Master of Leaves by Murray Silverstein

With permission of Book/Mark a Quarterly Small Press Review.
   Winter-2015                                      

Review by Martin Abramson

MASTER OF LEAVES:  By Murray Silverstein

Sixteen Rivers Press

San Francisco, CA

$16.00, 91 pp, Paper

                          Murray Silverstein's style is a breezy, casual, off- the-cuff affair that gets quite chummy with the reader. Of course, a chum is a friend with whom one can speak his mind without fear of criticism. But alas, the reviewer, hard hearted cynics that he is, may assume no such intimacy. If a line like

                    hummingbird at the fuchsia---suck away, pal.

offends him to the soul, what can he do but hold it up and hope the reader agrees.

Not that Mr. Silverstein's collection is replete with such examples, but the style would seem to encourage them, and not always felicitously. The same poem, “The Constant”, refers to the speed of light and asks, "why, in the famous equation, must it be squared) it's already the speed of light?" The question is disingenuous as the poet shows later that he's perfectly aware that mass figures in the equation. The poem is a conceit which describes the body of a woman as a physical constant, tossing Einstein in for corroboration. To be sure, the poem contains some lovely descriptive lines: "but there's the heat, that feral almost- chocolate smell/ and twigs of cedar—twiglets---tangled in your hair." But there's also simplistic philosophy: "We're hit/ with a double whammy in this life: sex and other people." Maybe a single whammy. Doesn't  "other people," certain ones, include the subject of sex?

Mother is "Mother Goose" in which a mother's despair at the loss of her daughter to sudden elopement is nicely set

            against the indifference of the geese: "...my mother sat

            down/ in a chair she never sat in, and wouldn't speak..." While the geese, ". . .steadfastly fly-                                 floating across the sky.. ." are unheedful.

The poet's world has changed, but

               ...what is that to the geese?

             ... Tell me, if you know, I say we can never know, but we can ask...

             the lyric mind

              was made to ask. But what is that mind to the geese?

Two poems that are similar in theme are "Here Went the Egret" and  "Song of the Field." The latter recalls "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" in lines like: "The song of the field is the buzz of the mind..." and "To enter the mind, enter the field." In "Here Went the Egret," the speaker digs a pond and stocks it with fish only to watch his aquarium emptied by an egret. But, forgetting pond and fish, the poet is awed by the power of the egret (as was Hopkins at a windhover) "...stroking the morning, erotics of air, as up/ and over me she glides..."

Both poems suggest that the closest we can come to reality is by an apotheosis of, or even by entering into the consciousness of a bird. This one ends with the poet who:

             ... dug the pond, bought the fish,

             Thought there was me, the egret, the fish, but no,

                                                           there is only the egret.

"Song of the Field," after descending from the mind to the man, to the field, to the edge of the field, to the woods and to the caw of the crow, concludes: "...to enter the woods, you must enter the crow."

Mr. Silverstein often pays homage to authors and artists he admires. In "Lunch with Saul Bellow," he quizzes the novelist as Dante did Virgil. "...how is love lavished?" "why is it lavished?" "...love itself is spun! From what?" The poet gets reasonably straight answers thus far, but the remainder of the poem dissolves into forest sounds;  "hoo-hoo-coo:" literary advice: "build a house/ of stories, tangled with other stories" and cryptic pronouncements: "sadness the marrow of the want bone."

The poem, "In Scarlet Town" invokes Bob Dylan's song, Vermeer's Young Woman at a Window with a Pitcher, Moby Dick, and Beethoven. It's a kind of culturally comprehensive comment on guilt, betrayal, escape and remorse summed up by the penultimate line," Mistakes were made and all is lost," but things are partially redeemed in the final image of the Vermeer: "Let me call your attention to her lips."

In "Self-Portrait," Mr. Silverstein once again plays physics off against art, referencing the discovery of the God particle with Rembrandt's painting. The trillionth of a second glow of the Higgs boson is mirrored in "...the tiny drop of white in the black pools" of the artist's eyes; and in "'...the glowing speck of silver I on the head of his cane..."

In two lengthy poems, "The Poison, The Cure" and "What is Man? " Mr. Silverstein brings Joyce and Dostoyevsky into the mix in the persons of Prince Myshkin and Molly Bloom. The first poem is more or less sexually oriented. The second is considerably darker involving dogs, leashes, pain and Ulysses.

"The Wheeled Blade" is probably the most overtly erotic poem in the book. The poet and a friend, baking pizzas, remember Judy Sharfman from years past, whose father ran the Hebrew school;  who would ...open her legs on her back on the grass and then snap them shut." It was his initiation to the female body. And the grown boys, marveling that she'd subsequently become a rabbi, comingle her with the Bible: "wordstream from the cuntspring" and "Torah within the Torah."

