September 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri

Over the years, Harjo’s built a body of poems that reveal Native Americans’ spiritual history with lyrical insight and hypnotic magic. An American Sunrise adds richly to the canon. Inspired by lineage, we see power in the tragic. There’s also joy and melodic moments that come only after delving into the dark. From “Memory Sack”: “That first cry opens the earth door. / We joined the ancestor road. / With our pack of memories / Slung slack on our backs / We venture into the circle / Of destruction, / Which is the circle / Of creation/And make more — ”

In the poem “Cehotosakvtes,” two women sing as their people move over the Trail of Tears. One in the front, one in the back, in their native tongue, this song: “Do not get tired / Don’t be discouraged. Be determined, / Come. Together let’s go toward the highest place.”

Harjo, the 23rd poet laureate of the United States, is the poet of authenticity, whose past combines with a poetic imagination to revisit scenes. The stunning “Washing My Mother’s Body” is a five-page poem with thematic strands found throughout the book — a revisiting, remembering, rectifying.

Never do we see a hardy people reduced to fragility. Harjo’s poems are fables of what endures under the harshest circumstances. The family stays with honor. “In A Time of War” is unforgettable, highly charged, with an unwavering commitment to life from a place of rubble. “Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather to his grandson, //his granddaughter, as he blew his most powerful song into the / hearts of the children. //There it would be hidden from the soldiers...”

These poems, read together, are prayers for justice, peace, and memory. Inspired by pain — and through rigor and the flint of poetic courage — they become testaments. Harjo’s success is due in no small part to writing personal history from difficult circumstances. And her compassion.

First Morning
For Shan Goshorn, December 3, 2018

This is the first morning we are without you on earth.
The sun greeted us after a week of rain
In your eastern green and mountain homelands.
Plants are fed, the river restored, and you have been woven
Into a path of embracing stars of all colors
Now free of the suffering that shapes us here.
We all learn to let go, like learning how to walk
When we first arrive here.
All those you thought you lost now circle you
And you are free of pain and heartbreak.
Don’t look back, keep going.
We will carry your memory here, until we join you
In just a little while, in one blink of star time.

*****

The Grace of Distance by Matthew Thorburn. LSU Press. 84 pages.

A new book by Thorburn is a pleasure. His familiar voice is a smooth-speaking one which imagines the poem into being with some of the finest lyrics in print. Thorburn takes a moment, explores it, then turns it on its head with a new sensibility. Where he excels is in the patient unfolding of story where he lays a platform and then slowly changes those thoughts to extraordinary ideas that shed new light. To read this book is to feel satisfied by language refreshed, sweetly composed with honesty and grace.

Birds before Winter

Dabbing lather across my chin, I picture you: bent low
over the tap, drinking from your cupped hands.
You probably aren’t even up yet. Hair a tangle
on the covers, eyelids made pale by the sun.

Sweeping the back step I find a cricket,
wings laced with frost. The leaves keep falling.

I look for you in all the things that are not you.
The plate of milk, left by the cat, sours.

You must be filling the red teapot
with water now, measuring green tea.

The birds wing their way south. They take
the sky with them, each black scrap.

*****

I Will Destroy You by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press. 80 pages.

Flynn’s writing is so natural sometimes we feel we are in the same room with him; and what belongs to the writer is given easily to the reader. Flynn’s poetic knowledge includes those two most necessary elements: originality and surprise. These poems are reconstructions from childhood traumas and the hunger that moves us forward. But make no mistake, this gorgeous book is more than how to survive. Each poem is a compelling dynamic where language is shattered and rebuilt to convey truths that are haunting and beautiful. Nobody bends a lyric the way Flynn does to break the heart: “Vulture, follow me up: here is the arm / my mother held me aloft with (as // well as she could, until she couldn’t), it / is cut free of her body now, pulled // away from her shoulder, away / from her breath, as you point // your wing toward her offered heart, toward me — …” (Sky Burial).

