BOYS
by David Lloyd
Syracuse Univ. Press, 192 pages, cloth, $22.95
ISBN 0-8156-0797-0

Remember jr. high? Remember the pain of wanting to be accepted, especially if you were the new kid at school? If so, Boys is bound to please. This is a small volume, indeed much too small. It gives us a novella and a dozen short stories about adolescent boys in the ’60s in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Upstate New York.

Lloyd succeeds in a way so many fiction writers do not. He fleshes out his characters beautifully and makes each story alive with a richness of emotional and physical details. We feel what the boys feel, and that’s a trip—a trip back in time.

In most instances Lloyd chooses a first person narrator and the opening lines pull the reader right in. For example, The first time I saw someone get kicked in the face was by the steps leading to the front doors of the school. I was heading to the bike rack to meet up with Joey and Frank…

Or, Miss Hart likes sneaking in stories that don’t have anything to do with what she’s been talking about a minute before and sometimes don’t make many sense at all. A few of her stories are pretty good, like the one about the man living in the whale…But others are just not believable.

Lloyd’s skill at putting us in the psyche of an adolescent boy is so good that readers will want a novel instead of a novella—and more than likely Lloyd will deliver, for this book evidences a fiction talent having fun with fiction. He’s authored two previous books, both poetry.

The novella, Boys Only, is the book’s gem. It gives us the world of one boy’s consciousness and a peek into three households. In just over 80 pages Lloyd gives us the woes of family life, the heartache of a romance that never moves past fantasy, the misery of a busted friendship, and the terrible loneliness of wanting to be accepted. This author creates the total reality of the boys’ lives, including violence. Get ready to chew your nails.

Barbara K. Lawing

SAYING THESE THINGS
by Ronald Moran
Clemson University Digital Press (2004) 76 pages, $15.00
ISBN 0-9741516-6-1, Poetry

Ronald Moran’s book of poems is of the best kind—a selection of works written over a long period of time (not a chapbook forced to fit a theme or written to meet a deadline). The 65 poems evidence Moran’s wittiness and bewilderment, sorrow and delight, as he absorbs everyday life.

True to expectation with such a wide-ranging collection, the reader enjoys an intimate visit with an individual consciousness—in this case a man a long time married and a long time on the faculty of Clemson University’s English Department. He recently retired. His poems look like traditional poems, with symmetrical stanzas and lines, but they do not rhyme. They are contemporary in spirit and subject: first use of the Medicare card, a visit to a Toyota dealership, a stranger stopping to ask ‘Have you accepted Christ?’

Many of the best poems invoke the ghosts of his loved ones. In “Night Passage”: I leaned over the railing/ of a huge ship at anchor./ My father was in the water./ I called down, Is it cold?/ He said, No, in someone’s/ voice I did not recognize.

In “Directions in the Car” Moran lays out the situation in the first stanza: his mom gives his dad directions on where to turn and soon they’re yelling at each other. The concluding stanza: I was in the back seat alone,/ the only child of parents/ whose love took such turns/ I never knew where they were.

“Behind Home Plate” gives an exceptionally clever portrayal of the coming of Mr. Death. “Weddings,” one of the best poems in the book, shows a husband and wife passing each other in the bedroom during the night: dark, close quarters/ for sleepers on the move. This poem and two or three others let the reader glimpse private moments between a man and woman who’ve been married for many years. Love pictures, snapped at ordinary moments.

A full-text digital version of the book is available: www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp

Barbara K. Lawing

BARB QUILL DOWN
by Bill Griffin
Pudding House Publications (2004) 36 pages, $8.95
ISBN 1-58998-256-8, Poetry

In his chapbook Barb Quill Down Bill Griffin offers us the paradox that the avian world represents— the majestic but dangerous, melodic but cacophonous world of grackles, goldfinches, magpies, pelicans. He contemplates these birds in a range of verse forms as diverse as the birds themselves and with the observant eye of the experienced birder who is not content with just noticing Peterson’s field markings, the thrush’s “russet breast, / the signatures of your evening cowl.” Instead Griffin favors “the hidden marks,” the “pale tips on twin tail feathers / only shown when you fan for balance.” (“Friend”)

These poems are marked by the tensions of a world filled with both euphony (“an endless garland / of winter cormorants solemnly wreathes / this solstice vision”) and cacophony (“the whicker cluck of the wood hen . . . it red knot and stocky black body.”) Griffin’s birds participate in the wonder of flight—”a ballet of black wings” with “creature and creation joined / in eddy and flux for this one moment”— yet are subject to the brutality of natural and mechanical predators. A Canada gosling may be “one minute all down & punk & pursuing gape” and then “the next minute opened like a meat counter specialty” by a car.

