Cat City by B.J. Cassidy, Northport, NY 2002, 43 pages. (Self-published chap-book: available from author at 631-261-6505: $5 ea.) Review first published in Book/Mark, Spring-Summer 2002-03
Reviewed by Martin Abramson
Bonnie Cassidy has given us one of the most delightful collections of cat poems since Old Possum. From her cat-patrolled ramparts overlooking Long Island Sound, she has stirred up a magical, mewling brew made up of two parts love and one part exasperation. And to spice up the mix, she has sprinkled in vignettes and encounters from her life.
Like Eliot’s cats, Ms.Cassidy’s have individual personalities e.g. Pooka, a mischief maker probably related to Eliot’s McCavity. Or Calphurnia, so obsessed with flowers that she’ll habitually knock vases off shelves just to smell the lilacs and azaleas. Then there’s the savage Miss Kitty and the elusive Ghost Cat with his “blue glass eyes”. But B.J. goes Eliot one better in the very personal relationships she maintains with her feline family:
she blends
into my flesh
she is
not a lover
but somehow loves me
when others do not
Or:
…my cat
in my bed
even as I write this
she is climbing on my chest
rubbing her face against mine
and purring
Or:
only the cat understands me
as she tries to enter
my mouth
purring
this is a divine mystery
Over and over, Ms. Cassidy catches the mystical feline essence of her subject.
Silent tiger
stalking toward nirvana
your footsteps silent
your breath silent
an aura about you
silent and silence
Or:
…the storm wind
moans in ecstasy
yes yes
swirling and gusting
and the feral cat cries
at the front door
“let me in”
Or:
Miss Kitty is coming
to hunt and to feast
and no one is safe
from the claws and the teeth
But the true wonder of this book lies, as in all fine poetry, in the loveliness of the line and the luster of the image. The grey cat is “…invisible at night/mistaken for shadows/in the sun”. And: “…like a white whale/a big tom cat/appears in the side yard”. Or: “the crows are entering the trees/they talk to each other/about the cats”. Or:
who could replicate the
sleeping cat
from a blueprint
while scientists follow
the dots
a red cardinal flashes
against the pale leaves
Or:
we used to have a ghost cat
in the hall way
small and black
he would lie
curled up
till you reached out
to pet him
then he’d fade
now my son says he’s back
Ms.Cassidy is particularly skillful in suggesting the interaction of men with cats. In “News Flash” a businessman steals millions, escapes to Florida with two cats and dies of drink. At Key West, Hemingway’s cats accompany “the black man/with the drum” by “caterwauling”. And in the title poem, her cats sense that “the man smells/of smoke/fire saltwater/fish/when he comes/to my bed”. (Hmmm, that sounds like a certain, celebrated, maritime poet who lives in these parts, but I do not hypothesize.)
The truth is that no collocation of brief excerpts can really connote the atmospheric mystery, idiosyncratic humor and elemental strength of these poems. They need to be read in their entirety, each a complete and moving moment, each amplified by the preceding and following poems as well as by the continuity of the entire collection. The poet is like the cat in that:
I sing because I must
there is no contemplation
no musing in my songs
they spring
from endless wells
of bottomless
unfulfilled yearnings…
in deep woods at sunrise
under the boardwalk
I sing
Saturday, April 17, 2010
BOOK REVIEW: Condo; A poem, by James Boring
REVIEW by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark,Fall-Winter 2006-07
Condo: a Poem, by James Boring. 2006, Lit Pot Press,Oceanside, CA Inc. 59pp. $10.00
In this modern art gallery of portraits eviscerating the residents of a senior citizen community, Jim Boring calls them as he sees them; and brother, can he see them! The shocking cover photo of a naked, middle aged woman with an unreconstructed mastectomy should tell us that there is to be no merciful soft-focus or blurring of the age-lines in this collection. Each poem begins with the number of an apartment and in a few incredibly deft strokes, lays bare the story behind each door.
111
She walks ahead of him
Carrying the bag of beans
Deference to his solitary nature
He looks up from time to time
Her broad bottom rolling before him
Reminds him of the way.
Sometimes the author alludes to a Florida setting: “Look at these birds/ White as there is no other word for it snow/ With their long curved beaks and their legs/ With the kneecaps on backwards” (Ibises). “In the Parking Lot” notes the EMS truck that responds to a late night emergency: “The heavy throbbing of the engine/ Mocks the poor heart it rescues”. They’re all here: the old man with his voices, the vet who broods on the absurdity of his wartime experience, the Holocaust survivor, the aimless widow, the faithful caretaker, the neighborhood watcher, the grandma primping for a date, the couples living in mutual misery. All done in a conversational, street-wise argot that cradles tender personal emotions in thick, but strangely gentle workman’s gloves.
Some poems look back on lifetimes, others snapshot momentary tableaux. Some wonder about lost feelings, some marvel at feelings that remain. From the Rabbi trying to say something meaningful about a deceased person he never knew, to the old heads nodding in dark corners, death pervades this book; sometimes as the enemy, often as an expected friend. These poems are about the wreckage left by death as well as the dread of its approach.
He slumps small in the wheelchair
A boneless bag his head
Limp on his shoulder
Hands between his legs
But there is such astonishing tenderness as well:
Once in a while he asks for my breast
He doesn’t just take it he asks for it
I lean down to him lying in my lap
Over an old child softly sucking.
