July 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri

The terrible made magnificent by lyric. We can forget the technical details because they’re here with clinical excellence, so I want to talk about the nature of the words, the way pain and harm can be synchronized to beauty. This is an old concept — as old as poetry — but when it occurs, when thought zones become music, it must be mentioned. Abushanab has hit the nerve and left it vibrating because poetry is just a theory, a set of equations, until it’s touched by the bravest writers, like this poet who coordinates ideas with sinews and blood.

Many writers are afraid of what they’ll find in their lives and in themselves. Please read this to understand how words make magnetism only through the most dynamic processes, opening the wounds, coordinating the past, finding the key to the closed doors, and using unprecedented language. There are tough subjects in this book; they are the underlying laws of excellence.

Cheating in a Small Town

It was dim enough to call it dark,
an amber bulb the only light.
The Jameson had done its work
to complicate the wrong and right.
Her wedding photo on the shelf
looked down on us. We didn’t quit.
We got undressed in spite of it,
as though we couldn’t stop ourselves.

I wanted this. I wanted to know
the harm we’d cause, the damage done
by giving in, by letting go.
I knew her daughter slept just down
the hall, her husband was on a job
in Memphis. I had so much less
to lose, my life already a mess.
After, when she began to sob,

I left. The light was creeping in
to expose our nakedness, our sin.
On my way out the door, I said
that I’d come back. I never did.

*****

Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy. Press 53. 84 pages.

We all know the centers of families cannot hold, so Murphy turns it into thought experiments that become poems. Her feelings wave, passing a mother gone mad, relatives, and partners to link the geographic landscape with a poet’s purpose: That is, to take good notions and elevate them into places that cannot help but touch the reader. This is artistic substance — creating kites of feelings/meanings and connecting them so well to the stranger at the other end of the book. Beneath daily vicissitudes, Murphy conveys a general tone of wellbeing in language that has been shined up for pleasure and permanence.

Returning to a Place Known Only in Childhood

My grandfather’s house
is tearing itself down.
The buckeyes and sweet
williams have spread
and canary grass covers
the railway where
as children we rushed
to feel the tracks,
warm after the trains passed.
The old neighbor’s fields
are smaller than I remember.
So is the rented shack near the station
where my grandfather
and his father before him
came to drink bourbon
between seventeen-hour shifts.
Most men in my family
worked the Ohio rails.
But I know my father
by his contrails, by
the occasional thunder
of engines as he slows to land.
A bluebird flies over overhead,
its wings clapping,
reminding me
the thing wasted is not my life
nor the summers spent,
snap bean and corn husk.

*****

Luxury, Blue Lace by S. Brook Corfman. Autumn House Press. 80 pages.

In the poem “(The Crisis),” Corfman begins: “I can feel myself saying, I used to want to be a girl — …” Corfman transforms while transforming the poem, and in this, allows us to see the loneliness of isolation born the wrong sex. This becomes the stewardship — a mission, and unstoppable interior monologue we’re privileged to hear. The poems come to us from a common base — discovering who we are — lifting the layers. This poet has mastered the craft; that means dressing up the world in the right clothes. The language is crisp, the stories are real; the heart, well, “A dream — nothing is impossible…”

(Caution)

I am trying to talk about the deepening without talking about darkness.
The seriousness of the glacier, the way it doesn’t melt but hardens in the sun.
Bring your pickaxes and your small boxes of matches.
The layers refract sight from the center better than opacity hides any blue core.
I am tired of using black and white as symbols for despair and hope, as if they are abstractions.
Often darkness saved me.
Sometimes still I am alone.
Sometimes still I kill the sea creature headed for the surface.
Here is a dead piece of coral that never lived.
This is my mind and this is my mind in the net, chewed by the ski boat’s engine.
It feels like the gaps in a series of absences.
never gives up, it struggles and glides to find a perfect life. It’s stellar that way.

*****

Fearless: Women’s Journeys to Self-Empowerment, edited by Cat Pleska. Mountain State Press. 228 pages.

This book anthologizes essays, poems, and stories by women, breaking the age-old patriarchal peace-with-silence. You will find voices of reason, lyric, discontent, wisdom, humor, and hope. True talents are found here with writing that dominates the page and covers all the bases from reality-writing to autobiography, reportage, and confession. The thread running through can be seen as the classic one — women making good moves — heartfelt stories — editor Cat Pleska has put together a testament for our time. We’re fortunate to have this book where these women have the hall pass. They know the way. They’ve got the chops.

You Do Not Have to be Good
after Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to mother
every tear-streaked child
or broken woman searching for backbone, strong legs;
To heal each broken necked
pigeon your daughter drags home;
To be the Christmas Eve way-station
for the stranded couple the boss
is afraid to take to his home;

No need to envy
the blessing of wild geese
over Rochester, Minnesota.

