Oracle Bones

Review of C. Mikal Oness’ Oracle Bones

Paperback

Lewis-Clark Press, 2007

by Karin Schalm

One of the most difficult tasks of a poet is to capture life and death while invoking the musicality of language. By capture I mean more than portray or show; I mean enact. A good poet translates emotion into words, inviting the reader to share an echo of what was originally felt. A great poet transforms emotion into song, creating a reverberation that engages the reader’s own psyche. At his best, C. Mikal Oness is a great poet. In his first book, Oracle Bones (Lewis-Clark Books, 2007), Oness demonstrates a mastery of language that engages the reader on a strong emotional level.

Oracle Bones is divided into three sections: Divinations, Scapulimancy and Charms, with an introductory poem, “The Handworm’s Hipbone,” setting the stage as an exploration of “the dark”:

He pe sceal legge leaf et heafde

Under the overturned wheelbarrow,

in the dark of that insulated space

warmed by the decay of last year’s leaves,

is the dark of the dark and building soil,

is the dark of the ever-dampening.

And when I overturned the overturned

wheelbarrow, the dark flew out like a covey,

like sparrows, and having been for so long

so used to all of its damp and warm

containment, and having fled so quickly,

it left behind the decayed, or half-decayed

body of an ordinary bird, a black bird,

the remnants of its red brassards browning

beside it. The remnants of last year’s leaves

also lain by its head for so long as to be

blackening beside it, silent and benign,

as if sent there by charm to diminish

some inconsequential thing shamefully

placed in a dark space in a dark time

to become naught in the heart of the harrower.

Oness’ goal in Oracle Bones is to decompose the darkness, to diminish shame. He does this partly by letting it fly free like “a covey” and partly by placing it next to something more “benign, as if sent there by charm.” The first technique involves the telling of the story—liberating it from its dark, hidden space of silence—and the story Oness tells involves dark confession as well as transformation.

In the first section, Divinations, we learn from “August 1990” that the poetic narrator accidentally killed his friend and mentor, Don, in a tragic car crash five years earlier. The source of the narrator’s great shame is that he was driving drunk. This is the main event of the book, the event that less significant events—like leaves—blow up against. The poem begins with small details of the narrator’s brunch with Don before the accident:

And it seems now as if brunch were a dream—

a fourteen dollar plate of shrimp and ham,

champagne from ten to twelve, and staggering

to my car. What did we talk about? Our jobs?

It continues with the startling clarity and painful consequences of the crash:

I only remember this: a sharp right turn;

in retrospect, a dreadful look of horror

on a woman’s face; then time goes past; I wake

to a loud slide, a crash of glass; my dash

board spins; I fall against the roof, the road

through the open window; I pull myself

out of my car, I think; I walk myself

past Donny, past a full crowd looking on.

I was, I say. I drove. It was me driving.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I understand. I’m fine.

And powerless—that’s what it is you know—

on the curb pulling my ripped shirt over

my head, refusing help from the paramedics—

I am refusing help for the last time.

Because years later walking down the street,

or sitting on my bed at night, it comes

to me that I have done this, and someone

is dead, and that a mother must still weep

just north of here; I can begin to hear

her now. I can begin just now.

Oness builds both meaning and musicality through repetition. When the narrator is “refusing help from the paramedics,” the reader sees how unaware he is. Later, he is “refusing help for the last time” because he realizes how much he needs it, and not just for his physical wounds. The mother who “must still weep/just north of here” is finally something he can “hear.” All of the talkiness of the poem slows down, inviting the reader to be in this quiet space with the mother’s sorrow. Just as the narrator “can begin to hear/ her now,” he can also “begin just now.” He is beginning the process of healing through accepting, truly accepting, his part in the tragedy. This is a powerful place to begin.

The second technique Oness uses for decomposing the dark seems inherently flawed. The narrator refers to placing something benign as a charm next to the dark. “The Handworm’s Hipbone” opens with a mysterious Old English quote described in the appendix as a “charm against wens.” Not familiar with the term, I learned that wen means “a benign skin tumor, especially of the scalp.” This definition deflates the power of the mysterious Old English as well as the enigmatic definition Oness supplies, and not (I might add) in a good way. The terrible beauty of the “dark of the dark” is trivialized when seen in comparison to a skin disease. Perhaps this is Oness’ goal as well, to render the darkness as “naught in the heart of the harrower,” to make it disappear, or to decompose into something indistinguishable, and therefore less significant.

