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Poetry ReviewsPoetry reviews currently posted: Selected Poems 1972-2005 by Eric Greinke. (Reviewed by Dave Wheeler) Selected Poems 1972-2005 For more than thirty years, Eric Greinke has been crafting poetry with colorful quality and provocative texture. This collection attempts to capture the unique evolution of a poet, and, I'm sure, only begins to paint a picture of Greinke's true merit. From the beginning, Greinke sets a mood of dedication. The first poem, "Postcard," is a message sent to someone far away. Short and simple, he writes: The sky is grey here. My room is quiet & near. Thinking of you in my little cocoon. From there, this collection becomes a series of poems as postcards, dedicated to family and friends and poets near and far. It's like stumbling upon a box of old letters, in a desk, in an antique shop, inviting a stranger into the warmth and intimacy of Greinke's life. Much of Greinke's collection consists of short poems, packing power nonetheless. He writes as an avid nature-lover. Each poem creates landscapes of mountains and fields, flowers and birds, stars and snow, especially in pieces like "April," "Painting," and "The Tree." Greinke goes on to take his readers on walks with him through forests, through rainstorms, through the dead of night. Even poems like "In the Library" and "The Nun" evoke natural illustrations. Consider a nun: Her eyes are Chinese Jade. Her wings are maple leaves. Her mouth is a blue window. About halfway through, Greinke's style shifts toward psychedelia. There is a set of three-part poems that transform the landscapes of this collection into acres of peculiarity. Just when you come to expect roses and rain, you'll find the unexpected in the "Seasons" part of the poem "Ice Feathers." A stray nose appears at the door. "You're just in time." I said. Jeweled hornets buzz around The home of the Clown. April is a vegetable month. February tastes like lilacs. Meanwhile, down by the smiling pond, An Angel cleans her sooted wings. March is a time of abandoned zebras.Greinke follows this up with another three-parter called "The White Trees," which in some ways resembles the Anthony Burgess novel The Wanting Seed. There is a sense of a post-apocalyptic return to savagery. The world collapses at the hands of humanity and what have we to do but succumb to bacchanal regression. Although never yielding his strong grip on vivid imagery and clever sonic devices, Greinke continues the excursion into the bizarre with poems like "The Door" and "The Clown Choir." His attention to alliteration and assonance creates gratifying rhythms to his work. In the poem "The Forest," you catch glimpses of these techniques in lines like In spring the seedlings pop, pushing through the birth-wet dirt, thirsting for the life of light, straining thin arms toward rain. Many never make it through the membrane of leaves. At the collection's close, Greinke returns his readers to poems short and simple, like those at the beginning, but not without a curious residue: SOME TREES
Three little trees
all in a row:
You, & me,
& Marcel Marceau.
Greinke seamlessly weaves together the vibrance of the naturalist with the unsettling images of dream worlds and mimes. His collection of work from more than three decades establishes Eric Greinke as an accomplished poet, seeing both worlds seen and unseen. Children of Gravity There's always an image around us, something profound we choose to see for what it is or ignore. Bees. Sparrows. Moon. Smoke. Gravity. Light. These are some of the images used as a bass line beating along to the beauty of imagination, dreams, words, and objects. The poems in Children of Gravity show that we are all unique yet interlaced in a web of conquest and meaning, diverse beings and words broken down into the raw unadulterated questions of philosophy and nature. Children of Gravity is broken into three parts: These along with the title of the book Children of Gravity, are also titles to individual poems. "The Conquest of Air" introduces the backbone of imagery in poems such as, "A Bee Discovers Gravity" and "A Day in the Life of a Sparrow." "Tendencies of Unfamiliar Objects" transcends the images, blowing them into many different words and unexpected connections. Space and single words become negative poems opposite the written ones. They glare into our soul and haunt our natural phonetic inebriation. In the second half of "The Contortionist's Wife" this is exemplified. I believe in you and the anatomy of the invisible, the language of flies quieting in the approaching darkness. In between this geometry of bones and the oak trees across the street is a riddle of light, degrees of weather, time. I hear the mumbo jumbo of your heart pressed to your calves thinking of the discipline of snow in filling only the empty spaces, shapes in the shadows of houses or the moon held by thick branches. And I hear the breath of words escape from below your arms, pale birds breaking flight in every word you cannot say. "The Art of Translation" makes use of images to try and interpret this imperfect world for what it is, even if there isn't an answer. From "In One Version of the Shape of Things to Come," …In my movie the ordinary shapes of things become unrecognizable, a child's white ball is an angel under a pillow of light. A dog becomes the cloud that costumed the top of an evergreen yesterday… Translation is an art and journey on its own and can prove to be just as inviting as what is actually there. Children of Gravity does something that is to be greatly appreciated. It's as if the book itself rises in the air and blows a cool stream of images and thoughts that scatter to the floor. But in the most unexpected places, they'll be lifted up, directly in front of your eyes. An Empty House: Korean American Poetry With its eye-catching cover, An Empty House: Korean American Poetry is a beautiful book. And a random perusal gives the reader the immediate feel that the poems in this 133-page collection are for all of us. The poems by twelve Korean American poets are very accessible to an American audience and especially to the modern ear. The language of these poets is direct and simple and their poems are typically short. There is a sensitivity expressed in these poems of exile that speaks to the love of family and home, and love of nature—themes that appeal to all of us. The memory of the homeland and the yearning for those connections to family are strong elements throughout this collection. The family is present in many of these poems as in “Father” by Chong Cha Lee. The memory of the comfort and love between father and child is awakened in the lines. After listening to the dull adult talks, / I fell asleep on my father’s lap. Yearn Choi’s poem “From the Idaho Potato Field” evokes a special tenderness for all our grandmothers: Looking over the green field with small white flowers, And again in Yearn Choi’s poem “An Empty House”, the images are so vivid and the memories so heart wrenching, I must ask “Is the house still empty?” Yearn’s poem “Prayer in the Summer Woods” is a prayer for Gaia, and for us, too, because we are a part of its nature. His poem “Retiree’s Last Words” has a kind of uneasiness mixed with resignation, feelings that we all can relate to when faced with a career change or retirement. And we love the connection back through the ages to Li Po, the 8th century Chinese poet in his poem “To Koh Choong-suk.” Current events enter into the moving lines of a number of these poems. The poets shared their anguish and grief at the loss of life at the Virginia Tech massacre—the grief expressed at the losses suffered by the families of the victims and their anguish that the perpetrator was Korean. There also is sadness for what war and occupation do to a people and the desire to see Korea be a whole nation again. The sorrow and pain suffered by families with daughters assaulted and killed by our armies of occupation, as in “Candlelight Demonstration” by Chun U Yi is a matter of grave concern for Americans and for our policy-makers. These poets, too, are very aware of the social problems faced by many in our society: the homelessness of the Vietnam veteran on the side of the road unnoticed or ignored by passing motorists by Haeng Ja Kim in “The Homeless”, or the nameless woman / Who froze to death at a bus terminal / Last night… in “Wailing” by Anne Park. Considering the current crises in families facing foreclosure, we can appreciate the wistful humor in “Mortgage Payments” by Yung Whi Chung. Or the acute numbness of loss suffered by the man in “Elderly Couple” by Sook Young Lim. Or the terrible anguish and hardships suffered by the family in “The Immigrants” by Chun U Yi. That these poets share an awareness of the small things we encounter in our daily lives was exemplified in “A Stream of Light”. In this small poem by Yung Whi Chung, a smoke detector is given real meaning. And in “I Want to Be a Tree” also by Yung Whi Chung, elements of nature are personified, a style that is seen in quite a number of other poems in this collection. “In the Forest” by Sook Young Lim, there is a tree standing on one foot after giving away a branch to pouring rain. This handling of elements in nature gives the trees and flowers a palpable presence not often realized by writers. A spring rain knocks against a ceiling glass and A weeping cherry in the front yard / Sprouts a new bud, / Reporting the beginning of a new life;… in “A Spring Rain” by Soon Paik. The dandelions in Monica Sohn’s poem, usually treated as weeds, take on a very different meaning when they are happy to be together with the weeds, as an expression of democracy. Wow! Looking out the car window this spring and seeing dandelions in profusion, Monica’s lines came immediately to mind. In “Daffodil” by Anne Park, The cries followed, going between the steps. / As if saddened by the premature cut stems being sold, / Even the light green stems looked up to the blossoms, / Seeming to whimper. In these lines from “Sunflower” by Se Woong Ro, there is an acceptance of what nature gives us: I planted sunflower seeds again, And again in “A Neighbor” by Chun U Yi: The dandelion and clover don’t respect the fence, / Which separates us from the neighbor, / They secretly invade our territory / Without declaration of war … As so much of American culture rushes headlong over the precipice, I found the celebration by these poets with the beautiful things that are beautiful so refreshing, as in the awareness that what the dawn brings is so vivid and palpable to the senses in “A Day of Awakening” by Haeng Ja Kim. The sun rises. / With the day’s portion of hope on its head, … And how the season and the self merge into light and time in “Winter, the River of Dawn” by Yang Ja Park is deeply moving to any reader who ponders life. The joy of observing nature is given a light touch in “A Pocketful of Spring Rain” by Chong Cha Lee. Look at them—
