2006 WINTER / SPRING / SUMMER / FALL
MEAD: Twenty-six Abecedariums
by Karl Elder
Marsh River Editions (2005) 26 pages, $10.00
ISBN 0-9718909-9-4, PoetryAn abecedarium is a primer for learning the alphabet, but Professor Karl Elder has strung together 26 abecedarian poems for readers well beyond learners. Such poems, like sestinas, are filler poems: they require filling in prescribed elements in prescribed places, and they are long enough to challenge the poet to keep them lively over their course. Because Elder adds the requirement that his poems be in blank verse, he has to fill in 260 syllables per poem. This he generally succeeds in doing through invention, wit, and use of a dictionary.
The test of an abecedarian poem, in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, from a to z, comes with the letter x, which begins the twenty-fourth line. Because there are so few useable English words that begin in x, Elder has to triple-up on the letter x itself and double-up on several words, including “xanthic” (yellowish): rather than / xanthic, leaves, when dervish-like they stood, spun, / yellow-red and blush-gold, in the face of / Zoids you stood, pretend sword in hand, deft, bold.
In other poems Elder solves for x by using words that begin with an “x” sound, like “extras” or “exhumed”; in other cases he falls back on the more common abecedarian words “xylophone” and “Xanadu.” And “Xmas” (twice), and he also employs, wittily, “Chiasmus,” which derives from Greek X.
The title comes from the first word in line 13 of “The Human Condition,” a playful poem about the body. It calls lust more of an aphrodisiac than / mead and tweaks us for being whores . . . to states of happiness. This poem it pleased the poet to write in a single, 26-line sentence.
Another enjoyable poem is “The Resignation,” in which Elder riffs on Richard M. Nixon’s departure from the presidency. This topic allows him to begin lines with “Milhous,” “Pacific,” and “Quaker,” and to end with the speculation that if Nixon had won his first run for president, in 1960, Zapruder, after all, might have filmed you.
If you want to brush up on the alphabet, Mead is heady and at times intoxicating.George Held
DRIVERS
by Nathan Leslie
Hamilton Stone Editions (2005) 236 pages, $14.95
ISBN 978-0-9714873-5-2, FictionIn Drivers, Nathan Leslie captures the human experience through the lens of one particular vehicle: the automobile. This collection of stories, which range in length from full short stories to the two-or-three-page short-short, explores life through the perspective of “drivers”—people on the road or connected in some way to the realm of traffic. By exploring the concept of “drivers” in this manner, Leslie gets at something beyond the literal interpretation of operating a motorized vehicle. Leslie’s characters are themselves driven—by ambition, greed, hope, love, confusion, money, power, and so forth. In linking these stories around “drivers” as a theme, Leslie explores the culture behind the car culture and something of the greater ethics of humanity in the process.
The stories in Drivers contain depth that is not immediately apparent. A story about a tow truck driver’s search for a stolen car turns into a meditation on greed; a story about a car salesman turns into a complex look at how to love. These stories resonate, first because of the clear, sharp writing and evocative characterization, but it is the greater truth about life so carefully crafted into these stories that keeps one thinking past an initial read. Often there is danger below the surface as well, a theme of control that relates to the emotion behind the act of driving. For example, in the story, “The Speeder,” Leslie explores the rationale behind the act of speeding, the idea of what drives the driver. “Traffic is an accordion,” says the narrator, who intends to stop speeding after he nearly kills a child by driving fast in a suburban neighborhood. “It pulls forward…” (p. 32).
The point of view of this book shifts, characters shift, and yet the language of Drivers brings the narrative together—the repetition of words connected to driving, to a near miss, to speed, to driving in a historical context. The rhythm of the language moves in short sentences that mirror the short story form, with clear, crisp images and unique descriptions throughout. “Eyelashes look like little pale coral tentacles…” (p. 158). Leslie conveys the urgency of his characters’ experience through his word choice and through connecting ideas that rearticulate from story to story. The thread of driving holds the story together, but the mode of exploration twists to give a new perspective with each turn of the page. Taken together, the stories in Drivers link to illuminate a greater truth. As in life, these characters are complex individuals with complicated stories to tell. When filtered through the experience of driving, or the landscape of cars, the subjective character plots unfold, boiled down to the essence of what is experienced behind the wheel.
Drivers is a well-written collection with evocative, original language. These stories are captivating and thoughtful, prompting the reader to take a careful look at their experience. Nathan Leslie has published two other collections of short fiction and is an author to watch—an up-and-coming writer worthy of greater attention.
Andrea Quarracino
AIR TRAVEL
by Clarinda Harriss
Half Moon Editions (2004) 95 pages
ISBN 0-9767054-1-9, PoetryThere is a certain level of sophistication inherent to Clarinda Harriss’ poetry that hangs it head and shoulders above so much else that’s out there. With that comes an intense stewardship over the language that carries each thought to fruition. More so than many other poets I’ve read, Harriss’ poetry is informed by a scholar’s love for the sound of words, and not puffed-up pedantry mind you, but the gritty and colorful and oftentimes obscure, though so gorgeous on the tongue so as to cause the reader to scramble for his dictionary and commit the words to his own repertoire. Reading a Clarinda Harriss poem, one gets the impression that each syllable is a carefully chosen decision that follows any great craftsman preparing her work.
In Air Travel, this tradition continues with a predilection for the sensual, grounding much of Harriss’ poetry in the ephemera of here and now. Her world is one of memory, of fond tributes of places past and friends remembered, to ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, and hats. There is even a section dedicated to a departed canine—the poems written with such existential grit, that any accusation of campy eulogizing would be dogged. This mnemonic celebration avoids the kind of bourgeois sappiness we see so much of today but flutters with all the grace and beauty of classically composed ballads and love songs.
As a lifetime resident of Baltimore myself, nothing opens up the experience of this city quite like the poems found in this collection, which, in turn, politely shame those of us who have lived here all our lives but haven’t the mastery of words like Harriss to articulate the same experiences. Next to a history book, this little companion piece peels back the “feel” of the city that only its residents know in truth. In “Downtown Hot September,” she writes concerning the Inner Harbor as Mist hovers over the harbor, smoky/ heather-blue, hot and heavy as swamp gas./ Evening heaves and rolls over, fitful in fevered sleep. You know it’s good when you feel the imagery.
There are many great poems in this find. Among the most beautifully tactile are “Hauling the Dog,” “Anthrax,” “Median Strip,” “Crabfingers,” and then there’s the soon-to-be classic romp, “The Tragedy of Hats.”
In fairness, some of the poems remain a difficult read, with frame-of-reference subject matter that can often overshoot the reader, though maintain a sort of linguistic functionality that makes them enjoyable nonetheless. And even in these off-the-beaten path memories, when we feel like we’re trespassing in places we shouldn’t be, Harriss remains the consummate raconteur. It’s hard to believe this professor of English has lived this much life and lived to tell about it.
But Air Travel wouldn’t be complete without a glance into this subject. As she writes so profoundly Consider perspective/ how potent its hocus-pocus, how even if/ we were together/ rather than fifty thousand vertical feet apart/ each of us, love,/ by squinting one eye and holding up one thumb/ could make the other/ disappear. It’s this kind of eloquence, how in a brief tribute to the stratosphere, Harriss can take the entire history of flight, and like a tall sailing ship bottle it in her own experience, that makes this collection worth a serious and studied read.Trey Palmisano
HARDBOOT: POEMS NEW AND OLD
by Vivian Shipley
Louisiana Literature Press (2005) 123 pages, $14.95
ISBN 0-945083-12-1, PoetryVivian Shipley has published eleven poetry collections. Her poems are often vivid narrative vignettes reflecting on her own life and those of others, stitching art, history, literature, and life. This collection presents a chorus of voices, a whirling globe of places, and a distinctive, precise vocabulary. There is a toughness about Shipley’s work that is reflected in the book’s title Hardboot and in the wary, wiry survivors she often portrays.
“Why an Aging Poet...” provides the title of the collection, through the speaker’s identification with jockey Red Pollard. Pollard, from nowhere, with nothing, all cards stacked against him, went through torture to become a jockey despite his large size and lack of support. He bonded with injured racehorse Seabiscuit, and eventually they won the 100,000 purse at the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap—Until Seabiscuit’s last race—March 2, 1940/ at Santa Anita—Red said they were a couple of old/ cripples together, all washed up. They rode to victory,// drawing a crowd of 78,000. I can picture myself reading/ poetry to them. A hardboot like Red, I refuse to believe/ my hopes exceed what nature and fate bestowed. There is/ always revision, change in literary taste, The New Yorker. Humor and history combine in this delightful narrative of effort rewarded in differing arts.
The other edge of Shipley is visible in “Debris,” an evocative narrative of incidents in the life of Paula Hitler. Paula narrates three of its four parts, and the last is in the voice of the priest who heard her last confession. By all accounts Paula Hitler was a confused, conflicted, even childlike person whose relationship with her unspeakable brother shadowed her life. Her voice rings true here as the poet enters the mind of the sister who could never totally detach from her charismatic, evil brother. The third section is her final confession, and the last, the priest’s attempt to console her: “Paula, your brother’s already history. There’s no way/ to understand the monster he was, to revise evil.” His conclusion places her into history too, in her ordinary grave: The inscription will be: PAULA HITLER: 1896-1960./ Like a poppy, your brother must have been the flower/ of a dark seed. Your memories are a tapeworm that/ will die with you, and you should not try to forgive what/ should never be forgiven. You are God’s child. Believe/ the promise in rain: there is something new on the way.