Unfortunately, the book loses some steam after the opening act. The reader catches glimpses of Don, the master ship crafter and mentor, in lively imagistic poems like “Sorbies” and “Chisel.” For the most part, the narrator’s earlier moment of recognition—awoken by intense tragedy—dissipates, shrouded in references to fishing, boats, Beowulf and runes (thus the title Oracle Bones). By section three, Charms, Don has almost completely disappeared. In “Mentor,” the narrator claims, “Forgive me: I have simply forgotten who you are.”

Oness seems to drop the main event of his book out of convenience, though, rather than a true act of decomposition. When asked about the different syntax and approach in poems like “August 1990” and his Beowulfian “Sea Voyage” in an interview with Sheri Allen, Oness said that he simply assembled the poems he had written over a period of time.

The poems were written at different times as I was engaging in different formal projects, and then, like so many others who put together books, I emptied a large room and played several games of poetry solitaire with the poems, experimenting with arrangement (Oness, The Southeast Review online).

When the narrator tells the story of the birth of his own child, it’s a bit jarring—like pushing in a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit. There seems to be yet another dead child to account for, a child of the narrator’s. At the beginning of “In Memoriam” he says “All our relatives have turned to roses/in my mother’s yard, as has my child.” This losing and gaining of his own children is a compelling story, and definitely one I want to hear, but not in this collection. If these poems had appeared in a second book, they would have seemed cathartic. In this context, they seem simple-minded and self-serving. They make the whole enterprise turn sour for me, like a compost pile someone forgot to turn and pawned off as soil. For example, the poem “Struck” shows maple leaves alive and shimmering in light:

Under the silver-leafed maple, my house

gleams: inside, my one-year-old.

In any breeze the tree shimmers

wagging underleaf to overleaf.

A white light burns in a pure wind.

I want to believe that the purity of this wind is real, that there’s a sweet light emanating from the narrator’s house, his home, but I’m not yet ready for this. The wound from the car accident is still so fresh in my mind that I need more time to heal. All the charms and runes and fancy terms like “scapulimancy” (which refers to the heating of bones to produce cracks which are interpreted as oracular signs) feel like a distraction to me, a denial of the work at hand. Unlike the passages where Oness is great, where we are asked to embrace the oracular wisdom of his words.

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C. Mikal Oness is a homesteader, poet and printer, living in rural Minnesota. He is the founding editor and director of Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press producing hand-made limited editions of poetry and prose. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Missouri, Oness has received the Toi Shan Fellowship from the Taoist Center in Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, Third Coast, The Bloomsbury Review, Fence, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines. His work has been awarded the Mahan Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award from George Mason University, and a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant. His book of poems, Water Becomes Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2000 and was awarded the Posner Prize in Poetry by the Council of Wisconsin Writers. He has a limited edition chapbook, Runian, from Bergamot Press, and another limited edition, Privilege, from Cut Away Books. His manuscript, Oracle Bones, was selected for the Lewis & Clark Expedition Prize and was published in 2007.

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Karin Schalm lives with her family in Missoula. She works as an administrative assistant at The University of Montana, rising early most mornings to walk her dog in the dark. She is a Master Gardener, a labyrinth lover, and a big fan of mountain wildflowers.

Water the Moon

Poems by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Marick Press
Paperback - November 2009
88 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-9348511-2-8

Reviewed by Z. Cody Lee

Every book of good poems contains moments that I have taken to baptizing “Catch-alls.” First, because they are the passages that get copied into our notebooks and journals, which, indeed, I once heard a poet call “catch-all books.” However, I tend to identify with the term more in its metaphysical sense, in the sense that these catch-all moments are actually catching/capturing all that poetry is supposed to do and, quite simply, that is why we extract them: the language is doing just what we had hoped language could do; it is doing precisely what we needed it to do—whether or not we can put our finger on exactly what or why that is.