Though these have brought joy
in those moments of attention,
someday you will weigh their cost,
wonder — was there more?

You have only;
To bathe this body given,
the skin of your infants;
To thank the beginning and end of each day;
Remove stiff shoes in spring, walk gently,
let bare feet offer devotions
to expectant soil.

Perhaps years from now,
you might lift auburn eyes,
as Canada geese
chevron the blue dome
over West Virginia.

*****

Alive & In Use: Poems in the Japanese Form of Haibun by Charlotte Mandel. Kelsay Books. 58 pages.

What a natural phenomenon. It’s a delight to read a fulsome description of a place or occurrence and then see it synthesized into nuance and essence. It’s even fun to track the mind to its crystallization. The form Mandel masters is fundamental to our senses. This defies belief systems and gets to the very core of experience. The prose is determined, interesting, descriptive. The haiku is about the prose, its convictions. Sentient thought is diving deep and appearing shallow and clear. Watching the haiku widen the overall meaning is a treat.

Rocking Chair Angel

In this wing of the retirement home, a lounge room next to the
elevator is furnished like a sun porch with wicker chairs and couch.
Sunlight pours through the windows. Flowered print chintz
cushions enhance my sense of being in a garden. A pillowed
rocker holds me in its arms, welcome warmth on back of my head.
A woman steers her walker to the elevator adjacent. “Your hair,”
she says, “is a halo in the sun.” The elevator door slides open, she
passes through, it slides shut.

dust in a ray of sun
fireflies

*****

Last Will, Last Testament by Frank X Walker. Accents Publishing. 74 pages.

The poem “Bill Collectors” ends: “We have not come for cars or houses. /We have our own. /But we do want the memories you owe us.”

Frank X Walker is one of my all-time favorites. What this says is that he really evokes resilience — making us able to show love all the better. What does “relevant” really mean? Honesty? Revelation? Or just being extra lucky to be able to express what you stand for. These intimate poems watch a father die before his children’s eyes, day by hospital day. His oldest son, the poet, chronicles each hospital visit so clearly, so tenderly, you believe you’re in the room. Skilled writers still need something to say to be “relevant” and they need the full freedom of self-knowledge to reach down in and pull out the truths of love, with the decision to mend it with language. This father left early on in his son’s life but has been brought back as the patriarch circling in by his decisive being, structuring a generation. A newborn son provides the unity of purpose in the story of birth and death and endurance — the felt life of inheritance.

Walker is one hundred different souls. They all become ours. No one else lets us see how alike we are quite like this poet.

Also, if you can get your hands-on Walker’s 2015 book About Flight (Accents Publishing), you’ll never forget you did.

THE REAL CREATOR

Though your funeral was in a church,
your cathedral was the great outdoors.

Work was your religion.
You paid your tithes in sweat.

You didn’t trust the sanctified.
You were pretty sure stained-glass windows
were used to keep people from looking inside.

Yet, you believed in something,
figured that whatever made us,
whoever could put up an oak tree
inside an acorn or transform a moment
of orgasmic pleasure into a brand-new life
with its own purpose
and powerful new engine
that would eventually get old
and wear out
like all good things,
would be too big to fit inside a book.

*****

Some Unimaginable Animal by David Ebenbach. Orison Books. 60 pages.

If this poet talks about food, he means feasts; if he talks about philosophy, he means humanity. I wish I were in his class to watch this teacher/poet in action because there’s a fiercely pleasant dynamic to his presence. He has a big voice that includes everybody with wry love. Life is a magical mystery tour, and this poet knows it and turns thinking into soul, pop, rock, and Bach. He belongs here at this time in history to help us understand how meaningful every dust mote is in relation to the universe. It’s rare to have observation and insight so deliciously prepared that you feel everything is going to be alright. That’s why you keep reading. Looking for the next poem to tip the chart.

Hunger

But not the hunger of the afternoon
too long at the desk, hands adrum
before the computer —

and not the hunger of the fast,
the plan, your fridge full
of what you won’t eat —

not even the four-in-the-morning
hunger, shocked hollow in the gut,
but sleeps cures it —

no, not the temporary hunger,
the blood-sugar plummet,
the stage play —

instead the long hunger,
the hunger of the march
and the door that won’t lock —

the hunger at the edge
of a slow paycheck. Real hunger,
with a jaw of its own —

*****

Meteor by C.M. Mayo. Gival Press. 106 pages.

Especially memorable in this candid energetic book is a sequence of poems (Section ll) “Davy & Me.” They capture the mysterious rapture of comradeship that’s seldom been described better. Even Mayo’s tiny poems see the world far away, then close up, slowly building, then deepening, revealing rather than portraying.

