2001 SPRING / SUMMER / FALL / WINTER From Winter 2001/2002 Three Midwestern Poets:
OUTCASTS, Brian Daldorph. The Mid-America Press, Inc. 2001.
ISBN: 0-91479-14-3. $10.
WANT, A.J. Rathbun. Creative Arts Book Company. 2001.
ISBN: 0-88739-428-0. $10.
SAY HELLO, Ryan G. Van Cleave. Pecan Grove Press. 2001.
ISBN: 1-877603-72-4. $10.This year I picked up three full-length books by Midwestern poets, and I'm happy to report that all these young dudes show promise. Truth to tell, the Midwest is not the first place I look for fresh, cutting-edge poetry, but the titles of the books in question—Outcasts, Want, and Say Hello—were assured and stanch enough to make me add them to my virtual shopping cart. And I wasn't disappointed.
Brian Daldorph is the hard-bitten romantic of the bunch. Laconic yet lyrical, his best poems are character sketches of the doomed and dysfunctional. Outcasts takes its title from the writer and anti-slavery activist Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. We must come down from our heights and leave our straight paths for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truth by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.
Although Outcasts captures moments in the lives of historical figures like Jesus, Flaubert, and Sylvia Plath, it's the lesser known freaks, victims, and addicts whose stories affected me and linger in my imagination.
On the freakish side, "The Human Pin-Cushion" is a haunting portrait of a Vaudeville performer who pushes his talent beyond the limits of his audience's endurance and to the edge of his own spiritual integrity: When I was crucified onstage,/ people fainted./ An old woman had a heart attack./ Her husband sued./ I was ruined./ Then I felt pain,/ all the pain I'd missed,/ black waves/ welling up in me/ until I felt nothing,/ nothing at all.
"Fat" is a small triumph, a sketch of a woman who has tried anorexia in order to please her husband but without success. She resolves to eat her way out of his affection, gorging on junk food: Now he'll be the man / with the fat wife, she thinks, / biting / into sweet hate.
Daldorph's victims are compelling in their vulnerability and pain, like "Miss Chastity." Raped as a child, she loses her sensuality, her sexual identity, and she grows up to be a steadfast churchgoer, wearing her hard black dress, / legs crossed, / glaring. It's a sad ending to a sad story, but I can't help but admire Daldorph for the way he makes his characters come alive with such precise, powerful lines.
Unlike Daldorph, A.J. Rathbun offers up his personal life for us to scrutinize. His debut, Want, is hungry for things that are hard to attain: knowledge, love, light. The desire is so palpable in Rathbun's lines that I find myself returning to them time and again. The title poem draws its energy from formal assuredness as well as what I can best characterize as post-Beat inventiveness: In the night I know the dead/ want long past dying, that my heart/ is gone. Hear that, that's the sound/ of a man whose heart is gone/ in the drizzle as one bliss-filled/ moment like light on Lake Union fades./ I follow Want and Want leads me here,/ where I envision your legs that move within/ your short skirt while stars block out/ the hungry want of streetlights.
Erotic, all-consuming, and punk-rocked, Rathbun does well when he weds the personal with the mythic, autobiography with archetype, pop culture with Midwestern austerity. The B-side to "Want" is "Need," another standout in which the writer's imagination seems boundless, his language rich and effortless. Listen to the odd beauty of these lines: Sharing the stage with utensils,/ Need cuts meat between a fork's/ tines and teeth. In the rain,/ Need wears bridle and spur./ Need tangles a lock's metal/ teeth, sucks steel, consumes/ birth to death.
Ryan G. Van Cleave's first book, Say Hello, paves a quirkier road to the reader's heart. Whereas Rathbun flirts with pop culture, Van Cleave fiercely embraces everything from chupacabras to Cadbury Crème Eggs. Mr. Van Cleave's book has already earned praise from such luminaries as Martin Espada, Peter Meinke, and Sherod Santos. But Say Hello is a book that works hard to engage and introduce us to a passionate world full of teeth and lightning.
The book's centerpiece, the three-part title poem, is a vortex of pop-culture, sharp ironies, and sado-masochism-all imbued with the symbolic keys to our postmodern lives: it's the broken Coke bottles on Highway 59, the newspaper heap/ in your garage (roaches squirm atop the mound); it's the chemical peels,/ email overglut, daytime smut tv, spooky painkiller pop-a-bility,/ 2 for $1 poetry books, Delillo's Toxic Airborne Event, the way your fourth/ grade teacher smacked your knuckles with a molded plastic ruler/ and it made you jizz your pants though you never confessed to anyone.
The world that Van Cleave tears down here is a lonely, abandoned one, but he is not so ideological as to miss its surface beauty. His poems never shy away from underscoring the moral ambiguities of human experience.