This collection is also varied stylistically, its forms ranging from semi-prose poems to free verse to a variety of unrhymed stanzas; all the poems are substantive and crafted. It increases the pleasure of this book in that it is not one thing. Although we keep returning to the sights and sounds of Shipley’s New England, the range of this complex work contributes to its capacity to refresh and delight.Janet McCann
MORE OF ME DISAPPEARS
by John Amen
Cross-Cultural Communications (2005) 76 pages, $12
ISBN 0893048887, PoetryDefying the usual connections, John Amen’s new poems peel away the crust of denial, as he looks, amazed and horrified, at a world determined to destroy itself. The startling power of his words lies in the concurrent recognition of inner turmoil, family despair and the mirror of the world outside.
His language is so striking that it catches the reader up into a kaleidoscope, spinning, becoming clear and then scene shifting into another reality. In his poem "Vacillations," Amen places himself in the center of an unidentified world that eventually leads him to the title of his book: I am grateful for all the green in our veins./ Ivy wraps around gravestones. Lyrics flow// like lamb’s blood. Leaves are quaking on the branch.
Each day more of me disappears.
Like random thoughts, images appear and take hold of us, and, brought up short, we find ourselves in the presence of a highly developed consciousness willing to follow the winds where they blow. The process of movement is as much a part of Amen’s poetry as its images.
Amen writes of intimate family matters, such as when the poet at seven asks about the numbers tattooed on his aunt who survived the Holocaust: “Some questions,” my grandfather/ says, rubbing his own unblemished arm,/ “should not be asked.” As life went on,/ I learned that most of the questions/ I wanted answers to fell into that category./ Still, I asked them, and I am still asking them. These questions are indeed part of Amen’s trip through life. His curiosity has an open quality, sometimes like that of a child, sometimes coming from a sophisticated understanding of the way things work in our time. The painter’s ability to see through facades becomes the poet’s need to describe the craziness he sees, and make a safe place for the child in his heart. This is not just “sensitive,” which has become an epithet, but rather a courageous effort to shine a light of reason on the constant wars, large and small, the inhumanity of much of our behavior, the smooth lying that goes with this nonsense, and always the hidden power—in politics and in personal relationships.
This is a fine collection with wonderful language and imagination. Amen’s combination of sadness and anger goes well with his skill at description, his deep thoughtfulness, and his clarity of vision.Henry Berne
VIRGINS ON THE ROCKS
by Karla Huston
Paralle Press (2004) 29 pages
ISBN 1-893311-46-5, PoetryIn Virgins on the Rocks, Karla Huston vacillates between the mundane and the profane. The mundane as in the everyday world of things like in “Mandolin” where she focuses on the creation of the musical instrument. Or the everyday ethical quandary she tackles in “What She’ll Do for Love,” where the speaker’s student confesses to doing schoolwork for a boy she likes and the speaker remembers her own flirtation with cheating for another: Like Katie, I hoped he’d be the servant/ to my clever tongue, need my words/ so much he’d never leave.
And “Theory of Salt” meditates on that ubiquitous but often ignored substance. Salt plays a role in her other poem referencing Lot’s wife “Spiritual Warfare.” Here, she wants to know the wife’s name and puts herself in that no-name-pillar-of-salt place. Similarly, in “Mona Lisa Imagines,” Huston thinks her way into the plight of that famous woman smiling in spite of suffering her pose for Leonardo.
Some of these forays fail. When she writes in “Half a Cup” from the point of view of a breast, we get the engaging lines: Even when she fed babies, they opened/ their mouths for the plumper twin first. But this breast comparison is the best moment of a poem that moves predictably into what we would suspect from the subject: the clichés of stand-up comics about sagging and the fears inherent in mammograms. Though, you have to respect her for trying these experiments to expand her poetry with humor and poignancy. And in the end, more of them come off than not.
Huston, for example, incisively follows “The Gods Argue About Sex” with “To My Husband Who Thinks I Only Write Poems About Sex.” In the former, Zeus and Hera argue over who gets the greatest pleasure from sex, and in the process, they torment that poor human transsexual Tiresias. A funny and thought-provoking piece then followed by “To My Husband...,” which sounds from the title to be played for laughs but digs deep under the domestic emotions at play between the sexes. These poems last longer than the first tickle of controversy.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
FLIGHT TO ELSEWHERE
by Samuel Hazo
Autumn House Press (2005) 132 pages
ISBN 1-932870-04-0, PoetryIt has been said that publishing a new book of poetry in America is like dropping a feather in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Flight to Elsewhere by Samuel Hazo deserves an echo, or at least an audible swoosh. It’s not so much that we have a shortage of poets. It’s the shortage of poetry readers that limits the market, making it difficult for all but a handful of poets to become known outside their own regions. For me, it’s always a pleasure to discover an outstanding poet from elsewhere—in this case, the Northeastern US. Although I was not familiar with his work or reputation, Samuel Hazo is apparently a prolific writer, with numerous works of fiction, essays, plays and other poetry books to his credit. An older man (“Professor Emeritus” means retired, right?), Hazo brings his considerable maturity and depth of experience to his poems.
This book conjures up the feel of a campfire where the youth of the tribe have gathered on an autumn night to be regaled by the wise chieftain, who spins tales and dispenses wisdom on a variety of subjects ranging from religion to philosophy to walking the dog. In “National Prayer Breakfast,” Hazo is reminded of a placard urging him to “Honk if you love Jesus.” His reaction is that Jesus in fact/ spoke Aramaic in Jerusalem,/ foretold uninterrupted life/ and sealed it with a resurrection. If he asked me to honk/ in praise of that, I’d honk/ all day.// But rising from the dead/ for me seems honk enough/ since no one’s done it since,/ and no one did it earlier or ever./ Others might disagree, and that’s their right.
Hazo’s style leans mainly toward free verse narrative poetry with an occasional bow to traditional form. “Seesaws,” for example, is a nice, tight blank verse poem in four quatrains of iambic tetrameter, each line a pithy saw: The bigger the tomb, the smaller the man./ The weaker the case, the thicker the brief./ The deeper the pain, the older the wound./ The graver the loss, the dryer the tears. Each line stands on its own and seems equally important, if unconnected to the other lines. Ending such a poem might be a challenge (like choosing when to jump off a moving train) but Hazo does it brilliantly with The longer the life, the briefer the years.
The title of this collection is extracted from a line in the introductory poem, “The Mutineer.” The mutineer is the poet and the mutiny is a spiritual one, against aging and death. The author considers how leaves curl against the ground/ like Muslims at prayer and weeks later, as they flatten, dampen and rot, change from elegies in place to their own obituaries. . .Watching the way/ of leaves prefigures what I know/ will come.// It urges me to take a flight to elsewhere. The collection itself is actually many flights to many elsewheres, and the author takes us with him.
In many of his flights, the author takes us to ordinary places that become extraordinary under his discerning eye. In “Ongoing Presences Have No Past Tense,” Hazo declares, I keep whatever stays as intimate/ as breath, recalling the scent of his father’s aftershave, the memory of the whiteness of his father’s shirts, his hair, still black at eighty-two and other recollections as if they are still occurring. I trust/ the body’s unforgettable assurances/ that know what’s true without/ discussion or hypocrisy.// The teeth/ with just one bite can tell/ an apple from a pear.// The tongue can savor at a touch what’s salt,/ what’s sugar.
Hazo’s poems seldom distill but often expand. His forte is in magnifying the sub-atomic particles of experience, making us realize that the often overlooked details of living are the truest stuff of life. The poems in this collection are very accessible, to the point where some readers looking for more challenging fare may be disappointed. But the craftsmanship and editing are impeccable. This is a highly polished work with no, repeat no, ragged edges.
As the latest offering of the Autumn House Poetry Series, The Flight to Elsewhere keeps good company with other outstanding collections including The Devine Salt by Peter Blair and The Dark Takes Aim by Julie Suk.Richard Allen Taylor
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From Spring 2006
VANISHING POINTS
by Gayle Elen Harvey
Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (2005), 25 pages, $7.
ISBN 1535-5462, PoetryGayle Elen Harvey takes inspiration from the Bible, works of art, music and personal experience to present an interesting mix of poems in her new chapbook.
Like the Bible, this collection starts with Genesis, with a re-creation of the Adam and Eve story, but with a slant more sympathetic to Eve’s point of view. Awakened by rude thumps to her rib-cage, still wet/ behind the ears, her sole landscape’s insubstantial, more foreign to her/ than a moonwalk… True to the original story, Adam blames Eve for everything, but the poet leaps to Eve’s defense: Devoid of good neighbors, no mother to advise her,/ she’s at loose ends and itching for adventure, enthralled/ by the stripe in the high grass. . ./ Forbidden fruits jangling like the room keys of a lover.
Harvey again represents womankind in her version of the burning bush story in Exodus. The angel of the Lord appears to her as a seductive figure from the center of the fire: Revealed, turning leaf-branched into/dazzle. Crimson liturgies erupt from his shoulders. His roar splits/the darkness. You are feverish/before his pure gaze. Harvey spices the poem with sexual imagery (orgies of gold, semen-stained thighs) and why not? The Bible is full of sex, with all that begatting and knowing that went on. But that’s not the point. The point is in the last stanza: All that remains of your faith waits/where you left it.//You succumb to the dwindling cry at the core/of the burn. Having faith, then--in God or man, and by extension, to any idea or construct, is a response to seduction, and only happens if we are willing to be seduced.