Perhaps the poem “Something Real” captures what is best about Griffin’s paradoxes. It includes his typical ornithological precision— a speaker discovering the remnants of a bird in the form of three feathers, “primaries grey-limned blue,” to be exact—but also metaphysical reflection: “Three feathers at rest on her pillow, / sky brought low as blue-limned grey / and holding a place / for something real.”

In this poem, Griffin also creates a tension between brutality and song. The speaker catalogues the hazards that might have destroyed the bird— “feral housecats, collisions with chrome, / the foul exhale of combustion and speed”— but follows these lines with his best elegiac music: “something real / in my unanswered cry, / as real as a flightless soul brought low / by keen teeth of loss, the laceration of grief, / bleeding alone.”

Janice Fuller

 

JASPER
by Michelle Groce
Novello Festival Press (2002) 174 pages, $17.95
ISBN 0-9708972-6-X, Fiction

The reluctant hero and title character of Michelle Groce’s novel Jasper is a stray cat that has had his run-ins with “the Chow and the Chevy Malibu” and as the book opens loses the boy caring for him when the boy’s family moves away. Though Jasper the cat can talk to other animals—dogs, cats, an owl, a possum—this, thankfully, isn’t a Homeward Bound-like tale of Jasper’s quest to find the relocated boy, but rather an internal journey.

Jasper, living in his abandoned tree fort, surviving off handouts and what he can scrounge, thinks what he really wants is the easy life: a human to give him food, shelter, and attention. Having lived in the wild, Jasper has formed a bond with the moon, the cat’s spiritual touchstone, and also developed a unique power to see glimpses of future tragic events. Joined with an owl called Hank, who can read people’s thoughts or moods, Jasper tries to change these events.

Complicating matters, some of these potential threats happen to creatures that openly hate or wish Jasper harm. He has to save a dog that has bitten his tail and a man who wants him dead and who has attacked his friend Hank. This tension between doing the right thing and seeking what is in one’s own self-interest drives the novel. Once Jasper finds a home, he has to choose between freedom and security, between helping others and helping himself. Though Jasper braves ferocious dogs, poisonous snakes, and malevolent humans, self-pity is his true enemy.

The novel is categorized as Young Adult, and it is certainly appropriate for that audience, with clear and simple prose, with the genre-staple anthropomorphizing, and with an appropriate message: “You don’t do what you do to make others be nice to you.” Groce also wisely gives a wide range of emotions, filling her characters out with flaws and having them face real tragedy.

All ages can enjoy the cat’s eye view of the world, where a man with a potbelly “resembled a turtle, only instead of carrying his shell on his back, the big man carried it in front.” The relationship between Hank, the “unworldly” and literally minded owl, and Jasper, the street smart and self-serving cat provides opportunity not only for growth but humor. A fellow cat worries about Jasper hanging out with Hank: “A great horned owl. He could take your head off!” Hank replies, “I don’t think so . . . Jasper has quite a large head for his body. See how thick his neck is?” And so, Jasper has even wider appeal.

S. Craig Renfroe

 

PETITIONS FOR IMMORTALITY:
Scenes from the life of John Keats
by Robert Cooperman
Higganum Hill Books (2003) 64 pages, $12.95
ISBN 09351850-X, Poetry

In Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from the life of John Keats, Robert Cooperman portrays Keats’s life using not only the persona of Keats but his brother, friends, would-be lovers and more in poems entitled things like “Mrs. Francis Brawne Welcomes John Keats Into Her Home.” We begin at the deathbed of Keats’s mother, setting the tone for the appropriately mortality obsessed volume. We move through Keats’s struggle to reject surgery for poetry, on to his turbulent career and love life, to his untimely death, and a little beyond to his legacy.

The book’s title comes from Cooperman’s “Wordsworth Remembers His First Meeting with Keats: London, December, 1817.” And in the last stanza, he has Wordsworth say, Later, I recited my “Ballad of Rob Roy,” / a nudge in the right direction. / Let Scott try, in five hundred pages, / to get the times and the man better / than I did in a few perfect lines. Clearly, this sentiment could speak to Cooperman’s own project. It’s later revealed that Wordsworth had a colossal ego, and so let’s hope the irony is intended. Though the task is Sisyphean, Cooperman does get us closer to the man behind his immortalized representations.

