Sunday, July 8, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Nonfiction by Liane Kupferberg Carter: Florid Feelings
Mr. Silverman wasn’t as handsome as the dreamy Mr. Steinfink who taught American History. No matter. I loved him. Fiercely. Fervently. Ardently. As only a moody and intense fourteen year old can worship a man of 25. It was 1968, when many draft-age men became teachers in order to avoid being sent to Vietnam. All our junior high school teachers were young, virile, and catnip to teenage girls.
Ira Silverman taught ninth grade English, and looked the professorial part: horn rimmed glasses, blazers with leather elbow patches. He was sarcastic and sensitive, a seductive combination. I would linger after class, waiting for him to notice that we were kindred souls. But Celia Schwartz, a flushed girl with googly green eyes, was always hanging around him too.
“Poetry is about compression,” he told us. “Learning to see is a discipline. Open your senses and drink the world in.”
Celia showed up the next morning with a pile of poems she’d written, quietly but effectively muscling me aside. Not to be outdone, I decided to pen poetry too.
Every afternoon that fall and winter, as Dusk Descended (as I would no doubt have written it then), I would wrench up my bedroom window and kneel in front of the hissing radiator, lowering its hinged lid to use its warm surface as my desk. I would press my nose to the rusted storm window, and suck in a cold sliver of metallic air. Feverishly I wrote, recording every passing sensation, as the sky turned cold magenta blue or fiery peach, and cars whooshed by below, their headlight beams sweeping the walls. I reveled in a voluptuous melancholy, closing out the sounds of my father’s tired tread passing my door, and my mother’s increasingly irritated calls to come set the table. When I wrote, the world fell away.
“I’m going to be a poet when I grow up,” I told my mother.
“That’s lovely, dear,” she said. “And how are you going to make a living?”
Comments like that made me furious. She didn’t understand. But I was sure Mr. Silverman did. Our world of poetry was private. Sacred. Mr. Silverman understood me. Sophisticated and sardonic, he was the grown up world that lay ahead.
Nearly every morning I would shyly hand him a new sheaf of poems I’d stayed up late to type on an old Olympia manual typewriter. He would pepper the onionskin pages with succinct comments: “Show don’t tell.” “Too obvious.” “Too emotional.” “Not enough.” “Too much.” And, thrillingly: “Very good, almost excellent.”
All that year, while I giggled with girlfriends, passed notes in study hall and tried to act worldly when we whispered about sex, I filled page after diary page with such overwrought outbursts as “How much longer can I endure this pain? It is shattering the frail wreck of my sensitive soul.”
In class one morning, as Mr. Silverman explained poetic license, some students passed around a photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s newly released album cover. I glanced at it, then stared. Oh my God, John and Yoko were naked. I had never seen a naked man. John Lennon had pubic hair? I looked up at Mr. Silverman with revulsion. Did he look like that, under his suit? I felt my face blaze.
“Man, I just don’t get it,” David Duffy was insisting to Mr. Silverman. “What does a poetic license look like?”
“I just told you, poetic license isn’t an object,” Mr. Silverman said, exasperated. “It’s a concept. It’s the writer’s freedom to break the conventional rules of language.”
“But where do you get it?” David insisted. God, he was so dense. Mr. Silverman looked at me, and rolled his eyes.
“At the Department of Motor Vehicles,” he said.
Day by day I handed him piles of poems, signing my name in lower case letters. I poured out my passion. The florid feelings simply flowed. “Were I to cry my longing to the cool wind and leave myself behind!” I scrawled. “Ah how heavy it is to be – how lonely this night!”
Breathlessly I brought him my yearbook at the end of the school term. I longed for a sign. Something that finally acknowledged and settled the bond between us. He wrote, “Without any writing on it/a piece of paper can be held/ any way you like/and it will be bright/ and pure/Empty your mind of the scribblings of darkness/ and live./Love Lee Love.”
