Child Sings in the Womb

Review by Martin Abramson

CHILD SINGS IN THE WOMB

By Patrick Lawler.

Bitter Oleander Press, New York

$18.00, 136 pp, Paper

By permission of Book/Mark Quarterly.                 

                Mr. Lawler’s poetry is endlessly, complexly, multiversely evocative. All of which may or may not amount to greatness; but which, to this writer, rates far higher than a good deal of modern poetry considered great by authors and their cliques.

                 The work is a Joycean pastiche of images, suggestions, implications, impulses, jokes and wordplay that serve as a bright gloss over dark engravings. The titles tell half the story:  Man Killed by Static Cling, Dead Couple Wed at Their Funeral, Sweethearts Vanish in Tunnel of Love, Woman Receives Letter from Joan of Arc, Preacher Explodes during Sermon and so on. Funny titles. Serious poems.

                   Mr. Lawler’s topics run from the Greek philosophers through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to theoretical physics and hit a great many heavy topics along the way. Aside from the Kierkegaard-Nietzsche letters, Dear Bose-Einstein Condensate is the strongest piece of the collection. The slowing of thoughts in his mother’s Alzheimer’s frozen mind is compared to the slowing of light in the condensate (a state of matter cooled to near absolute zero). The mother’s mental lethargy is contrasted with the chaos of thoughts in the speaker’s brain “…when the head is overly full of memories, / and they push against the inner walls of the skull, / and they keep pushing until they dent the head, until they pop/ it out like a banged kettle.”

                   The observation that all the cells of our bodies are replaced at regular intervals,  fuels a running gag in which the author assumes the personae of noted poets: “I changed my name to Robert Bly” “I changed my name to Mark Strand” I didn’t tell you I changed my name to Adrienne Rich,” “Just ignore the W.S.Merwin name tag.”  But the personality disorder is clear: “My Inner Child was adopted by a dysfunctional family.” “I am part cracked mask, part rearing horse, part whittled flute.”  “In group therapy, I look around/ and I am alone”

                     I feel like a tightrope walker. Oh, I have a net. That’s not the problem. What

                      I’m missing is the rope.

And interspersed with all this are the author’s sexual fantasies centering on an unnamed woman whom he never gets around to approaching: “Sex will shake us to our erotic roots. Fire will spill from our openings.”

                     In the longest effort of this collection, Dear Neitszche/ Love Kierkegaard, Mr. Lawler regales us with a sequence of letters from K to N filled with philosophical allusions: “Fear and Mumbling” “You give them Eternal Recurrence, and they say, ‘Haven’t we heard that before?’” “Oh Fred, you are so silly. Doing your death-thing with Divinity” “I am in the middle of writing the definitive book. Possible titles: Neither/Nor; Both/And.” “Berkeley was there. Kept bumping into furniture.” “Out of emptiness we emerge into new emptiness.” Which is apropos of a line from another poem, Dear Blank:

                                        “Blank is to blank as blank is to blank.”

N’s cursive according to K: “Your script is blotchy. Big cloudy pieces of ink like a coming storm“

                                There’s plenty of verbo-philosophical slapstick: “I tell you Zeno isn’t going anywhere.” “Get Uber it, I say.” “One of us is named Sisyphus, and one of us is named Stone.” “I’m not just another pretty word.” “I used to dance for the Army at military funerals, / I was a tap dancer.” You get the idea.

                             The first part of the book consists of poems in the same vein except that they are set up to stretch from margin to margin with large gaps between words and phrases. A nod to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, I suppose. I find the form distracting, but I guess I’m too ‘old school’ to appreciate it. There are also playful typographical variations of cases and the idiosyncratic convention of beginning each title with the word “dear”. 

                             A dessert of delicious humor ends the book in the form of another epistolary poem wherein the author banters emails with a Nigerian internet scammer who is trying to get his bank account number. Addressing him as, “Dearest Akeem,” Mr. Lawler maunders on about his own dead father, his psychotic student, his girlfriends, God, and, ironically, the pleasure he anticipates in spending the $475,000 Akeem will be paying him for keeping Akeem’s $9.5 million in his personal account. A humane but barbed put-on of an online criminal.  