Unable to close their beaks in utter happiness There are periods of quietness in some of these poems that is spiritual. They compel us, as poetry should, to ‘stop and listen.’ A number of these poems are meditations on the pleasures of getting by from day to day, by observing those small things around us or the small things that we can do each day for ourselves and for others that give solace. In “In the Autumn” Insuk Kang asks us to stop and listen, go out into the forest and retrieve our memories from the fallen leaves. When we can reconnect to nature, we replenish our spirit. Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu All Eyes on US: A Trilogy of Poetry If one of poetry's purposes is to provoke thought, then Portolano has accomplished that purpose with this compendium of work from three previous books. Today, we live in a dangerous, dysfunctional, unpredictable world and Charles Portolano dares to write about it. Politicians squander this country's financial resources on overt and covert projects around the globe, yet can't find the money necessary to balance the national budget or repair a crumbling infrastructure. Politicians whine that we are a country with our hands out, demanding entitlements, while granting themselves the grandest entitlements imaginable. Portolano grieves but refuses to remain silent. His outrage and sorrow are palpable. Route 66 once epitomized the naive, adventuresome, hopeful heart of America. That America has changed, as reflected in this excerpt from "Route 66": But what was, isn't anymore Have we as citizens been herded like dumb cattle through a chute of our own making? Has our silence allowed "The Neo Cons" to flourish? Long before they even History will deal with the "swerving, swaggering cowboy" whose powerful persona has failed. "The Living Lies" have weakened him: These lies, In his latest book, Portolano names the unnameable and zeroes in on the chinks in our national armor. He clearly states what most citizens feel, but cannot articulate. All Eyes on US is a book of surprising insights and uncomfortable poetic truths. Merge With The River In the poem "Source," James Downs writes: Words are in the river, and it is here in this volume of poetry that the poet plumbs the depths of nature; the changing sounds, shapes and movements of water. The concomitant awareness of the living body and the living spirit reside here, inhabit the same space. Downs uses a light hand in his art, reaching out to the reader with lucid images to find out just what draws him, time and time again, to the river, and in so doing shares this experience; lets it open out. Merge With The River is divided into five sections. Each starts with an epigraph; the one that tantalized me the most is a quote by Sy Syfransky, editor of the Sun, that starts: To which god shall I pray today? and James Downs answers in his well-wrought voice. Here's the start of the poem "String." I have come to this water's edge Then he surprises and encapsulates, distills if you will, with a scattering of haiku throughout this volume. These are not simple haiku that meet the forms criteria, though they do that too, but rather poems that illuminate and exalt. Each one, perfect as a whole and perfect in their shapes, can be taken apart and still work, because they are not built upon an anchoring phrase but because they are buoyant. Here's one in its entirety: Thousand leaves in breeze / Buddhist bells ringing silence / that follows deafens. Songs and silences in each line; this is a masterful achievement. Wonderful as all these poems are in this collection, the poet allows that he's unable to devote every waking and sleeping moment to his craft; after all he has to make a living, but he is so close, and the fact that he lives and works in Yosemite National Park certainly enables him to focus and create. He writes everyday, and that in the end is what it takes to live a poetic life and to compose what swirls and eddies, what merges with the river. He has become a part of this grand place where he can return and return, as he aptly wrote in the poem "Weather," In the wind there is a world / in the world there is a wind / let 'er ring! This is a fine collection of poems by a fine poet, and a fine read. Winds of Change/Vientos de Cambio Dear Tomás... "My Blood Runs Deep" reminded me of some of my favorite Caribbean poets: Dennis Scott, Lorna Goodison, John Agard, Victor Questel, Mikey Smith, David Dabydeen, and Kamu Brathwaite. Do you know the great work of Louise Bennett (Miss Lou), who died recently (in Toronto, where she'd moved from London?). Also, if you haven't read Olive Senior, I highly recommend her. Her poetry is fine, but her stories are exquisite, especially "Summer Lightning and Other Stories". She moved from Jamaica to Toronto some years ago, and I hosted her on PEI in the late 90s. And what about Dionne Brand, from Trinidad, and living in Toronto and teaching at the University of Guelph? She's a first-rate poet, novelist, essayist, and memoirist. I recommend her novel At the Full and Change of Moon, her poetry collection no language is neutral, and her non-fiction book The Map of No Return. "Death Comes Too Soon" is moving, of course, because of your mother's role in my own life. "Bonfires of Belfast" is a powerful political vision. The Bobby Sands reference flashed me back to a good friend in Nova Scotia, who was a "communications officer" for the IRA (and a fine musician/singer), and who had to flee Ireland...and was prevented by friends from returning during Sands' hunger fast. Bicycling in Ireland in 1975, I met a Ph.D. student from India, studying in London, who'd just hitch-hiked through Northern Ireland, and was beautifully treated by everyone. That was the year of some serious IRA bombings in London and Birmingham. This student, who was from southern India and dark-skinned, said that the Irish (unlike the English) didn't care about his colour, only that he was neither Protestant or Catholic, therefore welcome everywhere! "Isla Negra" is a gorgeous poem. I absolutely love the opening three stanzas and stanza six of "Valparaiso" -- some of the finest writing in the book. I very much like the rest of the poem, too, especially the lines When they sing their spirituals / they seem like sad angels / singing with sweet voices. Your writing is sublime, too, in section ii of "Cabo Virgenes," the opening stanza of "Iguazu," and stanzas one, six, and seven of "Havana (May Day 1995). These are lovely poems, Tomás, throughout, and I'm just highlighting my favourite passages. Among my very favourites are "Havana Heat," "Cuba Libra" (section ii is amazing), the "Pinar Del Rio" section of "Cubop," and "Killing Hope." The Cuban section is very strong. If I had the chance to anthologize a few poems, I'd definitely choose "San Felipe." And I also love "The Frontier." The Chilean, Cuban, and Mexico-California borderlands poems are right up there with your ancestral Yazoo County poems. Perhaps even richer, as your descriptive language, imagery and metaphors, command of rhythms, and narrative lines have grown. The emotional resonance is as deep and lingering as in the Yazoo poems. The weaving of politics gains even more intricacy, and finesse, and strength. Thank you for this moving, evocative, admirable gift...the gift of your newest poems. Ricardo 5 SPEED Well-regarded small press editor, publisher and poet, Charles Potts doesn't publish just anyone. So, why did he publish a guy named Klyd Watkins from Nashville, Tennessee? He told me, "I published Klyd Watkins' 5 Speed because it is poetry that deserves a wider audience and more attention than his work has hitherto received. It has some things in common with the work of other poets I've published. For instance the absence of formal requirements other than musicality and pertinence allows the poet to focus on the substance and a style will innately be established. I promote poetry that has intellectual rigor, emotional resonance, and high artistic intent." Over half the poems in this collection are either about or mention Watkins favorite place for poetic reflection, Radnor Lake, Tennessee. About this Potts notes, "More particularly I have learned the value of re-considering the same location, scene, or set of circumstances, under different or slightly altered conditions, from Klyd Watkins. Different time of day, different season of the year, different frame of mind, yield mutually supporting but distinguishable results, completing the view or poet's vision." Here are two examples of Watkins reflections at Radnor Lake. This a concluding excerpt from his poem, "Radnor Lake, Second Observation Deck January 9 2000": I think I am thinking this to justify / a description of the maple on the water / because reflection rules / here again today like it did / the time the waves flipped my image and showed me / to the clouds. / Again my horizontal maple's / gone aggressive - leafless / this time - bobbing on the water. Its folded / wave whipped shape bounces hard as if / the waves are trying to throw form off the water / into flight / like some kind giant last cousin / to a water spider thrashing to spring free / of maple mambo on the water and rise / into dissipation's multiplication of light. And this poem entitled, "Radnor Lake, Otter Creek Road February 6 2000": I asked Watkins to tell me about his writing process, in particular his reason for spreading copy. He told me, "I like to be free to try any notion that enters my mind. In doing that, I destroy the previous draft, and since a lot of my impulses toward change turn out to be wrong, I need to be able to backtrack. Since word processing files take so little space, virtually none, I save, or "save as," all the drafts. I'm one of those poets that fights with punctuation. If I'm going for momentum, and often I am, a comma (in verse, not in prose) seems a conflict of interest, but you can't get rid of all of them. Despite all my revision, I agree that, when the muse is generous, the first thought is the best thought. I definitely write long segments that I know better than to change." About his spreading copy he says, "Pace is important to me. And when I get to rolling I tend to use complex syntax. I find that with complex syntax I can use very simple diction that works, and plays, really hard. I use lines, partial lines, the sweep of the eye, multiple margins, to control pace, and use pace (or attempt to) to help the reader thru the complex syntax. If the reader is hearing the words inside her mind at the right speed, the sentences may be involved but they are not hard to understand, I hope." This technique is used well in his exceptional eight-page poem entitled, "December 31, 1999". Here is an excerpt from that poem: Oh indeed there shall be / dramatic / discoveries Sure not because / it's the millennium because awe / at nature yielding her secret's / part of what's / always there but / should scientists / find / soon perhaps among / the winking of coincidence / herself / which / I hear / fascinates some of the now but / somehow / the acrobatic mimes in scientists minds / will detect / something new let's say / a force or effect / counter to entropy which indicates / the universe may be not winding down after all that maybe / the big bang was a big sneeze clearing a breath way. There is a wise, whimsical center to these well-crafted poems. It is apparent that Watkins not only has a natural grace for words, but is also well schooled in their use. He told me he received a BA and MA from Vanderbilt in English in the late '60's. I wondered whether he felt his schooling helped or hindered his progress as a writer. "I don't know for sure. I suppose if I had been completely independent I should have dropped out of college to read and write full time on my own, supporting myself with simple, part time work. I had two sons by the time I was twenty-two and prepared myself to support them. I not only studied, I taught. A decade at a community college in Kentucky. The classroom can be a wonderful place to read poetry. When you have three, five, a dozen, good readers going over a text together-John Dunne or William Carlos Williams or Chaucer-and they all get to putting their insights on the table, and the jocks or whoever may be there only for credit begin to glean that there is really something there of a value so energetic it goes beyond getting a grade, what's wrong with that? I had to turn down a fellowship to Iowa Writer's Workshop when I was twenty-four and had three sons. If I had been able to go to Iowa, would I now be even better or even worse?" These poems exude kindness and compassion - wisdom. I noted that many of his poems are reflections, meditations on life - the moments before our gaze. I suggested that he sounded a bit like a southern philosopher, and he told me, "I am not particularly well read in philosophy (or anything else, except perhaps poetry). It is kind of you to pose that as a neutral statement, even a bit of a compliment possibly. When my friend Hugh Fox states a similar opinion it sounds like an accusation; he says I "turn into a combination of Richard Morris, Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas," and most of my poet friends hold the aesthetic position that it is incorrect for a poet to be philosophical, a position that is itself either philosophical or unconscious. Since I became aware, as a teenager I guess, that we have the freedom and the duty to craft our own lifestyle, not take it ready made from anyone, I have wanted to be both free and responsible. Perhaps the tension between freedom and responsibility forced me to become somewhat systematically thoughtful." This depth of thought and rigor of thought is evident in each poem in 5 Speed. Here is a wonderful example of his ability to take a common moment and raise it to philosophical reflections. It is entitled, "June day at the Y": All the tanning young mommies // and that's not even the same / lifeguard / lord there are too many goddesses // and I myself tho I am most surely / a mortal man // that is not all I am, that is not even / what I am. My eyes squint / to climb / sun splashes over the red bathing suit / and phenomenal legs and arms of the lifeguard / knowing in my head there is / something higher something / we climb /inward into something whose / unending beauty / we / in our doomed flesh reflect. I want to thank Charles Potts and editors like him who bring us voices like Klyd Watkins. He's a wonderful writer and southern gentleman whose poetry is precise, lyrical and luminous. Of One and Many Worlds RaynRoberts is a