I pored and puzzled over it for days, not sure if I was gratified or insulted. Scribblings? Darkness? Was he saying I was in some metaphoric dark place? That my poems were merely a teen’s overheated outpourings? Was he urging me to stop writing about an imagined life and start living it? But what of that last line? Was he secretly telling me to love him, or to leave him alone?
My mother gave me permission to invite Mr. Silverman to our family’s junior high graduation celebration. I pictured him standing on the front step of my parents’ house, and shivered with delicious anticipation. “Ira,” I kept thinking. “At last I’ll call him Ira.” He would finally see the woman in me. I would confess my love. He would confess his. We would kiss. There would be breathless words. And then…
That night I waited. Then I telephoned his house several times, letting the phone ring and ring. All through dinner, I watched the door of the restaurant, hoping he would appear. He never did.
He never called.
I never saw him again.
Liane
Kupferberg Carter's work has appeared in the New
York Times,
the Chicago
Tribune,
the Huffington
Post,
Babble,
Parents,
Cosmopolitan,
Glamour,
McCall’s,
Errant
Parent,
and Brevity.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Review: Joannie Stangeland's Into the Rumored Spring
Into the Rumored Spring
by Joannie Stangeland
Ravenna Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Joannie Stangeland's Into the Rumored Spring was dedicated to and inspired by the author's close friend, a breast cancer survivor, although I believe the fine craft and broad scope of the poems it contains will speak to almost any reader who has struggled, in matters both profound and mundane, and survived. However, it's difficult to imagine a more authentic gift from one author to another (the friend, we learn in these pages, is also a writer) than honest, thoughtful poems like these.
They not only testify to the empathy a loyal friend can offer, but, in addition to their fine craftsmanship, they are filled with moments of unexpected beauty and flashes of unsentimental insight.
The collection opens with a poem of despair, as the protagonist is caught in the "cruel silk" of cancer's "Web of Days."
Recovery is excruciatingly slow. In "The Hours of Waking," "... the day becomes more ordinary,/ a gauntlet..."
Stangeland writes in "A Crow Means Everything":
When the murder makes its own weather,
a wheeling dusk, that flurry
blocks what sun will show.
If there is one way to fly,
the crows will find another.
Hope is elusive. In "A Dream of Sound," "She breathes the sky,// listens for another story,/ the residue of last night's dream./ Wind shivers the smallest leaves."
In "More Than the Sum," there is a glimpse of acceptance: "If a part of herself is missing,/ it is no longer a part of herself."
In "Tender, Then Bright," "What is no longer green is becoming green./ Next she will see the new leaves/ of the willows—so tender, so bright."
Interspersed throughout the collection are brief poems, each entitled "Intermezzo," in which the protagonist's husband and daughters bring home news and mementos from her old life and from the outside world she has been shut in from during long weeks and months of illness. Her adolescent daughters are often described as "blooming."
Other poems describe dreams of returning to Venice, a rower's paradise, filled with stirring, almost taunting descriptions of the city's sensual delights. The protagonist is an avid rower.
In the collection's final poem, set in Spring, she is finally ready to go back on the water:
The hull skims across the lake.
The sun is in her hair.
Leaves emerge, soft as moths,
shiver in the wind.
Spring streams around her.
She is blooming.
A moving labor of love, a wonderful tribute, these poems provide a window into the slow, day-by-day struggle against an insidious disease by refusing to shirk its starker aspects and by offering hope without platitudes.
In "When It Is Blue," Stangeland writes:
Her new body, built now for water—
sleek, streamlined—
a seal or a porpoise
(think of dolphins around the bow
as a schooner races along the coast
and the sails are full.)
*Note from the author: The author friend for whom the poems were written is doing well and approaching her five-year mark. All author proceeds will be donated to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
by Joannie Stangeland
Ravenna Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
They not only testify to the empathy a loyal friend can offer, but, in addition to their fine craftsmanship, they are filled with moments of unexpected beauty and flashes of unsentimental insight.
The collection opens with a poem of despair, as the protagonist is caught in the "cruel silk" of cancer's "Web of Days."
Recovery is excruciatingly slow. In "The Hours of Waking," "... the day becomes more ordinary,/ a gauntlet..."