Another highlight is "Illinois Ninja and Spanish Virtuoso," a strange account of a wannabe-Bruce Lee with a small talent for stand-up and an Asian-American violinist who struggles to master both Paganini and Conversational Spanish. Meanwhile, "D Cup Blondes from Planet Xerxes" is a hilarious retelling of how a babysitter's stories of big-breasted warrior-princesses warp the sexual imaginations of young boys. Other poems pay homage to the mystical lyricism of Charles Simic, such as "Psalm of the Boy from Milwaukee Who Loved Roast Beef": By moonlight, I press my face to glass/ outside closed butcher shops;/ here, my resolve fades completely.// That apron, blood-smeared and dark/ calls my name, says I am yours,/ and I believe. God, do I believe.
On a thematic level, Say Hello espouses the notion that childhood is a hellish period in life. "The Day Grace Kelly Died" is perhaps the best example of Van Cleave's pessimistic view of youth. Here the death of an actress known for her romantic roles is eerily juxtaposed with the vicious beating of a boy by teenage thugs. Other poems like "Victims" and "Packrat" show the darker side of maturation—at times Say Hello seems eager to say goodbye to the Wonder Years, as if reciting a litany of drink, drugs, sex, violence, music and fashion has a therapeutic benefit for the poet. Yet if Van Cleave writes to leave behind the trials of yesterday, he's at least offering to lead us somewhere different: Take a deep breath, he says, let's swim hand-in-hand for the other side.
Jarrett Keene
INTERROGATIONS AT NOON
By Dana Gioia, Graywolf Press, 72 pages. $14.00 (paperback)Only at the zenith of the day can we confront the thoughts that define and torment us. This is the organizing principle behind Dana Gioia's third collection of poems, Interrogations at Noon, a brilliant examination of dreams and nightmares, death and loss, and failure.
"Words," the opening poem of this collection, explores the quintessential human conundrum. The world does not need words, Gioia writes. Yet we express our thoughts and emotions with words, we define ourselves with words, and we must use words to name what is greater than ourselves. Through naming, we come to know and remember, and we begin the journey toward becoming complete human beings, even though this is a journey we're destined never to complete.
To journey toward becoming complete means that we must submit to a rigorous self-examination, the kind Gioia's speaker in the title poem undertakes when he discusses the internal voice that chides his personal failures. Personal failure, we learn in the book, can take many forms. We fail, in fact, at everything we do: we fail as husbands, wives, parents, friends, lovers, citizens, and providers. We are so good at failing that Gioia calls it a certain undeniable gift in the poem "Failures," which leads to this imposing conclusion: Satisfaction comes from recognizing what you do best.
If even language fails us, how can we expect to glean any hope from the culture we've created? The old gods offer no hope. They're still locked in their battles, which were caused by lust, incontinence, and greed, as Gioia writes in "Juno Plots Her Revenge." The wealthy offer no hope, he says in "The Waterfront Café." They drink, carouse, Stoically...choose the fruitcup and a glass of Haut-Brion, as their yachts are rocking in the sun. Unfortunately, the rest of us look on and utter a phrase that comes all too readily to our lips, I don't care. Solipsism seems the ruling theory of too many.
Why not choose earth when heaven is a whorehouse? Juno asks. Perhaps to such a god, the earth could never be paradisiacal. But earth, Gioia tells us, once was a paradise, one we have lost, but which we can regain. In "A California Requiem," the voices of the dead admit their failure, one that remains with them in the grave and defines their hell: We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth/For killing what we cannot even name. Yet these same tormented souls can ask the poet to Become the voice of our forgotten places./Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.
Teaching is precisely what Gioia as poet will do. "The Lost Garden," the penultimate poem of this challenging collection, ends with this hopeful stanza: The trick is making memory a blessing,/ To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,/ Of wanting nothing more than what has been,/ To know the past forever lost, yet seeing/ Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.
For Gioia, like Dante and Eliot, the journey to the underworld is an essential part of our fate, one that must lead to an acceptance of the difficult task of exploring all the ways we have failed. The return from the journey brings with it the responsibility to teach others how to accept this role, this blessing, and how to work toward the transformation of the wasteland into a new paradise, a daunting challenge.
Readers of Gioia's earlier collections will recognize his attention to language: how he sculpts each poem syllable by syllable, how he uses traditional and open forms with equal agility. But they will find the poems here shorter, more lyric, and far darker than those of his earlier books. Some might prefer the poems of The Gods of Winter, but they will find that the interplay between the individual poems and their remarkable depth makes Interrogations at Noon an important book, one that marks Gioia's further growth as a poet of significance.
