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.

Josph Stroud, Of This World

BOOK REVIEW: Of This World, by Joseph Stroud

REVIEW: Of This World, by Joseph Stroud. Copper Canyon Press, Washington 2009, 359pp. $18.00 at www.coppercanyonpress.org

Review first published in Book/Mark, Fall 2009 by Martin Abramson

Joseph Stroud is a great poet whose scope is both vertical and horizontal. He goes everywhere and sees everything, noticing insects, birds, animals, trees and flowers, calling them by their names and placing them in their natural settings. He wanders cities, mountains, forests and islands giving us their very presence as though we are standing by his side. He speaks of people, politics, love and war but always in the particular, showing their effects on the landscape and the individual. He supremely communicates the mystical thereness of things, the existential mystery of objects pulsating within their contexts, the spiritual aura surrounding the most commonplace artifacts.
The first section of this compendium of previously published and new works is called Suite for the Common and is composed of six-line, free-verse poems, two to a page. They constitute a perfect introduction to Stroud’s world as they illustrate in miniature, his seemingly endless fascination with all the dimensions of life and all the scenes of the world. My references up to page 44 cover this section. The second section, Passing Through, includes pp. 47-96. The reader intrigued enough to acquire the book may follow page references to the other six sections.
What is the source of that magic whereby Stroud defies the usual surfeit attendant upon reading large doses of poetry? What motivated me to keep turning all 351 pages? As a reviewer, I didn’t need to read the entire book twice to write an appreciation. I persisted because these poems have the intensity and human interest of a great novel. The ingredients Stroud mixes to distill his addictive brew are hypnotic. The recipe includes:

The seamless merging of the natural world with the mystical:

The yellow jacket keeps crashing against the pane
Trying to get out…
To the dead, paradise is the sidewalk you stroll down
Looking in windows, humming, stopping for coffee. p.4

Minute and flawless observations of nature:

Late spring and the nasturtiums are behaving themselves, just poking
Their leaves over the flower box. But I know it won’t be long now—
…soon they’ll make a break for it, soon
the tendrils will bolt across the deck, swarming toward light. p.8

Suddenly there was Ellen’s favorite hen shrieking
and rising into the air clutched in the single talon of a hawk. p.9

…those iris
rising as blue flames out of the earth. p.21

…Inside the pear there’s a paradise
We will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste. p.40

In a half-tomato:

…autumn’s city,
with its bloody seed-shine of canals,
bridges, tiny boats, a labyrinth
surrounding at the center the great palace
of emptiness. p.93

Sinister mushrooms show:

delicate gills, stalks the
color of salmon flesh, odor of storms and autumn.
“Taste And See” p.161


His uncanny descriptions of death as in “My Father Died” p.14:

…There is a great machine
in the blackness that dismantles one moment
from the next. It makes the sound of the heart
but is heartless.

The disillusionment of time as understood by Tibetan monks:

…there’s a festival… where monks
carve the delicate Buddha paradise from blocks
of frozen butter. At dawn, amid the chanting,
among prayer wheels and dragon masks,
paradise
is tossed into the fire, and all our butter dreams
rush out in flames.

And the martyrdom in, “Lazarus in Varanasi”.

From a pyre on the burning ghat
a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.
As if remembering something important. p.25


The fatalism of “Reading Joyce in Winter” p. 171:

I can hear snow falling over the Spur
over Burnside and the Hawk
falling across my life
filling the hours the days
where someday I will become
one of the shades
the snow drifting out of the night

Or “Venom” p.195:

The doctor said melanoma
and all the doors into the bright mornings
began slamming shut.

In “Bible” p.202, Stroud symbolizes death through the struggle of living
creatures to survive: “the spider-crab, the field mouse, the snake,
the scorpion…”

And the heron

is Lord of the Apocalypse stalking across the pool,
choosing and stabbing: This one. That one.
My chosen ones.

Pages 74-89 feature poems written from Vietnam which meticulously
chronicle the language, landscape, artifacts and life of the people.
They also rehearse the shameful tale of the U.S. war against that
country and the long-term scars that remain.


