Review by Martin Abramson

PART MIRTH, PART MURDER

by Dan Giancola.

Street Press, New York, 2006

$12.00, 56 pp, Paper

Dan Giancola, who has worked summers as a laborer, carpenter, clerk, and caretaker among a multitude of manual jobs; and spent the school years as instructor and now professor at colleges in Eastern Long Island, thoroughly refutes the old canard about those who teach. The poetic mastery Mr. Giancola demonstrated in his previous collection, Songs from the Army of the Working Stiffs, are, like fine wine, aged and matured in the present volume.

As the title suggests, the poems are grouped in two sections labeled respectively Mirth and Murder. They are separated by an intermezzo called Bedtime Suite in which the author expresses the tenderness and profundity of fatherhood. However, as I have a limited space to review this book, I propose to begin with the last and to my mind, the most moving section, Murder.

The philosopher Giles Deleuze writes of “philosophy at the edge of chaos” and later extends the concept to writing at the edge of chaos. He is not so much interested in formal systems of language, as in the areas where it deterritorializes, frays and breaks apart; seeing this as a productive, affirmative process that makes new thinking possible, rather than a destructive mechanism. He values the edges where language stutters and begins to fragment because in so doing, it opens into the universe of dark energy (my interpretation) which flows into the writing, illuminating and energizing it. These are processes which Mr. Giancola understands very well and uses to signal advantage in his best poems.

Elegy for Dan Murray, set during a memorial reading in a noisy bar, illustrates this:

our voices wander

like lost explorers

through your poems

and die in the din

…………………….

the amp croaks a final syllable

In Labor Day, the lawn of a beach house slopes down…

below a flag yanking

its lanyard like a guard dog

……………………………….

on the deck a telescope

poses like a heron.

……………………………….

Overhead a cormorant

a dark thought passing…

In What Do You Know About Corpses and Gold?:

Day lilies send forth flames

on slender green wicks

that gutter at dusk

January is the poem and the month…

when lovers

tally their hurt

on spreadsheets of fog

Meditation on a Moon Jelly is a minor miracle that begs comparison with Moore’s Octopus and Bishop‘s The Fish. The poetic camera, with all its intricate lenses perfectly aligned, focuses on this nearly transparent organism and finds in its crystal vacancy and exfoliate “cellophane” pulsations, a mandala for the silence of a preconscious world.

They gather light

like ice & disappear, itinerant

oracles portending clarity’s emptiness,

zen ciphers even gulls eschew.

And Mr. Giancola effortlessly repeats this feat with poems like Slugs, Ecology and Vivarium: studies that peer deeply into the universe of living things and ferret out the secret filaments of experience. Ecology is a perfect example. In complexity, Giancola finds Mozartian simplicity: “A vine’s aim? Climb.” And so they do with the sole purpose of strangling a tree. And after they are hewn down and strewn around…

on the yard’s green page

they scribble winter…

in loopy script

that’s all too human

In The Gate, the sleeping poet, tracking through wilderness runs across a rustic gate that in dream’s frustration evades his every effort to pass. Reminiscent of the Kafka story of a man who waits his entire life for a door to open, it symbolizes a crime that needs atonement: to whit, the youthful killing of a deer with bow and arrow. It is only by entering in imagination, the actual bleeding wound he had inflicted, that the author is able to pass through the gate, learn “what man I was” and find “a world to live in.”

In Eels, we witness a boy’s earliest memories of a mother-goddess

barefoot with bucket & spear

on barnacle rocks, singing

of her life as a bird, as a fish

in that world out of which

we are born

The Oak “grows in the wind,/taking the shape/of its trouble”. Indeed, the profusion and precision of natural imagery throughout this collection would be stunning even without the insights and revelations to which they point.

In the first section, Mirth, Mr. Giancola indulges his interests and ordinary experiences. There are some pieces that focus on athletics such as Little League and The Beehive which describes the dangerous exhilaration of mountain climbing. Others are clearly physical: Sciatica, which elevates the clinical to the mystical; Sunbather and The Fat War, both ironic studies of physical vanity, in the former, leading to cancerous horror. Crowns, examines an unpleasant visit to the dentist again inspiring a confession of vanity and fear of aging. In Haircut, the poet’s youthful visage with abundant hair and ponytail, mocks his tonsure which he orders cut to the bone thus hiding his receding hairline, only to reveal “my father’s face”. We share the commuter’s experience on that Machiavellian form of transportation portrayed in: Riding the Long Island Railroad.