A strength of this collection is Harvey’s facility with the persona poem, and there are several poems here written from various points of view. For example, in “Anorexia Nervosa,” the female speaker in the poem tells us, Thin/as a hex sign,/I have never been this beautiful. With this insight on the nature of the illness, which grossly distorts one’s self-image, the victim asserts that fat-cheeked, every mirror leans close/just to kiss a stranger./I can barely lift my empty spoon./Last night I dreamt I salted,/ate my own/heart.
In another persona poem, “Found Out,” Harvey speaks for two skeletons discovered in a sunken car and pulled out of lake. A decade lifts us from this reedy tryst/where we’ve lain hip to hip, lungs bubbling like hookahs. . .//Your wedding ring still gleams, an eyeball/in this silty bedroom. . .Mine, lost long before we drove ouselves to this unfathomed/Honeymoon. Harvey seems to know more about these skeletons than she discloses. Her use of “tryst” and the details about wedding rings (one was lost long before the car crash) implies that the deceased couple was having an illicit affair at the time of their deaths. If the remains were actually identified and if the nature of the relationship was revealed in the newspaper account, Harvey chooses not to share those facts with the reader. This is, of course, consistent with the poet’s decision to let one of the skeletons tell the story, and the skeleton might not have been in a mood to confess all. The poem leaves us with tantalizing mysteries left unsolved.
Radically different from her persona poems, “Notes After Visiting The Artist’s Studio” seeks to convey in word pictures Harvey’s impressions of paintings on display or in progress as well as the artist himself. Expansive with visuals,/his canvasses take little dictation. Variations of marigold and azure/leap, ravenous. A spice box of spatial invitations. Harvey sprinkles the poem liberally with words that refer to colors (marigold, azure, lime, terra umbra, black dog, teal, blue-feathered) and mixes them with music terms (operatic, pianissimo). I like: Among acres of underbrush/and panther, dusk uncensors the moon while he paints her,/blue-feathered, an intimate/trollop, more elaborate than scarlet and her followers. I tried to like the poem as a whole, but it seemed a bit prissy, contrived, haute culture a little too haute. And to be fair to the poet, my cultural training and sensitivities (could I have some ketchup with this sushi, please?) may be too primitive to appreciate fully this type of poem.
Vanishing Points’ three parts will most likely have greater appeal with women than men and should be a treat for art lovers.
Richard Allen Taylor
dear good naked morning
by Ruth L. Schwartz
Autumn House Press (2005) 67 pages
ISBN 1-932870-03-2, PoetryAdmiration for the poet’s skill and enjoyment of the poet’s work are two good reasons to read poetry. To come across a book that deserves A-pluses in both is rare, but dear good naked morning by Ruth L. Schwartz gets my vote as a collection that is as superbly artful as it is pleasurable in the reading. The pleasure for me did not derive from the themes of this collection, which are quite somber—death, loss, grief, pain, and the resultant quest for healing—but in the tumultuous beauty of the poet’s language and the vicarious (and unexpected) shedding of unwanted mental baggage. Schwartz is, according to her bio, a professional practitioner of “Depth Hypnosis and Shamanic Counseling,” a fact that would seem to give her unfair advantage as a poet. But c’est la vie, that’s life, and life isn’t always fair.
C’est la vie is, in a sense, an alternate way of expressing the theme of this collection, which begins with the introductory poem, “Come With Me”: . . .to the rim of the city, the ridge of the hill/which waits for us, forbidding, forgiving, implacable/. . .There is no other world/for us to love, only this one. . ./where vultures stand beside the fallen/head of deer as at the head/of some great table, one by one waiting their own turn/to sip the nectar of the eye. With this stark but grudging acknowledgment, Schwartz launches herself and us on a quest to accept the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.
Later, in the same poem, the poet writes Sometimes that’s all I want: to love you,/whoever you are, an idea that echoes like a refrain throughout the book, but in variations ranging from love of a particular “you” to love of all the world’s creatures and objects we might not associate, normally, with love.
For example, “Highway Five Love Poem” is a love poem for all the tomatoes/spread out in the fields. . ./their gleaming green and ruddy faces like a thousand/moons prostrate in praise of sun. Written “for Anna,” we may infer that the list of lavishly painted details in this poem—clotted cream of cloud; moist fudge of freshly-planted dirt; shaggy neglected savage grasses—were intended to honor or commemorate a drive in the country with a dear friend or loved one.
Divided into two sections, the collection’s Part 2 consists entirely of “Green Fuse,” a long poem whose title is taken from a poem by Dylan Thomas: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age. Schwartz’ poem, a 27-page blockbuster, contains a running dialog, or series of dialogs, between the poet and “you;” between life and death; between past love and present aloneness; and finally, between the inner world of feeling and memory and the outer natural world that is neither cruel nor kind, but merely ravenous.
In the life and death category, Swartz shows us the irony of death teeming with life in the form of a bloated frog,/belly swollen as a sunflower--/dead thing//covered with life, swarming with it:/broken dotted lines of ants, daring miners dipping,/gleaning what they can.
The poet offers an insightful but parenthetical observation on love: (. . .there are those who shape their love/around whatever isn’t there. Who love in absence, where the flame can’t overtake them.) Given the unrelenting, self-confronting reliance on the first person voice in all these poems, it is interesting to see in this passage how the poet seems to shift attention away from herself, as if to say, this is not me I speak of, but others who shall remain nameless.
I am filled with admiration for what Schwartz has accomplished in this collection. Among many other aspects to be praised, her emotional honesty puts her in a fishbowl, not only for the sake of her own self healing, but also to allow the reader to bathe in the same curative waters. It is perhaps a cliché to say that she bares her soul, but she does so with consummate artistry, never asks for sympathy and never backs away from showing us this truth: there is no other world to love, only this one.
Richard Allen Taylor
ONLY THE SEA KEEPS: POETRY OF THE TSUNAMI
Edited by Judith R. Robinson, Joan E. Bauer & Sankar Roy
Bayeux Arts, Inc. (2005) 183 pages, $14.95
ISBN 1-896209-69-6, PoetryIn Only the Sea Keeps, Pittsburgh-based poets Judith Robinson, Joan Bauer and Sankar Roy have gathered the work of eighty-three poets from around the world—among them: lawyer, teacher, biologist, psychotherapist, printmaker, playwright, harpist, engineer. What their poems share is an attempt, not to explain, but to find a way to be in a world where a Tsunami can rise up one morning to erase hundreds of thousands of lives.
For the most part, the poems in this collection sit in the hard hollow of loss and disbelief, asking rather than answering: Show me a proverb, prophecy or parable on an A-bomb wave. / Isn’t the sea to be parted? (Mark Neville, “Exegesis”); How can you love your enemy / Or hate it when it is the sea? (Joseph Bruchac, “Satu, Dua, Tiga”).
They seem determined neither to turn away nor even to avert the gaze, and they tell the story again and again, sometimes offering gruesome glimpses: the bride’s body black bloated // bursting its bikini / identified by the inscription // inside its diamond ring. (Peter Dale Scott, The Riddle”). They don’t resolve but conclude where they begin: delineating loss precisely as with a carefully cut stone: In the distance small boats trawl for bodies. (Marc Jampole, “If Nature Had a Conscience”); the little girl upon her knees / beside her frilly bed / can’t breathe / what slides between my hands / the silk of faith / the scarf of strangled dreams. (John B. Lee, “Ten Days out of Step with the Sun”).
If these poems admit shock and grief, they contain surprisingly little anger—no fist raised up at anyone’s god or even at the sea. Children snare a hawkfish / in an overturned minaret. / A ship prows through the open door/ of a ruined mosque. // I walk empty-eyed, searching for the living. / I have no heart left to hate the sea. (Ben Hartlage, “The Land Is Delivered Again to the Sea”). I am reminded of Miroslav Holub’s “Man Cursing the Sea”: ... And so he cursed the sea for a spell, / it licked his footprints in the sand / like a wounded dog. // And then he came down / and patted / the tiny immense stormy mirror of the sea. // There you go, he said, / and went his way.
How then do these poems make peace with tragedy on this scale? Most don’t try. Indran Amirthanayagam’s “Arithmetic” shows us Muthiah: He’s 70 and / gathering palm fronds / on the beach, // about to rebuild / only 300 yards from the water’s edge. // He says a tsunami / comes every / 100 years. // He will / count / out his days. Dick Allen’s “In This Time of Disbelief” turns to prayer. Some find comfort in the compassion of survivors. Some weigh the Tsunami against another life, safe continents and oceans away. The making of peace in these poems entails more sitting with survivors, more bearing witness, less gleaning lessons.
In her recent essay “Poetry and Uncertainty,” Jane Hirshfield suggests that “A good poem...is a solvent, a kind of WD-40 for the soul....Simply to feel oneself moved creates an instance of freedom; outward circumstance is not the self’s only definition when the interior life presses back.” Only the Sea Keeps reminds us: Not all blows crush the bone, some pass through, // and if we listen, / we catch their echo. (Joan Bauer, “Without Ceremony”).
Royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to humanitarian organizations dedicated to tsunami-related relief and rebuilding in South Asia and the Hurricane Katrina relief.
