A monthly feature that looks at books of and about poetry.
JUNE EXEMPLARS 2014
Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
Congregation: Poems by Natasha
This Way Out, by Terrence Winch. Hanging Loose Press. 90 pages.
Eye to Eye. by Maria
The Tulip-Flame by Chloe
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern. W.W. Norton & Co. 125 pages. Paperback edition.
Letter Composed During A Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers. Little, Brown And Company. 96 pages.
Others on our BEST BOOKS LIST for June
Irresistible Sonnets, edited by Mary
You’re Going To Miss Me When You’re Bored by Justin
Without Angels by Marjorie
Sheds/ Hangars. Jose’-Flore
Plus June’s Best Anthology and Best Literary Magazines
From the wrecking ball of history, Natasha
First, when we read these poems we know what
The beginning of the poem Liturgy:
To the security guard staring at the Gulf
thinking of bodies washed away from the coast,
plugging her ears
against the bells and siren— sound of alarm –
the gaming floor
on the Coast…
This cannot rebuild the Coast; it is an indictment,
a complaint,
my logos – argument and discourse – with the Coast.
This is my nostros – my pilgrimage to the Coast, my memory,
my reckoning –
native daughter: I am the Gulf Coast.
You can put your chips on Terrence Winch, if ever you are blue – or used up – or too used to poetry. He comes from the land of leprechauns and is endowed with magic. I tried to follow the pathways of his mind but at every turn on the road to Damascus was a tiny explosion that changed my brain.
Winch anthropomorphizes his psychology and reduces its myth to concrete stories where humans think in an original way. Winch has one poem titled:
Almost Invisible Poem (And in its entirety is quoted below)
Only one line of this poem is visible.
Terence Winch’s innovative poems operate at the highest level of humor, meaning his timing sets the dynamic for the poem. Just when you think you’re prepared for a non-sequitur, he does you one better and audits your expectations. There’s a poem titled, The Emptiness; we are drawn into a very funny exposition, dour musings on time and death. The last four lines are:
My son is reading the Sunday funnies. He is the light
in the cave. Not emptiness, she says: empty nest.
Oh, I see. That I am absolutely not ready for.
Attacking poetry’s status quo is a good thing and one of the ways which Winch accomplishes this is by not taking poetry seriously; but by writing about it very seriously –
How I Lost My Virginity. This poem ends
…. As for my virginity, I lost it/ a thousand times, once in an apartment, /and once outdoors at the beach, with a /full moon above, the two of us pretending/to be in love. And on one other occasion, /I never lost my virginity at all, /as far as I can recall.
Winch creates a sense of immediacy by propitiously setting the poem around his psyche, and because Winch is a musician by trade and talent, his direct lines, although linear, have lilt and lift, and could not be mistaken for prose. This is because the lines, juxtaposed, are arranged to stir the evolution of the poem. Each line leads us essentially, in a planned archaeology, so that we are never disappointed or lost. Here is the beginning of the book’s last poem.
Never Say Die
Dear World: I am going to eat you alive.
Swallow you whole. Take you to the cleaners.
Clean you out. Thank you for everything you’ve got.
Mop the floor with you. Fuck you till your ears fly off.
Never let you go. Never say goodbye. I will cry,
me, a grown man, before I’ll say goodbye…
…
Terrence Winch pushes the frontiers of anecdote and makes it functional poetry. And he creates a space for love in everything he pokes. Something special happens when we are reading This Way Out. We are happy.
Eye to Eye by Maria Terrone.
Bordighera Press. 115 pages.
Whether philosophically, politically, or personally, Terrone reveals our vulnerabilities with intellectual fire and a hope for the future. That’s a lot to accomplish in poetry, along with the right way to present a poem. Terrone tells compelling stories, whether re-creating an elder relative’s embroidering; or recalling her own young life in a” plaid jumper” “watching a violent rain.” A poet’s choice of themes, topics, and preferences are always a portrait of the poet so we feel we know Maria Terrone and her connection to society with all its possible endings. Her poem titled E. R. bombards us with reality as it opens,
The prisoners from Rikers arrive shackled, /seems like five cops to one.// Their caretakers in blue shoot/ the breeze with one another/and their charges –sports mostly,/the usual stuff, and read the Post,/check smart phones, poke their mouths/ with fries from crackling waxed bags…
A patient with a bruised brow/dreams aloud in Chinese.//… The Denzel Washington–look alike/shakes his shackle, demands/a ”nurse administrator” …// The night reels./More patients are wheeled in./This negative space is more crowded/than eight hours ago, but now only machines speak.//Some enshroud their heads/with rough muslin sheets, motionless and silent/despite what brought them here.
It seems relevant that, clearly, at the center of each poem is a woman speaking. Women want to succeed first of all by answering the questions within themselves. The woman wonders, the poet answers, and these internal human propulsions make the poem. Maria Terrone, like other good poets, keeps us from the danger of ruining language— and it seems as if she writes not motivated by personal gain, but because she cannot contain her mind-thoughts without expressing. Therefore we have a repurposing of language which is at once clear, thoughtful, and beautiful.
Myopia
Not a diminishing—
the body’s way of forcing me
to look closer.
If I lie eye to eye
with these blades of grass,
I may see what they hide:
insect, feather, pebble,
maybe the cameo
that came unpinned
as I walked here decades ago:
that once noble face
framed by wild green hair.