                              Patrick Lawler serves up steak, caviar and popcorn; all cooked to a turn, in this elegant collection. The underlying themes of desperation, disorientation and mental breakdown preclude enjoyment of the humor unclouded by sorrow and regret; but the voracious reader comes away from Child Sings in the Womb feeling well fed indeed. 

                                 

                  

                      

                

                       

Review by Martin Abramson

THE HEARTBREAK AT THE HEART OF THINGS

By Vince Clemente

Seventh Quarry Press, Swansea, Wales

$15.00, 50 pp, Paper

By permission of Book/Mark Quarterly

                     The things Vince Clemente loves about John Hall Wheelock, are the things I love about Clemente: an empathic ear for human situations; a weather eye for the most delicate exemplars of nature; a mind attuned to the mysteries of being. Mr. Clemente’s ability to see the tragic glory buried beneath both natural phenomena and the human soul is plainly implied in the title of this collection.

                      Most of the studies in Heartbreak arise from long, contemplative walks along the restless shores and “alluvial mudflats” of the Atlantic coast of Long Island which he calls by its Algonquin name: Paumanok. American Indian names resonate for Clemente: Shinnecock; Nissequague; Mattituck; Connetquot; Peconic: place names on any map of the island.

                        Sometimes alone, often with his wife and lifetime companion, Annie, he wanders the fields and forests above Long Island Sound. Living in Sag Harbor, he has easy access to both bodies of water.

                        As a nature poet, Clemente is gifted with the idiosyncratic word-hoard used to describe in ever novel ways the minute details of living creatures and local flora. Mr. Clemente often calls his talent ‘small’, but if so, it is a vast smallness replete with the prismatic hues and ripe musk of this world. A deeply spiritual intuition guides his pen. Every line a reflection of God’s glory.

                          Here’s a bouquet of images: lilac rain; apricot light; aspen fingers viscous with pine pitch; tarn deep well; breastplate of sleek eelfare; monk-bent forsythia; dusk’s pollen glow; sun a lavender wingbar; tundra petals; aluminum sky; moraine of vowel. He finds endless flowers: gentian; trillium; iris; columbine; spartina. And from the sea: blues saunter in a tidal pool; shell-hoard/ of whelks & limpet, periwinkle, conch.   

                             The religious motif recurs throughout this volume: nuns at vespers; canonical matins; River Gods; souls of lost children; the Lord’s aspen fingers; the barn owl…chittering a song of creation; kneel in the morning; bathe as Eve did. The poet finds epiphanies in “a girl washing her hair in a rain/ barrel at sunset” and feels remorse over a doe wounded by an arrow or a tanager colliding with a window.

                             He understands why Hawkins, a neighbor, having lost a daughter, carefully builds a nest for wood ducks. “A Circle of Meadow” links a grassy habitat the poet has left untouched, reserved for avian life, with another vibrant image: the memory of an intellectually acquisitive boy who ransacked the libraries of Brooklyn and scattered verbal riches “through Brooklyn streets” and “under the Brighton Express”.  But it is the adult, for whom “the granary of love” is rededicated, which “as a swallow, drawn to the clearing, drinks from my heart/fissured as it is”.

                         In addition to Wheelock, Clemente pays homage to several contemporary poets, all from New England: Whitman, Thoreau; Kerouac; W.C.Williams and Karl Shapiro. In “Francis, Here My Hand” , he acknowledges a deeply felt communion with St.Francis and the “small, helpless things” the saint loved:

                                 the child scaling

                                 the womb’s walls…

                                 …the foal

                                 licking its mother…

                                the field mouse scurrying

                                for cover…

                                the barn owl leaning

                                in its nest…

                                the solemn cry

                                of earthly things

                               stirring to Be:

                   In everyday life, Professor Clemente maintains a steady correspondence with poets worldwide and has hundreds of letters and signed volumes to show for it. He often publishes appreciations of noted English and Irish poets. As American poetry editor for The Seventh Quarry, he still exerts a powerful influence on the nurture of fledgling poets.

                   Professor Clemente is a chthonic force from the smoldering core, reanimating a landscape made prosaic by malls and gas stations. He turns back the clock, restoring Paumanok’s Algonquin demesne to it’s original freshness and wonder. The pre-Columbian earth breathes in his poems and for the space of an hour’s perusal, he takes us there.

Reprinted from Book/Mark A Quarterly Small Press Review, Spring 2013.