There are some scathing sketches of people as in Neighbor, wherein a lonely woman is epitomized by the riding mower that constitutes her raison d‘etre; or Terrible Swift Sword which dramatizes the plight of a district piano teacher whose long-rehearsed fourth-grade chorus barely mumbles the chosen ode before an audience of snickering parents. In Passion Party at the Broken Down Valise, a harrowing slide show of drunken people are seen trying to have fun and hook-up at a bar “to end a month of loneliness”. There follows a grostesque display of sex-dolls, dildoes and erotica. It’s Long Island’s corner of The Waste Land.

It goes without saying, that an English professor who teaches creative writing will employ all the poetic techniques with old-hand mastery. They are woven into the warp and woof of these poems and I leave it to the reader to tease them out. Ditto the diction. The true joy of these poems lies elsewhere…in the ironic but accurate depiction of gullible people trying to adjust to modern modalities, in the author’s personal confessions with which the reader cannot help but empathize…but pre-eminently in the brilliant fusion of image and idea which generates the explosive power we like to call inspiration.

ONLY, NOT ONLY

Review by Martin Abramson

ONLY, NOT ONLY

By Francine Witte

Finishing Line Press, KY

$12.00, 28pp, Paper

                  Except for Sylvia Plath, I can’t remember when a woman poet communicated so poignantly her love for the wrong man. Poem after poem expresses the loneliness and hopelessness of desertion. Yet, in the subtlety and artistry of Ms. Witte’s literary handiwork, the total effect is not sorrow but a kind of pleasure: the pleasure of discovery. Organized into free verse stanzas, these poems, while feeling conversational, have the sure rhythm and strong meter of iambic pentameter sonnets. The poem, Dream Lover, is tensed between opposite poles of desire and renunciation:

                   All those nights I wanted John

                   to call. See how good? See

                   how really good I can quit you?

                  But he didn’t listen. Or call.

                   Just shows up in a dream last week

                   with the past slung over his shoulder,

                   Sinatra-style. This time I’ll be

                   different. No fists.

She notes in The room wants to know:

                

                    The Room Wants to Know

                     where you go every night…

                     and why the mirror takes you

                     back every chance it gets.

In Moment, her despair enlarges:

                     One day, you’re alone,

                     and a moment opens up

                     wide as a white beach

                     where anything can happen

                     only nothing does.

In Not Only:

                       I deserve better, she said,

                     as she billowed a blanket

                     above the bed that was only

                     half-slept in.

And in Woman and Silence:

                                                   Now Woman 

                       eats alone, and when Silence shows up,

                       faithful, like it does every night, 

                       Woman offers it a chair.

In Still in the Laundromat, thinking about laundry and her first love:

                         I must loosen the cling   

                         one sleeve has around another,  

                         and as I do, I think how tangling

                         and untangling involve the same motions.

A Flood offers a metaphor for her predicament, as she sits on the roof, her house completely submerged:

                          All her belongings

                         clean now, and silent

                         beneath her.

                         All she has left

                         is to wait for her man

                         to come sailing home

                         on the back of a door.

In, Party, 1991, we first meet John:

                                                                      …John struts in,

                         new face, eyelids sloped   

                         like a suicide run. He fires

                         up a Marlboro, blows out steam, not smoke.

                         Soon, we’re dancing a foxtrot…

                         God, it’s a sin  

                         to want a man

                         I don’t even know.

                         But I’m breathing Marllboro

                         Fumes…

                                                 John’s all man-sweat  

                          and leather. Insanity perfume.

The author, in Only, believes herself finally free of him:

                            Today, I watched your outline

                           blurring against the landscape     

                           as you were painted back

                           into the world.

                             …I heard

                             the sound of a wound

                             beginning to knit.

But It Could Happen suggests a relapse:

                                                      …I thought

                            this was over, this universe where

                            you are the weather…

                                             …But running from you

                            is a strange direction, like the moon

                            spinning into the velvet dark.

The last poem, Now That You’re Gone, suggests a final cure: “I am practicing/ living without you.”

                              Once, last week

                            I wiped your face

                            from the early morning

                            glass. By then,

                            you were nothing

                            but a thin frost,

                            easy as dew to remove.

“Or maybe,” she adds, “that too was a dream.” The poems are not dated, so I can’t tell you whether the author’s feeling of emptiness in Moment is a result of her renunciation in Now That You’re Gone. But whatever the chronology, Ms. Witte certainly wears her rue with a difference.

