2005 WINTER / SPRING / SUMMER / FALL
THE WOMAN WHO HAS EATEN THE MOON
by Lucinda Grey.
Wind Publications (2004) 85 pages, $14.00
ISBN: 1893239276, PoetryThe body, for Lucinda Grey, is the center of any kind of thought about both her internal self and her external environment. A sensualist who inscribes desire on each page of her fourth book of poetry, The Woman Who Has Eaten the Moon, Grey relies on her formidable talent as a lyricist with a rhythmic sense of a flamenco dancer to explore the sexual, spiritual, cultural and artistic struggles of her subjects, which range through the likes of Garcia Lorca, Frieda Kahlo, Francisco Goya, and into the landscape of her own heart. When Grey opens the metaphor of body like a locust stretching through a chink / in the crusty shell, she reveals to us such wisdom and insight into love and longing that we are surprised/ by the resonant thrumming of the wings.
Grey divides the book into two sections, the first, “El Duende Flamico,” is interspersed with meditations on the ecstatic sexual release of the body, juxtaposed with the heart’s embrace of longing and desire. As she writes in “Saying Goodbye to the Animals,” it is deep with us . . . the teeth of the tomcat/ in the neck of his mate,/ joy implanted in the womb.//And after that, how to live/ with this distance, the body listing/ in the direction it imagines home.
Grey’s work is the interplay between these two tensions, stunning us with the ferocity of her observations and the veracity of her truths. In “Sometimes the Body Turns,” Grey reveals the slippage between the two realms, how easy it is to find ourselves first in one, then leaning into the other.
And while Grey deftly and beautifully steers between her own experiences of desire, longing, and sensuality, she also uses the lives and works of other writers and artists, like Garcia Lorca, Fredrick Goya and Bernardo Gato, to more deeply explore the universal thrust between the sensual life and the burden of loss.
It is especially appropriate that on the 50th anniversary of the death of Frida Kahlo, Grey has included, in the second part of this volume, an extraordinarily luminous piece of work on the life of Frida. In these twenty-six persona poems, Grey brings us into the heart of this great artist in a way that is a revelation in both beauty and spirit.
In the poem, “In Either Tongue” Grey asks, What is love/ that we should grieve it so? Her answer is that it should send us stronger/ into the world.
In these poems, Grey’s life shines like the opulent luster of a pearl which navigates us out of the shallows and tide pools of longing, and into an ocean of sensuality, where, guided by the wax and wane of the moon’s pulse and stars that sizzle in thighs, we feel in each drop an explosion.Tony Morris
WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD
by Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Pudding House Publications (2004) 29 pages, $8.95
ISBN 1-58998-259-2, PoetryIn her first book of poetry, Kristin Berkey-Abbott tackles themes of depression, despair and the adult angst of emotional risk-taking with first-person narrative poems that are assumed to be autobiographical. The author excels at the extended metaphor in “Running from the Plantation of Despair,” declaring that she is held in the chains of mistakes and doubts. Salvation comes in the image of an imaginary fellow slave, who appears with my running shoes in her hand./”Girl, we got to set you free.”
Similarly, in “Daunted Courage,” she marks her personal struggle with opposing forces (to risk change or stay on familiar ground). I am no fearless explorer. . ./Instead, a runaway slave, I feel my way/through unfamiliar territory with no map/and only a rough understanding of the language.
The poems in this collection usually proceed with linear logic from Point A to Points B and C to a conclusion, Point D, which is all too often predictable and explanatory, leaving the reader wishing for a bit less logic and a bit more surprise. “Lunar Lessons” is a very fine three-stanza poem that unfortunately goes on for four stanzas.
However, in “Waiting,” the author has the dead poet William Wordsworth and Mrs. Wordsworth over for dinner, and in the delightful first poem in the collection, “Pies in Heaven,” she casts herself in the role of an angel trying mightily to please another character, who would complain about the taste of pies in heaven. In a shard of self-revelation, the speaker tells us, I would be that angel, so desperate/to please, bringing her slice after delectable slice. The author again appears as an angel in the masterpiece of this collection, “Medieval Christmas Pageants.” Recalling a childhood experience, she laments having to play an inferior role in which my Slavic looks. . .damned/me to the realm of angels and I smoldered, smarting/at the indignities of mother-made wings/and long robes.