Review by Martin Abramson

THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF…

By Barbara Hoffman

$10.00, 29pp, Paper

 

Our Barbara Hoffman has been a vital member of the Long Island poetry community for many years and is admired as much for her poetry as for her beauty and warm personhood. Her ability to glimpse sunshine and even humor in a life full of dark times, is reflected in this vivid garland of flowers whose glistening dewdrops often turn into tears.

 

Ms. Hoffman begins at the beginning where she describes the strict control her mother had over her and her breaking free in the poem, “Braids”. The twined hair, pulled taut, rein her in “like the bit on a horse”. But she springs herself and lets her hair “curl every which way”.

The author’s traumatic yet adoring relationship with her mother is powerfully suggested in the pantoum, “Elements” in which she tries to prevent Mom from making a terrible misstep (presumably marrying the wrong man) that threatens to drag mother and daughter to the brink where the “ledge crumbles”.

The mother-daughter nexus appears once again in “The Amish Mother” who relives her close physical ties to her child as she washes the body for burial:

 

        to remember her in your belly

        the transfer of blood and bone

         …how you talked to her

         before she was born

 

And again in “Una Furtiva Lachryma” where there is:

 

         only the gnarled roots

         of a stand of mangrove trees

 

          reaching out under water

          to cradle grief in outstretched limbs

 

This love is never extinguished even when visiting her mother in “Midnight in the Nursing Home”.  “You were happy to see me even if/ you had to ask my name”…”I put a chocolate mint/ on your tongue”.

 

 

The poet’s closeness with her sister,  is told after her death in “Persistence” as she repeatedly spots the sibling’s long blonde hair in crowds and realizes that no death is final. There’s “always a blurred remnant of memory, / a fragment that jars time.”

 

Ms. Hoffman, never shy about overt sexuality, drops erotic hints all through the poem “Jazz” whose very title derives from the slang for semen.

 

         as though he’d slide

         his thighs against mine

         push my legs open

         snake his music into me

 

In “Heat of Burnt Stubble” Ms. Hoffman excoriates Catholicism with the fire of forbidden sex, feeling “the heat of his tongue/in the pink folds/…fold upon fold/layering heat”.  In “Name Dropping” she recalls how, as a young girl, three Italian Lotharios feted and romanced her until “I started to crack/ like Venetian glass”. And she remembers the sudden heat and “fusing” between her and the priest who hears her confession of these acts. In “Drake’s Lemon Pies” she is excited by “a big blonde guy in a tee shirt” who “drops his gaze to the top/ of my legs/ below the short shorts”. When she bites into the pie, “tart creamy lemon oozes/ out of the side of my mouth”. (Short break while this reviewer regains his composure.) ”.  In “Traveling Through Childhood”, the poet recalls being molested at the age of eight. She knew it was wrong, “but how my body flushed/ all pink”.

 

 

“The Games Dogs Play” is a parable of the torments of mature love told as though by a dog whose adoration of its master is warped by the terror of being replaced by a younger bitch. So although charmed by “a diamond studded collar” she decides to play it cool so he won’t take her for granted. And just as we’re forming an image of abject servility, the last line suddenly turns us volte face revealing that at the end of the day, she holds the whip hand and can dictate terms:

 

               You know, he has to earn his keep.

 

Among Ms. Hoffman’s hardest times include the breakup of her marriage with the loss of her children as related in “All the Birds Cried” and “Chinese Checkers”. The latter recounts the writer’s choice, forced on her by harsh divorce laws, to keep her lover at the cost of losing her children. The poem describes her love for them felt on an afternoon picnic: “I bury my face in their necks/ drink in their fragrance”.

A radical mastectomy, about which she was misled by her doctor and for which she was completely unprepared, is related in “On the Dotted Line”.  He says:

 

                                  don’t worry it’s nothing…

 

                    …excision and frozen pathology…

                    two centimeters in circumference

 

Ms. Hoffman’s rebellion comes at 35. Freed from child-raising responsibilities, she let her hair get curly, “showed my teeth when I smiled. / Showed my legs when I danced.” She aces a university course and “The handsome parish priest left a bottle/ of Cold Duck on my doorstep”. It’s not far to her distinguished career as a Long Island poet.