Stangeland writes in "A Crow Means Everything":
When the murder makes its own weather,
a wheeling dusk, that flurry
blocks what sun will show.
If there is one way to fly,
the crows will find another.
Hope is elusive. In "A Dream of Sound," "She breathes the sky,// listens for another story,/ the residue of last night's dream./ Wind shivers the smallest leaves."
In "More Than the Sum," there is a glimpse of acceptance: "If a part of herself is missing,/ it is no longer a part of herself."
In "Tender, Then Bright," "What is no longer green is becoming green./ Next she will see the new leaves/ of the willows—so tender, so bright."
Interspersed throughout the collection are brief poems, each entitled "Intermezzo," in which the protagonist's husband and daughters bring home news and mementos from her old life and from the outside world she has been shut in from during long weeks and months of illness. Her adolescent daughters are often described as "blooming."
Other poems describe dreams of returning to Venice, a rower's paradise, filled with stirring, almost taunting descriptions of the city's sensual delights. The protagonist is an avid rower.
In the collection's final poem, set in Spring, she is finally ready to go back on the water:
The hull skims across the lake.
The sun is in her hair.
Leaves emerge, soft as moths,
shiver in the wind.
Spring streams around her.
She is blooming.
A moving labor of love, a wonderful tribute, these poems provide a window into the slow, day-by-day struggle against an insidious disease by refusing to shirk its starker aspects and by offering hope without platitudes.
In "When It Is Blue," Stangeland writes:
Her new body, built now for water—
sleek, streamlined—
a seal or a porpoise
(think of dolphins around the bow
as a schooner races along the coast
and the sails are full.)
*Note from the author: The author friend for whom the poems were written is doing well and approaching her five-year mark. All author proceeds will be donated to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Review: Marcia Arrieta's triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme
triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme
by Marcia Arrieta
Otoliths, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
by Marcia Arrieta
Otoliths, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
triskelion, tiger month, tangram, thyme, Marcia Arrieta's first full-length poetry collection, opens with an epigraph from Jacques Lacan, "the unconscious is structured like a language." Arrieta's poems seem to be structured in the way a language of the unconscious might be. Like dreams, they merely hint at underlying realities, making no attempt to corner them outright. Her lines are brief and her sentences are briefer, many composed of just one word. One of the longest in the collection is found in the poem "learning to see," stating simply that "we must continue to believe in the magical."
Arrieta's poems have a spiritual component, not in a dogmatically religious sense but rather following in an Eastern tradition which found echoes in the West with Blake, Rilke and later the Zen-influenced Beat poets, now somewhat out of fashion in this increasingly materialistic new century. Impervious to current trends, Arrieta's approach suggests she still views the poet's task as that of the mystic, to observe, if not for the purpose of intellectual comprehension, then at least of a cerebral processing of awareness and an experiential sort of understanding.
Her poems make no conclusions or value judgments, no pat statements, only observations, notes from the field. They compile abstract objects into a montage of hints and clues that read much like half-remembered dreams.
At times the mystery of this terse, abstract style may confound the reader to the extent that it feels arbitrary and deliberately hermetic, in the way of a challengingly simplistic modern art piece or inscrutable Zen koan. Not every line rewards and enlightens with repeated readings, but many do. As Arrieta counsels in "Impossible," "binocular a feather./ pay attention."
In addition to Eastern philosophers, Western psychoanalysts (Lacan, Jung) and artists such as photographer Joseph Sudek and sculptor/architect Isamu Noguchi, Arrieta draws inspiration from modern physics, in particular Einstein's theory of relativity. There are also several recurring motifs from nature, one being the "bear at the window," perhaps representing the wild, the unknowable, the dangerous.
In "the mysteries," Arrieta writes:
faraway in the land of imaginary all is calm. we learn of symbols.
symbol the man. symbol the woman. all in the name of meaning.
all in the name of understanding. the mountain in the distance.
We read there an allusion to Lacan's theory of the symbolic but also to the enlightened master, to Einstein the formidable genius, and even to the bear at the window, each represented by the distant mountain.