The weaknesses in this collection are easily overwhelmed by the author’s strong craft and skillful use of language and lines. Berkey-Abbott’s poems repeatedly and honestly connect with the reader at both an emotional and an intellectual level.Richard Allen Taylor
HIGH NOON IN POMPEII
by John Foster West
Parkway Publishers, Inc. (2003) 99 pages, $14.95
ISBN 1-887905-82-0, PoetryUsing language and paper the way a blacksmith uses a hammer and anvil, John Foster West pounds words into the page with a relentless passion that forges these poems into a weapon against grief, death, disillusionment and loss of faith. In the title poem, “High Noon in Pompeii,” a tribute to the late poet Guy Owen, West renders a cold account of a citizen of Pompeii caught and killed in the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius. Mouth agape, his scream of silence/still fills his dusty glass casket,/the gloomy cell around him now packed with future strangers, some struck dumb/by the awfulness of his surrender. . . The poem is a “cenotaph,” we are told, a monument to a person buried elsewhere.
Divided into sections that are distinguished by subject matter but unified in outlook, this collection features poems that are tough, sinewy, and decidedly masculine. The collection is, in part, a travelogue that takes us from Pompeii to Athens and Rome, then to Paris and Mexico but always returns to the author himself, with a snapshot of each location captured in the lens of West’s view of life and history. In “The Colosseum,” for example, we are told that the ancient ruin is the bottom half of a cankered bivalve, home to the ghosts of thousands of innocents slaughtered for the entertainment of the Roman populace. It is a place where tourists are unable to grasp/the ancient evil the eroded shell/still whispers skyward.
“Phobia” is a poem that confronts the author’s fear and hatred of confinement: The idea of being lumped up/like a knot on a rawhide thong,/unable to fold outward, skyward,/scares me. . . while “The Cruelest Month” and “Possessed” disclose his grief (if we are to assume that the speaker is the author) at the loss of his wife in a tragic car accident. In one particularly poignant passage, West speaks of the changed relationship with his children, who rush to embrace him: they chop me down with flashing hooves/that welcome and possess./And I am jealous for a moment’s beat/because I cannot see/which hug is for the father’s bones inside/and which is for the mother-cloak I wear.
There are flashes of humor in this collection, but they are few and far between. Even with opportunities for lightness and finesse, West continues to pound on the anvil with language that is stark and at times, oppressive. We get some perspective on this heaviness in “Meditations on Cloud 10” (the one that comes after that happy cloud, get it?) as West confesses that he, like Mark Twain, once felt the world was young/and people/praiseworthy.//But after the loss of my mate to the haphazard/crucifixion of fate …I have embraced enough pessimism to turn black/my four score years plus two.
Now in his eighties, West, a retired professor of English, is the author of three novels, three poetry collections and several works of non-fiction. High Noon at Pompeii is a worthy collection filled with interesting insights on historical people and places as well as the author’s courageous exploration of himself.Richard Allen Taylor
FAR SIDES OF THE ONLY WORLD
by David Williams
Carolina Wren Press (2004) 40 pages
ISBN 0-932112-48-X, PoetryIn Far Sides of the Only World, the world is on the fringes, found in the liminal states of war and clashes of culture, but unlike many poets working these borderlands, David Williams finds not just horror or frustration, but beauty. The kind of fragile beauty only the right words can elicit, and Williams hits on these words the way waves break in the surf, in the right frequency to keep us expectant.
The foreign comes in many guises, Pueblo and Guatemala or Lebanon and Canada. We go from the “Green Line” where a girl attends school and Going on with life became a form of defiance to “A Cutting from the Vine” where the speaker reflects on his grandfather’s place in Maine but sees that The whole neighborhood’s a parking lot now. Sometimes the accumulation of disparate cultures creates a truly global landscape at its best and at the worse a confused nowhere. But most of the poems come in a series with some coherence.
One of the joys of Williams’s work is how much ground he covers. In “August,” he goes from hose water beading on car hoods to charred shapes, unmistakably human. Or take “Waiting to Go on to Canada,” where he deepens the characterization of a woman in the park from a nice piece to a woman who lives under the threat of a death squad that murdered her husband.
