LOST HEARTLANDS FOUND
by W. K. Buckley
Pudding House Publications (2004) 36 pages
ISBN 1-58998-269-X, PoetryW. K. Buckley taps into the beat of hard work with a capital “W” in the heartland. His Lost Heartlands Found, at its best, puts the hard labor of the worker into a rhythm of dance. Some of the poems pound their rhythmic drum like “pimp-funk-to-the-rails-out-of-town” or “So What-Do!” where the speaker gotta tell ya things here have their reasons/ ‘splained in showers with those notches in-skin/ and cuts in heartland of nerve-on-real-nerve. Many of these poems are even given notes on their delivery, like the (Jumpy-chant in bebop) for “ice dry.” You can feel the influence of song and music. Sometimes to a detriment, where like Bob Dylan (who Buckley quotes more than once) putting Shakespeare in the alley, Buckley has Marx and Freud down there, too.
It is with the subject of work and the people involved in that work where the chapbook shines. The theme recurs in Buckley’s poems even when they trudge instead of dance. The mills and furnaces of Chicago and Michigan ash the background here. Sometimes the people’s plights are a little too familiar, too generic, but then several surprises redeem, like Bob who dried his amputated thumb and turned it into a rabbit foot-like charm. Work becomes its own character. In “Lover in a milltown,” Buckley writes, Smokestacks/ give off what wives call the grace of labor. And he wisely broadens the definition of “work” to include the labor of poetry: I work in this lake-light,/ riveting words/ before they are spoken.
Each of the four sections of Lost Heartlands Found begins with a page of epigraphs, from three to four quotations. These epigraph pages form their own collage poems, Blake bleeding into Dylan. And these pages would have served to open up the book, but many of the poems have their own epigraphs and so at one point the reader gets inundated with other voices, threatening to crowd out Buckley’s. And it’s his voice that drives the work, which makes the words dance.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
EPICENTER
by Wendy Wisner
CustomWords (2004) 72 pages
ISBN 1-9323-3915-9, PoetryWendy Wisner’s first collection Epicenter quakes with the longing and joy of the physical world. In “Oakland, ‘89: After the Earthquake,” the speaker learns new words like fault line, magnitude, after shock./ Epicenter was my favorite./ Nights I’d say it thinking of him. And it is this “him” that is at the center of most of Wisner’s poems, a him that is here a crush but is more often the absent father and sometimes the husband, who just may be a stand in for the missing father. The collection gathers around this pronoun “him” with a poetics of materialism, grounded in the very dirt and physical dimension of life.
Wisner creates a distant tone, emotion at arm’s length, through her focus on the things scattered about in these poems, things like cameras, pennies, pens, newspapers, paper clips, nightgowns, calculators, record players, Cadillacs, tree stumps, and coloring books. They are the jar of seashells that give off a flash,/ an afterglow—when you looked for him/ and he wasn’t there. Some of these poems are full of things but empty of people, devoid of human connection. But it is also through items that Wisner bridges that distance, connecting to people through what they have touched, the stuff they have left behind. A husband’s long sleeved shirt in her deft hands takes on daring in the dryer—/ twisting, tangling, knotting/ my sweater, jeans, dresses,/ as though he has that many arms.
The only weak spot in this fine collection is the fourth and final section, which breaks with the “him” focus. The three poems felt tacked on to the end. And they take away from the more satisfying third section. Especially disappointing, “Four Dreams” still has the wondrously charged items of everyday life, like a Batman shirt, but suffers from the inherent problem of writing about dreams: everyone has them, but they are of little interest to anyone other than the dreamer.
Despite the anticlimactic end, the foundation of these poems, Wisner’s simple language forged in the wanting and loving, makes possible evocative lines like I owned the baby, the way I owned the lawn, or There was a dirt I’d never known, or We were brute that night. Her powerful simplicity also makes the collection worth multiple readings, where each time through you pick up more and more on the subtlety and nuance of her writing and her heart. We impatiently await the aftershocks of her next work.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
SEX EDUCATION
by Janice Moore Fuller
Iris Press (2004) 89 pages, $13.00
ISBN 0-916078-60-4, Poetry
Readers seduced by the crimson cover and the bold title will be titillated and ultimately gratified by the poems in Janice Moore Fuller’s Sex Education. Forget about birds and bees; Fuller celebrates the sexuality of donkey dung cucumbers, variegated sea urchins, drunken bagpipe players, and dancing tourists.