There is also a call to engagement with this world in all its mystery, both to observe it and to dive right in. In the collection's first poem, "Almost Real," Arrieta writes, "read the sand. swim in./ travel the sequence of numbers./ study the wave theory of light."
"in search of fireflies" ends with a sort of metaphysical math problem:
a gingko leaf is found
in a book of psychology.
equate the sunflower.
The section titles of this collection are often poems in themselves. One is a simple semi-colon. The final one is titled, "A Circle," and is followed by a brief poem:
imaginary lives.
invisible mountains.
galileo's ink-wash drawing of the moon.
nothing is isolated.
water. rock. flower.
fields. woods.
trace the path.
The theme of unity emerges as, not ironically, the unifying force in this bold collection which feels equally comfortable with its experimental veneer and the timeless project at its heart.
Arrieta's poems have a spiritual component, not in a dogmatically religious sense but rather following in an Eastern tradition which found echoes in the West with Blake, Rilke and later the Zen-influenced Beat poets, now somewhat out of fashion in this increasingly materialistic new century. Impervious to current trends, Arrieta's approach suggests she still views the poet's task as that of the mystic, to observe, if not for the purpose of intellectual comprehension, then at least of a cerebral processing of awareness and an experiential sort of understanding.
Her poems make no conclusions or value judgments, no pat statements, only observations, notes from the field. They compile abstract objects into a montage of hints and clues that read much like half-remembered dreams.
At times the mystery of this terse, abstract style may confound the reader to the extent that it feels arbitrary and deliberately hermetic, in the way of a challengingly simplistic modern art piece or inscrutable Zen koan. Not every line rewards and enlightens with repeated readings, but many do. As Arrieta counsels in "Impossible," "binocular a feather./ pay attention."
In addition to Eastern philosophers, Western psychoanalysts (Lacan, Jung) and artists such as photographer Joseph Sudek and sculptor/architect Isamu Noguchi, Arrieta draws inspiration from modern physics, in particular Einstein's theory of relativity. There are also several recurring motifs from nature, one being the "bear at the window," perhaps representing the wild, the unknowable, the dangerous.
In "the mysteries," Arrieta writes:
faraway in the land of imaginary all is calm. we learn of symbols.
symbol the man. symbol the woman. all in the name of meaning.
all in the name of understanding. the mountain in the distance.
We read there an allusion to Lacan's theory of the symbolic but also to the enlightened master, to Einstein the formidable genius, and even to the bear at the window, each represented by the distant mountain.
There is also a call to engagement with this world in all its mystery, both to observe it and to dive right in. In the collection's first poem, "Almost Real," Arrieta writes, "read the sand. swim in./ travel the sequence of numbers./ study the wave theory of light."
"in search of fireflies" ends with a sort of metaphysical math problem:
a gingko leaf is found
in a book of psychology.
equate the sunflower.
The section titles of this collection are often poems in themselves. One is a simple semi-colon. The final one is titled, "A Circle," and is followed by a brief poem:
imaginary lives.
invisible mountains.
galileo's ink-wash drawing of the moon.
nothing is isolated.
water. rock. flower.
fields. woods.
trace the path.
The theme of unity emerges as, not ironically, the unifying force in this bold collection which feels equally comfortable with its experimental veneer and the timeless project at its heart.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Flash Fiction Contest Cancelled
Apologies for another lengthy hiatus between reviews. A new one will be coming by next weekend.
Meanwhile, I need to make a reluctant but necessary announcement about the flash fiction contest, which was scheduled to close by the 15th of this month. To be perfectly straightforward, we just haven't received enough entries to award the prize of this self-funding contest. I know a lot of you are like me and sometimes wait until the last minute on these things, but in the case of the poetry contests we held over the last two years, we had a good stack of entries by this point, and based on that comparison, we just can't be assured we're going to end up with enough to hold a fair, competitive contest this year.
So we're going to have to pull the plug on this one. All entrants' reading fees will be returned by PayPal within the next few business days, and again, my apologies.
