Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category

« Older Entries

The Shifting Body of Telling the Story

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Ten couplets make up Telling the Story by Susan V. Meyers. Ten long thin stanzas like the fingers on my hands, her hands, like the fingers that “eventually learn” in her poem. Two lines per stanza like the two fingers with which you check your pulse. The equivalence of structure to body does not remain consistent though the structure does.

Consistency is pressing too hard, too much ambition that “defeats us”, doesn’t let the body change like the burning cinders (hard things the fire leaves), stars, and red leaves the poem’s speaker sometimes feels. This lyric list is broken into

leaves flushing red, or a bone like an arrow—
the dead generations’—cupped cold in my hand like some certain arc.

with dashes as the arrow-bones’ line of flight: a part of the body becomes a projectile, moves through the generations of the dead then back to be cupped in a hand, an arc, but the hand is an arc or the object at rest can be an arc too in the indeterminate grammar of the line.

How can a mind in a body shifting so know “Is this the story I should be telling?” This is an adolescent girl speaking, her fingers digging into her neck, trying to find the one thing that’s supposed to stay steady, until she becomes dizzy. (One’s heart rate may change throughout the menstrual cycle.) This is also an older woman looking back, who still doesn’t know everything but realizes

…perhaps it’s enough that this story got started,
that fingers eventually learn:

If you want to find rhythm, test gently;
our blood pulses close at the skin.

The body learns as the body shifts, not the brain or the disembodied line alone. And only perhaps: those who change in a changing world must temper their wisdom with uncertainty, or it is not very wise.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: , ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | 1 Comment »

The Reversed Transitions of Destruction

Friday, October 10th, 2008

In Guernica, Robert Thomas’s visceral poem Plague presents a series of changes that portray the progress of destruction as a reversal of time. The girl who first catches the plague shows it with a sun that seems to age in reverse—from a white-haired tonsured monk to a younger monk with the same hairstyle. Then the plague spreads “like a fire” moving backwards through a book—The Book—from “Revelations to Genesis.”

Later, the speaker, a painter, describes seeing

a girl’s death forcing itself
out of her belly in a parody of birth

To destroy life, death must reach back to life’s beginning, but witnesses distance themselves from it, label it parody, to avoid understanding the full connection.

The death of a man described in the last few stanzas, if only as something the painter’s model may realize as possibly occurring that evening, occurs

…while he strolls through

his vineyards testing the firmness
of a fist of grapes (not quite ripe)

Yet his death is accompanied by a realization that

…each sip of wine
under the arbor—must have sounded
to Him [God] like a prayer to be left alone

It is as if the wine has fled back into a state before readiness so as not to be consumed by death; nothing is harvestable when the harvester dies.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: , ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | No Comments »

The Secret State of Everything

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Jéanpaul Ferro’s very sensual “The Secret State of Everything” in Willows Wept Review begins in a multiply liminal space. The first few lines establish this: “We came by moonlight to Cuba, / washed up on her shores with the giant catfish.” Moonlight suggests neither full darkness nor the full light of day but something in between. The shores of a nation represent both its political boundaries and the shifting line between sea and land. In the second stanza, the addressee’s kiss becomes “a topaz held against the morning light”, shifting to another kind of liminal light, that which marks sunrise, the time between light and dark rather than a state between light and dark.

Then, however, something shifts. Full non-liminal day appears, and makes “our every move sticky and blistering in the heat”. No longer referring to themselves as on the shore but on the island, which is to say fully in the territory rather than on its borders, they find themselves unable to change.

In response the two merge, try absorb the line between them, to swallow all the borders and liminal spaces. Then they return to the harsh waves “to hide” from a world of certain territory, light, and heat.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | 1 Comment »

Umbrella Summer 2008: Orsorum

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Hiroshima Umbrellas by manthatcooksOrsorum means a beginning, a start, an undertaking, or the first few words. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the section of Umbrella’s Summer 2008 issue that takes this term as its title proves a treasure trove of transitional poems and themes.