But Sex Education probes more than just sex and sexuality. The poetry simultaneously captures and liberates the female experience. Father-daughter familiarity is grotesquely sweet in “Delicacy,” in which the pair eats raw animal parts from a tin, and in “Breaking the Thermometer,” in which the parent breaks the thermometer (and the law) so he can tell his daughter, Here. . .Let me show you. But the sweetness vanishes in “Revisiting American History,” when the child [finds] herself deep in his bed…, dreading/ to stroke the war hero’s sword.
War metaphors and imagery abound in the book, but violence is tempered by tenderness, especially for children. A lost brother lives forever in “For William, Who Lived Twelve Hours.” Motherhood receives poignant respect. Twin daughters in the womb are contrasted and, in adulthood, missed with physical pangs. Mothers, whether eating dinner or visiting in dreams from the grave, are portrayed respectfully but not without irony. In “My Mother’s Seventieth Birthday,” the emphysema victim attends her party in a dream and can only [smile] at the candles and say, I still can’t get my breath...You blow them out.
Family relationships, love for animals, childhood reminiscence, and lost love are skillfully treated to fresh metaphors and sometimes-jarring imagery. But in Sex Education, in which people dance, make love, eat, dream, and wonder, the power of human sexuality holds dominion. The title poem suggests that the female body, characterized by grotesque beauty, is made up of mysterious parts: the outside parts no more fathomable than the insides. Any reader—woman or man—courageous enough to enter the red tunnel of Sex Education with headlights on should shiver after the last word of “Sex on a Plane,” inspired as the lovers go on forever, stumbling together into wetness.Julia Hayes
GERMAN WAR CHILD
by Christa Blum Mercer
A. Borough Books (2004) 170 pages
ISBN 1-893597-07-5, MemoirI grew up hearing my mother, a survivor of the Nazi blitzing of southern England during WWII, speak of shortages, blackouts, bomb shelters—and horrible fear. Like my mother, Christa Blum Mercer, author of German War Child, came to this country when the war was over.
Mercer’s father served on a German ship, my mother’s father in the British Army. In both families the job of caring for the children fell entirely to the mothers, who stayed on the alert for air raid signals and often had to shepherd their children into underground shelters in the middle of the night.
Same story. Different locations.
Christa Blum Mercer’s book succeeds because she clues us in on tiny details. She begins with distinct images about the day she and her mother dressed up to go to a parade to see the Fuehrer and takes us all the way through the war and its hunger-panged aftermath to the day she boards a ship—alone—for the States. The image she provides of precisely the last tiny thing she could see, as the ship pulled out into the ocean and she watched her mother waving good-by, succeeds just as surely as any movie screen in allowing the reader-viewer to absorb detail and feel emotion.
Through such real-life detail, Mercer succeeds in relating her eyewitness historical account. She has good material to work with: hungry bellies, the rubble of their bombed home, homelessness, and abundant family tensions.
Mercer also succeeds because she’s willing to tell the truth: her dad returns home “a broken seaman” who treats the family as though he’s still in the military, while the mother must scramble to find a way to come up with money to keep the family together. The younger sister is “the war child” and gets larger portions of food and other favoritisms. Yet, through all these unflattering reports of family tension, Mercer’s desire to be as fair as she is honest comes through clearly.
This book will appeal to young and old. It includes a generous supply of family photos.Barbara K. Lawing
JOURNEY FROM THE KEEP OF BONES
by Michelle Miller Allen
Amador Publishers (2003) 376 pages
ISBN 0-938513-36-2, Fiction
www.amadorbooks.comMany are familiar with the creation story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but less familiar is the story narrated by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. In the beginning, man was round, composed of two parts so that he was never alone, created of three genders: male-female; male-male and female-female. He had a rollicking good time with his inseparable partner, disrupting the sleep of the gods on far-off Mt Olympus. Irate, they called a council to devise retribution. Zeus, struck by a sudden insight, had a cure for the headache to split them apart and scatter them across the earth. Ever since, man has been in search of a partner, an alter ego, the other.
Journey from the Keep of Bones examines the interrelationship between the sexual and psychological dimensions of personal relationships, studying the reflections of you-I, Du-Ich interaction between the beloved and the lover and the seeker and the sought. Miller Allen cast her story on a split stage of ancient and modern, contrasting the characters and their reactions through alternating chapters between ancient Mesoamerica jaguar culture and contemporary GenerationX in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Trained as a playwright, Miller Allen moves the novel quickly through dramatic scenes with the skilful use of dialogue and imagery. Through the use of dream fragments and symbols, her characters are able to transcend the limitations of time and place.