En Este Pais

A blind man cannot use a dog
in this country
even if he’s rich
Or expect to receive his letters
even if they might be read to him
by a girl who can recite García Lorca
who knows the secrets of green
who can swim-stroke away and back again
Nothing really works
and intentions are coconut shells
full of spiders

*****

The Last Parent by Anne Stewart. Second Light Publications. 93 pages.

Anne Stewart takes us through the final loss, the final parent — and now what — paperwork and duty fill the void. In what could be a wonderful world comes the inevitable and the future becomes the present. The poet executes tasks on the page with personalized insights signing the last note of being a daughter. These are tasteful poems written with the stability of a writer fully present, fully conscious, who will complete your mind with hers.

When I come back

I want to be soft and tawny brown
with a soot black voice in scurrying
discourse with the earth.

I want the whole earth to myself;
my soft self, the flowers and bees,
the worms, the world a meadow.

I want no shattered joy from leavings.
No nevermores to break my heart.
I want to be at one. Me and the earth

and every living thing beneath mankind.
Just us. I want to be safe next time.
I want to be soft, unknowing, blind.

*****

Eagle & Phenix by Nick Norwood. Snake Nation Press. 66 pages.

You are going to love this guy for his clarity and cunning — his field studies of human behavior — reaching and never overreaching — that’s what I like. This is skillful living and skillful writing about it. As Norwood writes we are part of the poem in its becoming. That’s how alive it is — words almost jump off the page with human energy, texturing up our brains with images of a hometown, lineage, grandparents, family and terrific writing verifying the results. Curiosity is what makes vision, and vision makes space — big enough for us all to enter.

GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

A lioness so stalks your gaze
in the framed photograph we’ve kept,
taken before 1925, the year
you died at 34, hair swept up

and back, for head China,
cheekbones high, sharp cliffs,
it seems impossible you’re dead,
bones denuded long before

even my mother was born.
And so I stare at you, standing
beside the mild seated husband
who’d outlive you fifty years,

hand on his shoulder, leaning
forward, running a long, straight
shaft through my mortal guts.
Then ages past me.
i.m. “Josie” Westbrook Tidwell.

*****

Judith Neeld: Collected Poems by Judith Neeld. Summerset Press. 188 pages.

Poetry is community, and nowhere is that better exemplified than by Martha’s Vineyard poets who rallied to produce Judith Neeld’s touching posthumous book, Collected Poems. The volume contains samples of five of Neeld’s books, handsome seasoned work, plus extraneous writings published elsewhere. More than anything, are the valued sentiments expressed in the introduction by Brooks Robards, and the commentaries by the Cleaveland House Poets.

“All we know of her lies here…” Edna St. Vincent Millay. Two poems in remembrance:
Summer Island (from the 1988 book Naming the Island.)

There was a light about
the mornings
as if the sun had never notched us
before:
as if its hills stirred a color
no one had worn
until now.
An island is that way
sprouting on the horizon
like corn:
green shocks
in the last thick month
of summer.
And places choose us
and those days, coming back
bright as new metal
there was a kind of belling
as if we were harnessed to a steeple
and this place:
the old man on the rope.

Eruption at Arenal (from Cleaveland House Poets: 50 Years, 2013)

Years after, I remember
we slept in our usual skin.

The room was cold, two thousand
feet above sea level, stars abroad.

All day we watched for birds
in tree canopies, on earth scruff

under clouds and mist.
Tonight no owls called nor wind.

It happened then, when our dark
sex had left us dreaming.

At first the deep rumble of a throat
rolled us from bed.

Light catapulted through the room
and drove us out the door.

Arenal glorified the sky. Our blood
raced as hers spread

a fire that would slow
and turn its face.

Expelled from the sleeping garden
we stared at a candescent world.

Around us everyone
as naked as we.

*****

One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 96 pages.

I must share an epigraph of sorts, an anecdote from the writer Primo Levi with which Hofmann begins the book, because it defines his humor perfectly: Here, excerpted, is an exchange between Cohen, whose shop is always empty, and Goldberg, whose shop is packed. “Cohen asks his friend, ‘what on earth he’s selling.’ ‘Lark pate,’ … ‘But how can you afford it?’ ‘I add a bit of horse…’ ‘How much?’ ‘One lark, one horse,’ says Goldberg.”

Now we know what to expect from Hofmann POV and we’re never disappointed.

Hofmann has wonderful engagements with himself and we’re the benefactors. He’s always watching to his own creative satisfaction, and every artistic muscle in his body is vigilant to tell about it. This is fresh, jaunty language that definitely does not sound American or European, or anything but itself. The best parts are the ones he leaves out — the unnecessary words — those left make for bright connections of speech, almost in color, for their motion and daring. Here’s a poet who we can believe once took the basic and concrete and restyled them into mischief and a philosophy. We are glad for it — a man faithful to his word.