 

          This chapbook, with its handsome cover and clear format, truthfully conveys the humor, passion and heartbreak of its author. Its emotional intensity will affect both sexes, perhaps for different reasons. Enthusiastically recommended.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review by Martin Abramson

ALL THAT GORGEOUS PITILESS SONG

By Rebecca Foust

Many Mountains Moving Press, Philadelphia

$15.95, 80 pp, Paper

 

Ms. Foust’s book is written in a minor key to say the least. Poems about tragedies, abnormal births, drowned children and hard times abound. An early experience from “Origin” foretells the macabre side of her vision. Her fifth grade experiment almost blinds another girl and she is thrust into a dark closet where she weeps but also experiences freedom as an “icicle splinter of glee”. In “Backwoods” she describes a brutally abused wife who still wishes to go back to his…”tarpaper shack./ squatting in bottles and weeds.”

Foust’s descriptive powers are most impressive when picturing man-made disasters such as the “Strip Mine” where …”two halves of ancient bivalve/ face each other…” and

 

At the edge,

wild chicory adds blue

 to the green and white tangle

of bindweed and Queen Anne’s lace.

A snowstorm…”dull shine of whipped/egg whites” in “Allegheny County Winter Day” reveals the emptiness of a landscape where farmettes are on sale and “Everyone’s going/ or gone”.  “Things Burn Down” seems to be cast in the general form of a Villanelle but with considerable variation of rhyme. Still it makes its point sharply; that the miserable lives her family and the townspeople led was in stark opposition to the delicate damask they produced but never themselves used.

Many poems dwell on the dead or dying: such as: “Purple Heart” which describes the sordid suicide of a war hero whose body had been wrecked in combat by shrapnel and Agent Orange; “Mineshaft Memory” that sketches the crucial importance of someone in the poet’s childhood; “Water Burial” that reviews the spiral stripping of whale down to …”a jawbone a man/ could stand up/ and walk through”; “The Bees Are Inside “which  relates the purity of a childhood friend that is the total opposite of his corrupt family, and the “purposeful, soaring fall” that frees him from his unhappy life.

In “Gray” the author mourns a girl who had been a fine athlete until the lung disease common to the factory workers extinguished her flame. The title of “Indian Pipe” refers to a filmy white plant also known as the Corpse Plant. The poem compares it with the frailty of the narrator’s mother (or foster mother) once strong enough to raise five children. In “What Was Sacred”, a woman sits in a hospital having watched all night as a man died and his body cooled; but the poem ends with the glory of sunrise. In “Father’s Day Race” a young girl who dives off a racing sailboat after a piece of rigging, without a life-preserver, is lost.

Parts II and III of ALL THAT GORGEOUS PITILESS SONG break new ground, going political in “The Innocence Project” in which a man is jailed for twenty years until DNA evidence frees him. “A Kilogram of Salt” covers much the same ground as the film, The Reader, as a former female Nazi camp guard is deported after three decades of joyful marriage to an American Jew. Two poems that depict the misery of women who get the wealth they crave only to find it has turned to ashes are “Pentimenti” and “Marrying Up.” Several poems treat the tragedies of abnormal childbirth. The ironic “Apologies to My OB/GYN” expresses regret that her premature child required so much expensive extra care. In “Too Soon” the speaker mourns the terrible effects of DES on her childbearing abilities. “His First Death” alludes to the terrifying period after birth before the infant began breathing. Other poems mourn the difficult life of an autistic son. 

There is no debating Ms. Foust’s mastery of language or sure sense of prosody. Her poems instantly grip the reader too firmly for any worries about whether the poet will slip off that frighteningly high wire on which she’s dancing. These pieces are totally involving whether the subject is the Allegheny Mountains, a cormorant, a hooked fish, or an Amish quilt whose rows of even stitches echo the furrowed fields carved by a tractor traversing outside the window. To venture a pun; reading Rebecca Foust’s poems may themselves be a harrowing experience; but they are not without the emotional catharsis that results from the appreciation of great art

 

Marty Abramson

 

Review by Martin Abramson
THE STRAW SANDALS: SELECTED PROSE AND POETRY
By Pierre-Albert Jourdan
Translation by John Taylor
Chelsea Editions,
New York, New York
$20, 332 pp. Paper

Reprinted with permission from Book/Mark,Summer/Fall 2011 Issue.