Kevin Bezner
The Pharmacist's Mate
By Amy Fusselman
McSweeney's Books, 2001, 86pgs., $16, hdbk. ISBN 0970335539This is one of those books that lets itself wander through so many styles and techniques that it ends up being a most beautiful mutt of a book. In fact, if this book were a dog and you were walking it, the book/dog would start out a Cocker Spaniel, morph into an Irish Wolfhound, and end as the pretty brown dog next door.
The Pharmacist's Mate is many things. Foremost, it is a first-person journey from death to life. The narrator, who may or may not be Amy Fusselman, is dealing with the death of her father. She is reading his journal from World War II, when he was in the Merchant Marines, working as an untrained pharmacist's mate.
The narrator mixes her recent memories of his life and death with selected entries from the journal. The contrast is disturbing and delightful.
For example, the first such entry reads, "Chief Steward came to me today with a possible case of gonorrhea. I'm going to wait until tomorrow to see how things turn out. Had him quit handling the food, at least." The daughter comments in her own narration, "It's funny to read things like this, because my dad never became a doctor. After the war, he went back to school and got his MBA."
Her other thoughts, meanwhile, are on fertility treatments. She has a combined fear/desire for a child, but can't get pregnant because her body won't ovulate. She's doing everything the doctors suggest, but only from a self-aware highly ironic distance, and only after comically switching from a "low-end" fertility clinic to a "high-end" fertility guru.
She describes the ultrasound machine as having "the short, squat look of a first grader's desk, only wearing a computer screen and a white plastic sword. It is a first grader's desk, dressed up for Halloween as something from Star Wars."
Every few pages, subplots make appearances. They include meditations on guns, a trip to an AC/DC concert, and a mysterious brother who gave his twins up for adoption. That's the narrative arc of the book. Whether it's autobiographical fiction, pure nonfiction, or a haphazard combination is unclear, but it doesn't detract from the experience.
Fusselman further plays with form by writing in a near-verse style of numbered snippets. Then, on page 53, and the end of snippet number 42, a writing theory leaps off the suddenly metafictive page. The narrator steps back and says, "And that made me think, I have been numbering all these writings. I realize that all I am doing is trying to make this writing reflect a linear concept of time. If I were to embrace [this] idea, I would be numbering each of these passages '1.'"
And so the snippets immediately start over with "1," continuing that way until the end, never moving on to "2." McSweeney's Books, publishers of this unique writing, have made a name for themselves in the realm of oddball, experimental writing that still tells a strong story. The Pharmacist's Mate is a rare find—a compelling, hopeful and hopeless story packaged within creative, risky techniques.
Jen HirtBack to Top
From Fall 2001 THE SUM OF OUR BREATH
By Lynda Calabrese
Manzanita Books, 2001, 138 pp., $15.00, ISBN 0-9709884-0-0Linda Calabrese has hutzpah—she’s not afraid of life nor of putting the idiosyncrasies and worries of her life into a book for all to see. The world is luckier for her courage. This book of 75 poems (gleaned from a prolific 300) is accessible and direct poetry. It’s stuff we can use as we face our individual, and often lonely, journeys.
Parents will draw sustenance from Calabrese’s honesty over the real pain of the “empty nest” stage. Too often this difficult transition is discounted—parents admonished to “go on” without taking time to grieve. Not true for this poet who leads us down hallways where framed 8x10 photos… smile from their best dressed past, and Calabrese wants to shake the glass that hold them and scream ‘What’s so funny?’ In “Forced March,” the mother/poet is drafted into ranks of long distance mothers. Ultimately, we have to face the truth, we can hold them down just so long.
The most poignant poems are about a brother’s untimely death. In “Retouching the Dead,” Calabrese imagines cropping her deceased brother into photos where he’d appear like a cardboard prop / standing stiff and silly next to nieces and nephews / who never knew him …filling the space he always occupies / when we get together for some happy occasion.
Calabrese’s visual art background shines in this book—in photos of original art and in her descriptive use of language. We are with her on the trail beside enormous pitted boulders hugging the trail. We see the Tchelitchew painting with its dark greens and umbers / a camouflaged girl struggles … knotted children stare, dripping with blood.
There’s so much richness in this book that I can’t begin to gather it all into a short review. Poems about social issues like high school shootings and racism; Calabrese’s Jewish history; her aging parents; her long relationship with husband and fellow artist, Vin.
The Sum of Our Breath is truly a “sum” of Calabrese’s full life. But it is much, much more than that. These poems add up each of our lives. The sum of our lives, to this poet, is deep love—love big enough to encompass our weirdness, our fears and our humanity. What greater equation could one want?