Night

It’s all right
Unless you’re either lonely or under attack.
That strange effortful
Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping,
Hours, the telephone — unless misinformed —
Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does.
The night — yours to decide,
Among drink, or books, or lying there
On your back, or curled up.
An embarrassment of poverty.

*****

Be-Hooved by Mar Ka. University of Alaska Press. 110 pages.

“Behooved” is an interesting word. It speaks of doing things a proper way — respectably, honorably — performing in an ethical way. And, so, we have the undertone of this stunning original book about Alaska’s wilderness. In my life, I’ll never see a caribou, much less follow their migration like this poet has. I can’t imagine living in a frozen world, I never saw a moose. The indigenous people of Alaska, for me, live only here, in this book, and that’s why I read with such fascination — the housebound following the intrepid adventurer. And perhaps that’s how to read this memorable poetry.

The poet writes effortlessly about societal issues without calling them that. She’s precise with every one of her senses. And, so, we become familiar with her heart’s home. The implications of this book are great. Mar Ka describes a world at its pinnacle, fading except for what we’re willing to save.

Like Mountain Snowmelt
For Katy, Sharman, Paula, Sarah, Diane

We let down our milk
as we let down our hair,
with the same little breath,
the soft settling
of the muscles, faces calming
like pools after wind.

Our milk releases
like mountain snowmelt
suckled by sun,
as rivers unbraid toward melding.

*****

The Government Lake: Last Poems by James Tate. Ecco. 96 pages.

I remember exactly where I stood when I received my copy of The Lost Pilot. It was 1967, Annandale, Virginia, and I was sending out eight poems a day, according to my husband, who said it was like selling used cars — one in eight would be taken. He was right. How I devoured James Tate’s first book — winner of the coveted Yale Younger Poets Award — his wit and measurement of words, his sadness.

Today, I read his last book, and it is more than one can face to think there won’t be another. The Government Lake is so many parts of Tate: his surreality; life that can only happen in a dream state; humor so well stage-managed that you think you will (but never do) see it coming. Tate has killer last lines, and there’s so much death, there’s nothing to do but change it to absurdity. The implications of our frailties and silly lives are here, but their preciousness, too. And in these odd, stand-up, perfect prose pieces, we know more about human conduct than ever before. Read one poem, and you’re in the zone. It takes an hour to read them all because you cannot — will not — stop. Then put the book aside for another hour when you need it.

From the ending of the title poem, “The Government Lake”:

A man walked up behind me and said, “This Government Lake is off-limits to the public. You’ll have to leave.” I said, “I didn’t know it was a Government Lake. Why should it be off-limits? He said,” I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave.” “I don’t even know where I am,” I said. “You’ll still have to leave,” he said. “What about that man out there?” I said, pointing to the tire. “He’s dead,” he said. “No, he’s not. I just saw him move his arm, “I said. He removed his pistol from his holster and fired a shot. “Now he’s dead,” he said.

*****

Come Closer and Listen: New Poems by Charles Simic. Ecco. 96 pages.

The moral authority in the title is typical irony, for Simic’s not a direction giver — he’s more a circular-thought person who makes you smile and frown. In the title poem, he begins, “I was born — don’t know the hour — /slapped on the ass/and handed over crying/to someone many years dead/in a country no longer on a map…” In these poems, his neighbors are always other than the speaker, who’s always alienated while watching; sits in a tree like an owl; or, is on his way to the dump, waving to those going to church. Who is this poet who takes the tiniest thing — say, clothes on the clothesline — and makes them mystic? In “The Joke,” Simic writes: “Too long I’ve sought/What I had no name for,/Till one day/I unclenched my fist//and found a grain/Of sand in it./Whose joke is this?/I couldn’t say.//My hand grew heavy/As I held it out/Like a blind beggar/Thinking he hears steps.”

American mythology is what this is. An ordinary man walking through life who can’t believe what he sees and has to tell us about it. But he has to change it first. The poems are sweet lies about how strange it all is, how starstruck our little dreams are on their way to oblivion, but there’s nothing dour here, because humor comes through on the high notes, making a sad song ridiculously good.

Simic doesn’t go for the big splash — just a slow subtle hum, saying life did it to him again, and he wants to describe this before it gets knocked out of the park, never to be seen by anyone. This is virtual. This is reality. The test of a poet is whether or not you believe him. These harmonies, one-of-a-kind, are funny. And true.

*****

Send review copies (2019-2020 releases only) to:

Washington Independent Review of Books
7029 Ridge Road
Frederick, MD 21702

[Editor’s note: Grace Cavalieri will edit a forthcoming section of PoetsArtists called “You Oughta Be in Pictures.” Click here to submit a poem for consideration.]

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s 10th poet laureate. She produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem” for public radio, now in its 42nd year, and now recorded at the Library of Congress. Her latest chapbook is Showboat (Goss Publications, 2019).

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July 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri

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