                Ms. Witte is acutely aware of the supernatural forces behind natural phenomena as well. “There’s a thunder to everyday events/ that rolls so steadily, we block it out.” She sees her man engulfed in a tornado with her in Twister, and creates an ironic synthesis: “We started circling until centrifugal force/ pinned us up against opposite sides.

                               …we must have past (sic)

                            each other a thousand times as

                            we spun round and

                            round and round…

In One Night the Moon Runs Out of Patience, the moon humorously announces that she doesn’t care “how you pine away by her light” or “the tides or Chinese calendars”. She’s tired of “earth tilt, and sun/ pushing her out of the sky.” She wants to “make the crops grow’ and “…do the circuit,/ Oprah, Larry, Jay.”

                              In a sort of ode to the sun, I seen you, Sun, the author portrays the sun’s shifting roles in her life: when fugitive rays find her in the subway, or slick through a Venetian blind; when her mother “…left us like a pile/ of clothes she was giving away…” Even in a country setting, the sun curving “around the back/ of a mountain”, she suspects treachery: “…I know how you/ could shine on me and stretch/ me flat against the field;” but succumbs, letting the sun “stroke/ me sweet and bleach my brain/ till all I know is/ warm, so warm, so warm…”

Ms.Witte ties it all up with in evocation of time in Clock.

                                                       I am watching the clock

                         As it stretches its hands to a future that waves

                         from the back of a truck.

                         …

                                                     …then there’s this

                         minute unable to stand still long enough and a clock

                         steady in the sky of my kitchen wall

                         keeping time as if anything really could.

Francine Witte has certainly frozen some poignant moments for us, given us a deeply affecting gaze into the workings of her mind and delighted us even as she tolled the bells of sadness. It’s been a pleasure reviewing the work of such a gifted poet and I look forward to following her promising career in future.

                          

                                  

Review by Martin Abramson

PAINTING THE EGRET’S ECHO

By Patty Dickson Pieczka

The Bitter Oleander Press 2013 Fayettville, NY

$16.00, 81 pp, Paper

Reprinted from Book/Mark, Summer 2015

                It’s rare for a weary reviewer to be sent a book with a delight on almost every page and Painting the egret’s echo delights me no end. Mrs. Pieczka (pronounced PYECH-ka) writes in free verse stanzas sans rhyme, but with every other poetic device. Indeed, a good many of her poems are about words and writing itself. From “The Lineage of Ink”:

                          Ink lurks in the blood,

                        learning secrets.

                        …

                        Hieroglyphs and calligraphy

                                wind their cursive tongues

                        to feed on goat hide,

                                clay or papyrus scrolls,

to drink the phrases

                        that nourish a ravenous pen.

In “A Winter Poem”                                       

                        Soup stock boils in the kitchen

                        this snow-laced afternoon.

                        The poem begins with a page of steam.

                        My fingers squeak across its window…

                       

In Polish, sounds

                        purl like water in tiny

                        rivulets, a diphthong drops

                        from the mourning dove’s beak,

                        wings opening to the sun.

Nature imagery is everywhere:

                        Tonight I become the forest

                        and weave my hair into vines…

Or

                        This morning a ram’s skull

                        Rose in the east…

She

                        lifts a finch’s feather

                        and becomes weightless,

                        floats to the crown

                                   

                        of a hickory and finds

                        that her hollow bones

                        can whistle like flutes.

                       

And finds:

                                …a world beneath soil

among constellations             

of bulbs, potatoes,

a sky of onions.

The heat of “A Jalapeno” inspires an image of “a prairie surviving/ only when its grasses are grazed/ by fire that chews through purple/ mallow and lemon mint…”

Or:

                        Leaves scattering through

                        the tunnel of trees

                        ripple grass with their

                        shadows…

In “Rose Madder” the poet lists dyes for her boiling vat: “bloodroot/and larkspur…goldenrod…oak galls…woad…saffron near the foot of the ginko…sumac and indigo…”

Many poems describe a lover:

                        Your dream spills out

                        and trails fireflies

                        along a curve of evening

                        winding toward night.

From “Drinking the Moon”: “She traces the hollow/ of his throat, as though/ her fingertips/ might discern the truth/ in his words.”

In “Tradewinds”, at a tropical wedding where “The ocean plays a calypso/ of wave-splash and clicking shells…”

                          Saronged guests wing an ivory

                          whirlwind of rice that clings to him

                          in a flash of glinting sun. In the

                          wedding photos, he is already gone.