Martha Whitfield
PARLANDO, Selected Poems
by Ray Clark Dickson
2000 Kerouac Connection/KC Press PO Box 7250, Menlo Park, CA 94026. 296 pgs, $14.95, Paperbound.THE KID IN AMERICA
by Tony Scibella
2000 Black Ace Book 6/Passion Press/Temple of Man, 3430 East 12th Avenue, Denver, CO 80206. 126 pgs, $10.00, Paperbound.
I’m in favor of expanding the membership of the Beat Generation, even if prospective recruits need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the clubhouse. A whole pack of feral angels born between 1915 and 1935 could use some recognition, now that the Usual Suspects have been academized and plaster-cast into place. A few less well-known bohos have also survived all the hard living to tell their part of the tale.
Ray Clark Dickson has, in the course of living enough lives for a whole generation all by himself, been a drummer in a touring jazz band, a pulp novelist and commercial fisherman, among many other things. Finally, with ripeness (he recently turned 82), he settled down to write poetry about a life too large for mere lying. As it happens, Dickson is a cracker-jack poet, and a reader who has not seen his work just hasn’t been reading enough small magazines.
Dickson has a sailor’s knack for storytelling spliced to a musician’s sense of delivery; each poem is both a song and a story. Each is also structured differently; he’s not a poet who sticks with one form for everything—each piece has its own meter and rhythm. Some just race along, propelled by their own narrative energy, picking up bright bits of internal rhyme as they go. A lyric poem like “Under the Wine Palms,” shimmers in hexameters. Some have a distinct reggae rhythm, others are pure Bop.
The first stanza of “Where the Changing World can’t Touch Us” should show what he’s up to: Stinging smell of low-sulfur diesel: / it will take a cartography of the gods to find / landfall; as sure as fish whistle bait with bill, / frigate birds circle fantail for fragrance / of the catch
Dickson isn’t afraid to be musical and vivid, which is distinctly refreshing these days, and he maintains the cheerful attitude that life is an adventure rather than something to whine about. In fact, he’s about as close to a People’s Poet as we’ve had in some time. He’s plain-spoken enough for non-poets, technically interesting enough for poets. His subject-matter spans almost the whole Twentieth Century, and, when he goes back a generation or two in family history, takes in the Nineteenth. Parlando is relentlessly charming, irresistible, a complete pleasure to read.
Tony Scibella was a member of a Beat Generation colony in Venice, California—nestled on beachfront just south of Santa Monica—that flourished briefly in the late 50s before it was publicized into ruination by Lawrence Lipton’s popular The Holy Barbarians; Scibella is one of the very few to have survived from that day to this. The Kid in America is his magnum opus, telling in part just how he managed the feat.
Scibella begins from the blue-collar Italian childhood that he spent so much time trying to break away from. In recognizable Beat Prosody that comprises fractured grammar, ragged margins and angular rhythms, he swings back and forth from young urban impressions, memories of wartime propaganda, the first twitchings of sex—to the older/wiser hipster-philosopher who composed this bookpoem. So goes the first half of the book for the Kid: a kid can dream / kit kat klub / & all the women in their undies / the stuff u can imagine / what the big guys did.
Starting with the second section, Scibella takes off on a gallop of narrative, setting down in street-level detail the daily life of Venice’s own cast of characters, most notably Stuart Z. Perkoff, the most charismatic and arguably most talented of the Veniceniks. Perkoff’s collected poems came out recently from University of Maine at Orono, edited by his elder brother Gerald, and is highly recommended, though it is the proverbial doorstop of the Canon. Perkoff, good as he was, has been dead a quarter-century. Scibella is still living and active. He’s quit drinking and doping and watches his diet, and in his back-cover photo, looks to be in pretty good shape for a septuagenarian.
What prices The Kid in America beyond pearls is that Scibella has somehow managed to capture the immediacy of life in Venice, not just his life, but street life in general, all in his nonstop hipster patter. It’s infectious, powerful testimony. We can use as much of that as we can get. It would be a shame to think of the Beat Generation as just Jack-and-Neal-and-me.
Douglas Spangle
COMMON SIGHTINGS
Poems by David Chorlton
Palanquin Press, 28pgs., $7.50
ISBN 1-891508-12-1
The desert unfolds like a series of time-lapse photographs scored by the lilting rhythm of David Chorlton’s words in this collection of twenty-one poems. Chorlton, an artist as well as a poet, shares his love of nature with us as he paints the desert naked, with all its thorns and frailties.
In “San Pedro” he says, …The land // you cannot see / turns in its sleep / as you ride with it / to the first nervous flutter at dawn. Here, insight into the micro progressions of Common Sightings begins, the who’s-watching-who from the brush, from under a tree; how life thirsts even beneath the soil and stalks the darkness.
There is a love in these words as well as a sadness. The best example comes from, “Land Speed Record,” my favorite poem in this collection: Men have entered silence / to accelerate the desert / beyond the speed of life.