The title poem, is probably the best in this collection. The first of twelve sections describes insects on a late summer evening. "...a gnat storm is rising, a-jitter/ like a worried thought..." Water Walkers or Jesus bugs, don't walk so much as "dimple, and drift' on water.. .or they hump the water... sparks of manic desiring..."

In the second section, the October sun blasts the plum "turning its jam-dark leaves/ to pale-green moons." The third section centers on the autumn leaves. As the writer gathers them and crushes them underfoot, the leaves speak of their perceptions:

                Great master, our alphabet's an agony

                 of spine, a crazed ecstatic branching after light.-

The heliotropic leaves turn to the red south but wonder about Northern darkness and why lovers are impatient for the night.

The fourth section is commentary on the third in conference with "the Interior Gal."  They parse the aspects of light in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Mac Low's Light Poems:  “There's light and the endless craving of light to see itself and, ...light itself is made/ she said, of light-eviscerated plums.”

Section 5 is a meditation on death occasioned by the funeral of a friendly neighbor. The fall mirrors her death:  "...taking its toll. Golden a moment, then blown, rainy/ taking until the turn, the turn the tolling turns..."

Section 6 recalls lovers "on the lawn that sophomore spring: "   "Just out of jail and all over each other." But the episode ends in emptiness:  "The leaves falling, and then the rain."

Section 7, December Light, is fashioned in free verse as is most of these poems, but not without meter, variations within meter and internal rhyme. I will leave close analysis of Mr. Silverstein's complex scansion to those more erudite, and suffice myself with a long quote from this beautiful piece:

                ...what is, December 1, is light

              through the fog and slowly gaining on the neighbor's red-                                                                                       tipped maple                                                                                                                                                                 as if a cloud were an ember.

Inside the window, the same light gathers

in the hour-shaped glass centered on the sill, its bouquet

of red tulips and pale, feathered grass—whose stems

he can see are becoming translucent

the one light

through all.

Skipping to section 10, the January departure of the sun eviscerates the landscape                    

              And words, those tokens of joy the world offered once,

                     are beginning to disappear

                      into the things they've named'

                     becoming the tears in things...

And the penultimate section, 1 1, February Sky, takes the poet back to the dreary, typical city landscape in February, with the bearded religious loony, the couple on the steps of the middle school and the rain.

But with late March in Section 12, we feel "the fragrant breeze, so undeserved/ everything budding early." And we hear:

                     ...a children 's song! Sung by the living

                     to all that are gone, with verses, refrain—the silence

                     under the plum, blossoming, everything showered in light.

I'm constrained to admit a grudging admiration for Mr. Silverstein's work. He goes his own way, devising his own rules along it; but if uniqueness and honest path finding are exemplars of important poetry, these efforts surely fit the bill.

Martin Abramson is a poet, critic, author of four books, and a regular contributor to Book/Mark

Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet 2009

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

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

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

http://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-BBC-V…/…/B0038RSJ0U/ref=sr_1_2…
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Hamlet (2009) (BBC)
David Tennant and Patrick Stewart star in this critically acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s masterpiece from Britain’s renowned Royal Shakespeare Company. No recent stage production in Britain has attracted the excitement and nearly...
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Dreams

Dreams: martin abramson

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

REVIEW: by Martin Abramson

SPLITTING HARD GROUND

By Marilyn Stablein

La Alameda Press

Albuquerque, New Mexico

$12.00, 78 pp. Paper

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

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

                             At the burning ghat

                             bodies hover atop wood

                          stacked four feet high.

                          The eldest son lights the pyre.

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

                                       Only Mataji cooks

                                    with bones of the dead.

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

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

                                         These carapace shells, dried seed

                                         pods, and red earth fill glass jars

                                         in my studio. Assemblages house

                                         aged bones, skulls, bugs, dismembered

                                         doll’s limbs. River rocks, wild herbs…

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

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

                                                By a pinion fire I dream

                                                of summer, peaches simmer

                                                on the stove.

                                                                        …I’ll plant

                                                 A garden for you, Mom.

                                                 In the backyard.”

The simple pathos of these poems is overwhelming.

                                                On top of the bookcase…

                                                            wrapped in a delicate

                                                Japanese silk scarf, hand painted

                                                with scenes of cranes and curly

                                                foam tipped waves, rests Willie’s box.

                                                Wild pheasant feathers gathered

                                                In the woods and a few shells decorate the top.

                                                Is it a present or an art work?

                                                my poet friend Janice asks.

                                                My son’s ashes, I tell her,

                                                I like to keep him near.

                                   

                                    “The Water Carriers” is dedicated to Willie.

                                                All love is memorable.

                                                Some only for the pain.

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

                                                Water blasts ahead

                                                pounds the earth, shreds

                                                my heart to bits of

wayward shells, knotted

kelp, stranded sea creatures.

                                               

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

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

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.