But really the line-to-line evocative language drives the poems in Far Sides of the Only World. With this poetic imagery and this world-wise volume, Williams almost earns his 9/11 poem, but it looks away when it should stay wide-eyed on the family photos, to do lists,/ insurance charts, soot, debris. And “In the Wake,” his 9/22 poem falls even further. But it’s no fault to reach so high and to stretch for the heavens, and if Williams doesn’t make his goal, his poetic movements still soar.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
GHOST IN THE BLOODY SHOW
by Martin Vest
Limberlost Press (2004)
ISBN 0-1931659-89-2, PoetryMartin Vest’s Ghost in the Bloody Show begins strong. The first half absorbed in violent death, suicide and accidental alike. Dark poems open up about childhood cruelty in “One for Yarrel Donkey” or the sickness in the heart of “The Lycanthrope’s Ballad,” where the speaker wonders, Why wouldn’t I want to rip open/ their throats to show them/ the only song that’s theirs? We can see through the poets eyes life brushed with death like a painting.
Much of these first poems are unsentimental looks at suicide. They give us lines like blew his jaw against the wall like a Jackson Pollock and but before or after he puffed up/ dead on the shores/ of a river? And in “Milk and Fire,” Vest compares the shooting suicides of men to the slow methods of women, like Sylvia Plath’s use of gas, finding Men abort their families, selfishly;/ married to their work./ Women are mothers—/ they cradle their pain.
The second half of the book loses its footing, moving from lives snatched away to failed relationships. Where Vest infused the death poems with the blood of real emotion, the ones focused on relationship rely too much on the familiar or the weak concept. However, a few fresh images lie buried in the lines, like this from “Familiar Blankets…”: stolen back from the crude feast/ my hands once made of you. Or the sophomoric associative exercise of “Lives Lived…” that still develops into the wonderful images of an ex-wife who is thin again, rewound into youth/ with yellowjackets of pride for eyes,/ knowing that your pain/ would knit itself into every April. But the end of the chapbook sadly slips into the abstract.
The dark power of the early poems makes the volume worth reading and the flashes of vivid imagery worth continuing. And in continuing you find the title poem a bright spot that harks back to the beginning. “Ghosts in the Bloody Show” recounts a birth, a bloody birth: More blood. Is that normal? I asked. And the poem ends in an exit reminding us of those other bloody exits in the book.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
FOREIGN BODIES
by Sandra Becker
Carolina Wren Press (2004) 36 pages
ISBN 0-932112-47-1, PoetryIn Foreign Bodies, Sandra Becker lyrically follows the illumination of our bodily being, physicality bleeding into aesthetic beauty. She weaves medical language with the poetic, sprinkling poems and titles with X-rays, EEGs, angiograms, ICUs, or mammograms. At its best this leads to physical facts working into metaphorical meaning, as in “Gnosis of Deus” where At the juncture of femur and tibia,/ there is bend, a minuscule gap/ under the knee cap,/ like a mouth slightly open, expectant. Her poems move from the history of X-rays or personal medical exams to her father’s heart failure in “Flash in the Night” and “No Starr-Edwards, No St. Jude” and her mother’s breast cancer in “Orbiting the Sun.”
Sometimes the medical connection is explicit as in “Medical Transcription” where the speaker works typing in records and prays for the unknown people: so I pray for X and his melanoma/ Y and her breast cancer/ Z status-post brain trauma. Or the evocative “ICU” that details the place not just in terms of space, but time as well, the accrued past. But if not explicit, the heart of these poems have to do with that idea of the title, seeing our bodies from a distance almost foreign or at times seeing that foreign thing in our bodies: life.
Occasionally, Becker goes for the easy connection, the overused symbolism, as in “Fracture” where the physical and mental are the same. And in “Meditation on Dying,” we get what one would expect with little poetic detail to bring these lifeless ideas back from the brink.
Perhaps the most curious misstep is including notes at the end on several of the poems. Sure it’s interesting to find out “Gnosis of Deus,” Knowledge of God, is where we get “Diagnosis.” But many of the notes state the obvious, especially the one for “Foreign Bodies.”
Overstatement and simplification aside, the poems here offer a subtlety, a sort of spiritual hope from scientific fact. In “What Cells Know,” I study how easily we can be made/ to bleed and how forces gather to restore/ what has been wounded. And in “Cellular Memory” we don’t have to fear parting because our cells have soaked up each other, remembering when we nestled in each other,/ enshrined like pollen in a bud. . . . Just as we will be able to recall our thirst/ to burst into another life. And often, these poems do burst into life.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.