poet of many worlds, as revealed in his latest collection of poetry. His wide range of interests-from the natural world to the nature of humankind, is evident of an intellect graced with warmth and humor. He looks unflinchingly at these worlds with a clear-eyed honesty and a hefty dose of sympathy for our failures as human beings. Even as the world, as we know it or perceive it, crumbles beneath our feet, RaynRoberts pulls us up and reminds us to have faith in our fellow humans: Social justice is a recurrent concern for RaynRoberts and he gives voice to that concern in his poetry. We may feel a sense of despair with the course of human events but the poet offers us a way of looking at the world. Rather than putting the issue at the level of governments or government agencies, however, he brings the issue down to a personal level in how we treat each other and how kindness to each other can restore our sense of humanity. Yes, it all begins with small acts of kindness [from Acorns]. What a beautiful thought! We tend to feel so helpless to change the course of events but a small act of kindness is something each and every one of us can do to help make the world a little kinder and to ease the pain of daily living for those who are less fortunate. When we do these small acts of kindness, we allow love to flow, as the poet suggests, through the door that has been opened. More than a moral act; they can be the means of transforming the self. In effect, these small acts of kindness also become transformed into a stand against the cruelty of rogue leaders and oppressive governments. Though RaynRoberts gives us his insights into the human condition, he makes no claim for having the answers for how we achieve a more just and less violent society. He lets us know that ordinary life offers possibilities, that we can give meaning to our lives and those of others by meditation, by those small acts of kindness and by discarding what is false in our lives. He acknowledges the gulf between man's aspirations and the world in which we live. Those who would make a stand for justice and who try to cut through the ambiguities of society and religion risk defeat by the contradictions in the political universe. Truth lies between people / who are afraid to exchange views of it; so sometime / the greater vision they might have given one another is lost. [from Seers.] Perhaps the core of his belief system is best exemplified in the mid-section of the book. Titled "One World Twelve Poems," these short and snappy pieces, most of them no more than ten or twelve lines, sharpen one's perception with their humor. These are everyday images, everyday sounds but now refracted and magnified. It's magic. The old monk said he'd been at war One of the unexpected pleasures of reading this collection is the wry humor that RaynRoberts brings to his view of the world, as in his "Meditation on a Clock." Aware of the pull and wishing I was a bug. Life is so simple for a bug. In a number of his poems he reflects on our connectedness to other living creatures, such as the tadpole in "Sameness" or the pheasant taking flight at the movement of the poet's head in "Why Do You Fear Me?" or the raucous cries of crows in "Crow Wisdom." He feels their presence with an acute understanding of our relationship to these creatures. In his communion with other creatures, they become personified and he reconciles his individual awareness with the world around him. While I sat on a bench The poet's keen observations of nature, its small creatures, and those small happenings all around us that we don't notice echo his sensibilities to the dual nature of man and his place in the universe. He exults in the beauty and harmony of the natural world and it is during these moments that he loses the sense of individual consciousness to become part of the greater whole. If we think about it, we all long for something outside of ourselves: a oneness with our world, its mountains, its streams and other forms of nature. This is a mystical urge to which one cannot be indifferent even though the poet may have no explanation for it. One of the poet's tasks is to find a way of setting down what he has learned. Each of RaynRoberts' poems has a rhythm of its own. In these poems there is an economy of phrasing yet they reveal a warm and varied humanity. His poems are an affirmation of his connection to many worlds and in this sense they speak for us as well. The poet's ideals are spiritual and his poems are spiritual critiques of man's progress (or lack of) in the modern world. It's not the known that holds the secret to knowing more. One salient thought or conclusion to reading this collection is this: Many of us are experiencing deep despair at events and crises affecting our lives, our society and our planet. We look for answers. The poet too looks for guidance in the philosophy of the great teachers of both the East and the West, like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. (And we recall that the greatest leaders for social justice and non-violent resistance in the twentieth century have been men of color.) RaynRoberts became a convert to Buddhism after living and working for several years in Asia. We all benefit from the poet's shared interpretation of East and West philosophy. Fully aware of the conflicts and problems on the home front as well as regional conflicts around the globe, he confronts the contradictions of our universe. He doesn't give us the answers but his clear-eyed existential philosophy gives us guidance on the road each of us must take. The poet takes the age-old questions of who we are and what we are about, but he does not flinch from those questions for which there are no answers. When we only dream of achieving some sense of unity with our worlds, we can have the kind of guidance that is no further than the small price of a book. Driven into the Shade Everything has music. Yes, we talk about "music of the spheres", "the music in daily living", "music hath charms to tame the savage breast." And often the phrase "the music of poetry" is tossed about during explications of poetic works. This last one has a certain truth. There is music in poetry. A poem has beats and measures, breath and breath pauses. There is repetition of sounds and bars from one passage to another, transitions from section A to B back to A and on to C, similar to music. Poetry volumes take the same kind of journey as individual poems. The poet works to create a rhythm, there may be repetition of themes, melodies that run throughout, color and tone, and harmony between the words, within the pieces, the sections, the book, and ultimately between the poet and the reader. The poetry flows to synthesis in its conclusion. When a reader reads poetry, performance happens within the encounter between the poet and the reader. The poet, like the musical composer, has his own musical style. You recognize a poet's signature throughout his works, like you recognize Mozart's or Beethoven's or Debussy's. Brandon Cesmat's new work Driven into the Shade has a certain rough music. No, I don't mean rough as in unfinished or imprecise or less than refined, for Cesmat's poetry is sharp as a diamond in its images. The rough music is of nerve endings open and alive, of veins open and pulsing blood, of wood hewn from long-lived trees to become a sturdy home. Cesmat has written a volume showing the interplay of various periods of his life, like a musical symphony. And, as in a symphony, this volume of poetry ends up totaling more than the sum of the parts. His work is divided into sections: At Home, Leaving the House, Collisions, Roots and Limbs and ending full circle but much larger and deeper with Through Windows. In Brandon's first section, the memory poem "Gracious Sabas" gives the flavor of a Southern California childhood such that today I look at flour tortillas as topographical maps, In biographical poem after biographical poem in this section, Cesmat takes us on a journey of the child growing up, living the life dealt him. Later in this section, the title poem, "Driven into the Shade", explicates his rough encounters with a family pulling apart and his attempt as a child to keep it together. She held out her arms and asked me to open the door His images pull and release, giving an almost operatic voice to the family dynamic: "Like a princess she could feel the .22 pistol under her mattress." "Bad Dad, Bad Mom, Bad Boy." The second section Leaving Home presents the musical notes of new encounters with the outside world: musicians, football, lovers, railing against television, experimental encounters; "men and women clustered like a DNA strand" (Lonely Boys). The section ends with an angry encounter with father out in the world. (Where Was Fidel When I Needed Him?) When I turned 16, I met him. He took me / to a Baja bar where I listened to his voice / as I tunneled beneath our wasteland of memory,... Now, firmly out in the world, Cesmat has "collisions" to add to his music; conflicts with actions he strongly does not believe in. As a listener to this poetry, this section was the roughest for me but it could be the strongest as well. The poems are of subjects I have had little connection with: Central American politics, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Brandon's collisions with these events and people bring to the fore his own personal beliefs. But Cesmat is taking us on a journey of discovery as well, discovery through words and music. We learn new things from his music. His acts are sleep promises made, never touched / like fingertips tracing the hawk's helix (God Acts). His smile dissolves like adobe brick (Fingertip Elegy). If enough sticks to his fingers when he pulls them from cages, / everyone is happy: he gets votes, they get minimum wages (The Texas Teacher's Cola). Streams of rhetoric careened through the blood (Silent Hours 1983-1990). would shotgun the facts except for one hour that / my closed mouth held the breath of peace (Silent Hours 1983-1990). Politics can alienate. But holding political subjects to the light, pulling them out from under a bushel can get at the meat of the problem. That is why I believe this section is so strong. It is a gutsy move. From the opening to "Guatemalan Fires", a poem of Central American history that has lessons for today: Bishop Juan Gerardi, In this section, Mr. Cesmat's music is not just in the words but is the words themselves. Other poems in this section are about the crumbling of the West, the horrible losses in huge wildfires, and children of his own. A wonderful warm collision in this section Sons, discusses whether he really wants children; in the end he decides: The Roots & Limbs section is about writing and the poet's art, its musical sources and the poets seeking personal roots and limbs: so I try to be a raven to follow your sound / east to Tempe and Albuquerque (Dreaming American). A wonderful nature poem follows: pomegranates brush against the coyote's fur (Sliding from Seeds). From the sky over my desk, / the paragraphs are lakes; (Comments On A Stack Of First Drafts) touched me as a writer myself, but can affect everyone who has worked through any task. Because the writer's life is initially a solitary one, poets share their frustrations and hopes, like others in their chosen field. You have set whatever fire consumes this page. / These letters sway and arc from your hair (River Murmur). When I first surrender to a half moon In this section, some of the most satisfying poems for me are poems to musicians, as the poems are written with jazz music to the fore and of course here the music is out front. You are given access through musical allusions, the musician noted and the musicianship that Brandon brings to the writing: With your horn-bell's glisten, / blind me. (So What? to Miles Davis) until / he / lays / a / walking / line / down / Dixie Highway, / not just straight-ahead, / but with a shuffle for / anticipation, / with a slur in the pattern, / --fretless-- Throughout this section Brandon continues seeking personal roots and limbs. "The Emptying" is about a dispute over poetry and over two people's ability to be around each other... ready to forego food or / breathing for a moment together. The chapter ends with the poem "Beneath the Covers" presenting children as proof, children as a mother's music. See, on this planet all lines intersect if we follow / them far enough. Our poor mother bets all on her children. The final section Through Windows really does go out into the universe that the whole book has been journeying towards. This section's rough music reveals the tender heart that has underlined all of the volume. The music of words is back to the very personal of the first childhood section, but now the subjects are