Each reading of this book (and I read it four times), revealed something new. In some places the imagery alone, carries the momentum. But, as is typically Chorlton, there are those places where he braids nature with human nature and like a light slap on the cheek, reminds us how intertwined our lives are.
A very good read.
M. Scott Douglass
JUNE 10, MALIBU DRIVE
By Daryl Rogers
March Street Press, 36pgs., $6
ISBN 1882983602Like all of March Street Press’ productions (that I’ve seen), this collection has a solid look and feel, and like all of Daryl Rogers’ work, it’s alive and thrashing with the heartbeats of real people living in a curious world.
June 10 is a photo album pasted with snapshots of violence, stupidity, carelessness—a chilling perspective of life in America as witnessed by the narrator in the title poem: An old woman is lying / on the center line, / with one side of her face / pressed to the blacktop. When he gets home later, he forgets to mention the event to his girlfriend. It just slips my mind.
That’s the prevailing theme of this collection: Shit happens (and no one seems to care).
This is not a feel-good collection, it’s a slice of raw meat served from the disenfranchised side of the table. The images are often harsh and even the humor is biting.
In “Before Work” the author let’s us feel his futility when describing an old bum … He reminds me of a bird I saw earlier // trailing a spittle-like strand of blood // stuck to the ice in the street, // hopping in an effort to fly / and leave the rush hour traffic behind.
This is tough, but well worth the time.
M. Scott Douglass
RARE SPACE
By Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Word Press, 98pgs., $15
ISBN 0-9708667-0-4
To say that Rare Space, winner of the first Word Press Poetry Prize, bears a striking resemblance to Gravel, winner of Slipstream’s 1997 Chapbook Contest, is an understatement. Over twenty poems—including both title poems—appear in both books. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, after all, it says something when two separate contests select the same (or similar) manuscript for publication. And while I understand the need to change the name, I’m not sure I’d title a book after a poem that focuses on the narrator’s prowess at doing the Lewinsky—even if it is a metaphor for something else.
Those points aside, this is a strong collection of poems that don’t tiptoe around the interactions and often-dysfunctional relationships between the narrator and those around her. But beneath the toughness is a love of people and place that transcends the dark sides of those relationships with a “cups-half-full” optimism.
In “House Sitting,” we see a glimpse of the complex relationship between her and her mother: My mother took a cruise to Istanbul / leaving me with the cats and a key / that won’t work. Before she comes / back, I will change the locks and kill / at least one plant. I will begin / building the wall that says / “this side is me, this side is you.”
In poems like “What It Might Look Like,” Mcilroy sheds the leathery exterior—much of which comes from years of experience on both sides of a bar—to expose her vulnerability: I’ve lost my passport / just when another country / seems to be the only place / I could be without you.
Leslie Anne Mcilroy is an editor and co-founder of HEArt Magazine and I had the opportunity to attend her “premiere” reading event when I was in Pittsburgh. Having published two pieces from Rare Space in Main Street Rag and presented my interpretation of them on several occasions, I was pleased that Leslie chose to read both of them as well. It confirmed for me what I’ve always believed to be true about good poetry—the poet’s voice comes through: her inflections, her cadence. A good poem practically reads itself in the poet’s voice. I hear Leslie Anne Mcilroy in these poems.
If I were to offer one piece of advice to Leslie for future readings it would be this: Less is more—if you read the whole book to an audience, you strip away some of the mystery (and sell fewer copies). To readers I would say: Leather & lace—though it has some rough edges, Rare Space is accessible air that everyone needs to breathe deep and hold for awhile.
M. Scott DouglassBack to Top
From Summer 2001 A MAP TO THE NEXT WORLD
By Joy Harjo
W. W. Norton, 2001, 138 pgs., paperback, $13.00,
ISBN 0-393-32096-0
In her eighth collection of poems, Muskogee Tribe member Joy Harjo writes about what words mean to her, while still allowing (and encouraging) a reader’s own interpretation. She accomplishes this through the tradition of storytelling, in the veins of myths and fables and maps to the next world.
The writings alternate between typical poems and slightly political prose poetry. The prose sections allow Harjo to play with phrases that fall in the realm of political language. “Predominant anthropological theory” isn’t very poetic, but Harjo makes it work within the boundaries of prose poetry. Framed by her spiritual views, she gives new insight into Pol Pot, the cultural history of the Bering Strait land bridge, and public school conformity, among others. There are as many ways to God as there are to poetry, she reminds us, in the voice of an activist, poet, and critic all at once.
Map is mile-marked by the perennial poetic images of new beginnings, internal struggles, and matters of the heart. Despite this usual linear line-up, the underlying structure of each poem, and the entire book, is more cyclical than linear. Harjo put a lot of thought into the order of these poems, and it shows. An image from one poem reoccurs a few pages later, with another layer of meaning. The effect is that you feel like you’re learning something as you move from poem to poem, wrapping new knowledge onto new knowledge.