After a breakup in “Finale”

                          I no longer wore the negligee woven

                          from sultry wisps of his breath. It hung,

                          dissolving in the closet

                          with the bones of our first touch.

From the woman who receives Van Gogh’s ear:

                        What emptiness feeds

                        your martyred hunger

                        to offer me

                        this fleshy curl

                        of bass clef that drips

                        its lowest notes in blood…

Some poems have medical themes as in ”The Diagnosis” which “slides/ from my doctor’s pen,/   an inky snake…” follows through her daily routines and “winds around me…” at night.  “A Curvature of Bone” sees the spine as a “rock strewn path” “partially covered with sand…and threaded together/ with tenuous ligaments”.

“Voices of Touch” is a moving evocation of Helen Keller’s sensory world.

“Rocky Bluff” brings déjà vu to a familiar valley before history where “…I will return…/when I am       wearing/ different bones.”

“Pieces of Winter” etches a world where wind plays icicles “like a xylophone” and

                                    As we walk the frozen

                                    shoreline, snow memorizes

                                    the shapes of our boots

                                    our immortality…

I hope it’s not sexist to observe that these poems have the delicacy and sensitivity that clearly identify them as a woman’s handiwork. And this is by no means to dismiss them as anything less than superbly crafted literary emanations. As a man, I have often wondered about the workings of the female mind, and I’m grateful to admit that reading Mrs. Pieczka’s oeuvre may be as close as I can get to its mysteries.     

Master of Leaves by Murray Silverstein

With permission of Book/Mark a Quarterly Small Press Review.
   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

Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet 2009

On the Royal Shakespeare Company's TV Production of Hamlet: 2009.

Hamlet is probably the single most powerful fusion of words and situation in the language, and I believe the Royal Shakespeare Company's television version featuring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart is the best production. Two examples:                                                                            
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean my head upon your lap. ...
Ophelia: Aye, my lord.
Hamlet: Or did you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought, to lie between maid's legs.                                                                       

In every version I've seen, Hamlet reads line 5 more or less normally. But Tennant, knowing what bawdy Elizabethan audiences appreciated, says: "Or did you think I meant CUNT...ry matters?" Brilliant and authentic.
In every version, Olivier, Gielgud et al., Claudius reacts to the play-within-the play by rushing off screaming for light. But Patrick Stewart understands that Kings don't panic. Especially since Hamlet, by his crudely pointed remarks has made the "trap" quite obvious. He gets up calmly, walks over to Hamlet, stares into his eyes and shakes his head from side to side. This gesture from a king can only betoken death.                                                                                    The whole interpretation of the play leans strongly to the Freudian side. Hamlet's anguish before he sees the ghost is over his mother's hasty marriage.  There's no "Hyperion to a Satyr" adulation of his father at this point. In speaking to Horatio of his father, in this version, Hamlet simply states:"He was a man etc." With no heroic stress on 'man'. In fact, the casting of Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and the ghost is meant to emphasize the idea that they pretty much looked alike. Which was possibly one factor in Gertrude's acceptance of him. This version sees Hamlet as a high-strung adolescent whose Oedipal predisposition is suddenly inflamed by his hallucination of the ghost whose his accusations against Claudius fulfill Hamlet's terror. (Yes, others have seen the ghost, thrown in to please the groundlings, but it's Hamlet's fury that animates the play; just as the witches in Macbeth only trigger Macbeth's overweening ambition but do not cause it.)  And, of course, Hamlet's fixation on his mother is given an appropriate degree of frenzy in the bedroom scene.                                                                        

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Hamlet (2009) (BBC)
David Tennant and Patrick Stewart star in this critically acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s masterpiece from Britain’s renowned Royal Shakespeare Company. No recent stage production in Britain has attracted the excitement and nearly...
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Dreams

Dreams: martin abramson

When we're awake, we remember our dreams in fragments, if at all. When we dream, we remember our waking lives in fragments, if at all. (I know there are exceptions.) The main difference is that the waking mind can reflect on it's existence and even ask if it's dreaming. In dreams we assume we're awake and seldom ask if we're dreaming. I've had dreams of times, places and people I've never experienced on earth. And I've had dreams of times, places and personages who definitely never existed on earth. Does this have implications for the "Many Worlds" theory of Everett? Comments welcome.