Lori Wilson
VANISHED
by Carolyn Beard Whitlow
Lotus Press (2005) 109 pages, $18
ISBN 0916418960, PoetryCarolyn Beard Whitlow’s new book of poetry, Vanished, is the winner of the 2006 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and is published by Lotus Press, Detroit. Whitlow, Dana professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, has work appearing in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies, including Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Dos Passos Review, the Kenyon Review and others. Whitlow has also been named a Cave Canem Fellow, her most recent honor.
In this collection, the poems are divided into three main sections: Ain’t Nobody Home, Brick House, and Blue Sky. Whitlow is a poet with a playful, soulful spirit. She loves wordplay, rhythm, rhyme, and sings out her story like some haunted chanteuse. In particular, many of her poems deal with the act of writing itself or of words and their power.
“Mercurial”, the opening poem, has the poet sipping a pot of black, /words tumbling from my lips/communion toast, daily bread daily/ prayer beaming balanced on my tongue/ poem on the Ford assembly line. . . The humor found in the image of poems being on an assembly line is typical of Whitlow’s sense of the absurd, especially the absurdity of trying to capture our lives in words. In a later poem, “Verily, Verite” Whitlow revisits this theme: The spiral stare of empty pages,/Pebbles of history pelting my brain,/lyrics dribble my chin, dangle/in my mother’s voice, a tongue-tied gift.
Though words may fail to save some of our experiences from “vanishing,” Whitlow deftly captures the experience of love. Her poems become vehicles of desire and frustration that hit the mark with a sharp tip. Again, from “Verily, Verite” the poet talks about love, though not the kind of romantic encounter one might expect. The night swelters. I wash my body/ of yours, mud pots and pumice, hug/the pillow for warmt . . . The blues are brewing. . . I long for something sweet, the touch of your voice on my lips./ You’re gone. Now words come like passion./ “I loves you . . handle me with your hot. .”
While some of the poems in this collection remind one of the blues, there are also more traditional forms such as the villanelle and sestina. Also included is a paradelle, a contemporary repetitive form designed by former U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. In Whitlow’s “Travel Paradelle,” the poet travels through books and is afraid to go outside. From this opening, the poem explores the relationship between man and woman, all the while repeating words and lines that have come before. Whitlow’s enjoyment of this word-rich form is evident.
My favorite poems in this collection are the ones where Whitlow lets herself go and the words flow. For example, in “Choo-Choo”, there’s a frisky rhythm and the sentiments are the same: Chugalugga, Chugalugga, choo-choo train/Fast going nowhere, catch up runnin’behind—/My mind partly cloudy, tears fall like rain,/For the last, I mean the last, first time.
I’m especially fond of the next verse when the poet declares You my Cane, Daddy, you my sweetie, Sweet Man. All that’s missing is a wailing sax and some ivory-tickling piano.
Vanished is the work of a confident, mature poet who knows herself and is an astute observer of her world. This is a poet who wants to prod the reader with provocative words grinding against one another. She wants to laugh with the reader over shared ambiguities. And she wants to feed the reader the sultry language of her past and present in rhythmic, bluesy bites.
Anne Barnhill
THE DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS & OTHER POEMS OF THE IRAQ WAR
by David Ray
Howling Dog Press (2005) 240 pages, $20
PoetryFaced with problems from climate change through corporate control replacing democracy to war, I often hear people simply sigh and say, “What can you do?” The very simplest thing a person can do is to speak out. The trouble is that we live in a society that has weaned itself away from the kind of artistic protest that the free speech principle supports. As for the “What can you do?” people, I suggest that if they choose to be quiet, they sit down and at least read The Death of Sardanapalus and then ask themselves how eager they are to support the war in Iraq.
Poetry has ways of exploring big issues through studying objects innocuous in everyday life, but transformed by circumstances. In “The Panic After 9-11” we read: Every suitcase a bomb./ Every rental truck full of explosives./ Every intaken breath anthrax/ unless it is smallpox revived. The suitcase, previously a symbol of happy holidays, appears now as ominously as photographs of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud. It is now as much at home in or subconscious as on the conveyor belt at an airport. 9-11 began ordinarily enough, and then the everyday turned nightmare. And to bring the war and its roots into yet more homes, we find a poem, “Oil,” beginning with Oil for the sputtering mower/ which each weekend makes me clamp my skull/ with both hands and scream like the woman/ on the bridge in Munch’s woodcut, “The Scream”—/ all for a carpet-sized lawn!
The mention of Edvard Munch is just one of a stream of cultural references that runs through the book, including George Grosz, Moliere, Lorca, Wilfred Owen, and the painter Bruegel. It is Eugene Delacroix’s painting that is described in the title poem with its portrait of regal indifference as Sardanapalus observed the massacre/ around him—all prearranged/ as a tribute to his greatness. A series of poems refer back to William Stafford, conscientious objector and poet whose work spoke compassionately against earlier wars, and as Ray notes in “Unwelcome Visions”: He saw that missiles were mounted under wings/ and the sky was again trembling with war.
As war returns, it can hardly be discerned from familiar entertainments. “Combat Stress Control” opens: The troops have been rehearsing for months/ as if for a football game or a movie, and leads to what Ray calls “Invasion of Mind,” the poem where War’s at the window,/ is bound to get in.// In through the window/ and right through the door,// in through the pipelines/ and right through the wires. The saturation of the public mind can only be addressed by “The Ministry of Propaganda”: Every technique described by Orwell/ or practiced by Goebbels is in place,// but so far few have dared say so.
While we take in the sound bites, listen to analysts, and take our news where we find it, the real impact of war is rarely considered. “Practicing to Be Bombed” asks the question the newscasts overlook: Have you decided, my dear,/ where you wish to be/ bombed? At home or out// in the rain? Even more chilling is the poem “To a Child of Baghdad” promising that Our bombs may yet blast you/ to a better life.
Yes, poetry does reach places that opinion pieces won’t go, and this poet exposes the president as well. “Portraits of George” highlights the indifference of the one who gives orders: With Baghdad far below// their commander is out of range for smelling/ vaporized bodies or hearing gunfire from rubble,// a scene that not God but George hath wrought—/ all, perhaps, for the portraits.
During World War I, Siegfried Sassoon wrote a statement at once specific to the contemporary situation and universally true. It included . . . also I believe I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize. In the spirit of this project, David Ray has shown himself to have both the imagination to see the impact of the violence in Iraq and the eloquence to express it.
David Chorlton
HOPE’S WHITE SHOES
by Ziggy Edwards
Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange (2006) 19 pages, $8
ISBN 1-932 870-09-01, PoetryBy their very nature so small with so few poems, chapbooks, paradoxically, seldom feel short. Perhaps it’s that their pages haven’t been picked through, not yet weeded so though there are gems that will hopefully be harvested for a poet’s collection, the chapbook is often padded with the weak and the unready. So Ziggy Edwards’s Hope’s White Shoes commands attention.
Though consisting of a mere fifteen poems, they convey the awe and joy of a poet engaged in and engaged by the world, so much so that you want to continue to see through Edwards’s eyes. Her images energize the reader even if they grapple with heavy or even academic subjects. Take for instance, anorexia in “The Fitting Room”: Hunger makes your ears raw open wires,/ bones humming icicles of poise. Or evolution in “Arithmetic”: wherever sunlight hits. ape and ape/ and mate, divided by spine plus x/ plus time, time, time/ times ten make naked man fur moccasins. God in “Of an Age”: …O God,/ “under God indivisible,”/ God of fifth-graders on stage/ in cardboard Pilgrim hats—/ boxed, gift-wrapped model/ airplane God.
And despite the few falters, the weak line where a unique image could serve better than the two peas in the pod standbys, the only real failing with Hope’s White Shoes is that it ends too soon. I look forward to a Ziggy Edwards collection.
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
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From Summer 2006 DYING LIGHT AND OTHER STORIES
by Donald Hays
MacAdam/Cage (2005) 261 pages, $23
ISBN 1-59692-125-0, FictionIt is no surprise that some of the stories from Donald Hays’ Dying Light and Other Stories have appeared in numerous journals. The title story “Dying Light” was selected for New Stories of the South: The Year’s Best 2003. Hays collection is a dark and disturbing look at everyday life. With black humor and distinctive voices, these stories explore the complexities of relationships, the duty they require, the pain of loss, and the power of forgiveness.
The ten-story collection begins with “Rites of Love,” a story of a woman, Elizabeth, who lives with the emptiness of the sudden death of her college-aged son and a marriage more of “desperation than devotion.” After losing her son in a car accident, she turns to her high school sweetheart, Monty, an invalid paralyzed by a high school football injury. Hays’ strengths are in the details and the ability to say something simply, yet meaningful. He describes a typical afternoon from Monty and Elizabeth’s youth: “They’d tether their horses and picnic on the bluff, a sandwich, a coke, an apple, and in the romantic way of the young, speak softly of the dead behind them.” Years later when Elizabeth holds Monty’s ashes in her hand, she comes full circle, noticing the texture, “the uneven grain.” Monty is the memory of what they could have been and the broken reality of who they became. It is a metaphor that Hays will revisit often.