his children, his family. But like a logging road cut through the forest, / there is a way between us, though it isn't the only way (The Way Between Us). Now with three sons lined up between us, / my orbit has taken me to the opposite end of the dining table / from you (Farsighted Husband Speaks). I've been up since dawn, / ...playing along / to that God song (God Song). My favorite poem in the volume is magnificently the concluding poem of the volume, "Ice Drum." In it a father and son share an icy pond and yet much more of each other: Surfaces change and we say nothing as This magical poem is of two humans sharing deep meaning in life with the earth and with each other and they recognize the music between them. Driven into the Shade has a music that is alive! Brandon Cesmat's composition takes us on a journey of both identification and discovery, eventually digging deep into the mantle of the earth, to that certain rough music that brings poetry and ourselves alive and together. d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution Review By: Charles P. Ries A few months ago I asked Chris Harter, Editor/Publisher of Bathtub Gin who are some of the pioneers in the small press movement. He said without a doubt one of them had to be the late d.a. levy of Cleveland, Ohio. This was the first time I had heard of d.a. levy. When levy shot himself in November of 1968, I was fourteen years old. With five older siblings who were all politically active, I was well aware of the Cultural Revolution that was unfolding around me: civil rights, the Viet Nam war, Woodstock…, the counter culture. This moment in time was vividly brought back to life for me in the mimeo graph revolution. In his Editor's Notes in the May-June 2007 Small Press Review, Len Fulton says that the mimeo graph revolution "is almost overwhelming in its reach and passion for its subject. It is sobering to think that one young person could accomplish to much in so short a time, while confronting torment from within - and genuine torments from without." While I enjoyed reading levy's poetry and seeing his visual art, what I found most compelling were the numerous interviews with him from this time period. They reminded me how ground breaking the free speech movement of the 1960's was, and what a wonderful, diverse and passionate group of poets were at the forefront of this effort. If you love the small press, poetry, and the freedom of expression we all hold so dear, you must read this book. Near Occasions of Sin Review By Charles P. Ries Louis McKee exemplifies the 'philosopher poet.' From the title of his lasted collection of poetry, Near Occasions of Sin, to the content of his poetry we see a writer who is not just good with word, or good with image, or selective about the moments in time he chooses to inspect, but a poet who is capable using his well-honed skill with word, image and observation and elevating all of them with a philosopher's mind. McKee is rich and textured in his yearning observations, nimble in his rich insights and wise in his conclusions. I felt I was not only being entertained, but learning. I was growing larger because of his clarity and counsel. It is not surprising that McKee has led an examined life as suggested in his poem, "After The Sixth Visit": That's that one / when you lie / back and say no- / thing, everything / having been said / at least five times / already, and she / says well, what / are you thinking / right now? And you / tell her that / you're thinking you / want to fuck her / and she says why / do you think that / is? but it is / too late, time is / gone, fifty minute / hours, seventy / dollars, and you / know when you leave / that you won't be / back, you are better / then you have / any right to expect. McKee is a man who wants love, who loves love; a man who adores women but has had more then his share of challenges getting them, keeping them, and loving them. He, like all lovers (and writers), is a work in progress. This is illustrated in his poem, "Failed Haiku": This evening I took a moment / to indulge a fantasy - you, / walking naked along a Jersey beach, / the sunlight on your lovely ass. / An ancient Japanese master / could work miracles with as much. / I am content with this. And again from his poem, "The Reason I Write": I like to think she gets naked / and looks at herself in the full-length mirror; / as she does, and with a smile, slips / into soft bliss of soapy comfort, / the almost-too-hot water uncomfortable / for just a moment but then just right. / With her wondrous hair pulled up, / she uses it as a pillow, pours a glass / of wine, then picks up a book of poems. / This is the reason they were written. / The rest of you, get your muses where you can. / I write for this woman, naked in a hot bath / under a modesty of bubbles. This is our / moment. Our poem. You find your own. As I read this, McKee's thirteenth collection of poetry, I could not help but think of the late great small press poet Albert Huffstickler (who passed away in 2002) who, like McKee, had the ability to yearn and observe so purposefully. When I read poets of McKee or Huffstickler's emotional depth, I wish they wrote novels. I wish these short, rich, textured scenes and their meaning could be extended 300 more pages. Many poets write well, but few poets give us work as rich and profoundly meaningful as Louis McKee. Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over 150 print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing and most recently read his poetry on NPR's Theme and Variations. He is the author of The Fathers We Find, a novel based on memory, and five books of poetry - the most recent entitled, The Last Time (The Moon Press in Tucson, AZ). Most recently he has been appointed to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of his work by going to http://www.literarti.net/Ries/.The Way of the Dreamcatcher: Spirit Lessons with Robert Lax: Poet, Peacemaker, Sage Review by Renee Branigan, O.S.B. Only occasionally does a book come along that is so totally refreshing and energizing that, when you reluctantly arrive at the end, your first inclination is to simply start again at the beginning. A serendipitous encounter in 1993 while on the isle of Patmos led the author to Robert Lax, a great American minimalist poet, a sage, a man who lived slowly and gently with the whole of life. To most, his name is recognized as the lifelong best friend Thomas Merton, but after reading The Way of the Dreamcatcher, I came away certain Merton was as much blessed as blessing in their relationship. This book is an invitation to sit close and listen even more closely as the author deftly plies this gentle, holy man with the great questions of life: From where did we come? To where are we going? How shall we get there? The questions are huge, but the answers are savory and doable. This book is dense with insights that cultivate living slowly, quietly, surely: waiting on God, staying on track, learning with pleasure, praying the dream true, turning jungle into garden. The dialogue format works well for this book because the author does not intrude: the focus is always on Lax who is mesmerizing in his wisdom and simplicity. The reader is drawn into this liturgy of encounter which is further peopled by artists, poets, musicians, philosophers, and spiritual writers who have touched the lives of the two in dialogue. This is precisely a book to give a friend. It is utterly exquisite in its external attractiveness, but even that pales in the face of the great light within the pages. It's a book to keep and to share, to savor and to digest, to begin and … to begin again. (A sequel to be released August 2007.) Voices in Wartime: The Anthology - A Collection of Narratives and Poems Review by Barbara Evans, editor for PoetsWest We listen to the generals speak about troop movements, a mission, a precision strike, collateral damage, the military objective or action, or an enemy pacified. All abstract terms. No images. Nothing palpable. No longer do the media provide us with images of the war, not even the coffins being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base in Maryland. Voices in Wartime: The Anthology, a robust collection of stories and poems you don't get in daily news reports, sheds the abstract treatment of war. It is must reading for anyone who thinks about the consequences of war. The narratives and poems in this printed collection are an extension of the interviews with the soldiers, journalists, doctors, teachers, refugees, ordinary citizens, as well as poets, who appear in the film by the same title. The various narrators have given a human face to those caught in the horror of war and its aftermath, as in the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. In "Everything that Was Beautiful is Gone" Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon recounts the devastating and cruel effects of the sanctions?even "pencils for school kids because of the lead inside them, all kinds of medicines, antibiotics. You had the systematic destruction of a whole society." The sanctions affected the most vulnerable population (women and children) and decimated the intellectual life and stability of that society. War increasingly becomes an impersonal conflict. War correspondent Chris Hedges points to the exhilarating and addictive effects of war in which technological advances in modern weaponry ever increase the distance between opposing forces. Monstrous machines increase the casualties, especially among the civilian population. Those who fly the planes and work the machines never see the faces, the blown-up bodies. NBC cameraman Craig White embedded with the Third Infantry Division likened the beginning of the war in Iraq to a video game. The "special cameras could show things a mile away. You'd see a tank, a little poof! You'd see another object go poof." Then as the war progressed, he saw the horror of it—not as depicted in the movies but in the savage reality of bodies being blown apart, heads flying off, arms and legs severed. "Burning trucks full of ammunition popping off. . . . depleted uranium, and radiation going up into the air everywhere." Poets and writers articulate the personal emotions and experiences of both soldiers and civilians. Craig White addresses the raw fears of soldiers under direct fire, the horrible risks from depleted uranium, the men, women and children trying to flee the carnage but caught in the crossfire. "They always lost." Jittery and exhausted soldiers shoot first. Was that moving figure friend or foe? Soldiers at a checkpoint order civilians to halt. Almost no one in the Army speaks Arabic and there are few translators. The civilians don't understand and their immediate reaction is to run. What happens next? They get shot. There is the anguish of the woman whose husband and son were killed in the front seat of their car: "Why? Why did you shoot? Why did you kill them?" (She spoke English.) Whether the killing of one of their own (friendly fire) or that of innocent Iraqi civilians, the soldiers are doomed to "having nightmares over and over and over again." "Poetry is a very potent thing in the Arab world," says Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon. In his poem "Wrinkles on the Wind's Forehead" the wind is a blind mother / stumbling / over the corpses / no shrouds / save the clouds / but the dogs / are much faster. US Army Lt. Paul Mysliwiec who served in Iraq in 2003 gives the viewpoint of an officer who feels deeply his primary responsibility for the safety of his men. First and foremost, he is a soldier and his goal is to get his men home. He acknowledges the important role that poetry has played in his commitment to his mission. Two poems, A.E. Houseman's "A Shropshire Lad" and Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" intensely reflect his feelings toward that kind of commitment to duty. In "The Trauma of War" Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay describes how soldiers form these intense bonds with their comrades in combat and when one or another comrade in their unit is killed or maimed, they become "mothers" to each other. This is deep stuff. The deep emotional conflicts created by the war experience linger long after actual combat ends. What happens to a soldier trained to kill when he or she returns home? What are family members going to do when the soldier returns home and emotionally shuts down? John Akins's incisive three-part poem "The Order of War" wraps up Part 1. From Boot Camp to Vietnam and the Vietnam Memorial, only a soldier who is a poet would notice the significance of the line. In boot camp Akins and the other little guys at the back of the line in formation,…Four lines across. Then the line falls apart in a random strung-out column in the jungle. When Akins returns to the U.S., he visits the Vietnam Memorial. He looks for names / in the gleam / of chiseled granite. He sees that the line has reformed itself tight, every line spaced even …in chronological order. In Part 2 the voices provide an immediacy of impact, as in Emily Warn's poignant narrative about her father who was a paratrooper in World War II. The psychic trauma he suffered caused this war hero to be lost to her and to the family. She underscores the emotional impact in two poems "Skeet Shooting" and "California Poppy." There's always another war. The writings in the anthology offer insights into the conflicts whether in Iraq, the Sudan, Nigeria, or Columbia. Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon again points out that children can't go to school and "women cannot go to work to support their families." Nothing but smoke, / and depleted uranium. Children, always the most vulnerable and the most victimized in war, suffer also from the effects on health from poverty, polluted water, insufficient diet, insufficient medicines including vaccines?things we take for granted. It is devastating for the child who loses an arm or a leg. When Rumsfield was asked about the chaos that is a daily feature of Iraq today, his simplistic response was that democracy is messy. For those who think poetry has no relevance to society, Chris Abani recounts the experiences of his fellow countrymen. Christopher Okigbo, who died during the Biafran War, had seen it coming and "lost faith when the war happened anyway." Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka spent three years in prison for speaking out against his government's policies which caused the death of thousands of children from starvation. The activist writer Chinua Achebe, embracing the idea that art is at the service of man, barely escaped the soldiers who believed his novel, A Man of the People, implicated him in the country's first military coup. In "He Went Out One Day and Never Came Back," award-winning poet Antonieta Villamil gives voice to the stark effects of the perpetual civil wars that come out of Central and South America. These are wars in which generations of people simply disappear. Villamil lost her brother Pedro and uses poetry to connect with his memory. She reiterates the role of the poet in society: "to be the conscience of a community or a culture." In Part 3: "Looking Back" the window opens and allows us to see what we've experienced in history and in myth. Jon Stallworthy of Oxford University gives us an historical perspective on poetry in wartime beginning with the Old Testament to Homer and Virgil and the Iliad to Chaucer down through the ages to more contemporary times. Walt Whitman served as a nurse in the American Civil War. Rudyard Kipling was a correspondent. Especially meaningful is the shift of historical narrative from the aristocracy to ordinary people as in the poetry of Houseman and Thomas Hardy and flowing into the work of poets like Randall Jarrell who writes so movingly on the death of ball turret gunner who is "washed out of the turret with a hose." Dominic Hibberd from the U.K. recounts the well-known story of the renowned World War I poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who are featured both in the film and book. Sassoon protested the hypocrisy of old men who send young men into war pretending it's a great adventure. To keep him quiet, Sassoon was hidden away in a hospital, the same hospital where Wilfred Owen was being treated for shell shock. Luckily the two men met before Owen was discharged and sent back to the front lines. Tragically Owen was killed just one week before the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. After the war Sassoon salvaged Owen's poetry and arranged for its publication. As another poet of that war, Charles Hamilton Sorley, wrote in "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto, / 'Yet many a better one has died before.… Jonathan Schell, the respected writer on disarmament, relates the shock he encountered in Vietnam where the military might of the U.S. contrasted so vividly with that of the North Vietnamese. Vietnam, as Schell points out, was a people's war and in rejecting the lessons not learned in Vietnam, the U.S. is repeating its destructive war in Iraq. Schell points to the fallacy of war as a tool of national policy and shifts the focus to how major changes in a society have been effected without resorting to war. This kind of "people action" has best been exemplified by the experiences in India when Gandhi fought for his country's independence from England, in South Africa under Nelson Mandela, and in the U.S. under Martin Luther King Jr. Andy Himes, the executive producer of the film, interviewed John Henry Parker, a Marine veteran and father of a soldier serving in Afghanistan. Parker's own father was a Marine who served in Korea. This narrative leads into a discussion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When we wage war, we create hells not only for the innocent victims, but also for the perpetrators. That hell goes home with the soldier yet we expect the soldier returning from war to adjust to home life without a glitch. If he recognizes that he needs help in adjusting from killing or "being shot at to fixing toast and eggs with the kids" he risks being stigmatized. Sometimes the help is not available either because of cutbacks in veteran benefits or by requirements in which the veteran must promise to stay in the military. The current quagmire in Iraq forces these veterans into untenable situations. Parker estimates that, lacking a support network, probably 60 percent of those who need counseling will not get the help they need. This particular narrative is given emphasis by the experiences of Sheila Sebron, a disabled Air Force veteran who endured twenty years of misery before embarking on a treatment program for PTSD. After rehabilitation she now teaches and counsels veterans and others on its effects. Her personal experiences allow her to relate to others suffering from similar disorders. Himes follows up Parker's interview with that of an Iraqi physician, Dr. Enas Mohamed, now living in Seattle. She is deeply involved in research on the effects of depleted uranium on cancer and other diseases. She recounts the effects during the first Gulf War of forty-two days of steady bombing: no power, no hospitals, no work, no factories, no light, no heat, no schools, no x-ray machines, no doctors, no help. Dr. Mohamed describes the cumulative effects of exposure to this radioactive material dumped on Iraq's citizens by the U.S. We fool ourselves if we think American soldiers will escape similar effects of exposure to depleted uranium. Terrible things happen in war and war does terrible things to us. No one escapes. Nigerian poet Chris Abani recalls the daily humiliations he witnessed at checkpoints in Nigeria and he reminds us that it's the same as "what's happening in the West Bank now. Israel humiliating the Palestinians" or Americans humiliating the Iraqis. In war's aftermath, the survivors internalize its trauma. As a child Abani played "in burnt-out tanks, picked up bullets and found skulls in abandoned hamlets." He recalls the horror of "women who cut off parts of their body to cook and feed their children." Or "women who killed . . . their children because . . . they would not have survived the war." American soldiers wore "garlands of ears" taken from the corpses of dead Vietnamese. Abani also points out how "Never again" can be a dangerous sentiment when used as a shield to cut off discussion against current oppression as in the case of Israel. Keeping silent is always easier and those in power make it even easier by keeping the people in ignorance. These comments by Abani have relevance today: The Bush administration uses fear and an evangelical vision to justify its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its detainment and torture of citizens from Iraq and other nations in prison camps both here and abroad. One of the most revelatory sections of the book is the personal narrative by Andy Himes, the executive producer of the film. He listened to his grandfather, a "fundamentalist and fire-and-brimstone country preacher from Texas," preach hundreds of sermons "full of heart and soul." Andy shares with us his journey of personal growth from the stark world of black and white in which moral choices are severely limited to the amorphous world of the peace movement. But his grandfather knew how to tell a story, how to bring joy and grief to the storytelling and it is this kind of influence that finds its way into the film and the anthology. Another significant feature of the writing in the anthology is the commentary by some of the contributors on the use of language. Chris Hedges reminds us that we need to recognize that the first casualty of war is truth and "the first thing that is hijacked is language." This is especially apparent to those who appreciate the use of language and its nuances. But the true horror of war is given stark reality in the poetry of our soldier-poets, both living and dead. Brian Turner, an Army veteran of both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq, is the modern-day equivalent of the World War I poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Turner writes poems in a language made of blood. In "2000 lbs" The civil affairs officer, Lt. Jackson, stares / at his missing hands, which makes / no sense to him, no sense at all, to have / these absurd stumps held up in the air / where just a moment before he'd blown bubbles / out the humvee window, his left hand holding the bottle, / his right hand dipping the plastic ring in soap, / filling the air behind them with floating spheres,… The living accounts by poets, journalists and others evoke images that impose themselves like stones on the brain. And we realize that in the midst of unimagined horror, the birds still sing and the golden light of the sun still shines on the minaret, the makeshift shack, the 50-caliber gun. We realize then how important it is to listen to the human who resides in each of us, as Brian Turner beckons to us in "Sadiq." It should break your heart to kill. / It should make you shake and sweat, / nightmare you, strand you out in a desert / of irrevocable desolation, the consequences / seared into the vein, … no matter / what god shines down on you, no matter / what crackling pain and anger / you carry in your fists, my friend,… Driving around AnyCityUSA we see cars and trucks sporting "ribbon" bumper stickers with the heartwarming message "Support our troops." But do the drivers of those cars and trucks give any thought to what that slogan really means? Where is the civic discourse that Americans need to engage in when our leaders use war as a tool of foreign policy? I believe the anthology offers the basis for a discourse that the bumper stickers lack. There are books that stand up to time, and a book like this anthology has lessons that will continue to be relevant to our lives. It joins other books on the subject, including: Fallen Soldiers by George L. Mosse, Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff, What the Hell am I doing here? by Paul Moorcraft, Blood Lines by Vamik Volkan, Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, Frederick Su's An American Sin, and John Akins's Vietnam memoir Nam Au Go Go. I think most Americans will find the insights and perspectives provided in Voices in Wartime to always be relevant and I would encourage ordinary citizens to exercise their intellectual curiosity to view the film or read the book. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jonathan and Rick King and Andy Himes for their passion and courage in making the film, to Andy Himes and Jan Bultmann, Executive Director of the Voices in Wartime Network (www.voicesinwartime.org) for their work on editing the book, to Claudio Mauro, Executive Director of Whit Press, for publishing the book, and to the participants who by their testimony present persuasive arguments that war is harmful for all living creatures. The most moving lines written by a fourth-grader, Cameron Penny, of Michigan wrap up this extraordinary collection of essays, interviews, and poems. If you are lucky in this life/ A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies. / And when the soldiers look into the window / They don't see their enemies / They see themselves as children. / And they stop fighting / And go home and go to sleep. / When they wake up, the land is well again. Baby Beat Generation & the 2nd San Francisco Renaissance edited and translated by Mathias de Breyne If you want to taste the Beat Poets and sample the writers who followed them, Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance is about as good as it will get. The work in this collection is of high quality. I'm not sure why this surprised me. I have read many anthologies and usually come away with a 50% sense of satisfaction, but not this time so I asked Thomas Rain Crowe whose work is featured in the collection and whose preface helped to established historic context. He told me, "Looking back, now I think the poetry that came out of the 2nd San Francisco renaissance is still some of the best, and most interesting, poetry of the last thirty years. These were talented, dedicated, and extremely literate poets, some of whom were 'well educated', but all of whom were very well read and had been writing for quite a long time, even though many of us were only in our mid-late twenties. This was a very diverse group of poets, who wrote in uniquely different styles from one another and from their beat friends and mentors." The book includes poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Jack Micheline, Jack Hirschman, Harold Norse, Diane Di Prima, Nanos Valaoritis, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman and David Meltzer on the beat side, and poetry by Thomas Rain Crowe, Ken Wainio, Neeli Cherkovski, David Moe, Janice Blue, Paul Wear, Luck Breit, Kaye McDonough, Philip Daughtry, Kristen Wetterhahn, Jerry Estrin, and Roderick Iverson, as well as pictures and an attached CD which includes readings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Jack Hirschman, Jack Micheline, Thomas Rain Crowe, Michael Lorraine, Cole Swenson and Ken Wainio. I sensed Crowe's significant presence in this publication and asked if he was the driving force behind it and how the hell did a French Press become the publisher for an anthology focused on American poets? He told me, "While it's true that I was the main contact and the supplier of much of the raw material that made its way into the anthology, this isn't a "Thomas Rain Crowe" production. Mathias de Breyne was the catalyst and initiator of the project. This anthology was his idea. He contacted me and asked for material--which he then chose from and translated into French. He was familiar with the publisher of La Main Courante, Pierre Courtaud, and it was Mathias de Breyne who contacted Monsieur Courtaud and proposed the idea of such an anthology. M. Courtaud's press, La Main Courante is primarily a press that publishes contemporary French poets. It's a relatively small literary press, and so this project was the largest project that he had undertaken to date. I did write a preface for the book, since M.de Breyne wanted something that would allow readers to get a glimpse into the whole scene in San Francisco during the 70s. And I did assist with problem areas of the translations. But this book was generated in France by a French poet and a French publisher--which is ironic in one sense and appropriate in another." All the content in this collection appears in English and in French. As I counted up the contributors to the anthology I totaled 29 men and 7 women. So where were the women? It was the 70's and feminism was coming of age, yet an anthology focused on the 70's features mainly male poets. I asked Kaye McDonough whose work is featured in this collection to comment on the state of women's poetry in the 70's, "I think the North Beach lifestyle itself was hard on women. You had to be able to live poor and like it -- handle yourself in a bar, walk alone on the street at any hour, and rely on no one. You had to take care that you weren't an alcohol or drug casualty -- and that you could keep up with all those poets and what they read, and they read plenty. You had to be able to read your poetry to rooms full of mostly men who were not shy about giving you feedback. The womanizing was a definite minus. Where I came from, women did not go about unescorted at night, let alone into a bar, so North Beach wasn't exactly a place to settle down and start a family-- I'm not sure I knew what in the heck I was after - alcohol certainly played a role. I think I wanted to live like a man - a man who was a poet." (An extended quote from Kaye McDonough can be found at the conclusion of this review.) This excerpt from her poem, "Talk To Robert Creely About It" is telling, "Breast are your bonbons / You suck a lemon fondant / spit out a chocolate-covered cherry / You try on vaginas like finger rings / The pearl cluster is too loose perhaps / the gold band too tight / You collect hearts like paintings / They are nailed to your walls / Skulls ring your house / They are the ivory necklace / fallen from the throat of your latest lady // Women lie around you like mirrors / You pick up one, then another / comb your hair, adjust your features in their glass / Do you see, you grow thin / from wanting some love on your bones?" (Beatitude #24, 1975) I wanted to hear a male's take on this gender imbalance and asked Thomas Rain Crowe if he would comment. "No one was counting in those days. There were a lot of women writing and involved in the 70s scene. Not all of whom got into the anthology, just as not all of the male writers in the bay area got into the book. It always felt like there was an equal balance of men and women (masculine and feminine energy) involved in everything we did. There certainly was a very strong feminine voice in North Beach and in the issues of Beatitude during those years. As I say, who was counting? If you look at the posters for Beatitude events and at the issues of Beatitude during those years, you'll see that there were always a healthy, if not equal, number of women represented. It didn't feel like anyone was fighting for position, etc. those that were on the scene and who wanted to take part publicly were the ones that ended up on the reading posters and in the many bay area publications during those years." I am sure the answer lies somewhere between McDonough and Crowe's perception of the time, but it presented an interesting back story and sent my mind rambling to today's small press scene where I often sense a lack of female poets and editors, yet realizing women write more poetry. So why aren't they publishing? Why aren't they fighting for an audience? I needed to find out about Beatitude. The small press magazine started in the 1950's and picked up in the 1970s which became the glue for these new post-beat poets. Again here is Thomas Rain Crowe, "Beatitude was the glue as you put it, for our group, and also for this anthology. Since Beatitude was at the center, the core, of the 70's renaissance, and a catalyst for the renaissance, the editor and publisher of Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance decided that this anthology would hinge on the Beatitude poets--since we were in closest proximity to the Beats and were working and playing with them constantly during those years, and since Beatitude was the first beat publication during the 1950s. It was us babies that resurrected the magazine. The publisher and editor wanted to cite and establish a viable tradition, with the passing down of the Beat heritage and the Beat "torch" as it were, to the next generation. This book establishes that tradition and documents the history of this "rite of passage." We published usually 500 copies of each issue of Beatitude. It was done in the mimeograph format of the former 50s Beatitude, and was distributed to bookstores all over the bay area, as well as to select bookstores all over the country--including LA, the Northwest Coast, Chicago, New York, Canada, and England. I was in charge of the distribution during those years, and the emphasis was not to make money, but to get the magazine out and as far-reaching as possible. We usually sold enough copies to pay for the next issue. But mainly it was about the poetry and showing others in the states and in other countries what we were doing. The magazine came out as often as was possible. There was no concrete publication schedule, as there is in most literary journals these days. In other words, it wasn't biannual, quarterly, etc. since we used a rotating editorship policy; it came out as quickly as each different editor could accrue text and get it through production." "Finally, I asked Crowe to tell me what he viewed as the key style and content distinctives between the Beats and Baby Beats? "While there would be some inevitable similarities, there are also some very distinct differences between us (the baby beats) and the beats. I think that, in general, our writing is much more imaginative and experimental--reflecting the values and cultural politics of the 1960s. I also think that the general oeuvre of the Baby Beats has a much wider arc. Our major influences tend to be more international--since there were more translations of foreign poets available in the 60s and 70s than there had been in the 40s and 50s. Also, we were more politically active, I think, than the beats. Our generation had a history of taking the issues of the time to the streets. We continued that during the 70s in San Francisco, and afterwards. Much of what we did, publicly, was usually for some cultural or political cause outside of the purely literary. I also think that we tended, and still tend, to be more inclusive. Inclusive of women. Inclusive of foreigners, inclusive of different literary styles and persuasions, inclusive of class and race, etc." As a reader of poetry, I can often say, I enjoyed that, but not as often say, I enjoyed that and I learned a lot along the way. This is a great collection for many reasons and on many levels. The poetry is outstanding, the bio's, photos, preface and CD provide wonderful historic context. It also made me reflect on women's role in poetry in the 1950-1970s in a wider framework. $20 plus shipping is not too much to pay for this very good, very enlightening read. Bone Strings by Anne Coray Anne Coray's poems in Bone Strings emanate with an intuitive sense of the Alaskan wilderness where she grew up. As one who is intimate with landscape, she is able to bypass the tendency to conceive wilderness as a pristine, magical presence. Instead, through her poems, she meanders the fractured line between harshness and beauty. She readily confronts the odds of survival and exposes the reader to a certain reality not only about the wilderness of nature, but also about the wilderness of self. Her poems are attentive to the plight of wildlife as civilization encroaches. The walrus, the moose, the ptarmigan, the wolves are just some of the presences with which she interrelates in her poems, and even if they fail in their individual struggle to survive, she draws on the continuity of nature as an active setting to death's inevitable presence. In the poem "Elegy for Four Wolves Killed by a Neighbor Last December," the opening line, which lends the book its title, reverberates with this sense of a cosmic presence lending continuity to a harsh reality: The north wind strums its bone strings. / Ravens too make their music, plucking / the last fish scraps from the ice. Coray's attention to nature goes beyond a sense of place. Her most genuine lines reveal how nature transforms the self. In the same poem, she continues, And I am still worrying transitions, / stuck in a brutal month of blood and skins. This sense of transition permeates her poems. Another example is found in "The Unexalted," where she leads us again to the interaction of landscape with self, The land / only collects our grief; the stars release it, untraceable, anonymous. Throughout her poems, her treatment of the human presence is as fragile as that of wildlife. She writes of a father who died in flight, of a mother waiting. In the poem "Alaskan" she opens with the line, Here, death is common by air, acknowledging in her steady voice what one accepts from living on the edge of wilderness. Yet, even in this knowledge, she doesn't give over to the finality of death, but instead she gives the reader a sense of its place in the cosmic world: So they are given over: / flying a Cook Inlet's coast / or a mountain pass, / there are little puffs / that make the airplane shudder, / breaths of the invisible / reclaiming their position / in the sun-washed sky. Even though these poems are anchored in the Alaskan landscapes, they have a tendency to appeal to the universal meandering in each of us. In the same poem, she draws up images as universal as Penelope waiting for the return of Ulysses, only here the women do not wait for return from the sea, but from the sky: Flights in fog and overloaded planes / take many, and widows lie / in star-laced beds, / the names of the unburied / soft upon their lips. In her seamless transitions, Corey's references to language infiltrate the imagery of external and