Pierre-Albert Jourdan, almost unknown today in his native land, had been honored in 1987 with a collected edition of 512 pages by Mercure de France and had thereafter been promptly forgotten, the collection allowed to go out of print. High praise from such luminaries as Jacques Réda, Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet have failed to produce a new edition in France; but thanks to the efforts of John Taylor, we English speakers have a generous selection of Jourdan’s work in a beautiful, bilingual edition which is miraculous both in terms of the original poetry and Mr. Taylor’s translation. The author of several weighty studies of French literature, many published translations and several books of original poetry, John Taylor is eminently qualified for this task.
Mr. Taylor offers us a goodly sampling of extracts from Jourdan’s books: The Language of Rising Smoke, The Dead Angle, The Entryway into the Garden, The Straw Sandals, The Approach, At the Mercy of Maxims, Journal Pages and Fragments. And the facing translations make much of the material accessible in the original, even for high school French scholars like this reviewer.
The poems are so incredibly rich that it’s impossible to just read this book continuously like a novel. Each sentence sends the imagination spiraling off into a different spectrum of images and memories. Each phrase may be savored and contemplated as a separate poem.

A knife! The tiny gash in the forest!

The fragrance of cypress beneath the eyelids.

The solar ladder up which the lizard climbs…

…the road of reality narrows to a tightrope.

Mysterious alms of the foliage…

A whispering leaf can be heard through dense forests.

…the sound of a distant flute crossing the ages…

The curse lies in the threshold being laid like this.

…the wind that is beating between the hedges…

…a remote song that rolls in to die as foam on the sand of today.

The grass keeps its heaviness of flesh…

A gunshot dragging a whole season behind it…

All gestures are petrified, coated with moss.

…ecstatic armfuls of possibilities.


I have picked out pregnant phrases that resonate for me. Most of them are embedded in paragraphs that are enriched by their presence just as they themselves are enhanced by their contexts. Many other images will resonate for you as well.
Most of the pieces are written in a mixture of prose and vers libre. The most easily recognizable as poems appear in the first, second and last sections: “The Language of Rising Smoke”, “Fragments” and “The Straw Sandals”:

…the shapeless kite is like a mauve cinder in the sky.

A rooted nothingness.

A single teardrop in which the world trembles.

A moment too acute for words to come out unscathed.

…words must go through a body in order to come to light…

Tomorrow we will have brand new blindfolds.

The shadow of a wing on the plaster. The plaster flakes off, the wing rots. The flight remains…

Let us allow this voice to grow quiet, it is lying in wait. Let us leave the field open.

Pieces in the second half of the book tend to be shorter and less interrelated. Jourdan honors France’s long history of maxims and aphorisms, following La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Joubert, by composing dozens of his own. In the middle sections of the book (one is actually entitled “Maxims”) Jourdan scatters tweets, blog-notes,diary entrees,anecdotes,quotations and more prose-poems. They range from the profound to the prosaic.

The “straw sandals” that give the last section its title are not footwear for the beach but standard hospital supplies. It’s material occupies half the content of this volume. Facing death as his body slowly gave in to the inevitable, and tied to the hospital’s umbilical, here Jourdan left us his deepest thoughts about life and death. They are in diary form and dated. Those included in this collection extend from Jan.1, 1980 to July 21, 1980. Others continue to April 1981, the year of his demise.

The “I will never have enough time” has not been digested. Not vomited back up. It is like a lump that keeps going up and down. Sunday, 6 January

You have to climb all the way up to the branch that is too fragile if you wish to perceive clearly what is happening below. Thursday, 10 January

You lead your life between layers of paper. Monday, 4 February

That the abyss is a mere crack does not mean that it cannot swallow you up at any moment. Wednesday, 6 February

Living thus from beginning to end, in incompleteness. Monday, 25 February

Even by scratching away at this sheet of paper every day, I will not be able to uncover the radiant fresco underneath the shadows piling up on it every day. Wednesday, 5 March

They came and showed their wounds because wounds were all they had to bind them to the world. Monday, 7 April

Light suddenly bursts out as if projected from an exasperated desire. Monday, 21 April

The butterfly…on the stone half-opens its wings as someone might turn the pages of a precious illuminated manuscript. Sunday, 27 April

We will not overcome this defeat unless we wholly accept it. Wednesday, 25 June

Thought puts on its cloth slippers. But the room with its polished wooden floors is empty, and the furniture has been covered over. No one is there. Tuesday, 2 December

The pathos of these last words depicting the poet’s pain and debilitation cannot be exaggerated. But it is enthralled into a kind of stoic resignation laced generously with light, splendor, natural beauty and profound wisdom. We are deeply indebted to Chelsea Editions for making this important body of work available, and to John Taylor for supplying not just a literal translation into English sentences, but a luminous transmutation into English poetry.