In “Why He Did It,” a father exposes himself to his stepdaughter in an attempt to protect his biological son from her advances. Consequently, his wife loses custody of his daughter, the protagonist eventually loses his wife and slips into a mid-life crisis. In the story “Material,” a creative writing professor has an adulterous affair with a student, is caught, and loses his wife and lover. In “Salvage,” a husband leaves his comatose wife’s bedside to travel back to another woman he has loved for sixty years. We are left wondering how we should feel about a husband who would marry one woman, pine for another, and leave when his wife is at her weakest. Marriage seems to be a tricky business for many of the characters in this collection. They either fail at marriage, or unhappily succumb, often times seemingly because of duty.
Although these stories are well crafted and interesting, Hays is at his best when he uses thoughtful characters. In some of the stories, the characters make foolish choices or create desperate situations, and the stories begin to wear thin. This is most evident in “Private Dance,” when a football coach decides to avenge his wife’s abandonment of him. Although the story is humorous, it is not of the same caliber as “Dying Light” and others.
The highly satisfying “Dying Light” is the culmination of the collection where a dying father, McMahon comes to terms with his son, Web. McMahon is a retired Marine with a wife who can hardly hear him and a son who wants “closure”. McMahon wants to die without regard to his relationship with his son, “but Web’s not the kind to let it go at that. He’ll have to pick at the sores.” And that is exactly what Hays has done with this collection. He has exposed life as unforgiving and at times, painful, but it always boils down to the choices we make. Hays’ characters do not always make the best choices, and sometimes their choices seem downright ridiculous. However, the characters and their circumstances often make for good storytelling.
Victoria Moreland
HOMEFRONT
by Patricia Monaghan
WordTech Press (2005) 117 pages, $17
ISBN 1933456094, PoetryLyrics for the Fevered God
War, writes H.D., is a fevered god.... And like a delirious god whose breath is crushed by the weight of his own body, the poems in Patricia Monaghan’s recent collection, Homefront, implode. Here we feel the weight of war as it pushes against the inside of our imaginations with a steady, persistent pressure. This is a place where the psychological and spiritual effects of war may be the stuff of legends and myths, but are as real—and as close—as the nightly news.
The collection opens with “Collateral Damage,” which serves as a coda—lives which should have been, will never be. We have no way of knowing the difference even one person’s life would have made in the world. It was taken from us, says the poet.
Indeed, this legacy of violence gets passed down. In a hauntingly exquisite poem, “Loaded,” a father, who collects guns, asks his children: Don’t you notice, he said, how people get shot/ by pistols they think are unloaded?....
And so the poem implodes with this one question. The children are confused about “critical truths.” The father explains that children should not think the world is safe and they should be prepared for the worst. Though his children are frightened—by guns, by random gunshots, by the father’s view of the world—they do understand just one thing:... loading leads to unloading.
Divided into five parts, the “fevered god” of Homefront is illustrated in various incarnations. Part One deals with the legacy of violence. Part Two takes the reader to “Songs of the Kerry Madwoman,” where a singular figure of Irish womanhood meets Irish history. In Part Three, the poems expand outward before imploding. Here the reader finds the god’s hand on the warrior families of: Native America, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm (“At the Pow-Wow”). The poems in Part Four focus on Sweeney, an ancient Irish king who is said to have gone mad from the tumult of battle. The collection concludes with Part Five, in which the poems again implode—this time with reference to our present engagement with the “fevered god.” (The Woman of Baghdad”).
Several of the poems in Homefront are written in couplets, suggesting a point/counterpoint visual structure which leads the reader to the possibility of a world in which war does not exist—perhaps, these poems seem to say in content and structure—one day the human race will kill the “fevered god.” For example, in “At the Pow-Wow” the concluding lines state: My warrior father knows/ why I am not dancing.
Across time and civilizations, inside the belly of myth and in the mind of our common past, Patricia Monaghan’s Homefront does not offer any easy answers as to why war exists. The book does, however, ask us to look with a steady gaze and a fierce heart, into the eyes of the “fevered god.” It asks us to see—quite clearly—not history, not the eyes of our children, not even the lives of all who should have been—but to see, finally, the reflection of our very own, very human, face.
Lois Roma-Deeley
THE COMPLETE TISHKU
by Marjorie Power
Lone Willow Press (2005) 43 pages, $7.95
PoetryThe Complete Tishku is a collection of Marjorie Power’s Tishku poems. Who or what is Tishku? Well, according to the final poem in the book called “Who Tishku Is, All Appearances Aside”: Stand with me/ on this kitchen floor/ now that a train rumbles past.// She is the trembling, the track, the coin/ run over—gleaming/ like never before. If that doesn’t clear it up, consider her a personal goddess or a poetic muse or a satiric character, and in turn Tishku seems all of these and, of course, more.
Power enjoys her readers guesses at the origins of Tishku, especially because she sees that as a sign that her readers are taking the goddess seriously. And Power has discovered a goddess by the name Tishku that was worshipped by a tribe in ancient Mesopotamia. She intends “to do further historical research.”
Regardless, the historical Tishku, the poetic one is well drawn if purposefully inconsistent: playful, vengeful, beautiful, young, old, terrifying, sexy, simple, and intriguing. She is like the childish Greek gods and the mother goddesses. She laughs at human endeavors and seduces her male creations. She is one with nature, but not the nature too often divorced from the cold reality of the natural world: Ride through dusk, and you’ll miss/ the birds that drop dead, then rot—no/ hard freeze clamping them in time.
The only flaw with the complete collection is that many of the poems, though about Tishku, are uneven. You have the accomplished “Tishku Makes Me a Match” that blends image and narrative to create emotion in the reader: In it sits a man-shaped beast, broken-clawed,/ thin, with thinning fur, his eyes aglow/ with an ancient fire desperate for fuel. Other poems feel more like exercises in persona or voice. But despite the ups and downs, any ride with Tishku is worth it.
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
church floor
by Spiel
Chiron Review Press (2005) $5
ISBN 944795-66-4, PoetryTo call Spiel’s writing, to say that church floor is raw and energized, is almost a misnomer. His work is hyper-charged, electric, goes so far into the depths of pain, both psychic and physical, that it is miraculous that he gets out alive. Anyone who dares enter the deep, spiraling labyrinth of his world, will not come out unscathed. Witness the following description of the maternal instinct as he has lived it: she swears/ pragmatic bonds/ time ground to prism’s pulp/ torture’s wanton bearer/ flagellates her mythic chains/ unconscionable warden/ grinds inequities/ to innocence— (from “time ground III”).
This is a poetry of the depths and it is made to be read slowly, repeatedly, carefully to the savor the instinctual rhythm, the throb of the words, as they are repeated and refined. This is recapitulation as a knife to the heart, resounding void of resonance/ no kindred kind/ to salve/ this skittish anonymity/ no ricochet/ of mirror’s fog (from “twilight’s lost day”). This is a symphony of pain in many movements, a programmatic work, a kind of Richard Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” in poetry.
Church floor is the journal of a survivor of the psychic wars, of a personality divided, of a body in the severest kind of pain. Experience and understanding are not a release from internal tortures, nothing in this life could remove those. Still the poet presses on, knowing the journey will be one through absolute darkness. He knows that finding light will not bring an end to suffering, cranial treasure/cranial burden/ vulnerable/ to shut out/ splayed consequences/ disheartening rumors/ self’s light/ locks its know/ to chasms/ unknown (“from frightened light V”). The poet may be disheartened but he presses on because that is what poets and artists do.
It would be unfair to discuss this unique book without a word or two on the design. Pages are figuratively drawn and quartered, fractured or ripped apart, as a counterpoint to the text of the poem. It is as if the pages were created to expose the rift in the author’s mind, the multi-layers of perception at work here; they are not so much a visual delight as a vivid accompaniment to the words they contain. At five dollars a copy, this dense collection has to rate among the best lit book buys of the year.
Alan Catlin
MY NATURE IS HUNGER,
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: 1989-2004
by Luis J. Rodriguez
Curbstone Press/Rattel edition (2005) 150 pages, $14.95
ISBN 1931896240, PoetryAs the author’s biography tells us, this poet has been active in the energetic Chicago slams and a world where poetry is not meant to be whispered. The disciplined syllable count and allegiance to melody of the Middle Ages has been replaced in our day by poets taking everyday speech and drawing from it those sounds and (sometimes) accidental nuances that give it a musical edge. Difficult and pointless as it is to analyze a life force, I still sense moments when the poet’s intuition leads hum to the right words. These lines are from “Exiled in the Country of Reason,” from the New Poems section of the book: You have known roads as Langston/ remembers rivers, as water flows through the cracked/ earth, as the rust and dust settles into a steel mill’s lament./ You have know roads, hoboing then laying down bricks, /plumbing level the offices and homes of a brick-lined America. Written in tribute to an African American revolutionary, Nelson Peery, this poem has all the elements of the best of Luis Rodriguez: clarity, an emotional sincerity that doesn’t become cloying, and the infusion of imagery that takes the reader beyond the poem as written. In this case the mention of bricks reminds us of the barriers in US life and the roads of the ways through them. Simple but well stated.
From the viewpoint of an immigrant, in my case a European whose entry to the country was peaceful and not economically or socially driven, the content of this book as a whole is instructive in offering insights to a world I have never known and which isn’t far away. I know it exists in Phoenix as it does in Los Angeles.
As much as I find the description to be vivid, I keep wanting an exploration of language that goes beyond what the book contains. This direction of thought leads me to dangerous ground, asking for more art when writing at all takes so much effort. No, I do not see some assembly of fashionable literati attempting to please the complacent classes, but to read a few pages that tell me Luis Rodriguez has found some peace in writing about what doesn’t let go, the creativity eventually leads to transcendence. Having said this, I remind myself that he has chosen a way and kept to it relentlessly. The sobering effect on other readers too will, I hope, not be lost.