But for those who like contests, don't worry; we haven't abandoned them entirely. We still plan to hold one next year, one you all just might be interested in, so check out our next two issues to learn what we've got in mind. Our Spring/Summer issue is almost filled and will be launching in June, and as always, we're accepting art, poetry and flash fiction submissions on a rolling basis year-round.
Meanwhile, I need to make a reluctant but necessary announcement about the flash fiction contest, which was scheduled to close by the 15th of this month. To be perfectly straightforward, we just haven't received enough entries to award the prize of this self-funding contest. I know a lot of you are like me and sometimes wait until the last minute on these things, but in the case of the poetry contests we held over the last two years, we had a good stack of entries by this point, and based on that comparison, we just can't be assured we're going to end up with enough to hold a fair, competitive contest this year.
So we're going to have to pull the plug on this one. All entrants' reading fees will be returned by PayPal within the next few business days, and again, my apologies.
But for those who like contests, don't worry; we haven't abandoned them entirely. We still plan to hold one next year, one you all just might be interested in, so check out our next two issues to learn what we've got in mind. Our Spring/Summer issue is almost filled and will be launching in June, and as always, we're accepting art, poetry and flash fiction submissions on a rolling basis year-round.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Review: Margaret Bashaar's Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel
Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel
by Margaret Bashaar
Blood Pudding Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Margaret Bashaar's second chapbook, Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel, is an unforgettable ride through a landscape that has frozen in time one particular summer, seen through the eyes of two young women, Mary and Claire, and the man or men who inhabited this space with them at a time when their lives were altered. The space in question is a haunted hotel in a "dead coal mining town" in which the only attractions are seedy bars, cemeteries, junkyards and abandoned train stations. It's Bashaar's intensely original, erotic lyricism that reanimates the denizens of this haunted summer and makes us care about them.
The chapbook, from Blood Pudding Press, is an object of art visually as well. Mine was bound with soft purple ribbon to match the fleshy-purple marbling of its pages. It's always fun to open a chapbook from this press to see what flutters out: in this case, a delicate blue heart and a sexy, creepy little booklet.
"Sexy" and/or "creepy" can describe a lot of the poems here, though many are also tinged with notes of shame or wistfulness at the memory of a certain kind of loss. Others affirm the strength of a survivor who has absorbed the power of the once-powerful entities she has eluded or defeated.
In "The Girl Who Lived at the Hotel," Bashaar writes of Claire, "When she tries to remember a name, the feeling/ of sun on her neck, her throat is suddenly open./ Water spills out of her mouth and it is the remembering/ that loosens her joints, makes flowers bloom in her palms."
Mary, "The Girl Who Kept Secrets," is as hermetic and self-determined as Claire is spontaneous and vulnerable:
She gets a hold on everyone she meets,
fingers gentle hooks, folds up tiny boxes,
whispers into all of them the secrets she can't keep.
She ties them up, stacks them to the ceiling in her closet.
She's six deep by now.
She holds the answers to questions under her tongue
before she breathes them into boxes,
before she learns how to forget them entirely.
In "The Unmaking," we are introduced to the mysterious figure of Claire's lover, the demon hunter, who "... wraps around her wrists and he pulls her along,/ he pulls her along and her feet barely touch the ground./ They go up the hill, up over the sidewalk,/ the stones,/ up to the water tower, up to the cemetery in its shadow/ and he leads her between the headstones and it is dark and it is cold."
In "The Leaving of It," Claire begins to slough off the influence of the haunting, viewing the hotel now from a more distant vantage:
She is half way home from where she balled her fists and prayed
for a garden three years ago, but she was something else then,
a linen thread, an unlit candle. Her lover told her she was in his walls,
that she was a part of him he could not carve out and she did not believe him.
She is still not certain if he handed her an apple or a peach,
if she's been tossed out into the ocean like a caught fish
or if she is still on a boat somewhere, gasping,
but she has gasped so long she no longer remembers
what it is like to breathe.
But in the next poem, "Claire Visits the Old Hotel," she is drawn back to the place: "... She could never separate/ these dark rooms from the summer/ and summer went to hell/ with its honey wine and monkey breeding."
