With permission of Book/Mark a Quarterly Small Press Review.
Winter-2015
Winter-2015
Review by Martin Abramson
MASTER OF LEAVES: By Murray Silverstein
Sixteen Rivers Press
San Francisco, CA
$16.00, 91 pp, Paper
Murray Silverstein's style is a
breezy, casual, off- the-cuff affair that gets quite chummy with the reader. Of
course, a chum is a friend with whom one can speak his mind without fear of
criticism. But alas, the reviewer, hard hearted cynics that he is, may assume
no such intimacy. If a line like
hummingbird
at the fuchsia---suck away, pal.
offends him to the soul, what can
he do but hold it up and hope the reader agrees.
Not that Mr. Silverstein's
collection is replete with such examples, but the style would seem to encourage
them, and not always felicitously. The same poem, “The Constant”, refers to the speed of light and asks, "why,
in the famous equation, must it be squared) it's already the speed of
light?" The question is disingenuous as the poet shows later that he's
perfectly aware that mass figures in the equation. The poem is a conceit which
describes the body of a woman as a physical constant, tossing Einstein in for
corroboration. To be sure, the poem contains some lovely descriptive lines:
"but there's the heat, that feral almost- chocolate smell/ and twigs of
cedar—twiglets---tangled in your hair." But there's also simplistic
philosophy: "We're hit/ with a double whammy in this life: sex and other
people." Maybe a single whammy. Doesn't "other people," certain ones,
include the subject of sex?
Mother is "Mother
Goose" in which a mother's despair at the loss of her daughter to sudden
elopement is nicely set
against the indifference of the
geese: "...my mother sat
down/ in a chair she never sat in,
and wouldn't speak..." While the geese, ". . .steadfastly fly- floating
across the sky.. ." are unheedful.
The poet's world has changed, but
...what is that to the geese?
... Tell me, if you know, I say we
can never know, but we can ask...
the
lyric mind
was made to ask. But what is that
mind to the geese?
Two poems that are similar in
theme are "Here Went the Egret" and "Song of the Field." The latter
recalls "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" in lines like:
"The song of the field is the buzz of the mind..." and "To enter
the mind, enter the field." In "Here Went the Egret," the
speaker digs a pond and stocks it with fish only to watch his aquarium emptied
by an egret. But, forgetting pond and fish, the poet is awed by the power of
the egret (as was Hopkins at a windhover) "...stroking the morning,
erotics of air, as up/ and over me she glides..."
Both poems suggest that the
closest we can come to reality is by an apotheosis of, or even by entering into
the consciousness of a bird. This one ends with the poet who:
... dug the pond, bought the fish,
Thought there was me, the egret,
the fish, but no,
there is only the egret.
"Song of the Field,"
after descending from the mind to the man, to the field, to the edge of the
field, to the woods and to the caw of the crow, concludes: "...to enter
the woods, you must enter the crow."
Mr. Silverstein often pays homage
to authors and artists he admires. In "Lunch with Saul Bellow," he
quizzes the novelist as Dante did Virgil. "...how is love lavished?"
"why is it lavished?" "...love itself is spun! From what?"
The poet gets reasonably straight answers thus far, but the remainder of the
poem dissolves into forest sounds; "hoo-hoo-coo:" literary advice:
"build a house/ of stories, tangled with other stories" and cryptic
pronouncements: "sadness the marrow of the want bone."
The poem, "In Scarlet
Town" invokes Bob Dylan's song, Vermeer's Young Woman at a Window with a
Pitcher, Moby Dick, and Beethoven. It's a kind of culturally comprehensive
comment on guilt, betrayal, escape and remorse summed up by the penultimate
line," Mistakes were made and all is lost," but things are partially
redeemed in the final image of the Vermeer: "Let me call your attention to
her lips."
In "Self-Portrait," Mr.
Silverstein once again plays physics off against art, referencing the discovery
of the God particle with Rembrandt's painting. The trillionth of a second glow
of the Higgs boson is mirrored in "...the tiny drop of white in the black
pools" of the artist's eyes; and in "'...the glowing speck of silver
I on the head of his cane..."
In two lengthy poems, "The
Poison, The Cure" and "What is Man? " Mr. Silverstein brings
Joyce and Dostoyevsky into the mix in the persons of Prince Myshkin and Molly
Bloom. The first poem is more or less sexually oriented. The second is
considerably darker involving dogs, leashes, pain and Ulysses.
"The Wheeled Blade" is
probably the most overtly erotic poem in the book. The poet and a friend,
baking pizzas, remember Judy Sharfman from years past, whose father ran the
Hebrew school; who would ...open her
legs on her back on the grass and then snap them shut." It was his
initiation to the female body. And the grown boys, marveling that she'd
subsequently become a rabbi, comingle her with the Bible: "wordstream from
the cuntspring" and "Torah within the Torah."
The title poem, is probably the
best in this collection. The first of twelve sections describes insects on a
late summer evening. "...a gnat storm is rising, a-jitter/ like a worried
thought..." Water Walkers or Jesus bugs, don't walk so much as
"dimple, and drift' on water.. .or they hump the water... sparks of manic
desiring..."
In the second section, the
October sun blasts the plum "turning its jam-dark leaves/ to pale-green
moons." The third section centers on the autumn leaves. As the writer
gathers them and crushes them underfoot, the leaves speak of their perceptions:
Great master, our alphabet's an
agony
of spine, a crazed ecstatic
branching after light.-
The heliotropic leaves turn to
the red south but wonder about Northern darkness and why lovers are impatient
for the night.
The fourth section is commentary
on the third in conference with "the Interior Gal." They parse the aspects of light in a manner
reminiscent of Jackson Mac Low's Light
Poems: “There's light and the
endless craving of light to see itself and, ...light itself is made/ she said,
of light-eviscerated plums.”
Section 5 is a meditation on
death occasioned by the funeral of a friendly neighbor. The fall mirrors her
death: "...taking its toll. Golden
a moment, then blown, rainy/ taking until the turn, the turn the tolling
turns..."
Section 6 recalls lovers "on
the lawn that sophomore spring: " "Just out of jail and all over each
other." But the episode ends in emptiness: "The leaves falling, and then the
rain."
Section 7, December Light, is
fashioned in free verse as is most of these poems, but not without meter,
variations within meter and internal rhyme. I will leave close analysis of Mr.
Silverstein's complex scansion to those more erudite, and suffice myself with a
long quote from this beautiful piece:
...what is, December 1, is light
through the fog and slowly
gaining on the neighbor's red-
tipped maple as if a cloud were an ember.
Inside the window, the same light
gathers
in the hour-shaped glass centered
on the sill, its bouquet
of red tulips and pale, feathered
grass—whose stems
he can see are becoming
translucent
the one light
through all.
Skipping to section 10, the
January departure of the sun eviscerates the landscape
And words, those tokens of joy the world
offered once,
are beginning to disappear
into the things they've
named'
becoming the tears in
things...
And the penultimate section, 1 1,
February Sky, takes the poet back to the dreary, typical city landscape in
February, with the bearded religious loony, the couple on the steps of the
middle school and the rain.
But with late March in Section
12, we feel "the fragrant breeze, so undeserved/ everything budding
early." And we hear:
...a children 's song!
Sung by the living
to all that are gone, with
verses, refrain—the silence
under the plum,
blossoming, everything showered in light.
I'm constrained to admit a
grudging admiration for Mr. Silverstein's work. He goes his own way, devising
his own rules along it; but if uniqueness and honest path finding are exemplars
of important poetry, these efforts surely fit the bill.
Martin Abramson is a poet, critic, author of four books, and a regular
contributor to Book/Mark