REVIEW: by Martin Abramson

SPLITTING HARD GROUND

By Marilyn Stablein

La Alameda Press

Albuquerque, New Mexico

$12.00, 78 pp. Paper

With permission of Book/Mark a Quarterly Small Press Review.
                                          Issue: Winter/Spring 2012

                        To this reviewer, Marilyn Stablein’s métier is essentially prose poetry. Almost any of her poems would read quite reasonably as paragraphs. But they wouldn’t be nearly as good. The author is very deliberate about linage, spacing, phrasing, enjambment and other factors that affect which words we read, the order in which we read them and their cumulative impact. Her metric deliberations make a world of difference.

                             At the burning ghat

                             bodies hover atop wood

                          stacked four feet high.

                          The eldest son lights the pyre.

                           Each line, brief and concise, gives us another essential detail. Each detail delivers a separate impact. Then in line 4, a culminating trope of greater significance is accorded greater metric scope. The next three stanzas describe the hunger of the flames which consume first the red silk coverings and then the limbs. Scavengers comb the ashes for gold fillings. Finally “an old woman /sadhu…steals a burning log” to boil her rice, which sets the stage for two lines of stunning force:

                                       Only Mataji cooks

                                    with bones of the dead.

                             Reading SPLITTING HARD GROUND, one easily forms the impression of a Beatnik poet wandering the courts and alleys of the world. From New York to Nepal; from Juarez to Varanasi; from Kathmandu to far-flung, unnamed rivers and seashores. In “Transient,” she speaks of a time when “A backpack is my pillow…Roadmaps are talismans…” and continues, “I’ve been gone so long/ one year thrusts into another/ like snowdrops in a winter’s thaw…No one recognizes me/  I’m a transient in my home town”.

                                Everywhere she goes, the naturalist-poet collects the detritus of wildlife and civilization.

                                         These carapace shells, dried seed

                                         pods, and red earth fill glass jars

                                         in my studio. Assemblages house

                                         aged bones, skulls, bugs, dismembered

                                         doll’s limbs. River rocks, wild herbs…

                                    When a friend gives her a partially de-fleshed hog’s head, she sets it out to cure “in a humid New York summer…” Three years later, the skull still cures.

                                         In different ways, each of these poems celebrates the seasons, the sensuous profligacy of gardens or the quiet pleasures of winter evenings. And the most moving of them conflate the fertility of nature with memories of a dead son, an avid gardener. In “Heirloom,” a seed catalog once sent to her son ignites memories:

                                                By a pinion fire I dream

                                                of summer, peaches simmer

                                                on the stove.

                                                                        …I’ll plant

                                                 A garden for you, Mom.

                                                 In the backyard.”

The simple pathos of these poems is overwhelming.

                                                On top of the bookcase…

                                                            wrapped in a delicate

                                                Japanese silk scarf, hand painted

                                                with scenes of cranes and curly

                                                foam tipped waves, rests Willie’s box.

                                                Wild pheasant feathers gathered

                                                In the woods and a few shells decorate the top.

                                                Is it a present or an art work?

                                                my poet friend Janice asks.

                                                My son’s ashes, I tell her,

                                                I like to keep him near.

                                   

                                    “The Water Carriers” is dedicated to Willie.

                                                All love is memorable.

                                                Some only for the pain.

                                    It’s a six-part poem centered on various forms of water. Walking in the surge at the Bay of Fundy, the poet meditates on how “…the first {surge of love} sets a precedent to measure by “even though a lifetime is but a blink of Brahma’s eye”. Part 3 is a moving hymn to the lost child.

                                                Water blasts ahead

                                                pounds the earth, shreds

                                                my heart to bits of

wayward shells, knotted

kelp, stranded sea creatures.

                                               

                            “The Sorrow of Captivity” provides graphic details of Morocco, Marrakesh and villages in the Atlas Mountains not likely to be found in travelogues. The poems tell of thieving ravens, mice and monkeys in locales like Benares where “I recycled everything” and olive oil was poured in empty beer bottles. Ms. Stablein takes us on scavenger hunts in poems like “Salvage” where she finds memories among treasures in trash bins: a Mexican hat; a hippie tie-dyed dress; two baskets; a garden trellis and an “aviator’s scarf like the one Peter/ loved me in…so Isadora Duncan…”

                              And we too find treasures amid the travel journals and bric-a-brac of an adventurous and often painful life: deep memories; exquisite imagery and graceful music. The physical book itself rewards us, set in Perpetua typeface and neatly packaged by La Alameda Press between glossy covers with a stunning photo of the Rio Grande Gorge on the front. SPLITTING HARD GROUND delights and saturates all our senses. Enthusiastically recommended.