I have been waiting a long time to read a book that fields questions of heritage, identity, and exile with such tact and polish. If I could stack a few of my favorite catch-alls from Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s new collection, Water the Moon, it would look something like this:

***

Those who perished

before arriving

build their tombs in those

who escaped.

(“Tibet”)

***

I imagine the void

of your solitude, crystallized instants

through which I observe

you are now at peace, ready when time ends.

(“Reading Grandmother”)

***

So what if the shroud of Turin never

soared, and sunlight confessed

nails piercing feet as rust?

(“Mysticism for a False Beginner”)

***

Yet the light is no mystery — the mystery

is how something moves to filter light through.

(“Steichen’s Photographs”)

***

What I see this book doing as a whole is very much different from what I see it doing page-by-page. What is accomplished in its totality reminds me of a poet who is taking a picture of her reflection in every windowpane she passes as her taxi speeds through town. And that taxi is bringing her to a place where she knows only one or two people, a place where she might or might not blend. Each photograph, in this description, later becomes a poem where memory and actual presence are held in the transparency of the glass as the poet tries to capture what is fleeting, what will soon be no more; for in each window so much is happening on both sides of the pane despite the poet; and what is happening on each side is both a part of and apart from the action on opposite side.

The manuscript is broken into three sections—Biography of Hunger, Dear Paris, and The Key Always Opens—which I will address here as closed units leading into and out of one another.

The themes, if you will, of the first section, Biography of Hunger, seem to travel in teams. The first six poems call upon well-known and easily accessible Chinese cultural figures: Mao, Confucius, Tibet, The Great Wall, Buddhists, as well as plenty of east and red evocations. And while the imagery seems to have at least one foot in Asia, the tone of these opening poems situates itself in a much broader spectrum, often charged and political—ranging from a tattered, all but empty letter between father and daughter to a letter addressed directly to the Chairman himself. Because the confessional, autobiographical allusions cannot be missed, these first half-dozen poems let us know who will be guiding us through the book and, importantly, where it is that they are coming from. We read in “Par avion”:

His letter translated nothing but instructions,

Confucian wisdom (One must not sit

on a mat that is not straight), from

father to daughter, two cultures apart.

The latter half of this first section begins to move away from China and into, most notably, Europe—the second “team” of images. With almost the same frequency that we encountered terms like “Year of the Monkey” in the opening poems, we see the language here peppered with French idioms and places—rendez-vous, mise-en-scène, nouvelles, vérité, Luxembourg Gardens—as well as other notable Europeans—Bach, Schubert, Plato, Beethoven. The energy and mood are also notably different in this half of Biography of Hunger. There is an urgency to explain (or at least to comprehend) large concepts like truth, mortality, loyalty, and loss; while simultaneously there is an anxiety present, a sense that the hard-earned knowledge gathered from one culture will not translate to another. We hear the speaker asking, “Can these things in my life mesh? Can they join?” In “A Course in Subtlety” we read, “I introduce my mother to my French husband. / Silence lost gravity and hit / the floor.” And then later, in “New Growth,” presumably the voice of the mother speaks, “Married daughters are strangers.”

The poems of the second half are just as marked by loss and powerlessness as the first half, only here that defeat is personal, whereas before it was political. All the same, as this first section moves toward Europe, we find ourselves appropriately positioned for the second section of the book, Dear Paris, which opens with a Cavafy quote: You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you. Here we are aware that this quote serves as both introduction and conclusion. In one way it acts as the speaker’s formal resignation that she might never actually blend the two cultures together from the first section—Europe and Asia. While, at the same time, a subtitle like “Dear Paris” calls to mind the infamous, infectious city of Paris, wherein the quote might be taken more literally at surface value.

The poems in this second section take place, for the most part, in Paris proper. They include an actual poem-letter to Paris, a brief history of France and the French mentality, and an ode, of sorts, to chocolate. The language and tenor of there seventeen poems avoid redundant and pompous insertions of the French language, which we might expect from a poet not as considerate and adroit as Sze-Lorrain. While all the while we are always aware of where we are, we are in Paris all this time, situated directly in the hubbub of French life. For the most part these poems stretch long and narrow down the page, with very few lines longer than ten syllables.