internal landscapes. In the poem "Kinships," she gives us, in her own words, the landscape of tongue. Here again, she underscores that fine line between beauty and harshness by giving wilderness its own voice, the river's throat learning / its earliest course leading us to the world awash with voice, which is as good a description as any for her book-a world awash with voice. Saying The Necessaryby Edward Harkness, (Pleasure Boat Studio, $14) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot Ed Harkness grew up in Seattle and studied poetry with Northwest writers Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. His poems evoke a familiar territory, from the Umatilla river to Aurora Avenue, from Yakima to the San Juans, filled with friends, travel, and colloquies with family and memory. The title of this book from a small, fine Bainbridge Island publisher reflects the tone and pace of its contents - - easygoing meditation opening into insights that crackle and sting. Harkness is most interesting when puzzling over the thinness of the wall between peaceful domesticity and massive political bloodshed. "History always comes home," he says, and war invites itself right into his book. He recalls the bayonets hung above the mantel with its "Christmas cards, candles &ldots; and two ceramic squirrels" at Grandma's house. "That's the blood gutter, this gray-eyed / lover of dahlias explained." Indeed, women are equal players in the century's conflicts, like the fighter Hannah, who "tripped on a German mine and became a rose / opening forever in her father's palm," and the Spanish women herded against a wall, who laughed and lifted their dresses in defiance of the firing squad. A few of the poems veer into sentimentality or flatness, but usually they're fresh and satisfying. The author can be funny, too, as when he opens his rain-soaked journal and finds that "the only legible word / is rapture. / It might be / rupture." Occasional birds trill in this collection, but there's little music in its voice. Nor is there much of music's counterpart in poetry - - the palpable tension that comes from speech pushing at the envelope of form. Harkness works with a trowel instead of a blade or brush. It's a good trowel. His materials are mostly gray and rough, like the Great Wall of China that snakes its granite way through the book. Along uneven ground the poet has mortared a line of ordinary stones, then a line upon that one, and then another. The lines may not sing, but they're solid, and they stand. Above review published in Seattle Weekly, July 20, 2000. More from Judy Lightfoot: The following was excerpted from a longer piece, "Seattle poets take you on a journey of words," and published in The Seattle Times, Pacific Books August 27, 2000. Seattle poet Edward Harkness' first book, published by Bainbridge Island's Pleasure Boat Studio, brings the reader home again to narratives set in familiar Northwest locales along with poems of memory and travel. The title of Saying the Necessary reflects its blunt, plainspoken approach, and Harkness' economy of style works especially well in poems about his children, where transparency of language is a window on a complex sensibility. In the lovely "My Son's Drawing of a Smiling Deer," the father sees the child add to his sketch of a doe the "long smile . . . of a boy who has seen / something wild return his gaze." With the stroke of a pencil, the son has revealed his "secret self," his father muses, "a boydeer from the other world." It's harder to locate the emotional center or purpose when the point of view isn't Harkness' own. The title poem, for example, is based on a heartrending journal kept by a Montana motorist stranded in snowy mountains who died of starvation. Harkness quotes from the man's notebook and outlines what he might have seen and heard but gives him almost no interior life. So while the events are powerful enough to evoke tears in a reader, it's not because they present the death of a developed consciousness or allegorize the fate of lonely, unheard writers. Perhaps it's because the reader can fill the blank in the poem's main character with her own unarticulated woes. Blue Willow by Molly Tenenbaum (Floating Bridge Press, $7.00) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot Seattle poet Molly Tenenbaum's world is a wonderfully messy, capricious one, where the steeping of a couple of teabags initiates a passionate encounter with a stranger, and a defunct appliance conjures up lost loves. Among the bread-pans 'The One You Need Is at the Bottom, in the Back,' certain to "rattle and zag" the pile until it collapses, you "hunched / for the crash" but still bravely fumbling sticky tins for the right one to bake that loaf of good whole-wheat. Forget your sorrow that Nothing happened " No marriage" and that you walk "single always" ('Honor Thy Livelong Toaster'). Ignore the unrelenting need for "always something, one / more thing" ('Filling the Cart'). Because this morning you can see 'The First Place Sun Lands' and then the next, can taste kiwi marmalade, can hear the whisper of a knife buttering toast and a "news-page turning" where the freshly wiped table has a "streaky shine" and "bee-comb bones, a lemon light" ('Tea and Toast Syndrome'). It's no surprise to learn that Tenenbaum is a musician - the exuberant riffs and liltings of her poems sing us right back to those loved-and-lost pieces of red wool and Blue Willow, and to the first clear syllables of our own lost language. Review published in Seattle Weekly, August 27, 1998. By a Thread by Molly Tenenbaum (Van West & Co., $14) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot Van West & Company, a publisher of fine books and broadsheets recently established in Ballard, has just released its first trade book, Seattle poet Molly Tenenbaum's By a Thread. Two years ago Tenenbaum's chapbook Blue Willow delighted readers with its lyrical meditations on ordinary subjects like eating breakfast, browsing books, buying produce, and making tea. In By a Thread, her first full-length collection, the musical fluency of her language still works a liberating magic as she awakens us to everyday surprises and comforts. Tenenbaum notices "a spark when it cools black / and lands, a dot of dark"; she imagines that barnacles "curled in their salty houses" under the sun must feel a rising tide to be "like a cool basement / on a hot day"; she convinces us that "The World Is the Shape of a Cat." The subtle jolts and sharp edges in many of these poems lend a bracing quality to the poet's characteristic effusions of appositives and sibilants, though the diction is often too precious for my taste - - Tenenbaum gravitates to choices like "twinkle," "nestle," "tucked," "snug," "caboodle," even "cavortle." I wanted more passages like the book's fine creepy bit on slug anatomy, and I missed Blue Willow 's troubling astringencies, broken appliances, and brassy hungers. But the poet's apparent intention in her new book is not, as in earlier work, to ground its pleasures in loss or loneliness. By a Thread is a praise-song of gratitude for a full life, which many readers will find inspiring. Tenenbaum's exuberant, accessible poems about nature and domesticity are well orchestrated in this beautiful first volume from Seattle's new poetry press. Review published in Seattle Weekly, March 2, 2000. More from Judy Lightfoot: The following was excerpted from a longer piece, "Seattle poets take you on a journey of words," and published in The Seattle Times, Pacific Books August 27, 2000. A more fully realized sensibility inhabits Molly Tenenbaum's work throughout, and it seems right to end this poetry roundup where it began, with a lover of produce and all its possibilities. Tenenbaum's By a Thread, presents lyrical meditations on ordinary events like taking walks and weeding the garden. On this everyday material, the poet's art works a liberating magic: she notices "a spark when it cools black / and lands, a dot of dark"; she imagines that barnacles "curled in their salty houses" under the sun must feel a rising tide to be "like a cool basement / on a hot day"; she persuades us that "The World Is the Shape of a Cat." A few sharp edges and turns of thought give these poems bracing qualities, though the words are often too precious for this reader's taste. Tenenbaum gravitates to choices like "twinkle," "nestle," "tucked," "snug," "caboodle," even "cavortle" - the book could use more passages like its nice, creepy bit on slug anatomy. But the poet's intention is to sing a praise-song of gratitude for a bountiful life, and audiences crowd the rooms whenever she reads from By a Thread. Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker's Journal by Alan Chong Lau (University of Hawaii Press, $17.95) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot. Excerpted from a longer piece,
"Seattle poets take you on a journey of words," and published
in The Seattle Times,
Pacific Books August 27, 2000. Twenty years ago, Alan Chong Lau was laid off by Boeing and began working for a greengrocer in Seattle's International District. This, he says in the preface to Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker's Journal, is where he started writing poetry. But his book is no portrait of the artist as a young grocery drudge. Lau throws himself joyously into his work and sends his radiant attention outward to find health and laughter nearly everywhere. In short lyrics, prose poems and some ebullient, twitchy drawings, he records the sights and sounds around him - and the smells, whether from "an alleyway / of crushed flowers /soaking in yesterday's piss" or a whiff of restaurant barbecue. To him, it's all amazing. With unsentimental fellow-feeling the poet notices the "callused feet and cracked heels" of passersby, the techniques of a woman scavenging vegetables in a dumpster, and a long black hair, in a new crate of Mexican peas, from the head of a picker who's surely underpaid. He observes shoppers as they prod mangoes, sample grapes and swap stories, treating the produce market as "their own private kitchen" where clerks are "uninvited guests." Beyond it all he notes "The charcoal squawk of crows" and "This sky / the ribs of / a blue clam shell" above Elliott Bay. Though Lau's publisher apparently couldn't resist printing some of the book's weaker stanzas on its cover because they mention China, water chestnuts and ancestors, Lau himself doesn't emphasize his Chinese-American origins. He speaks above all as a person and a poet, large-hearted and tireless, filling his pages with fresh wonder at the ever-changing same old workaday world just south of downtown. Reprinted by permission of Judy Lightfoot. The Cartographer's Tongue by Susan Rich (White Pine Press, $14) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot. Excerpted from a longer piece,
"Seattle poets take you on a journey of words." Published in
The Seattle Times,