Book Review by Martin Abramson

Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest by Michael Daley
Pleasure Boat Studios: A Literary Press, New York , NY
$16.00, 111 pp, Paper

Review first published in Book/Mark Spring 2011


This collection is difficult in the manner of much modern poetry; much indeed of the very best. It recalls styles practiced by poets like Pound or Ashbery: elliptical, fragmented, personalized, ambiguous, with missing referents, elusive meanings and seemingly random geographical or temporal settings. But if poetic abundance is an indication, Mr. Daley has indeed achieved a form of ‘redemption’ in his re-creation of a long, eventful life. A list of some the book’s major venues would include Poland , Turkey , Auschwitz , Maine , Oregon and New York . Some of the characters who appear include members of the poet’s family, either viewed directly or in parable. They are often offered with titles that revisit Chaucer: “The Daughter’s Tale”, “The Wife’s Tale” and so on.

One of the more accessible works is “The Pariah’s Tale”. The “Pariah” has been an unwelcome guest of “sour odor’ who “spilled” his “bowl on the table or dropped” his “pants to the neighbors.” He's a self-imposed exile who arrives in a foreign land, a “little island,” without any of the memories or mental detritus of a former life. It's a place where the church and schoolhouse are “locked in the daytime” and an “eagle circles the courthouse”: a courthouse stuffed with superfluous writs:

"You could scavenge all your life the bones of our romance with justice unfurled on a morning's swashbuckling breeze."

He swims out to steal fish from gulls, gill-netters and pleasure boats. “Over the rail the shadow of” his “head in the water/ fills with white foam” joining his “... petty brain to vegetable flotsam”.
He finally cries:

“Who will love me? Who will want me now? Keeper of rock, oasis in space.
I have drifted so far from the map now everybody’s angry.”

“The Child's Song” conveys a unique loveliness that expresses a child's perception of the natural world.

“Thunder on the rocky beach… wild strawberry…Indian Paintbrush, orange and black. …And the sky goes to stars, their milk filling the body of the Bear…” The child stares at the “shapeless sea…where we must go…out from the boughs of the forest.”

The truth of these poems is always concealed behind veils of hallucinatory diction. In “Moonrise After Moonrise”, Mr. Daley gives us a quick synopsis of earth’s history: “Stone age, Golden Age, Silver, Bronze Age, Iron Age” etc. followed by snapshots of our own era and its faults:

"When log trucks are slave ships,
patches of ground burned bare of mystery—
…the figure of virtue no longer suitable in halls.."

Clear enough, but what are we to make of associated lines like these:

"memoirs of criminals snatched from their sewing machines…
…terrazzo floors mutter the steps of prizewinners
…sacred groves machete forbade in, rusts in..."

Of course they are highly charged and dramatically suggestive, but they contain no clues to syntactical relationships and might suggest such radically different things to different readers that those expecting some sort of cohesiveness, have cause to complain. In a brief but glowing addendum, the poem contrasts the simple but pure consciousness of a robin hopping “down the branch into thick rhododendrons … a moment she remains eternal within”, with the preceding evils of civilization.

A beautiful poem called “On Air”, which provides glimpses into several biographies, changes scene and character abruptly in the manner of “The Wasteland”. (Daley borrows even more obviously from Eliot’s, “Ash Wednesday” in “The Daughter’s Tale” which repeats the “Because” opening throughout; also in the obvious spoof, “La Figlia Che Concupisce…”) At any rate, “On Air” begins with the child awakening at his grandmother’s house: “Lit dew halos my curtain.” The Second World War is raging and his father bluffs his way into the air force (reiterating the theme of air). Then it’s 1961 and the boy is living with his uncle Danny Donovan, a fisherman, who regales the young man with homespun philosophy: “He said,/ now I shall live to see what no one in the last decade…could live to believe”. In the next section, the narrator, having “lost my faith in air”, takes to riding the rails, meeting strange characters and having unsettling dreams and many dream-like experiences.