Confessional

I admit you haven’t heard from me
in a while. In me there’s a little liar.
And a little thief. And a little whore.
Forgive me — while writing these words
I was lost in a trance…the sky wild
blue, fruit trees jeweled with ice…if not

for what I’d promised, I wouldn’t be here
at all. You were with me when I found that
box in the basement — opening it was like
entering a room & having (at last!) someone else
breathe for me. No one, as you know,
sets out to lose their mind. This poem began
as a secret — not from you, I didn’t know you

then. Now, it wears its shame like a halo.
Please, take it, rip it up, put it in your glass.
We can watch it dissolve.

*****

The River Twice by Kathleen Graber. Princeton University Press. 112 pages.

I don’t know where this poet has been all my life, but I’ve certainly missed her — those long lines that float us through ache and love and quarrels. The only thing that parallels exquisite thought is the poem that carries it. Whether she’s picking up dog excrement or tasting a bitter peach or considering Mary Shelley, every word is placed exactly. From the stellar poem “Self-Portrait,” these lines: “For a time I lived between two brothers — / one with a door of iron; the other with no door / at all…Our mother was a black Singer / sewing machine. Our father, a pair of red dice…” She also can challenge language with its many disguises.

A Rhetoric (part 1 from a six-part poem)

Or how how we say what we say says everything

we don’t actually say but somehow mean, even if

what we mean is, frankly, very mean & not in the end

what we thought we intended. Not simply chiasmus

or pathos or logos but more than anyone can imagine:

visual rhetoric, virtual rhetoric, vernacular rhetoric,

cultural rhetoric, the rhetoric of the first-person shooter,

the rhetoric of the team, the mediated landscape, disputed

landscape, the rhetoric of the drone. The rhetoric

of soundscapes, soundtracks, sound effects: each click

of the keyboard, the clatter of the skateboard, the chatter

of the switchboard, & the rhetoric of the closed captioning

whose scrolling announces Today the government is closed,

that says, Let us welcome the new Minister of Loneliness.

*****

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017 by Eleanor Wilner. Princeton University Press. 232 pages.

A collection of poetry spanning 40 years cannot be given fair enough review. These sample poems from eight books are a portrait of the writer’s life where we see a poet inspired by nature, history, mythology, and societal challenges — passions centralized by authority and a learned background. You won’t find confessional poems, sensationalism, exposés, or literary gossip because Wilner goes for big ideas and surfs them to poetic conclusions. Her poetry is introspective and therefore instructive, with images that shimmer, while the narrative voice makes its accounts vivid — every poem offers an atmosphere of care for the reader. Here’s a life between covers, a life of thought, with the poem as benefactor.

Wingspan

For Tony

Hope said Emily (her life now

versions in anyone’s mouth —

the plaything of posterity,

as we are shaken in the moment’s

lawless jaws, white and lethal as

the crocodile’s teeth) is a thing

with feathers, but so few, so blue,

and such short wings, vestigial,

it was not meant to fly

but to abide, here, deep in leaves,

thick in the scent of summer green,

the air dusted with pollen;

nearby, the long drumroll of the surf,

and there, under the sky’s immensity of blue,

a scatter of feathers on the ocean waves

where wide-winged Icarus flew.

*****

Not Only/But Also by Anne Higgins. Duck Lake Books. 80 pages.

Anne Higgins leads a life of poetry and, also, a God-centered life. She’s not, however, a poetry proselytizer or persuader. She just writes poems about the radiance of the ordinary. Inspired by nature, art, and literature, these poems are like bathing in a fresh stream of cool, crystal-clear water.

Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs:
the first unfairness of the world,
the first game of unfairness.
Not a chair for everyone,
not a beautiful body or face
for everyone,
not a quick brain
for everyone,
not a finger for the keys,
a mouth for the reed,
an eye for the form,
a hand for the brush.

*****

Queen of Jacks: New and Selected Poems by Stellasue Lee. Bombshelter Press. 276 pages.