The power of simplicity never had a more able advocate:
Unit 201
The Widowed Second Wife
I know he loved me best
He told me so
She was so cold
He loved the things I did
He told me so
I did them for him
My mouth meant more to him
He told me so
My breasts my heart
He did not think of her
He told me so
I think of her.
If that poem took you to as deep a level as it did me, you will find much beauty and wonderment in Condo.
Condo: a Poem, by James Boring. 2006, Lit Pot Press,Oceanside, CA Inc. 59pp. $10.00
In this modern art gallery of portraits eviscerating the residents of a senior citizen community, Jim Boring calls them as he sees them; and brother, can he see them! The shocking cover photo of a naked, middle aged woman with an unreconstructed mastectomy should tell us that there is to be no merciful soft-focus or blurring of the age-lines in this collection. Each poem begins with the number of an apartment and in a few incredibly deft strokes, lays bare the story behind each door.
111
She walks ahead of him
Carrying the bag of beans
Deference to his solitary nature
He looks up from time to time
Her broad bottom rolling before him
Reminds him of the way.
Sometimes the author alludes to a Florida setting: “Look at these birds/ White as there is no other word for it snow/ With their long curved beaks and their legs/ With the kneecaps on backwards” (Ibises). “In the Parking Lot” notes the EMS truck that responds to a late night emergency: “The heavy throbbing of the engine/ Mocks the poor heart it rescues”. They’re all here: the old man with his voices, the vet who broods on the absurdity of his wartime experience, the Holocaust survivor, the aimless widow, the faithful caretaker, the neighborhood watcher, the grandma primping for a date, the couples living in mutual misery. All done in a conversational, street-wise argot that cradles tender personal emotions in thick, but strangely gentle workman’s gloves.
Some poems look back on lifetimes, others snapshot momentary tableaux. Some wonder about lost feelings, some marvel at feelings that remain. From the Rabbi trying to say something meaningful about a deceased person he never knew, to the old heads nodding in dark corners, death pervades this book; sometimes as the enemy, often as an expected friend. These poems are about the wreckage left by death as well as the dread of its approach.
He slumps small in the wheelchair
A boneless bag his head
Limp on his shoulder
Hands between his legs
But there is such astonishing tenderness as well:
Once in a while he asks for my breast
He doesn’t just take it he asks for it
I lean down to him lying in my lap
Over an old child softly sucking.
The power of simplicity never had a more able advocate:
Unit 201
The Widowed Second Wife
I know he loved me best
He told me so
She was so cold
He loved the things I did
He told me so
I did them for him
My mouth meant more to him
He told me so
My breasts my heart
He did not think of her
He told me so
I think of her.
If that poem took you to as deep a level as it did me, you will find much beauty and wonderment in Condo.
TRANSLATIONS: Some notes on translation (by m.a..)
Translations, Translations.
Paul Valéry is pretty much out of reach for those not fluent in French language and culture, but William H.Gass gives us deep insights in The World Within the Word.
For example: the chambermaid whose presence the poet barely registers as she quietly tends to his rooms, moves “as glass passes through sunlight/ without trembling the balance of my thought”
Comme passé le verre au travers du soliel
Et de la raison pure épargne l’appareil.
Gass tells us that in “The Rower,” Valéry imagines, in the water, “objects and their reflections…to be like the images of burning which smoked the walls of Plato’s cave…The boat’s prow is urged to divide the world which seems painted in the water, shattering its calm so that of such a massive stillness no memory will remain.”
And, in the same poem (in David Paul’s version) the poet describes floating into the sunlight from beneath the darkness of a bridge:
the mind
Lowers its sensitive suns, its ready eyelids,
Until with a leap that clothes me with jewels
I plunge into the disdain of all that idle azure.
And (switching lingos) when Catullus says: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and value at one penny the murmurs of disapproving old men.” Tom Stoppard recasts the last clause:
“and not give tuppence for the mutterence of old men’s tut-tutterence.” (‘The Invention of Love’)
Now that’s translatin!
Paul Valéry is pretty much out of reach for those not fluent in French language and culture, but William H.Gass gives us deep insights in The World Within the Word.
For example: the chambermaid whose presence the poet barely registers as she quietly tends to his rooms, moves “as glass passes through sunlight/ without trembling the balance of my thought”
Comme passé le verre au travers du soliel
Et de la raison pure épargne l’appareil.
Gass tells us that in “The Rower,” Valéry imagines, in the water, “objects and their reflections…to be like the images of burning which smoked the walls of Plato’s cave…The boat’s prow is urged to divide the world which seems painted in the water, shattering its calm so that of such a massive stillness no memory will remain.”
And, in the same poem (in David Paul’s version) the poet describes floating into the sunlight from beneath the darkness of a bridge:
the mind
Lowers its sensitive suns, its ready eyelids,
Until with a leap that clothes me with jewels
I plunge into the disdain of all that idle azure.
And (switching lingos) when Catullus says: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and value at one penny the murmurs of disapproving old men.” Tom Stoppard recasts the last clause:
“and not give tuppence for the mutterence of old men’s tut-tutterence.” (‘The Invention of Love’)
Now that’s translatin!