For those of us who come into this country from other cultures and remain isolated in our unwillingness to join the American sterility and corporate speech that bleeds into politics and leads us into wars, the experience of the ghetto is one as foreign to us as our adopted surroundings. We need to know what My Nature is Hunger has to say, even while we do not seek the solidarity of the Latino populace. This may be why my favorite poem here is the first, Running to America. During my first years here I listened to the man who had built up his lawn mowing business tell me about his friends who had died crossing the desert to enter this land of illusion and promise. More than twenty years later the business and political establishments finally address the border problem, even though their motivations are self serving. Nonetheless, these lines have a strong resonance: For the green rivers, for their looted gold,/ escaping the blood of a land/ that threatens to drown the,/ they have come,//running to America.
It takes the urgency of poetry designed for live reading to explain why the running continues, long after the runners have arrived.
David Chorlton
STOMP AND SING
by Jon Andersen
Curbstone Press (2005) 74 pages, $12.95
ISBN 1931896151, PoetryThe spirited title of Jon Andersen’s first book suggests celebration but what it delivers is a personal chronicle of resistance to the forces, social or private, that conspire against the pursuit of happiness. In “Hi-Fi,” for example, we find the author looking back on life with his parents, years in advance of their divorce, when: My Dad, red-faced and laughing,/ would grab me with his long arms, wrestle me to the rug,/ the second floor shaking with our roughhousing/ and the stereo blaring:/ daylight come and me want to go home... and in “Soldier,” he encounters a former student now in the army who can: ...disassemble/assemble/fire any rifle,/ self-extract from a mine field, call in an air strike, lead an ambush, execute/ and shout out orders like a machine. The army is not the career Andersen hopes he is teaching to prepare for, but the conclusion to the poem brings out his compassion rather than his ideology.
As these few lines show, this is a book of straight language intent on making the experiences behind the writing clear. This is the kind of poetry in which technique remains modestly in the background, although it is present throughout in the pacing and phrasing of lines. The simplicity of approach is fitting for a poet who finds many pleasures and consolations in natural settings, such as on the “Saddle Trail to Tableland”: I bundled up and breathed. I think that I/ believed that stone, and wind, and storms, and ponds/ of glacial melt could help me face the world.
What is it that draws the readers of poetry to the books they choose? There are many answers of course, but the one I most often find relevant is that poets, especially those like Jon Andersen, present a reality invariably missing from the over-publicized and glamorous offerings of commercial culture. We don’t, for instance, think about what it feels like for workers when “The Foreman Calls in Sick,” and it takes a deft few words such as these to put us in their place: We had no idea what to do- without a boss/ our years of experience in lumber disappeared/ like a penny in a slick magician’s hand. Time and again Andersen puts a frame around ordinary moments that we can identify with as they encourage us to evaluate such moments in our own lives. Mother starts painting again, Georgia starts yelling at customers in Bud’s Café, a friend needs help in working in his fields. Nothing to make the headlines, although the headlines sometimes find a way into the poems to let us know they are written by someone concerned with what goes on at the Pentagon and familiar with Dorothy Day, Pete Seeger and Roque Dalton.
The biographical note in the book tells us that Andersen’s mother encourages conversations about the big issues at the dinner table. We should wish for the same in every household, especially when it helps a son move into later life with an informed opinion of what drives the world, but who does not allow himself to become obsessed by it to the point of allowing all the reasons to stomp and sing to disappear.
David Chorlton
A Killing Fever
by Robert Cooperman
Ghost Road Press (2006) 82 pages, perfect bound, $13.95
ISBN 0-9771272-8-1, PoetryIf you like a good, old-fashioned cowboy movie, you’ll love A Killing Fever by Robert Cooperman, a collection that reminds us that narrative poetry was the great story-telling medium before the days of printing presses, movies and television.
The opening poem is derived from a post-Civil War newspaper account: “Article in the Gold Creek Optimist: ‘Minister’s Daughters Attacked,’ Gold Creek, Colorado Territory”—“One moment, Merry Goodwin, fifteen,/and the prettiest girl in the Territory,/and her older sister, Mercy, seventeen,/were enjoying a picnic outside Gold Creek--/…the next, they were set upon by monsters/who sought to hide their infamy/by tossing the girls over a cliff.
So, the preacher’s daughters are raped, one is murdered, the other critically injured and left for dead. The local sheriff immediately blames “Ute reservation jumpers” and organizes a posse to work terrible,/but just and swift vengeance.
In “Madam Jezebel LeDoux Addresses the Posse,” the proprietor of the local whorehouse promises a tantalizing reward: The man to put the first bullet/into those child-raping murderers/gets my best gal, free, for a week!” In a killing frenzy hauntingly similar to some that have occurred in more recent times, the posse goes riding in circles, drinking,/and slaughters a nest full of peaceful Utes.
Soon, the truth comes out that two bad white men did the crime, witnessed by a prospector, Sylvester McIntyre, who saw the whole thing from behind a boulder. Because of cowardice and greed—he was loathe to leave his gold untended—he did nothing to interfere.
Another posse is organized as the saddle-weary Sherriff stays home and hires the fearsome gunslinger John Sprockett to chase after the real culprits. Sprockett, a seasoned killer on the right side of the law, for a change, is given to quoting long passages of Shakespeare from memory. William Eagle Feather, the half-White, half-Ute tracker and expert guide, is recruited to pick up the trail. The local newspaper sends its ace reporter, Percy Gilmore, who passes for an Englishman but turns out to be a Polish Jew whose family was slaughtered by marauding Cossacks. Rounding out this unlikely A-Team is the hapless McIntyre, goaded by the sheriff into posse service as penance for his previous cowardice.
Except for two poems, presented as re-creations of newspaper accounts, each piece in this collection is a persona poem, told from the point of view and in the voice of one of the characters. We hear from all the posse members, and from Mercy, the raped girl who survives, barely, and from her parents, the Sheriff and the editor of the local paper.
The poet is faithful to the way folks actually spoke in those days, or so we are convinced, by the bold, clear style that is, for all the diversity of speakers, uniform throughout the book. For example, in “Sylvester McIntyre Rides in the Posse,” McIntyre bemoans his fate: . . .I’m thrust into the company/of the killingest man in the Territory:/so many murders on Sprockett’s soul/a wonder he’s not sunk down to Hell already./If I run, he’ll plug me, or Eagle Feather/will slit my throat. . .and Gilmore won’t/scratch a drop of ink to mourn my murder.”
The Killing Fever is a quest story in the centuries-old tradition of Homer and Chaucer, a tradition that carries on through the Clint Eastwood westerns of the 70s and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1990.
Cooperman’s poems capture the best and worst of humanity: murder, lust, greed, racism, and vengeance co-exist with love, valor, perseverance, and redemption. Rooted in history, this poetry collection is filled with action and suspense, reads like a good novel, and ends far too soon.
—Richard Allen Taylor
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From Fall 2006
CARP HEAD REPLICA
by Mark Hartenback
Pudding House Publications (2006), 38 pages, $8.95
ISBN 1-59889-399-8, PoetryReading Mark Hartenback’s new chapbook, Carp Head Replica is somewhat like visiting a lunatic in a padded cell. Hartenback admits this up front in “Conversation with a Psychotic Introvert,” in which he describes himself (or the character in the poems) as strong enough to be considered a risk… intelligent enough to be considered flaky. Hartenback reminds me of that character in Catch-22 who was thought to be sane because—hoping to avoid combat—he claimed to be crazy. The poet presents a similar paradox. He adds, Most aren’t going to take what I say seriously, this is a tremendous relief.
We learn from reading the blurb on the back cover that the author “lives in a diminishing Ohio River town surrounded by abandoned pottery factories and the tombstones of people who once made the area thrive.” To live in such a place must be demoralizing, and sad poets do not write happy poems. This reminds me to raise a caution sign that says, don’t assume that the author and the character in the story are the same guy. Maybe, maybe not.
For certain, the character in these poems turns the sweaty sock of his misery inside out for the reader to examine. In the opening poem, “I Don’t Need any More Insightful Observations I Need a Miracle Cure,” he writes, I realize that eventually I’ll be unable to bear life, such as it is, any longer, & will resort back to previous destructive behavior.
Fortunately, Hartenback’s vintage whine is often graced with wisdom and insight, and occasionally, humor. In “A Prayer in Cheesy Technicolor,” he underscores his desperation with a smirk: I have all these prayers that need saying. But I have trouble keeping a straight face.
What I like most about this collection is that the author does connect, fairly often, with an honest-to-God brilliant observation, and sometimes evokes an eerie this-could-happen-to-you feeling. In my case, it evoked an already-happened-to-me feeling, but at my age, that happens a lot.
In “Indistinguishable,” the poet complains, I have a feeling that I may have missed the obvious yet again. Maybe I should put the reading down and watch how the world operates… Later, he muses, I might get along better out there if I left my strange behavior behind closed doors… I need to dispose of it, a word at a time…
These poems are, with few exceptions, all about “I.” One almost gets the impression that the speaker is shut in, away from trees and sky, which never appear in this book, and only seldom does a “you” enter the picture. “Atmosphere,” is still an “I” poem but contains a second character, a “you” person who seems to be important to the “I” character. I want you to mean it, he says, I don’t care if it comes out sounding clunky or funny… I don’t want you to save anything for later. Later will take care of itself.