A mother naps for five minutes; a child remembers 25-cent movies; a father is released from a detox center; a kitten jumps up onto the lap; a stained marriage is released; a lecture is due at 9 a.m. How do these topics make poems? What are we allowed to write about? Stellasue Lee is a renowned teacher of poetry because she shares her secrets. Every concrete fact of our lives is worthy: that memory — even painful — is a virtue for the writer; that each well-made poetic structure upgrades all poetry.

The book is in six parts and harks back to childhood events but leaves none without meaning that resonates. The prevailing thought of this book is how resourceful the poet is, wasting nothing, how each poem is like no other, how one must dig into the soul for the material, and how more human we are for each slice of experience. At times, Lee interrogates the world to find what she can restore. These poems have various social conditions in which to find a center. This poet has crossed continents of living and documents every step. Each poem is a unique guide.

Dusting

I think I’ve begun to heal.
Days pass,

sometimes in whole hours
without drawing a ragged

breath in grief. I can be engaged
in the single act of…

oh, let’s say dusting,
thinking about

nothing at all save the weather,
or I need to check

the birdfeeder. Beds
get made,

meals get served, clothes
get washed,

books are consumed,
and my heart

beats steady in its small
satchel inside my chest.

*****

From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter by Linda Stern Zisquit. New Walk Editions. 26 pages.

The Hebrew Bible combines with Jewish folklore here. The legendary Korah actually had sons in the Jewish story, but no daughters. Zisquit imagines a daughter where each poem begins with a line from a Hebrew psalm. Twenty-one poems create a mythic world from the past in rhythmic language; 21 tiny literary scenes with a consistent voice make Korah’s daughter good company for the reader with her psychological changes and elegant language — a girl now created who will never go away.

…more desirable than gold [Ps. 19]

He spoke after love of honey.
The sun that shone behind him
blazed around us
though we were in shadow.
A bee dozed by.
If there is suffering there is also memory.
There is no utterance, there are no words
whose sound goes unheard:
speech of tree and whisper of stone.
I cannot forget the moment of his breath
or the light around his face,
a tree rustling,
pebbles stirring beneath us.
He said tomorrow and meant yesterday.
Gold becomes dim in the eyes
of the tired, the fire ceases to rage.
Only the sun still burns
with the glint of his gaze.

*****

We Is by Sami Miranda. ZOZOBRA Publishing.

This poetry pops off the page, makes you glad tomorrow is another day where we’ll get more of it. These bright, exuberant poems shake with a rhythmic center, energizing the page. Maybe it’s because Miranda is also an artist and has many vocabularies. He explains his title in a two-page poem, here are sample stanzas: “We is the dance/that shakes and rolls/down city streets, / shimmies into markets/for fresh fruit, / salsas against traffic…We is home/carried into conversation, / about a crowing rooster, /a ritual, dancing and medicine/to cure what ails us.”

So you can see Miranda’s work is all about healing. Part of that points to our plights, turning them to lore just to activate the message. Miranda knows grief and loss. His poems know guns and knives — but seen altogether, the book feels like a force for good.

Semilla

I am the seed
carried by a bird,
asking a sacrifice
for each mile I travel in its beak.
I go without guarantee
where I land will be a welcoming place.

I prepare to root myself
bury the most important
bits of me, wait until I can grow
into melancholy
foreign dirt’s
where I become
the distance I have travelled.

*****

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets. Milkweed Editions. 96 pages.

This book is written from hard country: “Men around here only touch when they fuck in a back seat…”

And other times, “touching” can come from pain and isolation, and will galvanize the soul to life and to poetry. Skeets’ lines are sporadic, giving energy, momentum, suspense — sometimes utterances, sometimes imagistic, always impromptu. In this disparate style, we’ll find the emotional range of longing, thirst moving into lovemaking, a rhetoric of danger broken into lines. We’re always clear there’s a master controlling this writing. Someone capable is in charge.

Woven through the work is landscape, the geography surrounds a world of masculinity. The sex act becomes a wider experience beyond lust. It stands for humanity, another way to be, a channel where one can belong. This is the hard brush of despair. And Skeets captures it in terrifying, beautiful, pulsating language.