Two shaman brothers, Ku-en and De-jah watch the Water to achieve a state of altered consciousness. Yearning to explore the universe beyond, Ku-en enters the water and disappears, entrusting his brother with the care of the village and his wife. Upon return, he finds his trust betrayed and challenges De-jah to return with him in the future. The brothers and their wives enter contemporary society of New Mexico to seek each other and resolutions of past conflicts.
Maxine Talbot works as a paralegal for D. L. Obermeyer, a divorce attorney, neatly analyzing domestic disputes. Frustrated by empty affairs, she wants to manage her personal life and have the perfect relationship. She meets Travis Dylan through attending group therapy for maintaining honesty and intimacy. They begin experimenting with private exercises. Adrienne Manfred arrives in the office, demanding a simple settlement from her affluent husband and Conner McKnight calls inquiring to retain D. L. Obermeyer on behalf of a late client. The stage is set. Like Shakespeare with his lovers lost in the woods, the plot moves through coincidental actions and mistakes as each tries to resolve personal dilemmas.
By alternating the chapters between ancient and modern, the author achieves dramatic tension, but maintains continuity through the use of dream fragments and symbols which transcend time and place, adding a higher level of interpretations of allegory and social criticism. Through contrasting the ancient shaman cult with contemporary culture, the author is free to examine the woman’s place in society and criticize historical values inherited from Christianity of female subordination and the political issues of equal rights. Beyond that, the language of the text is couched in myth, dreams and images that are universal, examining human psychology. Man has been fascinated with dreams since the beginning of time, using them to interpret the future or in modern times: self-analysis and psychoanalysis. How they are interpreted is dependent on personal perspective. Although images may be interpreted personally or universally to mean different things, they transfer across cultures. A knife can represent violence or justice, depending on the context and the interpreter. The skilled use of imagery raises Journey from being a simple boy-girl story to the level of allegory which can be energetically argued between friends at a pub.
Liberated from the Genesis Creation myth, the characters discard original sin to explore alternative consciousness to find a spiritual advisor in Light, the channeler. Living in contemporary society, they repair personal relationships through twelve-step therapy and discard the local church pastor. Drawing from popular psychology and New Age culture, the characters confront the future and search for inner fulfillment through personal development and satisfying relationships. Split apart, they search for the significant other often lost in the jungle of modern society. The journey is equally internal as external as they are forced to confront their limitations and solve the riddles of the hidden past, breaking the surface of their consciousness in dream fragments. Constructed with elements of a whodunit and magical realism, there are no tidy solutions as each searches for his own personal identity through the presence of others. Like smooth stones, dreams are passed hand from hand through discussion or by portrayal in painting, establishing a universal consciousness between characters that cross each other’s paths through accident. Dramatic, the characters are lively, portrayed convincingly through realistic dialogue, unresolved conflicts and professional appearance.
Journey from the Keep of Bones received 1st Runner-up from the Coalition of Visionary Resources for visionary fiction.Mary C Legg
HALF LIVES: PETRARCHAN POEMS
by Richard Jackson
Autumn House Press (2004) $14.95
ISBN 1-932870-00-8, Poetry, 73 pgs.No one can fault Richard Jackson for a lack of ambition. In his new book, Half Lives, Jackson adapts a group of sonnets from the work of the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch into modern American English. He does this while still retaining the fundamentals of form. The poems are sonnets in every way. All of them are fourteen lines. All of them serve a rhetorical purpose. All of them retain the functionality of rhyme. In fact, Jackson’s structural variations are noticeable only in the way he changes the stress count within certain lines.
Jackson’s poems are not translations. At least, not exactly. Jackson uses the poems of Petrarch as starting points for his own poems. In this way, Jackson’s work most resembles Robert Lowell’s “imitations.” However, like Lowell, Jackson refuses to be bound by a translation’s literal meaning. Often, Jackson’s poems seem to be translated more from memory than from Petrarch’s Italian. He writes of, my life, this disgust/for everything, this desire to be swept away like those dark stars/at dawn, whose life is a constant test, whose every breath is a trial.
A reader unfamiliar with the work of Petrarch might approach this book with some hesitation. Is Jackson writing a type of poetry that is neither a “true translation” nor a “true original?” Such a concern will not last past the first few pages. Jackson’s poems are so consistently successful, so studded with wonderful lines and striking imagery that his talent is undeniable.
How many poets want to know, What’s the word for a life the moment it is over?