In “The Velvet Dun”, Jackson Lassiter mocks those who “wax poetic of morn” for ignoring the true terrifying potential and power of a shifting time.

Have they never been unnerved
by the impaling dawn, hid
cowering in dread beneath
a yellow blanket’s vain shield?

However, he fails to give those of us who have not hidden (in dread– I assume we have all hidden from morning in irritation) reason to share or at least understand the fear before moving on to his love of “smoky nightfall”, turning what could have been a revelation about the dangers hidden even in rosy-eyed times of transition into just another night-owl-taking-on-early-birds poem, though admittedly an enjoyable one.

By contrast, his “What Do You Do With The Old Stuff?” begins with an attempt to create a transition, through a “purge” of unneeded material possessions. An inability to unload less physical rem(a)inders of the past gets in the way of change. The reasons for this change, displayed in the third paragraph, give this description of stasis its power and relevance.

Patricia Fargnoli’s “‘There is a radiance in each of us—could we but see it.’” uses a line from a poster not only as its title but also to communicate a transition that stands in shimmering counterpoint to the less present transitions of aging: the slow falling into pain and dysfunction of the body, the loss of loved-ones to death. “Yes oh yes, it sizzles in the cleft of my long dormant / sex”.

In “French Movie”, Robert E. Wood valorizes liminal and ambiguous space in film:

…pauses dominate if the goal is Cannes.
Sometimes it’s best if one character speaks no French
and the subtitles are white on white

More significantly, he concludes on a figure frozen in a transition: “someone has paused on a bridge at night”. A bridge works as an extended threshold between two riverbanks or two states; here, remaining on the bridge represents a valuable silence.

The speaker of Enriqueta Carrington’s “Suites for Cello Solo” attempts to use synesthetic music (”sunlit G in major mode”) to reawaken the recently dead. However, even an art that dwells in liminality cannot undo the transition of death once complete.

Rick Mullin’s “Montclair Father, 46″ highlights the ability of the media in general, and photography in particular, to freeze a moment of transition– in this case, a horrific and brutal moment of transition– in time and thus make it possible to be shared again and again. The effect of this is left to the reader to determine, even as the speaker puts down the paper and attends to his daughters in the second stanza.

Taste, Smell and Sight - COFFEE by Scribbling of LightJoan Merriam enacts a transition by resetting Neruda’s “Ode to Enchanted Light” in an office setting. The world become “a cup overflowing / with coffee” rather than “a glass overflowing /
with water”. Liquid is transformed and wealth redefined as that which speeds up life rather than that which is necessary to life.

David Graham, in “Statewide Razing”, narrates how a wrecking company name may inspire visions of the transitional act of a building’s destruction spread throughout a far broader locale. A phrase perhaps representative of the ambition of a company’s owner becomes a sign for decomposition with machinery equated to “burying beetles and carrion crows”. “The Honey of the Earth” takes snow as that most liminal of spaces, the blank page and offers that up, not as the intimidating specter so many writers fear, but as a valentine.

Finally, Clay Stockton’s essay follows the turns and transitions of Michael Donaghy’s “Upon a Claude Glass”.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in poetry, reviews, synaesthesia | 1 Comment »

Mystery in Derek Henderson’s “The Road Along St. Jude’s”

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

In Boxcar Poetry Review’s May 2008 issue, Derek Henderson’s “The Road Along St. Jude’s” stands out for its development and defense of mystery. The poem begins with and builds on a mystery the mystery of what emerges “[o]ut of my lungs” and then travels over “backroad and gravel”. With the patron saint of lost causes in the title, this reader at least can imagine heavy phlegm or the blood brought up by that once-poetic killer we now call tuberculosis or by the vulgarly familiar TB but the strength of the title’s suggestion of travel also creates the idea of a person emerging from the lungs, perhaps in fact the speaker.