Standouts include “The War Zone,” with the line our teeth make refuge for our tongues and “The Ceremony,” with the line there is no poetry where there are no mistakes. A number of poems address the issue of “monsters,” let loose to roam the world following moments of human negligence. Harjo works wonders with suspense and helplessness in twins meet up with monsters in the glittering city, a prose poem about a mugging. With a gun held to her head, the narrator sees the moment as an eternity of small moments destroying themselves against the perfumed dark.
A Map to the Next World is inventive and rich, with every end touching every beginning.Harjo has taken the traditions of her many ancestors and shown us her personal ritual for making sense of this world and the next. It seems that the true map to the next world is made up of the words we hold in our heads.
Jen Hirt
LOOSE ENDS
By Neal Bowers
Random House, (2001), 196 pg., hardcover, $22.95,
ISBN 0-375-504990
Loose Ends has a great opening line. The shortest distance between two people is almost always a lie, begins the narrator. From there we meet Davis Banks, a Midwestern poet, diabetic, and creative liar, who is about to get wrapped up in more lies than he knows how to detect.
The plot of this short and smart novel is that Davis Banks’ mother has died. He leaves Iowa for Tennessee to handle the funeral arrangements. His father died years ago, so Davis thinks he’s prepared for what’s to come. But he’s not prepared for the unsettling revelation that while he has entertained himself with little white, his parents had been living some very large lies.
Once in Tennessee, Davis hooks up with former classmate-turned-detective, Ann Louise, and they begin to deal with the mystery of Davis’ parents. Without giving away too much of the plot, the key details are about relationships. Davis’ mother and father both had, shall we say, unusual affairs, and unsuspecting Davis is left with the fragments.
Lies are bountiful in Loose Ends, making it darkly comical. Davis lies out of boredom, amusement, and protection. He knows that enemies can take advantage of the truth, but when the truth is a lie, actions get complicated. However, when the liar gets lied to, all rules dissolve.
Perhaps the darkest thread in this well-woven story is that Davis lies to himself in a way that affects only him. He is a reckless diabetic. He knows his sugar and insulin needs, but he ignores them or splurges, or just lies to himself about what his body needs. The diabetes become a character, showing up at inopportune moments to render Davis a diabetic mess. The body, however, doesn’t lie, and doesn’t react well to lies.
For author Neal Bowers, better known in poetry circles, Loose Ends is his first novel. He handles the crossover quite well, incorporating smooth poetic lines throughout the story. Davis thinks of his mother’s body, “Such a stern attention she held, mustered into death’s camp. Poor recruit. How much he wanted her to be at ease.” It reads just like a poem.
As the story crashes to a close, Bowers leaves the who-dunnit ending wide open. Some critics might view this as the easy way out, but in a story built on lies, it makes sense. Loose Ends is not an effort to straighten all the strings—it’s just a journey through a tangle.Jen Hirt
A SHORT HISTORY OF MUSIC
by Eleanor Brawley
St. Andrews College Press, 2000, 38 pp., $5.95
I know I’ve touched profound poetry when a line comes to me days after I’ve read the poem and it moves me to tears. This was my experience with Eleanor Brawley’s A Short History of Music. Her words, like music, vibrate in a deep, mysterious place which your soul will recognize.
This collection of 25 poems prods readers to go after life with all its complexities, not wait around for things to happen. We thought we had time to burn / time to see Spain” she writes, but after several of life’s tragedies, “went today to buy tickets.
Brawley is emotionally honest in her work. Tragic stories are not whitewashed. Tough topics—mental illness, accidental deaths, strained relationships with parents, spouses, children, friends—are exposed for what they are. Yet she doesn’t leave us without a lifeboat. You are reminded to make it the way you dreamed it could be, and to remember the miracle of an infant coming into a dark world / and bringing light.
One-third of the poems are gleaned from Brawley’s travels to Ireland, Eastern Europe, Africa and South America. These nuggets are insights to life behind the usual tourist’s camera eye. (Brawley is also a photographer and documentary producer.) We meet an ancient Ecuadoran woman who smiles when we ask her for the meaning of life.
In Africa, Brawley dances with women who share their dark dung homes / with calves and strangers / who season their stew this hot afternoon / with the blood of the cow.
Close your eyes for a moment and let the music of this brave poet permeate the everyday existence of your life. Like Brawley herself, you may hear the voice of someone encouraging you to ride life’s waves, no matter how rough the surf.Martha Whitfield
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From Spring 2001 all the lost girls:
confessions of a southern daughter
by Patricia Foster
University of Alabama Press,
308 pp, $24.95.This evocative and well-written memoir begins with a young girl walking through the woods. She is with her brother on a crisp autumn day, leaves falling all around her and dancing on the wind. As usual her daydreams are taking her away, far from the mining village of her youth, with its dirty slag heaps and dark, polluted skies.