Cooperman uses an almost documentary style to capture Keats and his time, shifting from one persona to another, giving Keats and those who knew him a voice. Cooperman also employs clever documentary-like editing, ending one poem with a topic that the next poem takes up, or having the same event rendered through two different perspectives. This last strategy is put to best effect in two poems on Keats and Coleridge meeting. Each legendary poet sizes up the other and at the same time exposes his own foibles to the reader. In fact, part of the joy of the book is the literary gossip, hearing Keats complain, for example, that the most popular poet of the time is the scandalous Byron.

The voices in the poems; however, have inherent problems with the blend of contemporary style and a more formal and archaic language of the era. The diction creates uneasy word choices like “coquette” and worse “poetasters.” And Cooperman repeats period images, which might have worked if the same person repeated them, but when separate characters have similar similes—like enraged mastiffs and like a chained mastiff—it feels like setting shorthand. But as Cooperman’s Keats points out, If critics could kill with a quill’s flick, / not a poet would be left alive.

You don’t have to be familiar with Keats’s life or his work beyond remembering him as one of the great Romantic poets, but the more you know the more these often stirring poems give.

S. Craig Renfroe

 

KRYPTON NIGHTS
by Bryan D. Dietrich
Zoo Press (2002) 54 pages
ISBN: 1-932023-00-3, Poetry

In Krypton Nights, Bryan D. Dietrich doesn’t merely allude to popular culture; he wears it like a mask, and he uses this assumed identity to plunge into deeper meditations on what is mythic and what is religious. As such, Krypton Nights can be enjoyed on two separate levels— it’s a collection of comic book character persona poems, yet Dietrich uses the voices of Superman, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Jor-El as ways to examine divinity and the complexities of the greater world.

There is a strange duality in Krypton Nights. As readers, most of us know, or have heard of, Superman and his charisma and integrity. Strangely enough, when any level of humanity is breathed into him, the results are hilarious. Who would have ever thought Superman had a sex life, or even a lot of anxieties? Through Dietrich, Superman can be seen as a comic, but very human figure— not the steadfast alien savior protecting everybody from nefarious villains or, as one movie suggests, impending nuclear disaster.

If Bryan D. Dietrich had focused solely on humanizing Clark Kent and Superman, Krypton Nights would have been nothing more than a graphic novel rendered in words and line breaks. Still, once Dietrich has made a reader comfortable with a persona, he then shifts into philosophical and theological matters, but doing so in a subtle matter. After all, it isn’t the poet directly referencing Moses, Jesus, Methuselah, and others; it’s the characters he’s speaking through.

Amazingly, Dietrich achieves this while staying 100% true to voices he borrows. Krypton Nights suggests a life time of reading and learning. Perhaps this is due to the need for a myth, a story or a persona to explain the greater complications around us? After all, abstracted speeches or sermons do nothing to retain one’s attention, but when the same message is clothed in an outrageous personality, it is hard to be turned off.

Rich Ristow

 

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
AND THE RUIN OF THE WORLD
by Paul Guest
New Issues (2003) 94 pages
ISBN: 1-930974-27-2, Poetry

Paul Guest’s lyricism ranges from mystical to self deprecation and sarcasm, and his The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World traverses a great distance. The collection is able to reference, among others, Godzilla, the poet’s disability, science, and much more. The mysticism doesn’t really come off as subject matter, but rather how the poet treats his subject matter.

In “Invocation to Destructive Muses,” Guest writes, Our poet writes for hours in the myth of quiet: / interruptions pile up like debris. Earthquakes happen. / They are canceled. Tsunamis lap under doors. / Sponged up. Beach Boys die. The poet feels bad / but not too bad. This is from a poem where the first seven words are, Be it Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Yet, of all the imagery of violent destruction, the persona of the poet starts peeking through, and Guest’s particular talent is taking things that wouldn’t ordinarily fit together, and making them work naturally.

Other entries into Guest’s first book are bluntly personal. “For a Long time I Have Wanted to Write a Handi-Capable Poem” best illustrates Guest’s refusal to fall into a self-pity trap. He doesn’t wave his disability in front of the reader, he just assumes his wheel chair is part of who he is. With that in mind, he chafes at disability political correctness: ... if I were the militant type, and I’m not, I might join / my brothers and sisters in disabledom and chain myself / in solidarity / to the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven, but they’re idiots, / and I’d rather have a super-size grape Slurpee any day. / God, I’ve fallen into a cranky orbit. The poem also describes failed attempts to pick up women in bars as well as speaking at a conference entitled “Transitioning the Adolescent Disabled into Adulthood.”