While being a section of poems set in Paris, there are interesting moments where the speaker finds symbols, moments, artifacts, and reminders of her former life. Be it in a Chinese restaurant on Rue Sainte-Anne where:

...the chef spreads a gauze

of soy-sauce around the heap, the circle

like a brush stroke of Zen calligraphy.

Porridge now smoking under my nose,

I confess an old habit — with a spoon, I dig

a hole, cavernous, right in the middle,

where ribbons of dried pork flurry out

and untangle themselves, like moist

brown roots expanding skyward.

Today, I still have no idea

how to eat porridge with chopsticks,

without stirring it into chalky ripples.

Or, again in a restaurant, we read in the poem “China”:

What — after revolutions — remains exquisite?

Paris has houses but here is not your home, says

the Maître d’hôtel frostily. Pas du tout, the beggar says.

No weighty words, he casts a legless shadow over the table.

And it is interesting that the element from the speaker’s old life in China—be it physically, genetically, or in memory—that reappears most often is food. This is most striking in a book of poems that opens, in the first section, with a poem that is, on the surface, about her grandmother cooking moon shaped snacks. It seems the speaker uses food, or perhaps more precisely, the energy locked inside food as a way of moving through time, space, and geography. Seven of the seventeen poems in this section are centered around food and/or hunger—“Eating Grilled Langoustines,” “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne,” “L’Assiette dea Trois Amis,” and “Snapshots from a Siamese Banquet,” to name a few.

Where the fist section of poems deals with two cultures coming together, the second section deals with cultures coming apart, or being picked apart, boiled down like basic, “traditional” servings of food. The third section, The Key Always Opens, while not belittling the complexity and deftness of the preceding sections, explicitly takes on some pretty large themes: art, god, science, music, and literature. There is not a single poem in that does not openly call forth Einstein, Celan, Edith Piaf, Bach, Van Gogh, Chopin, the Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus, or Virginia Woolf, to name some.

Though often times the poetry is simply evoking a sense that one is surrounded by these figures but not necessarily interacting or communicating with them, they are there nonetheless, their presence is felt. Sometimes the speaker merely passes by a statue, or hears a line from this or that poet, or overhears and recognizes some classical notes. For example, in “Instructions: No Meeting No World,” we read, “Hang a bicycle tire on the door and Duchamp’s / portrait on toilet walls.” Lines like this, and others indicate a stance that perhaps we are surrounded by “high culture” to the point of gluttons. There are moments when we might hear the speaker saying, “ENOUGH!”

Formally, the poems here, in this last section, are more expressive of the poet’s abilities to use both fixed and experimental units of verse. The villanelle, “Along Ludlow Street,” for example, is an example of this. Or, “A Lot had Happened: A Five Act Play,” modeled after Gertrude Stein, shows the poet stepping away from standard poem-on-the-page poetics and exploring language through a slightly modified lens.

These closing poems are rich and beautiful and noticeably different from the poems of the first two sections. It feels a bit like the poet let her hair down and, in many ways, the poetry responds rather willingly to this relaxation. “A town sleeps next to a rising dark force. / This night whispers eternal,” from “Van Gogh Is Smiling;” or, from “Rauch of Celan,” the lines, “At dusk the dead soar on iron wings, / the living grope around a mutilated day”; lines like these seem to exemplify Sze-Lorrain’s ability to reach into metaphor and shake sounds from it like apples from a tree.

One could hardly do better than this amazing collection of poems. Whether they are read one by one over the course of a week or all in one sitting, they have the audacity to look back at us and narrow their eyes. Often I sensed from the lines what the poet states herself in “Steichen’s Photographs” that “Souls inside them are probably speaking.”

***

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is an editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). She lives in Paris, France and New York City.

***

Z Cody Lee is a poet and letterpress printer. He lives in Missoula, MT where he is currently finishing a translation of the complete poems of Blaise Cendrars. See his fine press work online at www.gendun.com.

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.

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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.

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Edythe Haendel Schwartz ‘s collection, “Exposure,”was published by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown , KY December, 2007, and was nominated for the California Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in journals including Calyx, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Earth’s Daughters, Kaleidoscope, Poet Lore, Pearl, Potomac Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Spillway, JAMA, Runes, Passager, Water-Stone, Natural Bridge and other journals, as well as several anthologies.

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.

***

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.