BOOK REVIEW: Psychic Killed by Train, by Ron Overton
Psychic Killed by Train, by Ron Overton. Published 2002 by Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff St., B’klyn, NY 11217. Www.hangingloosepress.com. 111 pages. $13.00.
Reviewed by Martin Abramson. First published in Book/Mark, a small press review.
Out of sheer inertia, I had put off work on a new review for this periodical for months, and that hiatus would have extended indefinitely if Mindy hadn’t wildly upped the ante by sending me Ron Overton’s Psychic Killed by Train. I was immediately arrested by topics as vivid and lurid as the six o’clock news itself. Fragmented strips of murder, mischief and mayhem ripped from papers and broadcasts provide key metaphors and pulsating details that Overton projects into a mirror-maze of reflections and introspections, simultaneously weaving them into jazz tapestries. Wanting to write about these fascinating inventions was more of an involuntary reflex than a conscious decision.
Mr. Overton’s poems evoke the modern zeitgeist touching on subjects that range from subways to jet planes, Moscow to Mexico, Big Sur to 68th Street, baseball to traffic jams, private eyes to politicians. I could write a more extensive introductory appreciation of this work, but I’d only be rephrasing the astute observations of Mr.Asekoff found on the back cover. Accordingly, I will simply pick out a representative bouquet of poems and try to describe why I admire them.
In Real Life the layout of Los Angeles viewed from a ‘chopper following O.J.’s Bronco is the over-arching metaphor. Pieces of the reporter’s comments are ‘lifted’ to key into the poet’s final response:
Peter
as you can see
it's too dark to see
O yes
O yes
In Chemical Intervention images of crime and social disintegration fuse with modern maladies and the drugs we use to treat them. It all causes the “ringing in my ears” and makes the author worry about how much of the outside chaos is filtering through his “blood/brain barrier” bringing terror, guilt and perhaps, madness.
In Traffic Report, New York area mayhem, centering on the Long Island Expressway (the L.I.E.) and extending out to a chemical fire engulfing I-80 in New Jersey, lists the carnage of crashes, fires and jack-knifed tractor-trailer tie-ups across the landscape; all serving to delineate a claustrophobic hell of bumper-to-bumper gridlock that blocks any hope of anyone reaching a destination.
Weather Channel flawlessly merges the psyches of the weather reporters with their subject-matter: “…celebrities of rain and wind shear” they wish us no harm but cannot prevent the sparkle in their eyes as they report a hurricane “rollicking in circles just east of the Leeward Islands”. Formerly high school nonentities who spent their free time in the library or the audio-visual club, they are now heroes of the storm who venture…
Outside
riding the whitecaps of prophecy,
striding spindrift reefs and archipelagoes,
they implore us to stay inside,
to huddle tightly
beneath the homeroom desk.
In Animal Planet the poet’s own inadequacies (“as usual, I’ve arrived too late”) are coupled with the downward fluctuations of the elephant population leading to a sense of doom for the latter and failure for the former. The elephants are overrun by civilization, their “old ritual, gutted of meaning--/ their swaying mass, their passivity, like huge clouds/ bumping the ground on a windless day.”
In 1 Dead 1 Injured, the poet goes contrapuntal quoting the news report of a collision, with the gory medical facts told in the odd lines, and, in the even, a narrator contemplating the (severed?) hands of a victim who had been a gifted pianist. The great power of this poem is in the manner in which the even and odd lines complement and comment on one another. After a few readings, the separate themes vanish and the piece is easily read as a continuous, monophonic, richly harmonic line of music.
In Semiotics, the linked formalisms of business deals and cars jockeying for position on the road prepares us, with a sense of dread, for the polite “bespectacled clerk…who meticulously stores/the body parts/ in the Westinghouse”.
In Why Tom Continually Runs After Jerry,” a long list of desultory reasons like: “Because of natural selection”; “Because some things never change”; “Because of dialectical materialism”; culminate in a stunning dénouement:
Because in the stopping and the stillness, he feels a black wind on his
face.
Because in the stopping is the end of it
Because in the stillness is the end of it
What begins as a light-hearted movie critique of the 1940’s ambiance of Moon Over Miami, devolves into a mournful premonition of what those stars, movies, Miami and the country itself would become in later decades.
Noir, a dark foray into fatalism.
For the contemplative baseball fan, Baseball, Again should push all the right buttons. But if that’s not enough, one can forge onward to Future Considerations, Baseball I and Baseball II. On a related topic, Do You Have Prince Albert in a Can? revives memory-wisps of childhood summers and baseball cards packed in with “pink slabs of gum”.
The sports finale comes in the poem, Memorabilia. Covering hockey, baseball and football, it segues into the freakish and fantastic. The “Catalogue of Absence” treats of “records not broken, games played only in the imagination”. We are offered other bizarre mementoes like a “tear… from the Dead Eyes of Shoeless Joe Jackson.” “Bleak,” the author admits, “…but surely a Token preferred against/ the Shutout of Nothingness,/ the empty & abandoned Stadium of our Dreams.”
In A Man of the World, Overton presents a personal fantasy version of the debonair Parisian he would sometimes like to be. “…heavily accented/ always a cigarette dangling/ from its lip…” Seductive, but the sophistication rests on a vast foundation of bones; otherwise known as the history of Europe.