Barbara
Twinzilla Grist starts, “Some grateful bastard says God controlled/the bullets path, another claims randomness…” And twirls into …” So what if the whole Vatican vacations in the Poconos,/and I need to take out a second mortgage on my disbeliefs?/ What comes around is no joking matter for comedians,/and what’s kosher may just be grist for your candy bar,/so many laps around the rumor mill. It’s just me again, aliasing as you. Twinzilla—so go, go, configure.”
And she can draw a character like nobody’s business. In Grounded, “He is mired in oldness, the body’s effrontery, / dappled in brown spots, as though// he created his own shade, camouflaged/ from even himself, the agile man// who vanished, leaving this birdcage of flesh, / two plastic hearing aids in a chipped saucer.
And is there pain? Longing? Memory? You bet. This is poetry, isn’t it, and delicious to read because the humorist knows exactly what well draws water. And is there love? This is poetry, isn’t it?
She’s a dervish for the reader,
the kind of writer who makes you want to write. And that is my love letter.
The Tulip- Flame is the winner of the 2013 first book award from Cleveland State Poetry Center. Chloe Honum was a ballet dancer and this is important to know, for dance depends upon music, and control – and so does poetry. All those years of practicing gave Honum a fortunate advantage and a courtesy to the perfect line. It is hard work being a ballerina. Just think of the body’s morality in motion and the unselfish ethic of dedication. Chloe
Bay
Tonight, I listened to
the applause of small waves
and need you here. LOVE
stands on the bedside table
majuscule letters. Branches
in a waterless vase hold out
their berries like pricked fingers.
Today, I stepped into a morgue
to see my dearest friend. I placed
my gloved hands on the plastic
over her cold hands. Oh, God,
oh, yes, I want to hear you say
as you push into my flesh,
deepen my heart, like pink light
above the ocean turning red.
Gerald Stern takes his place at the head of our table as our grand Mensch of poetry. He sees rapture, and what’s fallible, in everything. Among his many successes is an ability to pull the reader in with non-stop phraseologies which are really divinations. The world is food for his feast— garbage cans, Stalin, plaster pigs, rats, Nietzsche—and they are all made holy in the name of moral argument. There is righteousness in restoring the past, and the search to understand it, through writing. Stern brings us a little more into our senses with his colloquial conversational confrontations with everything he sees and hears and thinks. He has a sideways look at the world around him, and in him—with humor for its universal angst.
Dumb
Fleabane again and I have another year
to take up its redness and what the wayside is like
with or without it and I have another year
to charge across the wooden bridge and shake it
again and take on the animals and fight
the stupid bikes and the bikers who ride across
with their legs spread out instead of walking their bikes
so we didn’t have to be pushed against the rails,
they are so dumb and their bikes have so many dumb
and useless gears like a dumb idiot box
with 2,000 stations, only dumb ancient
boxing and ancient movies worth anything.
Jack Johnson or Marciano, even
Orson Welles too much, give me the unself-
conscious, Karl Malden or Jean Harlowe,
for this is an old flower, it hates whatever
it wants to, it grows where it wants and it
loves goats because of their flattened eyes.
I was afraid to open this because of my husband’s pain from Viet Nam and the years that followed, but he turned to sculpture—Kevin Powers turned to writing. His novel was a National Book Award finalist— and now comes this stunning collection. Please, someone, bring this book to the peace table. These poems are negotiations.
Separation
I want the boys at the end of the bar
to know, these Young Republicans
in pink popped-collar shirts, to know
that laughter drives me mad
and if one must be old
before one dies, then we were
old. Nineteen or twenty-three
and we were old and now
as the fan spins and the light
shines off their gelled hair and
nails, I want to rub their clean
bodies in blood. I want my rifle
and I want them to know
how scared I am still, alone
in bars these three years later when
I notice it is gone. I want the boys
at the end of the bar to know
that my rifle weighed eight pounds
when loaded and on my first day
home I made a scene in a bar,
so drunk that I screamed and
wept and begged for someone
to give it back. “How will I return
fire?” I cried. I truly cried.
But no one could give it back
because it was gone and I felt
so old: twenty-four and crying
for my rifle and the boys
at the end of the bar
were laughing.
PLUS MORE! Best Poetry Books Listed for June!
Now there is absolutely no reason for not teaching the sonnet. After we present Shakespeare, what better way than to present 70 contemporary sonnets by the finest of our writers—some traditional, some jazz— even some freed by verse.
As you can tell by the title, an irreverent approach to life/ fatherhood/marriage. A searing wry honesty that lights every page.
This knocked the breath out of me. Every page about angels, and every page a new illumination. “The Angel Under Interrogation” is one of the great poems of our decade, if you can imagine angels at Abu Grab, you can imagine anything. May the Angels award every prize on this miraculous book.
It is becoming clear that Bitter Oleander Press is the place to go for the most current poetry in translation. This is a contribution to Letters – presenting poets we would never have known. It is what W.S. Merwin calls “Making the impossible possible.”
Power. Logic. Philosophy. Beauty. The sound of struggle. A record of glory.
Yoko Danno is Japanese and lives in Kobe. She once said that she wrote poetry in English because there is more freedom. This book proves it with its limitless imagination of pure silk.
BEST ANTHOLOGY
In observance and memory by 43 poets.
BEST LITERARY MAGAZINES
Celebrating its 175th birthday this year.
A literary legacy rejuvenated after a 32-year publishing hiatus.
Grace Cavalieri is a poet and playwright. She produces “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” for public radio, now celebrating 37 years on-air.
Review copies should be sent to:
Washington Independent Review of Books, attn: Becky Meloan
311 Tschiffely Square Road,
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20878.
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