How many poets can say, so convincingly, Despair like some neighborhood butcher/will wrap up my flesh at $2 a pound, before I ever stop.
Throughout these poems, Jackson writes of Petrarch’s abstract renaissance concepts of Virtue, Honor, Despair, and Love as if each one was his well-loved brother. His ability to make abstract concepts concrete realities sets Jackson apart from most poets. He is a first rate love poet while, at the same time, he is a first rate philosophical poet.
Readers who have forgotten what ambitious poetry can do, will be enthralled with this new collection. Richard Jackson is a poet who knows that, the moon/and the stars, the wind, the whole earth are images whose doors/open other worlds, if they only endure like the half life of dreams.Mike James
BLEACHY-HAIRED HONKY BITCH
by Hollis Gillespie.
Regan Books (2004) 279 pages
ISBN 0-06-056198-X, NonfictionHaving “survived the complete car wreck” of her life with her sanity relatively intact, Hollis Gillespie proves to be witty, “vulgar”, self mocking, and straight forward. And that’s just for starters. You could also add successful to the list. A regular commentator on NPR and a popular columnist for Atlanta’s alternative paper Creative Loafing, Gillespie’s debut collection of memories and reflections entitled Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood is already a best seller and is rumored to be optioned by Paramount for a film version.
Her book is a collection of short 2-3 page chapters or vignettes complete within themselves. They read like a collection of self-contained columns more than a traditional book length narrative with a cover-to-cover theme. This patchwork telling of some of her life’s most revealing and silly moments is told with all the hyperbolic hilarity of David Sedaris and the gritty self mocking of Charles Bukowski. Take for example, her description of an encounter with her friend Lary: When Lary shot at me the first time, I could tell he was secretly glad I didn’t die. It could have been an easy accident, my death, it could have been one of those ‘oh,fuck’ moments that happen in an eye blink that you spend the rest of your wretched life wishing you could take back. I mean, if you were a normal person. Lary, on the other hand, keeps wishing he could take back the moment in which his compassion led his aim astray.
Or the Marathon mass in London with her friend Laura: Then the priest glided in, all cloaked in sparkly curtains like a parade float, with a pointy hat, and before I knew it we were spending the next five thousand years doing knee bends while the priest bellowed in some language only Beowulf could understand.
As enjoyable as each chapter is to read and as tempting as it is to keep reading, this book is better read in short spurts. It’s the perfect companion to take with you to a doctor’s appointment, where her conversational tone will feel like a friend sitting next to you entertaining you with some of her best stories (complete with photographs). And of course like a friend’s stories, there are numerous repeats and catch phrases (like “Jesus God”). Even though you feel like you’ve heard this story before, it’s fun to hear again.
Like the story about Lary blaming her for a lost acid tablet. This is the same Lary who often offers to kill her when he thinks she’s feeling suicidal. Then there is out of the closet Grant who bought a crack house to convert into an art gallery called “Sister Louisa’s Worldly Possessions in the Church of the Living Room.” There are stories of lesbian ghosts and, of course, the man taking an “asshole stroll” who calls her a “bleachy haired honky bitch” because she almost ran over him. Her style is so conversational and familiar that by the end you feel that you know her and her friends better than you know your own.
Yet, with the good comes the bad. If you read too many chapters back to back, a predictable pattern becomes all too apparent. The structure of each vignette starts with an outlandish attention grabbing first sentence about something usually relating to a crazy friend or a dog or her parents or sometimes a complete stranger that leads into a semi-unrelated story (what amounts to a “that reminds me of the time”) from her own life. Then the story trickles down to the “funny but is really sad when you think about it” part that by the last paragraph uncovers a possible lesson in each absurd encounter.
The book is full of childhood memories that could all too easily have been pitched as a melodrama suitable for a Lifetime movie of the week, but with Gillespie’s healthy sense of humor, we get a laugh-out-loud appreciation of the shortcomings of her “just-this-side-of insane lunatics” family and friends. Still, through the affectionate parody, there is the obvious and raw regret, hurt, and fear. There were her parents’ failed dreams, fights, and divorce. There was regret over her father spending his dying days alone. And there is certainly an underline longing by the author to find a place to call home.
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch is a hilarious read. Most of us have been called a name or two in our time, but few have turned around and worn the label as proudly as Hollis Gillespie. Maybe this is a sign of the return of, “that vital woman, empowered with anger, wit, ruthless survival instincts—the bitch,” that Sarah Appleton Aguiar has written about in her book The Bitch Is Back. If so, I for one am pleased to welcome her home.Melody Clayton