Dwelling in this mystery with the reader along for the ride (whether kicking and screaming or enjoying the vicarious negative capability depends, of course, on the individual’s preferences) Henderson writes the erstwhile lung-dweller to “Crossed curves” that it perhaps travels “over”. The nature of these crossed curves themselves is uncertain. They could be roads that turn away from an intersection rather than continuing straight, or perhaps “Crossed” should be taken as a verb. Though this seems unlikely given the tenses of other verbs in the poem, the first-time reader will not see any of these until after the nearby comma, so it remains a reasonable possibility for at least half a breath. Another possibility picks up the religious theme of the title: the phrase could describe a Celtic cross.

This possibility connects the first stanza with the last:

You want to paint my
God that leavens the tree
Failing—again, falling—into a church

God leavening the tree suggests growth but also draws in echoes of the Passover holiday when (human-made) leavening is not allowed, while the last line suggests the felix culpa: the Church only exists because of original sin, and falling into a church brings up all sorts of redemption narratives. A Latin phrase may conjure up associations with the Roman Catholic Church, though this effect will be at least mitigated for readers who recognize its origin in Horace. Indeed, this problematic religiosity supports a reading of the final stanza as a protest against those who want to paint God, and by extension, the mystery the poem begins with in any particular concrete way.

The middle stanzas also substantiate this meaning as phrases and incomplete unpunctuated sentences suggest heteroglossia. This part of the poem appeals less to me, however, as it seems only to provide a supported resting place for the mystery rather than building and defending it.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | No Comments »

Saint Monica On the Verge

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, Mary Biddinger’s “Saint Monica Burns It Down” presents a woman drawing a dramatic line between herself and a man who has mistreated her. The poem focuses on this action rather than going into details of the relationship (though the man’s affair is presented), and we are given no idea as to what will happen next in the lives of any of the poem’s three characters. Thus, this text is a poem of threshold space. A literal threshold is made of glass and habanero pepper seeds, while the longer and shorter lines expressing this act and the circumstances around it are so arranged that the work, viewed sideways, resembles another kind of threshold: a picket fence.

Within the poem’s cusp, ambiguity surrounds the fate of the “other woman” who “sipped cordial by the light of a gas stove”. The word cordial itself has overtones of warmth and happiness thanks to its alternative meaning, warm and friendly. The word also originates from Latin for heart. These two together seem to suggest some sort of connection between two betrayed women. Of course, any such connection would likely be mystical, as no literal communication between them is mentioned. If we allow for such mysticism, we must also allow for the possibility of cordial as potion (or, less magically, poison). That the woman could possess certain witchy powers or at least a knowledge of chemicals and herbs is suggested by her ability to make her peppers grow to “unimaginable lengths and heat” and by the blindness the man suffers after touching the spiked windowsill. Saint Monica - Andrea del Verrocchio

This woman being identified as a saint further underscores her connection to the mystical. The visions of many a medieval nun would have caused her to be burned at the stake had they lacked the appropriate Christian gloss.

As for her being Saint Monica, one could say this poem presents a very different reason for her to be “able to exercise a veritable apostolate amongst the wives and mothers of her native town” than the “sweetness and patience” to which the Catholic Encyclopedia refers.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: , ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | 1 Comment »

Coconut Twelve’s Sweet Meat

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Young CoconutIn replacing sugarcane with young girls in Treasure Trove, Lauren Spohrer does not make transitional figures out of young girls so much as reveal the ways in which girls and women have been treated as permanently liminal and malleable throughout history. The phrase itself is malleable in meaning . Going by the denotations of “young” and “girl” it ought to refer to a girl around five years of age or younger (or perhaps you would draw the line at six). However, it is also commonly used to refer to those who might more properly be called young women. (In such a case, young is not being used to qualify what sort of girl is being referred to but to emphasize the youth already implied by the choice of noun.) Spohrer alludes to this uncertainty with sentences most likely to refer to females at each of these ages. ‘Approximately 3000 young girls born before 1550 in the New World resulted in an unprecedented surplus’ and Christopher Columbus ‘became romantically involved with young girls and stayed a month’. (This latter case adds an additional layer of doubleness to the phrase, as it seems impossible that this was a found quote in which sugarcane was merely replaced, though this remains a possibility elsewhere.) The slipperiness of the term also gains an etymological gloss in the last paragraph in which we are told that ‘The English word “young girl” ultimately originates from the Greek word zahari, which means “young girl”‘.