It's Mary who makes a clean break with the hotel in the poem that follows, "Baleen."
... She laid the road out in
front of her and drove and drove until she came to an ocean that gnawed the
land with foamy white teeth and she waded out into the surf with the cat in his
crate in her arms, lifted him up over her head as the waves rolled over her, and
when she was shoulder-deep she dropped the cat into the water and he was, in
and instant, transformed into Eden's whale, fur sucked into his mouth for baleen
and Mary startled only for an instant. She leaned against his bulk.
She pushed him out to sea.
The cycle's longest poem, "Meditation on Ichthyosaurus at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA," leaves the setting of the hauntings and their aftermath and speaks to Mary/Claire's growing sense of universal awareness, but perhaps there is an allusion to the demon hunter here as well when Mary/Claire addresses the ancient marine reptile: "I have eaten you in every lifetime and yes,/ you have devoured me and now/ I stand here and we are both bone and we/ are each monsters the other could not quite imagine."
In the poem that follows, "Claire writes a letter to the demon hunter upon learning about the God Dimension," Claire seems to make peace with the situation that "There is no shaman,/ no road woman,/ no man reincarnated/ 14 times with hands/ dry as old paper,/ no surgeon,/ no vow that can root out/ the sliver of the hotel's wall/ I carry under my skin./ My heart has grown around it./ I think of you/ when I realize this."
The poems in this chapbook are variously sensual and introspective, mysterious and candid, vaguely lurid at times, yet always captivating. Like Bashaar's heroines, her readers will find it difficult not to return again to the haunting landscape she creates in these poems and try to understand just what happened there and why they can't seem to forget it.
by Margaret Bashaar
Blood Pudding Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
The chapbook, from Blood Pudding Press, is an object of art visually as well. Mine was bound with soft purple ribbon to match the fleshy-purple marbling of its pages. It's always fun to open a chapbook from this press to see what flutters out: in this case, a delicate blue heart and a sexy, creepy little booklet.
"Sexy" and/or "creepy" can describe a lot of the poems here, though many are also tinged with notes of shame or wistfulness at the memory of a certain kind of loss. Others affirm the strength of a survivor who has absorbed the power of the once-powerful entities she has eluded or defeated.
In "The Girl Who Lived at the Hotel," Bashaar writes of Claire, "When she tries to remember a name, the feeling/ of sun on her neck, her throat is suddenly open./ Water spills out of her mouth and it is the remembering/ that loosens her joints, makes flowers bloom in her palms."
Mary, "The Girl Who Kept Secrets," is as hermetic and self-determined as Claire is spontaneous and vulnerable:
She gets a hold on everyone she meets,
fingers gentle hooks, folds up tiny boxes,
whispers into all of them the secrets she can't keep.
She ties them up, stacks them to the ceiling in her closet.
She's six deep by now.
She holds the answers to questions under her tongue
before she breathes them into boxes,
before she learns how to forget them entirely.
In "The Unmaking," we are introduced to the mysterious figure of Claire's lover, the demon hunter, who "... wraps around her wrists and he pulls her along,/ he pulls her along and her feet barely touch the ground./ They go up the hill, up over the sidewalk,/ the stones,/ up to the water tower, up to the cemetery in its shadow/ and he leads her between the headstones and it is dark and it is cold."
In "The Leaving of It," Claire begins to slough off the influence of the haunting, viewing the hotel now from a more distant vantage:
She is half way home from where she balled her fists and prayed
for a garden three years ago, but she was something else then,
a linen thread, an unlit candle. Her lover told her she was in his walls,
that she was a part of him he could not carve out and she did not believe him.
She is still not certain if he handed her an apple or a peach,
if she's been tossed out into the ocean like a caught fish
or if she is still on a boat somewhere, gasping,
but she has gasped so long she no longer remembers
what it is like to breathe.
But in the next poem, "Claire Visits the Old Hotel," she is drawn back to the place: "... She could never separate/ these dark rooms from the summer/ and summer went to hell/ with its honey wine and monkey breeding."