Pacific Books August 27, 2000 Susan Rich has traveled far from Seattle and around the globe for the Peace Corps, Amnesty International and various writing projects of her own. The poems in her first book-length collection, The Cartographer's Tongue, weave these journeys with narratives from her Boston childhood and many love poems. Throughout, Rich is drawn to life's injustices and dangers as if wanting to master them by meeting them head-on, and of the poets reviewed here, she works with the riskiest, most difficult material. Her poems juxtapose ordinary images - conversing, drinking tea, picking plums - with scenes of abject poverty, war-scarred streets and torture's aftermath that lead to painful self-questioning: "Do I leave to take a stand?" "Is memory a chain of alibis?" But though questions are sometimes the only possible reply to horror, Rich's multiply until they grow tiresome, even awkward. Watching a noseless leper she wonders, "what / does she miss the most?" About the ordeal of gathering shattered bodies after a Tel Aviv bombing she asks, "Whatever happened to the elbows, kneecaps, teeth?" To Rich's credit, she seems aware of the difficulty of writing well at life's jagged edges, especially when the writer is visiting an edge where others must live. Her best work is closer to emotional home. A fine understated lyric honors the journalists of war-torn Sarajevo who kept on publishing: "There was just bread and paper, / and there were many days without bread." "Men At Work" perfectly balances humor with generous appreciation of the weirdness of others, and "1959" is an unpredictable, affectionate meditation on the peculiarities of the author's parents. Reprinted by permission of Judy Lightfoot. Equipoise by Kathleen Halme (Sarabande, $12.95) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot In the work of Bellingham poet Halme a solitary spirit addresses a world not always in the mood for conversation. And even when events seem more responsive to human wishes, a perfect communion proves impossible - words that go between also stand between. But the poems keep pushing against the nature of things, pressing toward pure, unmediated experience, a union of self and surroundings that words can't achieve. In Halme's prizewinning first book, Every Substance Clothed (U. Georgia), the pursuit of a fusion admitted to be impossible is tragic, cryptic, antic, athletic - is interesting in the vexed and prickly erotics of its moves. The speakers of the poems accost experience and language, survive their stoniness, and swing the reader between vision and question, pother and calm. Equipoise shares the concerns of the earlier book but feels a bit lighter in weight and less piercing in intelligence, its metaphors tending toward the fluid and flowery instead of edges and iron. One wishes the new poems had harder work to do, and more art in lines that feel either thin or clotted. Still, there are many sharply observed moments: "pelicans / like folding chairs" ('Betwixt the Flames and Waves'), "the next table of men / who snap the news from page to page" ('In Mérida, Capital of Yucatán'), "love / alive astride lighthouse and gray scarf of horizon" ('Knots'), and the sexy, childfree woman sassing mothers who nag her to reproduce ('Autotomy'). Equipoise is most admirable when precariously achieved in the midst of trouble. Review published in Seattle Weekly, March 4, 1999. Gratitude by Sam Hamill (BOA Editions, $12.50) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot In his latest collection Port Townsend poet Sam Hamill speaks as Obaka-san, or "big fool" - an honorific that Japanese friends gave him, recalling the nickname of the early writer Ryokan. Like Shakespeare's wise fools and Nietzsche's Wise Child, Obaka-san surrenders to life instead of trying to manipulate, buy, or sell it. And like the Zen and Ch'an poet-calligrapher-monks of old, he makes his home everywhere and noplace, with a community of artists spanning the centuries. In Gratitude we meet these friends - in letters and elegies the poet sends them, in his translations of their writings, and in epithalamia celebrating their children's marriages. More precisely, Hamill, his friends, and the reader meet in the sociable situation his pages provide. Creating spaces where readers and poets living and dead can gather has been his life work as Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, author of over thirty books, and translator of Latin, Estonian, Japanese, and Chinese poetry. Gratitude can be read as Hamill's gift of thankfulness for being able to devote himself to these labors. But if we open it to find a certain something for ourselves - a newly carved insight for our mental treasury, a voice that will set our deeper beliefs to music, a self-enhancing mirror of our life or a soothing escape from it - we'll miss the poems. The painting on the cover of Hamill's book, Morris Graves' "Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye," suggests another approach. This creature's feathers blend so imperceptibly into surrounding cloud, and its slender features are such fleeting glimpses in the whiteness, that we realize the bird not by looking for it in the painting but by letting it meet our alert yet unexpectant regard, like the selfless gaze we rest lightly, wholeheartedly, on a friend in close conversation. Indeed, speaking these poems aloud as if in quiet talk with a friend is the way to know them; for the poetry communicates "The heart by way of the ear" and asks the reader, in turn, "What's that you wanted to say?" ('Preface: Ars Poetica') - as in this excerpt: This world is neither What, finally, is love? —"Lives of a Poet" Hamill's loose and easy Chinese-style couplets, Japanese-derived tanka, and free verse let the poems unfold as spontaneously as good conversation. Still, there is rhyme (so subtle we may have dreamed the sound preceding the echo) through which the words can enact, instead of merely declaring, the connectedness of everything. In being the speaker of the poems, we merge with their life and move with their changes. We grasp the poetry by letting go. The best poems in Gratitude slow us and quiet us down for themselves, each one becoming (as Basho put it) the only poem in the world. How good the only poem in the world is! And the next one, and the next. Review published in Seattle Weekly, August 20, 1998. The Essential Basho, translated by Sam Hamill (Shambhala, $25) Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot No wonder dreams of journeys are so often associated with death. We travel to leave our lives behind - the familiar workaday parts, anyway - hoping to arrive in a Paradise where our eyes, ears, tongues, maybe even our hearts, will be startled awake. What we really want is a new self, but what we often get is more stuff -samples of a regional cuisine, eyefuls of great art, tidbits about Kafka's life in Prague, opinions, trinkets. Traveling becomes grazing on a global scale. A different pathway opens up in Sam Hamill's newest collection of translations, The Essential Basho. Here for the first time in a single volume is the essence of Basho's work: four travel narratives, including the best-known "Narrow Road to the Interior," and 250 haiku returning us home to a dailiness transformed by awareness and attention. Whether the poet is on the road or behind his own brushwood gate he seeks, instead of new acquisitions or excitements, an honest encounter between world and mind. These two entities were never separate to begin with. So although Basho's travelogues seem to record his treks on foot through 17th-century Japan, they're actually journeys into his own true nature, the heartland within, where self and circumstances are one. Very early on the twenty-seventh morning of the third moon, under a predawn haze, transparent moon barely visible, Mount Fuji just a shadow, I set out under the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. When would I see them again? A few old friends had gathered in the night and followed along far enough to see me off from the boat&ldots; I felt three thousand miles rushing through my heart, the whole world only a dream. I saw it through farewell tears. Spring passes With these first words from my brush, I started. Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler's back disappear. Carrying just a few necessities along with friends' farewell presents, which he can't bear to part with, Basho lets each event on the way speak the language of its particular life. At a farm he asks directions, but they're so complicated the farmer just lends Basho his horse ("'He knows the road. When he stops, get off, and he'll come back alone.'") The horse takes Basho to a village and then turns around, a gift from the poet tied to his saddle. Farther on, Basho observes peasants wearing black formal hats for ancient rites, speaks with prostitutes on a pilgrimage, sadly leaves to his fate a child abandoned by his parents, retreats from a three-day storm into a shack: Eaten alive by At a mountain temple "I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open." Elsewhere, hearing distant villagers clap wooden noisemakers to scare deer from their fields, he feels "the utter aloneness of autumn." A stranger asks for a poem ("'Something beautiful, please'") and Basho writes a verse about the cuckoo's cry that arrives, just then, from across a field. Basho's words flow spontaneously out of each moment lived. Instead of giving us tours or mementos of the world, he helps us open to its presences and discover who we are. Through his haiku we sense the wholeness and sufficiency of an early frost, an eggplant seed, a hangover, "Mr. Seagull," a nest of mice, a bean-floured rice ball, tears in the eyes of fishes, and ourselves, awake and alive again. Hamill frames The Essential Basho with essays on Basho's life and work that are scholarly enough to educate a student of haiku or Japanese culture and lively enough to engage any reader. Their depth and ease testify to the virtuosity Hamill has achieved as Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, author of over thirty books, and translator of poetry in several languages. Travelers like me have carried around the world his pocket-size Basho (Narrow Road to the Interior, now out of print) until it's tattered. We'll treasure the fine new volume silkily sleeved in Hokusai's portrait of the poet on the road again. Review published in Seattle Weekly, July 22, 1999. The Homeless One: A Poem in Many Voices by Esther Altshul Helfgott Reviewed by Ruth Fox The needs of mentally ill homeless are important, though widely over-looked. They are needs that will persist until the cause of mental illness is faced and dealt with collectively. The Homeless One, by Seattle writer Esther Altshul Helfgott, is a book-length poem for voices that portrays how these issues affect us all. The strength of Helfgott's work rests upon the truths of those she knows and with whom she interacts. The use of the direct voice personalizes the issues, allowing us to hear the thoughts and feelings of some very real people. Crysta (a formerly homeless schizophrenic) and Genevieve (an elderly woman besieged for handouts by Ellen — the homeless one) struggle to cope with the deep emotions that are evoked when trying to really confront the homeless one's situation. The Homeless One tackles complex issues, most notably the lack of effective long-term solutions to truly rebuild the losses that have created what Ms. Helfgott aptly terms society's disease ÓÑ the forgotten and ignored mentally ill and homeless people that we try to shut out of our communities. Genevieve and Ellen represent the heart of the dilemma. Genevieve reflects the housed who feel frightened and helpless, and would rather not look at Society's disease. Yet as a show of compassion, she gives small handouts to ease its symptoms. Ellen represents the nagging symptoms that just won't let up, no matter how many handouts are given. There is no way you could read this work and not identify and respond to what the characters are feeling, given the range of viewpoints and emotional expression that have been woven together. Esther Helfgott has surfaced the unheard voices in our society, going beyond sentiment to human emotions that require response. This book is not only written words: it is a living action, asking for action in return. The homeless one's needs will persist until the cause of mental illness is faced. Only then will there be a lasting change in our society. Helfgott's poem is a most welcome step in this process. Published in Real Change, Seattle's Homeless Newspaper Storm by Judith Skillman (Blue Begonia), $12 Reviewed by Judy Lightfoot Poetry explodes our old habits of experience to make the world (and thus ourselves) new again. Some poems take us apart while putting us back together, enfolding our perceptions in the act of smashing them, and this is one of literature's great mitigations - the work of art that can possess its own chaos tells us we, too, may be able to hold ourselves steady. Look for no such mitigations in Skillman's new collection. Her poems tug us into the maelstrom of being alive and strand us there, dust-devils and curses blowing by, the ground buckling under our feet. Attention twitches, like tic douloureux, from Styrofoam replicas of molecules to memories of palsied Uncle Jake in the kitchen where the dog humped your red-faced mother's shin. A schoolgirl's briefcase holds "the stink / of instruments and limbs"; vision darkens in the "sackcloth of winter"; somewhere "between sewer and hedge" a turtle stalls. The nervous system is a scraped and shaken web on which moments crazily stitch themselves as "the earth gallop[s] closer." If we opened up, we'd feel this storm under the skin of even the sunniest picnic afternoon, but survival seems to require closing off most of our perceptions. Shall we open Skillman's book, then? Pricked and prodded by her restless, strenuous interrogations of the world we thought we knew, we'll shift uncomfortably, failing to find a place where the heart can rest. That's the point. Review published in Seattle Weekly, January 28, 1999. Window in the Sky by J. Glenn Evans.
Plain Speaking, a review by Michael Magee J. Glenn Evans is a storyteller who happens to be a poet. His CD, Window in the Sky, begins literally twenty stories up where he surveys the city from his Seattle apartment and ends on a remote road where he meets a hitchhiker with an uncanny resemblance. In between, Evans, along with poets Martin Marriott and Caron McCloud, reads from Evans' work beginning with his mi |