Sugarcane Red Outwire by msjacobyIn “Treasure Trove”, young girls also become objects of cultural exchange beyond the etymological. ‘Westerners learned of young girls in the course of military expeditions to India . . . The Arabs and Berbers introduced young girls to Western Europe when they conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century AD. Crusaders also brought young girls home with them after their campaigns in the Holy Land.’ The young girls cross– or, rather, are made to cross– the lines between cultures and so become figures for the thresholds themselves.

They also become figures for some of the uglier aspects of cultural interaction. ‘Europeans used to measure the worth of young girls by their color: the whiter, the more demand. It became a class symbol to have the whitest young girls.’ The ambiguity of ‘have’ allows the young girls to represents both daughters and slaves, which is in itself suggestive. Exoticist desires, too, are represented: ‘Some modern tastes have reversed this trend, favoring brown/raw young girls as more “natural.”‘

Overall, then, the young girls, by taking the place of sugarcane, become a liminal phrase or category that sits on a nexus of gender, race, and commodity. It is in this place that they can be subject to ‘a method of pounding young girls that involved a closed vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum’ or to having their identities submerged in an apparent vacuum.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags:
Posted in poetry, reviews | No Comments »

The Threshold Nature of Revisitations

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

A revisitation to a place or of an idea means entering into a threshold state between the old and the new: the place or idea itself may have changed, or your own perceptions may have changed– most likely both– and yet you still recognize a sameness and think of yourself as returning, not exploring. You may not be able to step into the same river twice, but you can step into a river with the same name even more than that if you like or if you must. In 14 by 14’s third issue, which takes revisitations as its theme, Robert Crawford’s “Empty Chair” brings out this idea through the title image. By describing the chair that tourists photograph “[b]ut only if nobody’s sitting there”, he indicates a repeated viewing of this chair. The emptiness itself becomes a space of transition in the final line, though the power of this is mitigated somewhat by its association with what we are told, two lines earlier “in an artful picture can’t be named”.

Anna Evans, in “The Turn”, takes us back from the threshold of death to revisit life and tells us how life is different in the aftermath. I find, however, that this piece doesn’t sing for me. Perhaps this is because the lines seem to assign all difference to the speaker, and I prefer more ambiguity. I do not mean that the world should change in response to a single individual’s experience (though one may fairly assume that one’s intimate world does) or that a poem should pretend that more changes than actually would; on the contrary, the world is always changing and goes on changing even when an individual experiences a traumatic event. We do not have to pretend otherwise to avoid the pathetic fallacy.

Carol A. Taylor’s “A Homecoming” moves from certainty to uncertainty while moving towards a time of day marked as liminal. At the start of the second quatrain, “[i]t’s not clear what I’m looking for”, but then the sonnet turns to the sestet with the line “[t]here’s nothing here for me to find” and moves on to dawn. Sunrise and change only come with an understanding gained by revisiting the past (possibly in a dream given the time), which adds another aspect to the threshold nature of revisitations.

The (re)appearance of birds in Michael Cantor’s “Tree Swallows in August” gives a space and sky in seasonal transition. Its conclusion shows how, interactively, a revisitation may change both the visitor and the space as the speaker receives a comeuppance reminiscent of the beginning of Marianne Moore’s “A Grave”.

Other poems in this issue are no less worthy of reading and consideration (indeed, some are more so) but simply did not fit into this particular take on the theme.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in poetry, reviews | No Comments »

« Older Entries

theme designed by Tim Sainburg