I sometimes skip a poem’s title and plunge right into the text. And I was glad to have done so for the poem on page 76 which Overton “found” in Warburton’s The Beginning of Writing::
Sumerians invent envelope
Rock art in Eastern Spain ceases
Phoenicians invent first complete alphabet
Picture writing appears suddenly in China
Chinese develop mail delivery system
And the title?---You’ve got Mail.
In a sense, all the works in this book are ‘found’, but a few are presented verbatim with any commentary or the need for it. Overton’s photocopy of a very early draft of Frost’s, Fire and Ice, complete with handwritten marginal notes and scansion marks, shows how immensely far the finished, flawless gem can be from the first amalgams of rock and pebble that are destined to produce it.
I’ll take subtle humor over broad anytime, which is why I like a poem called Compleynte: a scathing note penned by a wife? lover? which seems to explode the relationship; the last lines of the note predict that the author “will probably use it/ in some goddamn poem---” And these are also the last lines of the poem.
I hope these few examples will serve to express my pleasure in exploring this fine collection and will convince my readers to do likewise. Ron Overton keeps one finger on the pulse of the times and the other on the heart of being. If you like your philosophy set in city streets and served on paper plates with soda and hotdogs bought from a pushcart, this collection is a true banquet.
Reviewed by Martin Abramson. First published in Book/Mark, a small press review.
Out of sheer inertia, I had put off work on a new review for this periodical for months, and that hiatus would have extended indefinitely if Mindy hadn’t wildly upped the ante by sending me Ron Overton’s Psychic Killed by Train. I was immediately arrested by topics as vivid and lurid as the six o’clock news itself. Fragmented strips of murder, mischief and mayhem ripped from papers and broadcasts provide key metaphors and pulsating details that Overton projects into a mirror-maze of reflections and introspections, simultaneously weaving them into jazz tapestries. Wanting to write about these fascinating inventions was more of an involuntary reflex than a conscious decision.
Mr. Overton’s poems evoke the modern zeitgeist touching on subjects that range from subways to jet planes, Moscow to Mexico, Big Sur to 68th Street, baseball to traffic jams, private eyes to politicians. I could write a more extensive introductory appreciation of this work, but I’d only be rephrasing the astute observations of Mr.Asekoff found on the back cover. Accordingly, I will simply pick out a representative bouquet of poems and try to describe why I admire them.
In Real Life the layout of Los Angeles viewed from a ‘chopper following O.J.’s Bronco is the over-arching metaphor. Pieces of the reporter’s comments are ‘lifted’ to key into the poet’s final response:
Peter
as you can see
it's too dark to see
O yes
O yes
In Chemical Intervention images of crime and social disintegration fuse with modern maladies and the drugs we use to treat them. It all causes the “ringing in my ears” and makes the author worry about how much of the outside chaos is filtering through his “blood/brain barrier” bringing terror, guilt and perhaps, madness.
In Traffic Report, New York area mayhem, centering on the Long Island Expressway (the L.I.E.) and extending out to a chemical fire engulfing I-80 in New Jersey, lists the carnage of crashes, fires and jack-knifed tractor-trailer tie-ups across the landscape; all serving to delineate a claustrophobic hell of bumper-to-bumper gridlock that blocks any hope of anyone reaching a destination.
Weather Channel flawlessly merges the psyches of the weather reporters with their subject-matter: “…celebrities of rain and wind shear” they wish us no harm but cannot prevent the sparkle in their eyes as they report a hurricane “rollicking in circles just east of the Leeward Islands”. Formerly high school nonentities who spent their free time in the library or the audio-visual club, they are now heroes of the storm who venture…
Outside
riding the whitecaps of prophecy,
striding spindrift reefs and archipelagoes,
they implore us to stay inside,
to huddle tightly
beneath the homeroom desk.
In Animal Planet the poet’s own inadequacies (“as usual, I’ve arrived too late”) are coupled with the downward fluctuations of the elephant population leading to a sense of doom for the latter and failure for the former. The elephants are overrun by civilization, their “old ritual, gutted of meaning--/ their swaying mass, their passivity, like huge clouds/ bumping the ground on a windless day.”
In 1 Dead 1 Injured, the poet goes contrapuntal quoting the news report of a collision, with the gory medical facts told in the odd lines, and, in the even, a narrator contemplating the (severed?) hands of a victim who had been a gifted pianist. The great power of this poem is in the manner in which the even and odd lines complement and comment on one another. After a few readings, the separate themes vanish and the piece is easily read as a continuous, monophonic, richly harmonic line of music.
In Semiotics, the linked formalisms of business deals and cars jockeying for position on the road prepares us, with a sense of dread, for the polite “bespectacled clerk…who meticulously stores/the body parts/ in the Westinghouse”.
In Why Tom Continually Runs After Jerry,” a long list of desultory reasons like: “Because of natural selection”; “Because some things never change”; “Because of dialectical materialism”; culminate in a stunning dénouement:
Because in the stopping and the stillness, he feels a black wind on his
face.
Because in the stopping is the end of it
Because in the stillness is the end of it
What begins as a light-hearted movie critique of the 1940’s ambiance of Moon Over Miami, devolves into a mournful premonition of what those stars, movies, Miami and the country itself would become in later decades.
Noir, a dark foray into fatalism.