This is the story of double-edged dreams, of one generation passing to the next all the hope it can muster and all of the baggage it can never quite escape. Patricia Foster, raised in the small towns of southern Alabama, is haunted by them still, even as she often strains to get away.
She teaches now at the University of Iowa, after a stop as an artist in southern California, but at the age of 50 she is still a southern girl in her heart—her life and her way of looking at the world still inextricably tied to the memories of her mother. In many ways this is good. In others, it is fraught with a subtle and sometimes terrifying pain that in the end, of course, gave rise to this book.
For anybody southern, and for any woman who has struggled to come to terms with her mother, this is a powerful and hard-hitting book, wrenching in its honesty, graceful in its prose, establishing its author as one of the finest memoirists of her time.
—Frye Gaillard
The Hunger Bone:
Rock and Roll Stories
by Debra Marquart,
New Rivers Press (2001)
(paperback), 197 pages, $14.95
ISBN 0-89823-209-0Winner of the annual Headwaters Literary Competition for new and emerging writers, The Hunger Bone is a collection of short stories—some just a few paragraphs of tight prose hinting at Marquart’s poetry background—relating amusing and poignant rock and roll stories from the heartland.
Based loosely, or maybe not so loosely, on Marquart’s time as a singer with bands in the 70’s and 80’s, the stories are completely convincing in their descriptions of long road trips to dubious gigs or the drummer who disappears the night of a show. Marquart has included details that make these adventures reverberate like a perfect power chord. Picture the singer’s skull and bones earring, the Vinnie brothers with waist-length black hair, the descriptions of guitars, guitars, and more guitars, and metal bands with names like Bad Reputation and Everything Goes.
In the opener, "Three-mile Limit," the young female singer explains how normal rules can be abandoned once the band crosses the three-mile marker from their quiet suburban lives. "Last Prom in Huron, S.D." is about a pyrotechnics display gone amusingly wrong. "The Guitar Player Runs Out of Ideas" seems to echo what we all wonder about guitarists who, somehow, find that new riff when it seems all the possible riffs have been played. The dialogue is sharp, the insight has depth, and each story rolls like a rock song you once loved but haven’t heard in years.
The best story is "Santiago’s Dead", a sad and funny story of life beyond the band. Santiago is a Siamese fighting fish. Or was. The narrator is living with a former guitar player who now spends his time writing about the history of guitars. The story of the unnamed man and woman, and the symbolic death of their fighting fish, merges smoothly, like a melodic chord change, into an homage to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
The Hunger Bone is an excellent fiction collection from Marquart, who has already published poetry and essays to critical acclaim.
—Jen Hirt
The Atlas of Experience
by Louise Van Swaaij and Jean Klare,
English text version by David Winner Bloomsbury,
(2000), 96 pg. hardcover $24.95,
ISBN 1-58234-100-1The Atlas of Experience is a metaphorical thunderclap. This book is beyond anything you’ve ever seen—and that’s seen, not read.
Published in Holland in 1999, it found awesome success because it was such a novelty. The Atlas is made of 21 unusual maps showing the geography of abstraction. The maps are drawn to true cartography standards. Unsuspecting readers have to look at the maps for a second before they realize these are "made-up" continents. For example, the map of Secrets is an island surrounded by the Sea of Possibilities. The main city on Secrets is X-Files, with smaller towns called Trust, Refuge, and Plot.
The Holland version contained only the maps, but for the English version, the publishers courted journalist David Winner to put a cultural perspective on each map. Thus, for the map of Bad Habits, Winner pulls together a concise essay about why we have bad habits, including an amusing anecdote about what a bad habit Russian Roulette really is. His essays add a nice dimension to this already stunning book, especially when he meditates on what maps have meant to the human society. But some of the essays read more like lists of Bartlett’s famous quotations, and the map themselves could (and do) stand alone.
The Atlas is very whimsical, and that is its strength. The airport in the country of Boredom is called Automatic Pilot. Sparksfly is a mountain near the Volcanoes of Passion, in the country of Stream of Ideas. Tip of the Tongue marks the southern-most point on the Isle of Forgetfulness. A ship is sinking in the Bay of Wealth. The place names are full of puns, and full of truth. It’s no mistake that the Mountains of Work are surrounded by the Plains of Solitude.
The largest city is that of Change. The mapmakers even include a map of Change’s subway system. The red line starts at Thesis and ends at Anti-Thesis. The green line starts at Revolution, passes through Risk, and ends at Funeral.