It's Mary who makes a clean break with the hotel in the poem that follows, "Baleen."
... She laid the road out in
front of her and drove and drove until she came to an ocean that gnawed the
land with foamy white teeth and she waded out into the surf with the cat in his
crate in her arms, lifted him up over her head as the waves rolled over her, and
when she was shoulder-deep she dropped the cat into the water and he was, in
and instant, transformed into Eden's whale, fur sucked into his mouth for baleen
and Mary startled only for an instant. She leaned against his bulk.
She pushed him out to sea.
The cycle's longest poem, "Meditation on Ichthyosaurus at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA," leaves the setting of the hauntings and their aftermath and speaks to Mary/Claire's growing sense of universal awareness, but perhaps there is an allusion to the demon hunter here as well when Mary/Claire addresses the ancient marine reptile: "I have eaten you in every lifetime and yes,/ you have devoured me and now/ I stand here and we are both bone and we/ are each monsters the other could not quite imagine."
In the poem that follows, "Claire writes a letter to the demon hunter upon learning about the God Dimension," Claire seems to make peace with the situation that "There is no shaman,/ no road woman,/ no man reincarnated/ 14 times with hands/ dry as old paper,/ no surgeon,/ no vow that can root out/ the sliver of the hotel's wall/ I carry under my skin./ My heart has grown around it./ I think of you/ when I realize this."
The poems in this chapbook are variously sensual and introspective, mysterious and candid, vaguely lurid at times, yet always captivating. Like Bashaar's heroines, her readers will find it difficult not to return again to the haunting landscape she creates in these poems and try to understand just what happened there and why they can't seem to forget it.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Review: Marilyn McCabe's Rugged Means of Grace
Rugged Means of Grace by Marilyn McCabe
Finishing Line Press, 2011
Finishing Line Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Early on in her powerful first solo collection, Rugged Means of Grace, Marilyn McCabe establishes a direct voice with the capacity to address the unthinkable instant of sudden loss.
She writes in "If Beauty Is Just the Beginning of Terror":
where we stop short and are gone:
like the way the wind came
one day after Dave died
in a flurry of bike and deer
and clouds built themselves
an empire and the trees
bowed down and roofs fled,
barns collapsed,
sewers spewed
and all was gray and green,
then gone too blue
and the ghastly sun
like an operating room lamp
on the glowing insides of the patient,
the place where no light should go.
Quiet. Take the soft heart
from the body streaked
blue, white, red,
cup it like a bird in your mortal hand,
but it can't fly, as time does.
Time has the power to move on, the speaker implies, but the heart is in time's thrall and must wait.
At the close of "Marie," about Curie's loss of her husband Pierre, the narrator states: "I am held by this luckless substance./ The luminosity cannot be seen./ It is the end of everything./ Tell me how to live."
In the next poem, dedicated to Mme. Curie, the scientist is asked, "What drives you, woman, to melt/ and weigh, melt and weigh,/ distill yourself (a glorious poison)?"
The poem that follows, "Burning Bush," begins by addressing the mystery of life on earth, once the exclusive realm of religion: "The Genome Project guy thinks God works/ in deoxyribonucleic acid/ His wonder to behold."
It closes, "How we parse this profane world,/ find smaller, smaller/ sacraments,// holy fire,/ spiral of smoke/ from which we can't avert our eyes."
"Holyland" continues the contemporary speaker's search for meaning in a landscape which carries the heavy weight of history but is subject also to the indifference of a chaotic universe:
Be lost. No place more perfect: dry sea of tides,
vortices and waver of the ancient dead
home here on holiday, old rivalries and piques.
Stars on which to navigate shift against the bloody night,
some shooting swift as shots. Everywhere I see
myself and its opposite in mirrors made bleary
with time and a strange silvering that comes of air
and water's persistent search.
The varied natural subjects of "Bestiary" allow the more playful side of McCabe's voice to emerge. "Lettuce" laments: "Such sturdy substance/ at my source, one seed,/ but risen rosette, now/ this labile, sea-/ like self, I'm silly,/ frilled as a lizard. Unsolid,/ I'm salad. What the hell's/ happened to my head?"