Stroud’s Borgesian forays often explore the reflexive as when, traveling in Europe, fleeing his father’s death, he imagines himself inside Don Quixote and asks for someone to please, “Close the book. Leave me there.” p.15
While viewing Death’s legions massacring the victims of plague in
Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death, he observes:

Like everyone, I search for myself among the living
The ones fleeing, among those trying to escape the canvas. p.15

Or:
…The path leads into the woods to the house
where the old woman invites you to admire her oven.
Don’t go! We plead—we who have been cooked
and eaten, we who sit here gripping our forks and knives. p.22

When asked by Robert Bly if he had seen his late friend John Logan in
dreams:

No, I said. John and I were friends in this life.
And I miss him. I miss him even in my dreams. p.35

“ Homage to the Word-Hoard” p.138, feels like free association
but is a tribute to the power and pathos of language.
“The Old Poets Home” p.140, extols and caricatures old
master poets while lambasting some modern ones.


Vivid tableaux perfectly capture the mood of a moment as in “After
The Opera” p.28. Or in “Reading Wallace Stevens” p.35:

…two does pass through the sunlight
and through shadows between the pines,
disappearing among the colors they are,
appearing among the colors they are not.


“Feral” p.49, is reminiscent of the empty streets of de Chirico.
Stroud describes a plaza in Spain, silent, under a blazing noon
sun, where he sits eating goat cheese, olives, bread and black figs.

He grapples with the confusions of love Five years into his marriage, he thinks he understands love, but as he watches a foreign film that suddenly switches from subtitles to dubbed English, he thought for an instant that he understood Romanian”. p.17
More snapshots of love:

I never saw the oriole in the green leaves, just a flash of gold.
Do you think the morning won’t come when you’ll wake alone? p.38

Hitomaro, weeping, could not sweep
all the leaves falling on his wife’s grave. p.20

The sun pours down honey over the bodies of lovers
who make of their bed a small boat that rocks in the sea
of morning… p.41





The jingling from her anklets stops
Her lover, tired, rolls onto his back
And now the room chimes
with the sound of tiny bells
from the belt around her waist
Versions from Sanskrit & Tamil p.112


“Homage to Doo-wop” p.137, shows how the first awkward slow dance
at a teenage birthday party lead much later to:

…how I would hold the other through the night
and across the years, holding on for love and dear life,
for solace and kindness, learning the dance as we go,
learning from those first, awkward, shuffling steps,
that sweetness and doo-wop back at the beginning.


The poet’s confrontations with human cruelty fill his imagery of the Spanish conquest of the Mayan empire: p.24:

…no priest can read the signs.
…--now these strangers with beards and pale eyes.
Prepare now for whips and fire and blood and sorrow and sorrow.

Similarly, Celan on the holocaust: p.25

Can you find the key for the encryption
of his mother’s execution? How do you write
out of Auschwitz?
…a boot full of brain kicked out in the rain.

Stroud can write a novel in a paragraph. In “Elsewhere” p.218 he sketches his parents’ dysfunctional marriage; in “Knots” p. 219, he portrays his demanding father; in “A Story from the Fifties” a neighbor woman throws stones at her own house and subsequently disappears; in “How Green the Leaves” p.222, a bipolar friend sits in a chair for days with a knife in his lap. Stroud finds a metaphor for the friend’s situation in a plant being slowly consumed by colonies of tiny insects.

The section named Plainsong tells of the poet’s boyhood, his grandfather, his
boyhood friends, experiences with nature, the first kiss,the girl friends, a one-night love affair in North Beach, the end of marriage and, repeatedly, the pleasure of ordinary miracles:



There’s a poetry to this life
no one will be able to write.
The horses come down the mountain at dusk.
We’ve all seen this. But who gives thanks?