Lines like these do well to balance the collection against its richly textured imagery. More importantly, lines like these, and the rest of the book, work hard to present a solidly original voice.

Rich Ristow

 

ZOO MUSIC
by William D. Waltz
Slope Editions (2004)
ISBN: 0-9718219-4-1, Poetry

Often, reading surreal or Dadaist verse seems like an esoteric exercise. Art is there, but the voice comes off as mechanical, almost as if a randomizing computer program threw words, sentences, and paragraphs into a blender and called the results “poetry”— it’s hard to treat a lot of experimental verse as anything other than an intellectual puzzle. With that in mind, William D. Waltz provides a refreshing new take on Dadaism with Zoo Music. Waltz seems akin to the automatic writings of Tzara and Breton, but the poems themselves mostly work as monologues.

In “Daytrip,” Waltz writes: Gotham occupies an itchy corner of desire. / From this dull vantage one can barely make out / the utilitarian skyscrapers or the double crane / cresting over a small pond of hillocks. For all the density of the language, Waltz still manages a sort of simplicity suggesting these lines could be spoken aloud. The metaphors and strange modifiers have a breathing quality to it.

Contrast that, however, with some of Waltz’s weaker moments— ones teetering dangerously close to word salad, like “Emergency Broadcasting System”: My antenna farm tingles / opposite stockyards / when anvil-headed thunder rolls // like doomed boulders ... Good letter sounds— like the t’s and s’s— are here, and modifiers force some nouns into surreality. After all, it’s not just a regular boulder, but a “doomed boulder.” Or, instead of the regular farm, it’s an “antenna farm.” These poems linger close to the randomness of Naked Lunch and all the literature that inspired.

Waltz has a weird sense for image, and that is one of the strongest aspects of Zoo Music. For all the avant-garde and dada trappings, he offers more. There’s an overriding aesthetic at work, but Waltz knows to vary his form, in terms of his line breaks, indentations, and prose poems. Towards the end of the book, he even makes use of the “lyric essay,” that strange cousin of prose poetry. This inherent variety keeps the overall language fracturing from getting stale.

Rich Ristow

SATISFIED WITH HAVOC
by Jo McDougall
Autumn House Press (2004) 70 pages, $14.95
ISBN 0966941993, Poetry

In her new collection of poetry, Jo McDougall is concerned with loss and with the meaning of loss. Her poems lament sickness, the death of a daughter and the tangible process of aging. She addresses her topics without ever becoming either maudlin or trivial. Indeed, in these brief poems McDougall walks a tight rope over the traps of sentimentality and flat statement. Her skill is illustrated in the complete four-line poem, “Visiting My Daughter.” In the poem, she employs an off rhyme with great effect. She writes, For weeks/I visited every day,/ drawn to that fresh rise,/the blister of your grave.

Such apparent effortlessness is McDougall’s greatest strength. Her poems are subtle, while still being simple and direct. She writes a type of notational free verse, where just enough details are given to the reader. In the poem, “Straightpins”, she allows a common object to serve as a starting point for a meditation on dying. She tells how the young know, nothing then of nothingness/or pain or loss. The poem creates a world where, The old did not die/but simply vanished/like discs of snow on our tongues.

Many of these poems might remind the reader of the work of Thomas McGrath and Raymond Carver. As with each of those poets, McDougall shares a commitment to everyday language and a love of the ordinary. However, McDougall avoids McGrath’s politicizing and her work is far less narrative than Carver’s.

McDougall’s work is narrative only in the way that it tells the story of a specific place. In her case, the place is rural Arkansas. In one of the finest poems in the book, “The Boys From Brewer Bottoms”, McDougall writes one of the best football poems of recent memory. The poem concerns a football team made up of backwoods boys who, were handsome and polite,/respected their elders,/could crack a man’s back,/their blue eyes smiling.

The meaning behind every poem in this new collection can be gathered from a first reading. So many people who don’t read poetry complain about the allusiveness and obscurity of modern poets. McDougall travels over no symbolist trails. Readers who enjoy reading a newspaper will enjoy Satisfied with Havoc. It cuts to the point.

Mike James