For the contemplative baseball fan, Baseball, Again should push all the right buttons. But if that’s not enough, one can forge onward to Future Considerations, Baseball I and Baseball II. On a related topic, Do You Have Prince Albert in a Can? revives memory-wisps of childhood summers and baseball cards packed in with “pink slabs of gum”.
The sports finale comes in the poem, Memorabilia. Covering hockey, baseball and football, it segues into the freakish and fantastic. The “Catalogue of Absence” treats of “records not broken, games played only in the imagination”. We are offered other bizarre mementoes like a “tear… from the Dead Eyes of Shoeless Joe Jackson.” “Bleak,” the author admits, “…but surely a Token preferred against/ the Shutout of Nothingness,/ the empty & abandoned Stadium of our Dreams.”
In A Man of the World, Overton presents a personal fantasy version of the debonair Parisian he would sometimes like to be. “…heavily accented/ always a cigarette dangling/ from its lip…” Seductive, but the sophistication rests on a vast foundation of bones; otherwise known as the history of Europe.
I sometimes skip a poem’s title and plunge right into the text. And I was glad to have done so for the poem on page 76 which Overton “found” in Warburton’s The Beginning of Writing::
Sumerians invent envelope
Rock art in Eastern Spain ceases
Phoenicians invent first complete alphabet
Picture writing appears suddenly in China
Chinese develop mail delivery system
And the title?---You’ve got Mail.
In a sense, all the works in this book are ‘found’, but a few are presented verbatim with any commentary or the need for it. Overton’s photocopy of a very early draft of Frost’s, Fire and Ice, complete with handwritten marginal notes and scansion marks, shows how immensely far the finished, flawless gem can be from the first amalgams of rock and pebble that are destined to produce it.
I’ll take subtle humor over broad anytime, which is why I like a poem called Compleynte: a scathing note penned by a wife? lover? which seems to explode the relationship; the last lines of the note predict that the author “will probably use it/ in some goddamn poem---” And these are also the last lines of the poem.
I hope these few examples will serve to express my pleasure in exploring this fine collection and will convince my readers to do likewise. Ron Overton keeps one finger on the pulse of the times and the other on the heart of being. If you like your philosophy set in city streets and served on paper plates with soda and hotdogs bought from a pushcart, this collection is a true banquet.
BOOK REVIEW: Kentucky Swami by Tim Skeen
BOOK REVIEW by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Winter 2002-03
KENTUCKY SWAMI by Tim Skeen. BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2001. ISBN 1-886157-33-2. 75 pages. www.umkc.edu/bkmk
In his Ciardi Prize-winning debut collection, Tim Skeen is writing solidly in the tradition of E.A.Robinson, Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg Ohio. But the poems of Kentucky Swami are even sparer, more meticulously factual and more flatly reportorial than those predecessors. However, this doesn’t mean that we ever get the whole story. Skeen gives us only those vital fragments needed to make his point, and the point of each poem may be social, philosophical, symbolic or all of the above. Many of these pieces don’t bother to name their human subjects. Some merely identify the main character as an uncle, brother or friend. Several concern the poet’s father.
These are rock-hard pieces chipped from the tough lives of poor people: they depict an American wasteland of ruptured pipes, junk cars, bad luck and “poverty, poverty, poverty”. They celebrate people who work hard all their lives, fight America’s wars, get cheated out of their pensions, lose their old age to work-related diseases and still find gems of pleasure in among the ruins. There are few ‘poetic lines’ to quote here; rather the poetry of each piece exudes from its totality like a drop of amber on a maple branch.
To mention a few of Skeen’s ‘people poems,’ How I Got My Name sketches with a few deft strokes, the life of Juanita, a victim of repeated episodes of bad luck, who brought the poet’s mother a handful of timothy grass telling her to name her son after it. The Voice of a Woman with One Lung, describes the screams of someone whose throat cancer has condemned her to emit sounds through a tiny aperture in her neck. The causes of her condition in Pall Malls, black coffee and digitalis are hinted at. She is buried with a “light blue scarf/ the color of smoke around the hole/ in her throat”.
Skeen recalls throwing a baseball, as a boy, with Elton Maynard an embittered alcoholic who pitches the ball harder and farther with each exchange. Tim never finds the ball that soars over his head into the deep grasses, just as he is unable to find his way to the funeral after Elton is laid low by bourbon.
Kentucky Swami speaks of the physical traumas that change people’s lives as in, Scar, or Systemic Lupus. The first is a woman’s memento of a caesarian birth; the second a condition that both sickens a woman but also seems to fuel her boundless energy. Nola outlives parents, brothers, children and pets. The butterfly on her face is indicative of the life-force blazing through her. “The rash is only the body’s way/ of holding onto fire”.
In one of the most impressive pieces in this book—Patrick Lowell Putnam’s Monologue— the writer seems to adopt the persona of an Agent Sanitaire for the Belgian Red Cross in Africa. (Skeen was a Red Cross volunteer in Appalachia for ten years.) The crisis of a native woman’s breech-birth is used to explore Skeen’s relationship with his physician father and the strict Boston heritage which he represented. This is rejected in favor of the freedom and reality found in Africa. Even “the woman from/ the New Yorker…wasn’t shocked that I’d taken a native wife…but that I had three wives”. But some Westerners get it. The King and Queen of Belgium join him for a night of “dancing with the pygmies, eating wild mushrooms/ honey, smoking marijuana, yodeling!”