In this brief collection, pilgrimages for meaning are interspersed with more mundane anecdotes, like a trip to the dentist's office in "Open Wide."
Throughout, McCabe relates in direct and detailed, sensory-rich language a succession of earthbound, sensual encounters with the profound. The title comes from the closing line of "Lac du Saint Sacrament": "... This/ is my body, visible sign of invisible/ reality. You dissolve me:/ earth's impulsive intentions,/ its inadvertent and slow evolving violence./ You are a rugged means of grace.
Each encounter permits a little more illumination, even if no conclusions are reached beyond recognition of the artist-seeker's role of transient observer. "Signs of Passerines" begins: "I try not to think. All the things I've left behind./ My name on a white page, clack of my words clattering down./ The window: taking it apart. The center."
Early on in her powerful first solo collection, Rugged Means of Grace, Marilyn McCabe establishes a direct voice with the capacity to address the unthinkable instant of sudden loss.
She writes in "If Beauty Is Just the Beginning of Terror":
where we stop short and are gone:
like the way the wind came
one day after Dave died
in a flurry of bike and deer
and clouds built themselves
an empire and the trees
bowed down and roofs fled,
barns collapsed,
sewers spewed
and all was gray and green,
then gone too blue
and the ghastly sun
like an operating room lamp
on the glowing insides of the patient,
the place where no light should go.
Quiet. Take the soft heart
from the body streaked
blue, white, red,
cup it like a bird in your mortal hand,
but it can't fly, as time does.
Time has the power to move on, the speaker implies, but the heart is in time's thrall and must wait.
At the close of "Marie," about Curie's loss of her husband Pierre, the narrator states: "I am held by this luckless substance./ The luminosity cannot be seen./ It is the end of everything./ Tell me how to live."
In the next poem, dedicated to Mme. Curie, the scientist is asked, "What drives you, woman, to melt/ and weigh, melt and weigh,/ distill yourself (a glorious poison)?"
The poem that follows, "Burning Bush," begins by addressing the mystery of life on earth, once the exclusive realm of religion: "The Genome Project guy thinks God works/ in deoxyribonucleic acid/ His wonder to behold."
It closes, "How we parse this profane world,/ find smaller, smaller/ sacraments,// holy fire,/ spiral of smoke/ from which we can't avert our eyes."
"Holyland" continues the contemporary speaker's search for meaning in a landscape which carries the heavy weight of history but is subject also to the indifference of a chaotic universe:
Be lost. No place more perfect: dry sea of tides,
vortices and waver of the ancient dead
home here on holiday, old rivalries and piques.
Stars on which to navigate shift against the bloody night,
some shooting swift as shots. Everywhere I see
myself and its opposite in mirrors made bleary
with time and a strange silvering that comes of air
and water's persistent search.
The varied natural subjects of "Bestiary" allow the more playful side of McCabe's voice to emerge. "Lettuce" laments: "Such sturdy substance/ at my source, one seed,/ but risen rosette, now/ this labile, sea-/ like self, I'm silly,/ frilled as a lizard. Unsolid,/ I'm salad. What the hell's/ happened to my head?"
In this brief collection, pilgrimages for meaning are interspersed with more mundane anecdotes, like a trip to the dentist's office in "Open Wide."
Throughout, McCabe relates in direct and detailed, sensory-rich language a succession of earthbound, sensual encounters with the profound. The title comes from the closing line of "Lac du Saint Sacrament": "... This/ is my body, visible sign of invisible/ reality. You dissolve me:/ earth's impulsive intentions,/ its inadvertent and slow evolving violence./ You are a rugged means of grace.
Each encounter permits a little more illumination, even if no conclusions are reached beyond recognition of the artist-seeker's role of transient observer. "Signs of Passerines" begins: "I try not to think. All the things I've left behind./ My name on a white page, clack of my words clattering down./ The window: taking it apart. The center."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)