A bar called Eddie’s sits at the end of the world. By the tracks,
drunk men get some sleep. My father’s uncle tries to get some
under a long bed truck. The truck backs up to go home.

I arrange my father’s boarding school soap bones on white space
and call it a poem. Like my father, I come upon death
staggering into the house with beer on the breath.

*****

Cracked Piano by Margo Taft Stever. CavanKerry Press. 68 pages.

This is a zenith book for Margo Stever. She takes complicated stories and unfolds them with clarity and personal style. The outstanding Section Two centralizes on Peter R. Taft, the poet’s great-grandfather, institutionalized in the Cincinnati Sanitarium for a mental disorder. It’s believed that Taft (half-brother of President Taft) was wrongfully diagnosed by an unfair 19th-century custom, without sound medical information. Letters written by Taft to his father were converted to poems by Stever and become all the more powerful for compression into poetic form. The letters, already lucid and concise, prove this was not a deranged mind. Corresponding letters from the hospital superintendent are chilling for their lack of psychiatric expertise and compassion. This book, with all its varied subjects, proves that every event is an opportunity for poetry.

One poem to note, in Section One, is “Worst Mother.” It just goes to show that poet/mothers can’t win. They give emotional energy and their kids would rather go to the mall. “See, instead, this picture / of you as a child / with bare feet — / the one in which you have / cherubs wings, / gossamer everywhere.”

Hand

Cell and bone
more servile than the elbow
and more birdlike

than the nose.
Thin fingers fan out
like spokes on a half-moon

wheel, or the toes of a balled
Chippendale claw.
A hand can be a monastery,

fingers bent in repose,
or a slaughterhouse
where nothing is safe.

*****

Also on the best-books list for fall:

Prodigal by Michael C. Davis. New Academia Publishing. 54 pages.

A sparkling debut.

Cleaning the Catch

As a child attending to my father’s love —
fishing — I refused to clean

the bass, pumpkin-ear, and bream we caught.
Killing the cold quivering flesh
made me squeamish, infinitely sad.

So, he would sever the head
from behind the gills, then split
the belly and spill the guts.

Tail to absent head, I would drive the knife
like a razor, against the grain, scattering the salty
scales into the bright air.

When it came time for my mother to die,
ridden by cancer, she too quivered.
How I wanted her to stay.

And on that dock I find
one iridescent scale still clings.
Life lost, both wanted and wanting

*****

4PM Count, edited by Jim Reese. Artist-in-Residence Program, NEA. 205 pages.

Terrall E. Tillman Sr. is incarcerated in Federal Prison Camp Yankton, SD, and is one of 20 artists and writers featured in this groundbreaking program where creative writing is taught by editor Jim Reese. Yankton is an unusually merciful environment that produces graduates in a college program under Mount Marty College.

One individual featured: Tillman, born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. This former teen father has defied the odds of over 18 years in federal prison and 25 years of street life in L.A., triumphing away from poverty and the “thug” life, selling drugs, indulging in violence, and tainted by addiction!

Earning various education and professional certifications, and now armed with years of adept knowledge and proficiency in educating, Tillman has assisted hundreds of civilians and inmates regain their focus and strengths as they battle their misfortunes and stand up to become better and stronger human beings.

“Having a different kind of demeanor and mindset than the other black inmates already here who are predominately from the Midwest and Southwest, I’ve struggled to open up to them and/or find common ground to build a little rapport with some of them.

“When I was first got here to Yankton after being at Taft Correctional Institution in Central California for thirty-three months, where the building structures and compound were bland and close in proximity, I was overwhelmed with how spread out this institution’s structures are. I was very pleased to be in a much better and healthier environment as far as the atmosphere and natural community surroundings. The air quality here is great, and I’m fond of the landscaping of the facility along with all the variety of trees, plants beautiful pollen-filled flowers.”

*****

RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, edited by Jim Daniels and M.L. Liebler. Michigan State University Press. 362 pages.

Featuring 138 contributors, including every good name in poetry you can imagine in a brilliant beast of a book by two editors, already luminaries, who know what they’re doing.