Most of the ‘people poems’ in this volume comment on social problems, deal with personal relationships or blend the twain. Of the former, we may list: Strike; Graphite; The Instructor at the Police Academy Teaches the Come-Along; Signing Up For Unemployment Benefits; Gameday Saturday Afternoon; Jehovah’s Witnesses; The American Red Cross; Directions to the Otter Creek Correctional Facility; A Commonwealth of Kentucky #2 Pencil; War Memorial in Wheelwright, Kentucky; At the Gulf War Veteran’s Funeral; To Another Student Who Forgot to Put His Name on His Paper; Public Works; and The Masonry Professor at the Community College. Of the latter: Tongue; Biljana; Rural; For My Wife on Our Six-Week Anniversary; The Lancaster Room; She Asks If I Love Her; The Unmet Needs; To Our Unborn Child; Translation of a Mathematical Equation Which I Found on a Blackboard; and For the Record. I shall leave it to the reader to ferret out those in the blended category.
Beyond these, there are a few pieces that frankly deal with eternal questions such as 1Place Denfert-Rochereau; nature poems such as The Sunken Garden; and some found poems like, Buck Owens and His Buckaroos in Japan.
There’s humor in this book, usually bitter-sweet as in Safe-T-Man, a poem about an inflatable male figure a woman can sit in her car next to her to project the idea that she’s not alone. But the menace of modern society hovers in the background of this work just as it does in 9800 Franklin Avenue where the finding of a severed bird-wing “opened on a rock/ like a handkerchief left/ to dry in the sun,” clouds the atmosphere of trust and security that had sustained a neighborhood.
While this is not the place to critique individual poems at length, many are certainly worth the effort. This poet may not strive for quotable tidbits, but he doesn’t hesitate to serve up bloody meat on a platter as he does when describing the brutal love-hate relationship between him and his brother as children in, She Asks If I Love Her. Each wearing one boxing glove, the brothers would beat each other bloody and end up hugging tenderly. The stunning answer to the wife’s question as posed in the title, and referring to the struggling brothers, is found in the last line: “I have come to mistrust any subsequent version”. Kentucky Swami doesn’t try to sell us any sort of romanticized window-dressing. These are poems you can trust.
.
KENTUCKY SWAMI by Tim Skeen. BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2001. ISBN 1-886157-33-2. 75 pages. www.umkc.edu/bkmk
In his Ciardi Prize-winning debut collection, Tim Skeen is writing solidly in the tradition of E.A.Robinson, Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg Ohio. But the poems of Kentucky Swami are even sparer, more meticulously factual and more flatly reportorial than those predecessors. However, this doesn’t mean that we ever get the whole story. Skeen gives us only those vital fragments needed to make his point, and the point of each poem may be social, philosophical, symbolic or all of the above. Many of these pieces don’t bother to name their human subjects. Some merely identify the main character as an uncle, brother or friend. Several concern the poet’s father.
These are rock-hard pieces chipped from the tough lives of poor people: they depict an American wasteland of ruptured pipes, junk cars, bad luck and “poverty, poverty, poverty”. They celebrate people who work hard all their lives, fight America’s wars, get cheated out of their pensions, lose their old age to work-related diseases and still find gems of pleasure in among the ruins. There are few ‘poetic lines’ to quote here; rather the poetry of each piece exudes from its totality like a drop of amber on a maple branch.
To mention a few of Skeen’s ‘people poems,’ How I Got My Name sketches with a few deft strokes, the life of Juanita, a victim of repeated episodes of bad luck, who brought the poet’s mother a handful of timothy grass telling her to name her son after it. The Voice of a Woman with One Lung, describes the screams of someone whose throat cancer has condemned her to emit sounds through a tiny aperture in her neck. The causes of her condition in Pall Malls, black coffee and digitalis are hinted at. She is buried with a “light blue scarf/ the color of smoke around the hole/ in her throat”.
Skeen recalls throwing a baseball, as a boy, with Elton Maynard an embittered alcoholic who pitches the ball harder and farther with each exchange. Tim never finds the ball that soars over his head into the deep grasses, just as he is unable to find his way to the funeral after Elton is laid low by bourbon.
Kentucky Swami speaks of the physical traumas that change people’s lives as in, Scar, or Systemic Lupus. The first is a woman’s memento of a caesarian birth; the second a condition that both sickens a woman but also seems to fuel her boundless energy. Nola outlives parents, brothers, children and pets. The butterfly on her face is indicative of the life-force blazing through her. “The rash is only the body’s way/ of holding onto fire”.
In one of the most impressive pieces in this book—Patrick Lowell Putnam’s Monologue— the writer seems to adopt the persona of an Agent Sanitaire for the Belgian Red Cross in Africa. (Skeen was a Red Cross volunteer in Appalachia for ten years.) The crisis of a native woman’s breech-birth is used to explore Skeen’s relationship with his physician father and the strict Boston heritage which he represented. This is rejected in favor of the freedom and reality found in Africa. Even “the woman from/ the New Yorker…wasn’t shocked that I’d taken a native wife…but that I had three wives”. But some Westerners get it. The King and Queen of Belgium join him for a night of “dancing with the pygmies, eating wild mushrooms/ honey, smoking marijuana, yodeling!”