I found myself in an approach-avoidance conflict with these poems. Generally an optimistic person, I was put off by the unrelenting self-flagellation and pessimism in these poems, as the author seemed determined to find a dark cloud in every silver lining. One minor but perhaps symbolic manifestation of Hartenback’s style is that he writes everything—everything—in lower case, as if to make everything smaller and less significant than it otherwise would appear. While I respect his right to make that artistic choice, I refuse to write that way, even in reviewing his work. Yet, I found myself drawn to the poems, possibly in the same way we are attracted to Charles Schultz’ Charlie Brown, the perpetual but sympathetic loser. There is some Charlie Brown in all of us, and in Carp Head Replica, Hartenback holds up a mirror that makes it impossible to avoid that telling reflection of ourselves, impossible to escape the truth.
Richard Allen Taylor
DELIRIUM: SELECTED POEMS
by Lloyd Van Brunt
Presa :S: Press (2006), 47 pages, $6
PoetryLloyd Van Brunt repeatedly slips across the border from narrative to lyrical poems and back again in Delirium: Selected Poems, a well-balanced and expertly crafted collection that ranges from childhood memories to adolescent sexual fantasies to the death of an ex-wife.
In the opening poem, “The Surge,” Van Brunt passes along advice from his grandmother who said never reach to help/man, woman, or child that’s been struck by/lightning. Leave them there/on the ground, by a tree, or a tractor. The electrical charge, according to the grandmother, remains active in the body of the victim for some time after the lightning strike, ready to zap anyone who gets too close. If this is a warning to the reader, it is ineffectual. The author seems prone to being struck by lightning, and the reader can scarcely resist touching these poems when they reach out, which they often do.For example, in “A Houseful of Strangers,” the author (if we are correct in assuming these poems to be autobiographical) recalls an incident in which he was badly injured in a fall. From this event, he produced a poem that not only tells a ripping good story but also contains lyrical passages of great beauty: …how I lay there like a weathered log/being pushed and prodded /busily back toward a loud life. In great pain, he escaped into a vision—one might call it a “delirium,” (hence the title)—of being in a snowstorm. It was a dream that gave him great relief: I was walking through woods/ in the fiery dark,/ I was a candle burning/ I was a light in the distance,/ I was where the wind dies down with a hush,/ I was a slender tree,/ I was someone who keeps going the wrong way, I was one of those animals/whose homes are never found…
One of my favorite narrative poems in this collection is “Wanda Pickles.” The title is a corruption of the name of the girl to whom the poem is addressed: In the Talent Search you sang Smoke Gets in Your Eyes/ In such a chanteuse way that Jack Pease and I/ Stopped making fun of everything and/ Goosing one another and the fat girls whose butts/ Stuck out of the metal folding chairs/ In the cafeteria-auditorium. To everyone’s surprise, Wanda Pickles, the nerdy duckling, /So sophisticated she could have been a movie star…caused every boy in the 8th and 9th grades to drop …the drawers of adolescent/Adoration down to his ankles for the cross-eyed girl/Who never said more than an averted hi.Van Brunt skillfully integrates the details of the story with its general, if not universal, adolescents-in-America context: You were not only speaking but singing for us all,/ …the last liquid syllable/ like a soap bubble poised in the air,/ Trembling with the promise of a rainbow life.
Ducking back into the land of lyricism, Van Brunt’s “Redwoods” captures with simple elegance the essence of trees larger than any seen on the East Coast: they make such huge shadows/ they seem/ to drift like clouds. Just a page away, “Journeys” is a short poem that compares the falling of leaves to dying, As they journey to the woods/ That lie in the next world.In “How to Cope with Loneliness,” the poet begins, After the packrat ex-wife died/ I pawed through her possessions/ with gossiping relatives and friends. No doubt about this one—it’s autobiographical. Van Brundt finds a shoebox labeled Lloyd’s Letters—My Old Poems. While the sister searches for and eventually finds the jewelry she’s looking for (those garnets must be in this mess somewhere, she laments), the poet sits reading, and remembering, turning the old feelings over like plowed ground. The poet does not ask us to touch him, but we sense the electrical charge coursing through him before he resolves the poem with So let me simply celebrate/ Laura M. Conan/25 December 1933 — Thanksgiving Day, 1989.
Unless you count an absence of humorous poems as a weakness, this collection has no obvious weaknesses. Van Brunt is a poet of great skill in both narrative and lyrical poetry and frequently blends one with the other. Although I was personally not familiar with this poet, I learned—after reading this book—that he is the founding editor of the Pushcart Prize and has published nine collections in a writing career spanning fifty years
The great poets among us don’t get enough publicity. I hope this helps.
Richard Allen Taylor
KEEP AND GIVE AWAY
by Susan Meyers
University of South Carolina Press (2006), 84 pages
PoetryOccasionally, a reviewer gets lucky. A book comes along that has the tensile strength to endure for years and the sheer beauty to capture a reader’s heart. Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers is one of these, a book that may never stray far from the desk or favorite armchair of anyone lucky enough to have picked it up in the first place. It is also a book that readers will want to share with others. This recipient of the inaugural South Carolina Book Prize is a complex weaving of childhood memory, adult grief, and a lasting marriage—all rendered in the context of the natural world. The final impression is of quiet, unquenchable radiance.
Meyers’s greatest strengths here include a vision that is clear and unsentimental combined with language so finely crafted that it is rather like gold hammered to thinnest leaf for the sake of art. Part of the craft here grows from the poet’s willingness to work with received form (the villanelle, the ghazal) along with free verse and conventional stanzas to bring the reader into a layered world that is achingly beautiful and acutely painful, a world that nonetheless allows poet and reader alike to find the balance points, those astonishing manifestations that let us keep footing through the slow painful death of a loved one, the ups and downs of a long relationship, the journey all of us make through our lives.
The book’s first section, “Trying to get it right,” shows us the poet on the front steps in love/ with the little birds and moments later pulling for the hawk, admiring/ its heft, the turn of its head,/ …the unblenched eyes (“Contraries”). Other notable poems (and they are all extraordinarily good) include “Your Mother Forbids You to Leave the Yard” where a child on a swing is abjured Lean back into the rhapsody of air/ Lost child, close your eyes./ Let the wide sky lap you up, and up. The haunting “Ghazal of the Past,” tells us how a retired tenor sings his refrain, off key:/ Act wiser than you did a few years ago and also that Morning climbs in my window, panting, half-cocked./ I wake to grief I never knew years ago. The book’s second section, “Need has nothing to do with it” explores the painful two-year dying of the poet’s mother. Here, Mountains stutter their colors across the sky (“October, What the Mountains Say”) and the horizon is a pale, thin lip on the sea (“Weather”). A daughter says, at least partly to herself and to us, Listen, mother—/ thunder, out of season: an old woman/ at the end of her day, humming. “Small bones of contention,” the book’s final grouping of poems, traverses the emotional distance from I tell you, the shadows count for something (“A Counting”) to the evocative Some mornings I mutter down the hallway/ of our marriage and open the only available door./ But once in a while, say on a warm January morning,/ I ride out with him on the smooth lake of it (“Neither the Season, Nor the Place”).
Like the best gold leaf, these poems are translucent in their beauty. Terrance Hayes says in his foreword to the book, “We might fall, submit to loss, were there no art such as this to keep us upright in the world.” This book is made for keeping and for giving away. It is a collection that will touch lives in profound and wonderful ways.
Phebe Davidson
IN MIRRORS
by Lyn Lifshin
Presa :S: Press (2006), 84 pages
ISBN 0977252434, PoetryThe mirror, in art and literature, as in dreams, holds a certain fascination. It evokes magic, fantasy, and borders on the occult thrill of the surreal. In one of Lyn Lifshin’s recent books, In Mirrors, one looks into the Lifshin Mirror, at the boundary between the virtual and the real.
Lifshin transcends this boundary through the prism of memory and imagination. Time is traveled, from early childhood, through adolescence, youth, and the approach of age. These forays into time seem candidly autobiographical, and mercilessly self-analytical.Within the magical reality of the poems are realistic, smoothly rendered, clearly defined persons, places and objects—but in settings, of outlandish, odd, or even dreamlike quality. “The Child At A Mirror”:… not/ having words/ yet for what he/ can’t touch.
Into adolescence and under overwhelming social pressures the maturing girl wonders at the reflection gazing back at her. Can she believe what she sees? “Every Girl Of Fifteen”: wonders if she/ is pretty.
With the advance of years and stoic realism, the bloom of youth fades and courageous self-analysis emerges. She studies herself in the merciless mirror.
Some of the titles are like poems within themselves, and one in particular seems like a social commentary: “Women Are Confronted Daily By Multitudes Of Beauty, Images In Magazines, Movies, On Television—The Sheer Quantity Of These Images Has Increased Dramatically Over The Last Twenty Years.”
The poems pass back and forth through the mirror boundary with ease if not trepidation. Women looking into the mirrors are pre-coded in how to see what is reflected there simultaneously in the ideal and the real, seeing the virtual: what is seen is what is got.