Detroit Bound

I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job
I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job
Tried to stay around here with the starvation mob

I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place
I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place
Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face

When I start to makin’ money, she don’t need to come around
When I start to makin’ money, she don’t need to come around
‘Cause I don’t want her now, Lord. I’m Detroit bound

Because they got wild women in Detroit
That’s all I want to see
Because they got wild women in Detroit
That’s all I want to see
Wild women and bad whisky would make a fool out of me

— Arthur “Blind” Blake

*****

A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward. Terrapin Books. 202 pages.

The queen of anthologies gives us another keepsake with dozens of kissing cousins who are poets.

A Girl I Kissed When I Was Sixteen

1967, the summer of love

She had this way, at the end of a kiss,
or between kisses, of running her tongue
light and wet around my lips,
a slow circumference along

the open hungry mouth of me.
every time it made me shiver
and lurch, involuntarily quiver,
even shudder. She thought it was funny

and smiled, so that when she resumed
kissing, I was kissing her smile,
which meant another kind of thrill.
We were in the rumpus room,

her parents’ basement. Pool table,
pinball machine, fridge full of beer.
I wasn’t encouraged to do anymore,
just kiss her and hold her. If I’d been able

to, I would’ve. I wanted to, I know,
but I was so lost, other stuff
didn’t matter. It was enough,
kissing, her licking my lips just so.

— Robert Wrigley

*****

The Only Home We Know by Robin Chapman. Tebot Bach. 104 pages.

One of America’s most loved poets shares a rich life in new poems. Keep this one on the nightstand.

Flame

Sometime in your eighties or nineties

the ruin might begin —

a little getting lost, a word here

and there avoiding the light,

just out of sight — but then

a memory clear as a bell

for your eight-year-old birthday,

your yellow pinafore

and the taste of the yellow cake

with its chocolate frosting

and the crepe paper streamers

sticky and your brother blowing

that whistle that curls out like a tongue —

the day flares up in the house

candles still burning.

*****

Cage of Lit Glass by Charles Kell. Autumn House Press. 104 pages.

A debut book from a meteor on the rise.

Close Strangers

Built, torn down, then built
again. A small stone structure
in the middle
of this snowy wasteland

Where we met & sucked
cold air into our smoke-
burnt lungs. Colder autumn.
Tractor cap off & rag

dipped into gas to start
a small fire. Your scarf
was wet & smelled
like a mix of cinnamon & piss.

Dragging your nails across
my lower back, zeroing in
on what the mind empties out.
I took you there, all evidence

against. Still remember? Cold
no longer cold. Red house far
up the road. Wrecked nausea
a little money took away.

Two sheets tied together, red
too. Dress flat & ripped.
my arms scraped raw by
the almost frozen thorns
poking through the dirt into our skin.

*****

Sword of Glass by Peter Schireson. Broadstone Books. 69 pages.

Human, spiritual, funny, sad, perceptive, conscious, exuberant, inimitable, sexy, chaste.

SHADOW BOXING

I woke last night

in the dark thinking

about a time I loved

someone better

forgotten.

Wide awake, I went to the window,

watched the slow moon sink, and thought

about how we’d hold hands in the dark,

how we’d wonder aloud

if somewhere in our bodies

we might already have cancer.

We were a chaos —

even our happiness

was not very happy.

*****

Ransom Street by Claire Millikin. 2Leaf Press. 152 pages.

“The Geography of Losing and Getting Lost.” This poet was held prisoner as a young person; the soul, poetry says, cannot be held captive.

Hotel Room Atonement

I never tell anyone about my father, a limit
where the photograph folds
toward God. In backyard super 8,
my baby sister dances naked,
wet leaves stick to her skin.

I never tell the truth about myself; thus,
in bad dreams, the stone cutters by the highway
turn their heads
and the old women say,
it was bound to happen.

*****

Send review copies (new releases only) to:

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

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s 10th poet laureate. She founded and produces “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress for public radio. Her new book of poems is Showboat (Goss Publications, 2019).

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