Most of the ‘people poems’ in this volume comment on social problems, deal with personal relationships or blend the twain. Of the former, we may list: Strike; Graphite; The Instructor at the Police Academy Teaches the Come-Along; Signing Up For Unemployment Benefits; Gameday Saturday Afternoon; Jehovah’s Witnesses; The American Red Cross; Directions to the Otter Creek Correctional Facility; A Commonwealth of Kentucky #2 Pencil; War Memorial in Wheelwright, Kentucky; At the Gulf War Veteran’s Funeral; To Another Student Who Forgot to Put His Name on His Paper; Public Works; and The Masonry Professor at the Community College. Of the latter: Tongue; Biljana; Rural; For My Wife on Our Six-Week Anniversary; The Lancaster Room; She Asks If I Love Her; The Unmet Needs; To Our Unborn Child; Translation of a Mathematical Equation Which I Found on a Blackboard; and For the Record. I shall leave it to the reader to ferret out those in the blended category.
Beyond these, there are a few pieces that frankly deal with eternal questions such as 1Place Denfert-Rochereau; nature poems such as The Sunken Garden; and some found poems like, Buck Owens and His Buckaroos in Japan.
There’s humor in this book, usually bitter-sweet as in Safe-T-Man, a poem about an inflatable male figure a woman can sit in her car next to her to project the idea that she’s not alone. But the menace of modern society hovers in the background of this work just as it does in 9800 Franklin Avenue where the finding of a severed bird-wing “opened on a rock/ like a handkerchief left/ to dry in the sun,” clouds the atmosphere of trust and security that had sustained a neighborhood.
While this is not the place to critique individual poems at length, many are certainly worth the effort. This poet may not strive for quotable tidbits, but he doesn’t hesitate to serve up bloody meat on a platter as he does when describing the brutal love-hate relationship between him and his brother as children in, She Asks If I Love Her. Each wearing one boxing glove, the brothers would beat each other bloody and end up hugging tenderly. The stunning answer to the wife’s question as posed in the title, and referring to the struggling brothers, is found in the last line: “I have come to mistrust any subsequent version”. Kentucky Swami doesn’t try to sell us any sort of romanticized window-dressing. These are poems you can trust.
.
BOOK REVIEW: Zero Gravity by Eric Gamalinda
Review: Zero Gravity by Eric Gamalinda, alicejamesbooks, Farmington, ME, 78 pp, $11.95
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Fall-Winter 2001
Eric Gamalinda is about as good a poet as I’ve come across among those sub lunar talents seemingly within a few galactic miles of the likes of Yeats or Stevens. And, not to disparage Mr. Gamalinda, the number of such truly impressive poets seems to increase frighteningly and on a weekly basis. While there’s no such thing as too many fine poets, where will we get the time to read them all?
But in the case of Mr. Gamalinda we must surely make the time. His present collection, Zero Gravity, is so consistently original, striking and even shocking that his standing at the very top of the really good new poets is beyond dispute. Almost every line of almost every poem is memorable. It makes a reviewer’s task more difficult when his attempt to cite outstanding lines leads inexorably toward quoting the whole book. But let me make a start.
Mr. Gamalinda’s gaze exposes the world’s cities and landscapes bathed in a super-real light that emanates from and points back toward the realms of spirit
…the sky is a membrane
in an angel’s skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.
In “You Can Choose Your Afterlife,” a minor masterpiece, Mr. Gamalinda explores the strange heavens of the T’boli who assign afterlives according to ways of death. Death by the sword leads the soul into a red world where you are welcomed
with the tintinnabulation
of copper bells
Suicides inherit a land “where everything sways/ even in sleep”. As the poem sweeps to its climax this metaphor is movingly interwoven with the memory of a friend who, even in death, was always “one step ahead”. In a remarkable poem that Eliot might have penned between The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, Gamalinda seeks all that has been lost “in a source that is more blue/than anyone has ever seen”. In Blue, Kind of, imagery pours forth with astonishing splendor:
The moon at daytime
still thick with honey and minerals,
the flood tide of rare
and malleable metal.
After a bucolic intermezzo invoking the earthy wholesomeness of a shepherd with goats and dog, the author returns to
…the time of miracles
when all we need to know
will be revealed in dreams,
in water, in the desert,
in arteries, in stones.
We will understand
the persistence of trees
and the agony of rivers
…and in our poverty
there will be much to give
and more light than we can imagine.
In Buddha’s Bone, Gamalinda plays with the notion that chaos and chance are the ruling leitmotifs of this world.
heaven is in the effortless storm
of frangipani…
The ancients “learn to revere the places/where time and destiny drop them off/like lost luggage”. Yet in playing our endless tennis game with chaos, we manage to maintain some semblance of a pattern…of a home.
It’s as if we were taking turns
holding sentry over the world,
lest it change too drastically in our sleep.
Somewhere in the Far East, the author sits near a payphone thinking of calling his lover on the other side of the world as the sun “a bowl of saffron light/spills into a river of jade and mud”.The coin in his hand “carries your voice like a charm”. “Distance is something we learn to live with.”
Maybe I’ll be lucky and not miss my train
There are no maps there
and no schedules to guide me.
