesis” is in fact a disguised, surprise ode to weight gain, a concern that seems banal though at the same time real:

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating
and sometimes easy’s the thing.

To be double-me, half the trouble
but not lonely.

                    (from “Parthenogenesis,” 11)

The female body and its eroticism is indeed a theme that Shaughnessy explores in various poems. “Breasted Landscape,” “Vagile,” and “Me in Paradise” all contain subtle yet direct references to female anatomy. The strongest allusion appears in “This Loved Body,” a long prose-poem made up of twenty short sections:

This belly is hardly what I call a belly. Could there be less belly in
it? I am accustomed to women’s bellies, of which there is usually
some. You seem like a machine here, hairless and olive. But when
you bend you are as human as can be, literally within an inch of
your life. Because the machinery is in plain view, you have no secret
stash, nothing for winter, nothing to lose. In an emergency, this
would be an emergency. I am horrified, my thinlet, and won’t ever
let you be hungry.

                                             (from “This Loved Body,” 47)

In general, Shaughnessy writes with an acute self-awareness, a trait that, if left completely unchecked, could be considered an endangerment to the spirit of writing itself. Though this overly self-aware style of writing seems to be a trend in American poetics today, Shaughnessy seeks to balance this impulse with various attentive and figurative voices, articulating images that are at once edgy and unpredictable. I have read her poems with much curiosity, interested to understand how each imaginative leap leads to the next, how each poetic form shapes itself and attempts to weave a dialogue with the poems surrounding it. That said, I would also like to believe that there bristles some optimism, authenticity, and sincerity in Brenda Shaughnessy’s writings, as she makes a bold step closer towards simple love beyond the self, a complex appreciation for common goodness in this, our so confusing world.

**

Raised in California, Brenda Shaughnessy now lives in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, and is currently the poetry editor of Tin House magazine. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College of the New School.

**

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) writes under the nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. She is currently Poetry and Non-fiction editor of Emprise Review. She lives in France.

To and From by G.E. Patterson

As real as thinking/wonders created/by the possibility—forms…
—Robert Creeley

No gap has ever appeared in the transmission of language
—Andrew Schelling

The edge isn’t far we could be there now
—G.E. Patterson

Ahsahta Press, 2008

Reviewed by Heather Sweeney

To and From, G.E. Patterson’s second collection, evokes deeply felt displacements and departures. Patterson charts out new terrain as he carefully tends to uncertainties in his fourteen-line constructions. Bringing temporality and its relationship to geography to the surface, the poet suggests that we are forever “stuck on the possibility of being.” Possibilities congregate and disperse, becoming the only constant within these pulsating territories.

In To and From, Patterson consistently subverts the traditional and most common modes of quoting lines, raising, as he does so, issues of attribution and ownership. Bits of quotes hover and billow above, between, and sometimes below many of his poems. Utterances echo as they unfold upon each other. Patterson is a technician of elision. Carefully selected words address and incite questions. In an interview with Lisa Stouder for Ahsahta Press, the poet himself asks and illuminates: “Who owns language? Who has phrased a thought or feeling in a way that might be seen as proprietary?”

Consider:

“River smell….”
                 —Forrest Gander

             “…below us…above us…out of sight…"

                                                              —Ralph Waldo Emerson

              Salvator Mundi

              “…always….”                                   “…deer….”

                —Michael Ondaatje                       —Federico Garcia Lorca
                                                                          (tr. Edwin Honig)

                                                                          “…streets….”
                                                                                   —Jean Cocteau

“…all sorts of things…”                               “River smell….”
                            —Henry James                              —Forrest Gander

                                         “…which made it beautiful.”
                                                                    —Brenda Hillman

(48)

Patterson re-means and reconfigures. The sampled amalgamation of voices includes cameos by Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan and Yoko Ono. Summoning this eclectic group, he infuses their articulations with unique magnification, as his own images continue to morph: “Invisibility tree swan perhaps/This room seen with a bird’s anatomy (5)."

Quotations become titles and silences are attributed: “ '….' (unwritten words)/—John Milton.” The gathered tensions between what is said and unsaid, heard and unheard, texture his perceptions.

Between the silences, Patterson spotlights temporality in drifting landscapes that transform and evaporate. He has lived in and traveled to many states, and his poems follow a similar route, taking us from New York’s “factory of candles” to a North Carolina resort town to Cape Cod where “Mountainous abstractions might form and cloud/The ink-darkened trees then reshape themselves (64)." And we are forever in a liminal state, often seeking and contemplating stability: “coming from the car as it moves what stays (12)."

Acting as the observer, Patterson is lucid and seemingly detached: “Daytime moving in swirls the painted colors (16)." In his biography for Ahsahta Press, Patterson asserts: “Focus on the present moment. That’s the refrain from years of studying meditation and practicing yoga.” His yogic background comes as no surprise, as he plays with expansion and lets space breathe around the commingling voices. Expressions percolate and congeal. Fragmentation and genuine integration reveal themselves.

Often recording the rural and scenic, Patterson also illuminates very base human hungers: “Desires like horses persist and run (5)." He shuffles varying roads, voices, trees, and distances. Lines such as “The bigness scented the trees as expected (50)" heighten our inquiry about the capabilities of perception, because, as the observer points out, “In some sequence small things were going on (50)."

Patterson investigates what we hope to contain, what can be held and recorded. This is a contemplative book of distances shaping and reshaping the spaces between to and from. These poems “…wail at the ocean’s border (6)." These poems are tender, yet subtly electric, “pulling us closer (50)."

**

G.E. Patterson is the author of Tug (Graywolf Press, 1999), which won the Minnesota Book Award. His work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page, Poetry 180, American Letters and Commentary, Fence, Five Fingers Review, nocturnes: (re)view of the arts, Seneca Review, Open City, XcP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and the webzine of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Poems and Poets. He lives in Minnesota.

**

Heather Sweeney, who teaches writing and yoga, lives in San Diego with her husband and beloved dog.