For book collectors and fans of counter-culture, The Atlas of Experience should be number one on the wish list. It even comes with a poster of the complete "World of Experience"—all 21 maps merged into one strange continent that seems so familiar.
—Jen Hirt
The Search for Wonder
In the Cradle of the World
by Anthony S. Abbott
St. Andrews College Press (2000)
80 pg., paperback $10.95
ISBN 1-879934-66-3The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World begins with "Genesis"—as it should.
The swinging Lord, that master maker/ of cool chords, shifted in his empty/ heaven and said, "I need me some music,…" From there on, it was very good.
In Search for Wonder, Tony Abbott shares his curiosity of life’s complexities, of our relationships with each other, the world around us, and God’s often-baffling master plan. In one poem, "Unburdening," he uses the phrase, "so much distracts us from the task of being human" and that profound truth resonates throughout this collection.
There are deeply personal poems here. "Point of Light" and "Raining on God" for example, one about the loss of his daughter, the latter about a neighbor’s similar loss. Loss is a recurring theme because loss and how we cope with it are part of the human experience. Loss of children, loss of memory, loss of reason to hold onto those treasures in our lives that make "the house, the car, the trout worthwhile."
Toward the end, Abbott expands the view and takes us with him on his travels. In "This Monster Time" he unloads some of the baggage he has gathered along the way. And the horror in Eve’s eyes of the// history that will start unreeling/ here forever—Dresden, Auschwitz,/ Hiroshima. Adam’s guilt hidden/ in his hands. Better not to see.
This is a collection to be cherished, shared and reread—the work of a master. Highly recommended.
—MSD
Ancient Acid Flashes Back
by Adrian C. Louis
University of Nevada Press (2000)
72 pg., paperback, $11
ISBN 0-87417-352-3Being familiar with Adrian C. Louis’ work, the title of this book, Ancient Acid Flashes Back, intrigued me. Louis always delivers a certain grittiness and intensity from a perspective that I can sympathize with, but never share. The title and promo material led me to believe he might take me down a different path—and in many ways he does—with more lyrical language than I’m used to from him.
We trip through Haight-Ashbury during the sixties with character Naatsi (Louis) and his supporting cast: girlfriend Maya Wu and best friend Doyle. We’re talking sex, drugs, and rock & roll, but Louis doesn’t treat these subjects lightly. In "Free Maya Wu" he writes, he winced as the spike/ pierced her vein/ & the white powder/ became her blood.
This is wonderful collection of poems from a notable time in American history revisited in a way that is uniquely Adrian C. Louis. Naatsi rubs elbows with Richard Brautigan and smokes a joint with Bob Kaufman. We experience racism from a Native American perspective when he runs into a cheerleader from back home.
It wouldn’t be Adrian C. if he didn’t twist the political blade. In "Vanila Fudge" he takes a "pot" shot at Clinton in the sixties. In "Trees, Rush Limbaugh, & the Failed Exorcism of Maya Wu’s Ghost" Naatsi is dreamflashing as Louis writes, Some days he wants to call Dr. Kevorkian/ because he’s contracted some deep/ form of madness that allows/ Rush Limbaugh to make sense to him.
Another excellent collection from one of America’s best-kept literary secrets.
—MSD
Water In My Hand
by Betty Seizinger
Floating Leaf Press, 2000It’s certainly no secret that poets are often overlooked. Some of us are humored by the thought that we must die to be discovered and that little of what we write ever outlives us.
Water In My Hand is a collection of poems that wasn’t published with public consumption in mind. There’s no price on it; no address for Floating Leaf Press. This collection was created to share one poet’s work with friends. Betty is my friend and this collection is truly Betty.
Her voice resonates in "Totem Words": The man who loved woman/ wooed with words of yin/ that yanged desire. Even more so in "Suffering Fools," Thank heaven for my friends/ who take me as I am/ shortcomings, quirks/ especially those/ I cannot hide…
Betty is most of us who fuddle with words trying to paint a picture of our lives that makes sense to us. In Water In My Hand, Betty does this. She invites us in to meet her family, her children and their children. We feel the joys of childlike discovery, the struggle of coping with cancer and surgery, the disappointments of things not working out quite as she had hoped.
This is a fine collection, but this review wasn’t written for sales promotion (although I can tell you how to get a copy)—I wrote this for Betty who has been a huge influence in my life and the lives of many people in the Charlotte area, both as a teacher and as former president of the League of Women Voters.
And I wrote this review for others out there, laboring in the literary backwater of a world that places too little value on what we do.
Few publishers take the time or provide the space to let readers know about our work. I wanted to let you know that MSR is here for you and while we can’t review everything that comes our way, we’ll do our best.
—MSD
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