The nine poems of Backyard Suite p.257 describe local animals with
microscopic attention to details of color and form. P.277. …with
meadowlarks/ singing on the wires/ the song of one/ entering the song/ of
another. On p.268, “Oh Yes” chronicles the coming of winter and its effects
on body and soul:

…now we’re in for it, everything’s slamming shut,
closing shop, the leaves on the cottonwood are crying
fuck it and letting go in the wind, the cold/ is coming…


Stroud seems to have wandered everywhere always minutely observing and registering the sense of distant lands: Andalucía, Siena, Ayacucho, Kárpathos (and the Greek Isles), Santo Domingo, Samoa, Bali, Vietnam, Machu Picchu, Singapore,
Jalalabad. Here’s a description of the Golden Triangle:

…it’s in the triangle, you know, bandit country, guerrillas, opium
fields, no-man’s land, no borders, you can’t tell if you’re in Laos,
Burma, China, Thailand, Vietnam, nobody knows and nobody
cares…

Along with modern poets and thinkers, he has studied poets and works of many different times and cultures: Man’yōshū, Lu Yu, the Kokinshū, Rumi, Lady Izumi, Radulfus Glaber, Issa, Machado, Li Po, Confucius, Praxilla of Sikyon, Han-Shan, Cavafy, Rambaud de Vaqueiràs to name a few.

A translation from the Japanese: p.104

Dawn in the imperial city
I hear the swish of oars
and remember those fishing girls
from long ago
Anon.

Among Stroud’s most profound works are the “Praise Poems” pp.121-14
It is here, from the perspective of old age, that he flashes upon striking
memories of lovers, friends, nature, and youth while confronting the
imminence of death.

I have tried to suggest the richness of Stroud’s imagery. But the true reward awaits those who obtain the book and discover on every page and every line the magic poetry was created to yield.
We are left with the portrait of a man who loved both the pleasures of home and the strangeness of travel. One who has the sensitivity to appreciate the former and to wonder at the latter. One who celebrates the spiritual mystery of life even as he handles its bare, bloody physicality and expresses it all in poetry.

Anthony Guilbert and John DeCarlo

Review by Martin Abramson

Magma-Mystic

By Wayne Guilbert, 35pp

Walking Through Lebanon

By John DeCarlo, 39pp

The Mighty Rogue Press

Boulder, Colorado

Paper, $10.00  each

By permission of Book/Mark Quarterly

                             Back in the bad old days of the 90’s, there was a hulking, independent printer in the Wm.Blake tradition, called Anthony Guilbert whose Karma Dog Press brought such luminous poets as Vince Clemente to the public’s attention. Today, Guilbert is back and just as much the maverick, his Mighty Rogue Press opening with a double salvo of two fascinating chapbooks. Without having space for full-scale reviews, let me venture a comment or two.

                 Wayne Guilbert’s Magma-Mystic combines the native chants of Ginsberg and Snyder with the wisdom of Rumi and the freewheeling exuberance of Willard Gellis. He explores the paleontology of Colorado which he relates vividly to his own history. In poems like “Medicine Chant for My Legs”, “A Dine Canyon Teaching”, “Box-Canyon Morning”, and “Analog Rumi-Jazz”, Mr. Gilbert displays the extraordinary power of disciplined language when merged with the bardic barbaric yawp. It’s well worth the modest ten buck toll.

                  John DeCarlo’s Walking Through Lebanon ranges much further geopolitically in more conventional free verse. His slide-show projects scenes of peace as well as images of war-torn places littered with suffering people. Of the former, we have “Return to Eden”, “Sunset  at Ponte Vecchio” and “The Spice of Life”. The dark scenes are more numerous and usually tied to specific places, like the city of Berlin in “Lingering Motion” or Iraq in “After the Invasion”, or Lebanon in the title poem, or Peru in “In the Land of the Golden Inca”. Mr. DeCarlo magnifies the power of his poems by linking them to autobiographical experiences. His language is spare and precise for maximum impact, yet the poet never loses control of the music and meter of his lines. Walking Through Lebanon together with Magma-Mystic constitute an auspicious debut for The Mighty Rogue Press and leave our appetites whetted for future productions.

  

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