In trying to communicate his wonderment of life itself, Mr. Gamalinda constantly pushes language into ceremonies of innocence. He wants to send us the silence of an explosion of fireflies that rise in the gloaming. He asks if the disintegrating weave of an abandoned bird’s nest contains memories of lost sunlight.
I want to send you
this silence
This little volume is replete with images…archetypes almost…that will incorporate themselves into your life. The battered mother and the son waiting at the station for the train that will help them escape the father…and will later return them to him. The subway busker, her guitar case “an open palm/of frayed blue satin”. The couple in Afghanistan stoned to death for adultery. Lorca on a street in Granada. It is filled with mysteriously spellbinding poems like Uqbaresque, Five Tango Sensations and Definition of Flamenco in 245 Words. Poems whose perfect synthesis and unity defies quotation. Social consciousness here takes the long view seeing not only the pathetic poverty of the beggar in Memory is Not a Privilege of the Poor, but the shadows of memory that surround her. Amorphous shadows of happy memories that we might help her reconstruct, except that we walk away. All these gifts Zero Gravity brings us because “the angels tremble from so much beauty…and rain remembers nothing”.
Reviewed by Martin Abramson
Review by Martin Abramson first published in Book/Mark, Fall-Winter 2001
Eric Gamalinda is about as good a poet as I’ve come across among those sub lunar talents seemingly within a few galactic miles of the likes of Yeats or Stevens. And, not to disparage Mr. Gamalinda, the number of such truly impressive poets seems to increase frighteningly and on a weekly basis. While there’s no such thing as too many fine poets, where will we get the time to read them all?
But in the case of Mr. Gamalinda we must surely make the time. His present collection, Zero Gravity, is so consistently original, striking and even shocking that his standing at the very top of the really good new poets is beyond dispute. Almost every line of almost every poem is memorable. It makes a reviewer’s task more difficult when his attempt to cite outstanding lines leads inexorably toward quoting the whole book. But let me make a start.
Mr. Gamalinda’s gaze exposes the world’s cities and landscapes bathed in a super-real light that emanates from and points back toward the realms of spirit
…the sky is a membrane
in an angel’s skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.
In “You Can Choose Your Afterlife,” a minor masterpiece, Mr. Gamalinda explores the strange heavens of the T’boli who assign afterlives according to ways of death. Death by the sword leads the soul into a red world where you are welcomed
with the tintinnabulation
of copper bells
Suicides inherit a land “where everything sways/ even in sleep”. As the poem sweeps to its climax this metaphor is movingly interwoven with the memory of a friend who, even in death, was always “one step ahead”. In a remarkable poem that Eliot might have penned between The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, Gamalinda seeks all that has been lost “in a source that is more blue/than anyone has ever seen”. In Blue, Kind of, imagery pours forth with astonishing splendor:
The moon at daytime
still thick with honey and minerals,
the flood tide of rare
and malleable metal.
After a bucolic intermezzo invoking the earthy wholesomeness of a shepherd with goats and dog, the author returns to
…the time of miracles
when all we need to know
will be revealed in dreams,
in water, in the desert,
in arteries, in stones.
We will understand
the persistence of trees
and the agony of rivers
…and in our poverty
there will be much to give
and more light than we can imagine.
In Buddha’s Bone, Gamalinda plays with the notion that chaos and chance are the ruling leitmotifs of this world.
heaven is in the effortless storm
of frangipani…
The ancients “learn to revere the places/where time and destiny drop them off/like lost luggage”. Yet in playing our endless tennis game with chaos, we manage to maintain some semblance of a pattern…of a home.
It’s as if we were taking turns
holding sentry over the world,
lest it change too drastically in our sleep.
Somewhere in the Far East, the author sits near a payphone thinking of calling his lover on the other side of the world as the sun “a bowl of saffron light/spills into a river of jade and mud”.The coin in his hand “carries your voice like a charm”. “Distance is something we learn to live with.”
Maybe I’ll be lucky and not miss my train
There are no maps there
and no schedules to guide me.
In trying to communicate his wonderment of life itself, Mr. Gamalinda constantly pushes language into ceremonies of innocence. He wants to send us the silence of an explosion of fireflies that rise in the gloaming. He asks if the disintegrating weave of an abandoned bird’s nest contains memories of lost sunlight.
I want to send you
this silence
This little volume is replete with images…archetypes almost…that will incorporate themselves into your life. The battered mother and the son waiting at the station for the train that will help them escape the father…and will later return them to him. The subway busker, her guitar case “an open palm/of frayed blue satin”. The couple in Afghanistan stoned to death for adultery. Lorca on a street in Granada. It is filled with mysteriously spellbinding poems like Uqbaresque, Five Tango Sensations and Definition of Flamenco in 245 Words. Poems whose perfect synthesis and unity defies quotation. Social consciousness here takes the long view seeing not only the pathetic poverty of the beggar in Memory is Not a Privilege of the Poor, but the shadows of memory that surround her. Amorphous shadows of happy memories that we might help her reconstruct, except that we walk away. All these gifts Zero Gravity brings us because “the angels tremble from so much beauty…and rain remembers nothing”.
Reviewed by Martin Abramson
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
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 poems.
Review first published in Book/Mark, Fall 2009
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 poems.
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