The bloom of youth and beauty fades and the maturity of age approaches the faces in the mirror. The grey hairs, the laugh wrinkles appear gradually and insidiously. There is no denying and yet no acceptance. Another of the paragraphic titles capsulates the merger of denial and acceptance: “In The Mirror The Woman Standing On A Towel Sees Her Bulges As Curves, Her Grey Hair A Rose Amber” and, “She Goes Up To A Mirror”: like a mountain/ climber approaching/ mountains and facing down the pitiless image before her, she gazes into… what/ will reflect more/ than you can/ deal with.
Lyn Lifshin’s mirror is a gateway into a magic land of distortion and mystery, as if the reflections are mocking its horrified viewers with caricatures of what could have been, if not what “is.”
Lyn Lifshin, a realistic romantic, (or perhaps a romantic realist) is tough but tender, giving no quarter nor asking any, but squarely facing both the virtual and the real as they are, might be, or should be. To have read this book is to have had a spell cast. What you see is what you get.
John Birkbeck
RE-ENTRY
by Michael White
University of North Texas Press (2006),
66 pages, $12.95
ISBN 1574412116, PoetryMichael White’s third poetry collection, Re-entry, holds the 2005 Vassar Miller Prize, judged by Paul Mariani. The book is divided into three parts with the second part comprised of one long poem, “My Bicentennial Year.” Most of the poems presented in the first section are sacred relics of memory, those “emotions reflected in tranquility” which Wordsworth declared the essence of all poetry. And in the tradition of “The Prelude,” White takes a look back from mid-life, trying to hold onto memories as thin and haunting as ghosts. While trying to capture these ephemeral recollections in the black-and-white prison of words, White manages to bring wisdom and understanding to events of long ago. There’s a sense of nostalgia here, but that isn’t always a bad thing. In White’s hands, such sentiment becomes part of the well-loved tapestry of life, just one more detail that commands our attention.
One of White’s strengths as a poet is the focus he brings to the details he so carefully renders. In “The Levee,” White strikes just the right note to jolt us into our own reverie of what’s gone before, our own longing for what cannot be again: What I want is what I had: the landscape/ beneath the landscape; hawks and cliffheads; hum/ of bridges; summer’s sumac gold and cobalt/ clarities which deepened as the river/ gradually dwindled. . . What I want is what// I was—that self lost utterly in vagrant/ days that sank in flames as I spent them there—/ My element silt, my posture prayer….
The longing for what once was is as familiar as air to those of a certain age; the longing is both painful and comforting. Simply the naming of our desire brings a sense of power and solace in the real world of everyday detail as well as the world of our remembered dreams. White uses this tension beautifully as he recreates scenes of memory from those synaptic jolts so short and quick they seem impossible to hold.
Not all of the poems collected here come from the country of memory. Some are more discursive and less successful, particularly those poems peopled with those who make up White’s domestic world, his wife and daughter. The poems in the last section of the book are set in France or Italy or even a mid-Atlantic beach town and these become almost prosaic at times. Here are a few lines from “Beach Traffic”: It’s bumper to bumper now on Market Street/ where rank upon rank of billboards crowd in close/ above new growths of stripmalls and filling stations—// each with its sealed-in, stone-faced attendant./ So much of our lives, we focus straight/ ahead, into the glare afflicting us—-//…. How can we help but wander?White echoes other contemporary poets here, his lines untouched by the sentiment that enlivens the poems in the first section. But even here, White brings our everyday world to life, then infuses it with the knowledge of a deeper world, a world that can bring something of the holy even to stripmalls. This is White’s gift.
Anne Barnhill
THRU THE HEART OF THIS ANIMAL LIFE, A MEASURE OF IMPOSSIBLE HUMOR
by Christopher Cunningham
Liquid Paper Press (2005), 43 pages
PoetryChristopher Cunningham’s sixth book of poetry Thru the Heart of This Animal Life, A Measure of Impossible Humor was the first prize winner in the 2005 Nerve Cowboy Chapbook Contest. Like much of the work by small press male poets, its themes are blue collar life. His settings are the grocery stores and Wal-marts and in his bio claims to live in a “crumbling shack.” His people are the mad ones wandering through parking lots offering whiskey and generic paper towels. His problems are the inevitable dissolving of a comfortable shirt and using a refund from the phone company to pay for food.
But unlike the blue collar voice so prevalent, Cunningham has more hope, more appreciation for the joys of the hard won life. In “beautiful desperado in the silence,” the speaker smiles as he watches a man/ in a wheelchair/ cross a gas station/ parking lot/ at three fifty three a.m.,/ waving his arms/ and rolling the hell/ out of his chair/ and yelling. Or take for example, the end of “no matter how grand the dream”: we still/ must// daily// be human/ and/ suffer/ the miracle/ of/ existence// with a/ measure/ of/ impossible/ humor.
From the above, one can see Cunningham’s reliance on the short line, often the one word line. Sometimes this strategy can create a powerful emphasis or effective staccato movement down the page. Other times, it limits him, and the slight line length could benefit from variation. This limitation is clearly evident when Cunningham breaks from the pattern with the poem “at the front door” where the longer lines give him space to properly evoke images like the tight fiery ball of a weather blown spider.
Whatever the length of the lines, Cunningham’s best poems deliver an emotional striving, as in “the hours that matter”: the hours/ of/ futility/ and sacrifice/ that teach/ you// how/ to remain// upright/ against the/ savage/ heavens.// and these/ hours/ are all any of us/ ever have.// rejoice/ under the/ beautiful/ weight.
One last note, each cover has a spray-painted design done by the author, “No two covers are the same.”
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
PLAYBACK
by Raymond Chandler, Ted Benoit, and Francois Ayroles
Arcade Publishing (2006), 98 pages.
ISBN 1-55970-796-8, Graphic NovelIn 1948, Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for the movie Playback, and even though he earned a record amount for it, with the typical fickleness of Hollywood, the film was never made. Ted Benoit has adapted this “lost” screenplay into a graphic novel with illustrations by Francois Ayroles.
Playback is the story of a young woman looking to escape her past. She’s been tried in the murder of her husband. The judge sets aside the guilty verdict of the jury believing it is arrived at out of fear for the husband’s powerful father. Leaving her North Carolina home, she travels to Vancouver, putting as much space between her and the still vengeful father-in-law as possible. When she finds a dead man on the balcony of her hotel room, she realizes she’s back in the very same position. Torn between the attention and affection of the wealthy playboy Clark Brandon and Inspector Killaine, she has nowhere else to run.
The work has Chandler’s signature dialogue, especially in the first third of the book. When a man tries to pick up a woman on a train, he asks, “Would you care to see the Seattle paper?” To which, she responds, “No thanks, I’ve seen Seattle.” Later, Brandon asks a private eye, “Who told you my name?” The P.I. says, “I’ve got good ears.” “How are your teeth getting along?” Brandon asks. In these exchanges and most of the plot of Playback, you can see Chandler’s hardboiled view of life.
But this work is a far cry from his Philip Marlowe novels. One of the major problems has to do with the nature of the genre. When Chandler wrote the screenplay, it would have been filled out by the film, the setting elaborated, the characters given life by actors. The art in the graphic novel, all black and white, does capture the early noir films’ use of light and shadow to suggest the dark underworld the characters are going through. The figures, though, are often indistinct and several characters look similar if not the same. Whereas actors would have embodied these people, Ayroles’s drawings rely too much on Chandler’s dialogue to tell us who these people are. And Chandler’s own storytelling fails him in the unsatisfying close.
Despite the genre translation flaws, it’s better to have Chandler’s work, even a minor one, to remind us of his artistry and influence.
S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
A QUIET DIVIDE
by Roger Colombik
Plain View Press (2006), 112 pages
ISBN 1-891386-43-3, PoetryThe diary of a young girl in Sarajevo arrived on the bestseller lists in the United States in 1994. Thousands of American schoolchildren were introduced to the conflict of former Yugoslavia through Zlata’s Diary. After twelve year’s silence on the subject, Roger Colombik’s A Quiet Divide returns those now adult readers to the Balkan states to see that little has improved. But the elegiac delivery has aged beautifully.
Colombik’s collection of poetry, prose, and photography shows the divisions of religions and politics, young and old, rich and poor, and even the proverbial light and dark with fair play given to shades of gray. In “Zamosc,” he shows human divisions blurred by vodka and even the gap between heaven and earth closed here at the cemetery, where candlelight vigils/ create a starry night here on earth. But the reader sees how short-lived bonds are in “The Firmament of Neglect” when a request for a key to a synagogue leaves the locals wondering why an American writer needs a key to God. The spiritual and physical worlds are separated by a door neither the coal stained men/ forming metal with unrequited dreams nor the free tourist can enter.The repetition of some themes makes the divide feel more like an impossible ravine at times. Showing the effects of war and poverty only on children and the elderly gives the illusion that society’s greatest ills prey solely on its weakest members. And the ubiquitous glorification/damnation of Americans is not spared here.
As for photography, the collection includes heartfelt portraits, landscapes, and blurred street scenes that meld form and shadow with much appreciated glimpses of white light. A shot of ivy creeping over a Jewish cemetery begins the section titled “Ground Cover” and seamlessly sets the tone for poetry discussing the disappearance of Jews from the region.
The sculptor/photographer tells in Journal Notes: Robert Bly For A Day how the director of a Macedonian poetry festival asked him to be the American poet’s substitute. The sometimes writer Colombik was the only American in town and therefore the obvious candidate to present a lecture on American poetry. If this event began the lyrical elements of this collection, the Balkan states should thank Mr. Bly for his absence.
Heather Jane Collings
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