"where was it? Reno ? Albuquerque ?—
when one of Jesus’ shoeless boys sang on the night air,
and walked the desert calling all us drifters?"

We get a last look at his grandmother “…waving on the porch she rides/ past Jupiter and Venus”. And we close as the father, standing in the cockpit of a warplane over the Aleutians,exults in his freedom:

"you leaned into the ear of the pilot a low
whistle, a sigh, a breath, laughing on the air."

Hopefully the foregoing is sufficient to give the reader some of the flavor of this highly idiosyncratic poet. There are many poems that sing the sensations of childhood. There are several long poems such as “Teacup & Cookie” or “Frankie The Milkman’s Song”, which contain a wealth of images, experiences and human emotions that are well worth close study, but present deeper complexity than can be examined in a short review. I can confidently recommend Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest as both a notable instance of postmodern style and an extraordinarily rich quarry of poetic invention.

Exit Lines by Kevin Brown
Reviewed by Martin Abramson

Exit Lines
Plain View Press
Soft Cover, 101 pages
ISBN 978-1-935514-34-3

Link to Purchase

Striking cover art by Danielle Lesperance is our entrance to Exit Lines, poems by Kevin Brown. The poems can be roughly divided into two major categories: religion and lost love. As a follower of no religion, I often wonder that the great religious poetry of Donne, Hopkins and Eliot moves me so deeply. Of course it’s great poetry. But perhaps there’s some innate wish to believe in all of us. At any rate, I was strongly affected by Brown’s evocations of faith.

In “The End is Near”, Mr. Brown speculates that the homeless man, the pimp, the prostitute, the street-corner prophet and the schizophrenic who sees holy visions, might be actual harbingers of heaven. But we’ll never know because we have “mangled the mystery of God”. Forms of this mangling are cited.
“Fortune Telling” describes the various ways we seek to know the future: astrology, therapists, tea leaves. “And/while we arm wrestle/ with our destiny, today/ has us pinned to the mat”. While our Elijah’s and Isaiah’s are consigned to the desert

…Those who have ears to
hear have turned up the volume of the TV,
claiming to want to know the state of affairs,
but it is only the glow they wish to see.

In “The Church of Divine Reality, Inc,” the writer asks who is financially responsible for all the damage done by religious fanatics. “Someone has to take responsibility/ for God, after all; it’s not like/ we want him running wild”.
In “The Saint of Lost Things”, the poet yearns for the innocent pleasure he once took in small things like “the baseball signed by Carl Yastrzemski”… when he did not fear…

the tomorrows, which wait for me
like a second-rate bill collector
who would rather break my knee
than see me pay off my debts.”

The powerful “Begging for Blessings” contrasts the minor favors he might ask of God, such as clearing a traffic jam so he can get home early, with prayers for cancer cures or for dead children; where people “face God with/ their fists, stare down the divine,/ and dare him…while I wheedle and whine”.
“Memory Lapse” reminds us how in foxholes or in falling planes, we turn to God; but on the days when “we’re skimming the/ surface of life”, the days “between horror/ and hallelujah”, we forget Him.
“Entertaining Angels” has the speaker wondering what to serve angels: popcorn? hors d’oeuvres? And what sort of movies would they like to watch: “perhaps they/ like Bergman”. When they leave, assuring him ominously that they’ll return, the speaker doesn’t get it. He thinks “next time/ I’ll be ready. I’ll even have dessert”.
“After Effects” is a slightly undecided work that says some interesting things about Lazarus and pointlessly compares him with Jesus in terms of after-death experience.
“I Forgot To Ask About the Checkout Time:” strikes me as an ingot of burning truth. Especially the last two lines.

And it was at that point, in the
midst of my tirade, that
He reminded me that life is
like a cheap motel:

you get the basic necessities, if
you’re lucky, some of which may
not work and none of which
will be clean; you’ll share
the space with creatures
you would prefer
not to have any contact with;
and your wake-up call
will come
when you least expect it.

And anything else you want,
you’ll have to pay dearly for.

Brown generates considerable voltage in “Seeing the Light” when he tells us:

…its flash
sears saints as easily as

it does devils; its
radiance rips apart the
lives of the lovely and

the losers alike. We
would be better served
if, instead of hoarding

flashlight batteries,
we spent our seasons
staring at the sun.


Some of the secular poems edge toward the didactic and some of the religious poems lean towards sermonizing e.g. “The Last Sunset” or “Soul Searching”. “Moot Point” contains the just plain silly stanza:

Can I not even leave a
message for the messiah,
or is the call waiting
out of order?

“Serving Grace”, on the other hand, is an excellent poem and a good example of the extended metaphor style that we find in the ‘lost love’ poems. It sees God as a cook, the waiters as clergymen “mumbling about their/tips” and the customers as petulant children who do not deserve the steak they have and who “forget that there are those who/ have never seen a steak”.
“The International Forgiveness Institute” is the scene of an earthly interview that captures the speaker’s rush to authenticate his moral innocence as it crashes into heaven’s adamantine beaurocracy, where the interviewer keeps asking, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” And he feels that he will be “answering/ her questions for the rest of my life”.
There are echoes of T.S. Eliot in the last stanza of “Day One” and in “Garbage Day”, Mr. Brown paraphrases Dylan Thomas as he claims that the discarding of our gods and prophets “separates us from our/ minds and hearts” and that “…the divine/ conflict rages, rages against/ the dying of their lives”.
“In Search Of” is a Zen-like poem that contrasts holy suffering with ineffectual attempts at humor:

Getting through the fiery
furnace is easy, but what
good is a religion that won’t
help you do the dishes?

“A Second Chance, Of Sorts” is a truism and “Alternative History” is naively ironic. “Salvation” is as subtle as a barker’s sales pitch. But “We Are All Savages” delves into the flesh of life to come up with a philosophically significant revelation. After posing a list of vicious and sinful acts people commit, Mr. Brown concludes that our real guilt is not in the evil things we do “but because we have our reasons for doing so”. Anyone who can come up with insights like that is well worth our time.
While “Habits of the Heart” seems too easy; its companion piece, “A Vocabulary of Faith”, strikes a deeply authentic note in describing a woman who finds her salvation in a warm coat, her grace in a serving of pie and her “Amen” in her bed of castaway clothes.

Formally, Mr. Brown employs short sentences with occasional rhymes and a preference for dactylic meter. They are loosely set out in blank verse with enjambment deployed freely throughout.
The sequence of ‘lost love’ poems begins with “Left Standing At the Alter”, a tribute to the callow, superficial groom who gets shoved aside at the last minute when the true hero claims his bride. There’s the implication that ‘jilted John’ may have really loved the girl and that his pain, like ours, “…continues long past/ the last box of popcorn and/ the exit of the cleaning crew”.
Most of these poems are built around extended metaphors. “The Dictionary of Failed Relationships” uses a reference book that, in the end, “could never define/ the complexity of our love”.
“Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation” centers on the rules of grammar.
Newspaper form provides the analogy for “Bury the Lead”.
Falling is the metaphor for “Lover’s Leap At Rock City”.
Interesting uses of negation are employed in “Not What It Seems”, “Not For Nostalgia’s Sake”, and “Cupid’s Pockets Aren’t That Deep”.
The title poem uses the theater metaphor with the usual “missed cues, unspoken lines”. But the parallel effort, “No Exit, Stage Left Or Right”, is more successful; instead of just ‘skulking away’ as in “Exit Lines”, he ends up standing on a

darkling stage with nothing
but a crumpled playbill and
bad reviews to show for my life.

“Equal to Zero” applies mathematical terms to the defeat of the relationship.
“Eco-Friendly” begins as a circus act and ends in a trash heap after the author’s figurative “two and a half somersault/ with a twist” leaves him “lying flat on my face/ at the bottom/ of the/ big/ top”.
Other examples use “Method Acting”and “Molecular Biology” to provide the frameworks. The problem with the extended metaphor is that it resembles a conceit…a puzzle, where the reader becomes an ally of the poet as both search for terms that justify the analogy. And more often than not, the original passion is lost in the word play.
Other ‘lost love’ poems rehearse the history of the relationship, or recall certain poignant moments or reflect on the meaning of their failure… sometimes with sorrow, sometimes anger, sometimes resignation. All the stages of mourning are here and the author’s pain bleeds through the most contrived pieces. Mr. Brown is a moving writer and no one can doubt his agony, but we can wish for a mode of expression that transcends and masters it more effectively.


Reviewed by Martin Abramson.
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