Spring 2005
THE DIVINE SALT
by Peter Blair
Autumn House Press (2003) 64 pages
ISBN 0969941977, PoetryOne of the qualities I admire most in a poet is good judgment, and Peter Blair has it in ample supply. In The Divine Salt, Blair tackles a tough subject gracefully with poems about his experiences as an aide in the psychiatric ward of St. Francis Hospital in Pennsylvania.
His good judgment shows up first in the all-important choice of the opening poem, “Driving to Work,” which perfectly sets the tone of the collection. St. Francis Hospital/ looms above Bloomfield,/ two wings of burnt brick, its medieval/ spire a dark candle flame./ I’ve seared my mind in its heat:/ belted men to a steel bed/ . . . walked them/out of electroshock. . . With this passage, Blair establishes himself as both a participant and a witness to the inescapable emotional brutality of life—if you can call it that—in a psychiatric ward populated with characters who suffer from acute mental illness, are often tormented and sometimes violent.
As a witness, the author is always present in the poems, though he wisely keeps the focus on the subject—usually a patient—rather than himself. In doing so, he tells a ripping good narrative in language that is plain but compelling, while managing to keep enough emotional distance from his subjects to avoid melodrama. In “Donna Lee Polito,” the speaker is a psychiatric aide (the author, based on his bio), who escorts a female patient from one floor of the hospital to another. We learn that the patient has been improving, or so it appears: this is her first time off the locked floor/ in months. . ./ She’s tried suicide five times in three years. . ./ She’s been fine for weeks: helpful, bright, written on her chart. Confident of her cooperation, the aide is stunned when Donna Lee makes a break for it. He chases her down the street, but she gets away. From the eighth floor window, nurses watched/ her run, a tiny wavering figure, escaping/ all of us. . . She jumped this time,/ vaulting over the red railing from the high cement/ of the Bloomfield Bridge down/ to railroad tracks and scrubby trees.
The action and drama of the events depicted in Donna Lee’s rush to suicide are quite enough for the reader to handle without having the author report on his feelings. Assuming this is either a true story or based on real events, the author/narrator must have been devastated. Again, Blair has the good judgment to report the events objectively. It is only later, in “Lunch Break Between Wings,” that he chooses to let us see his remorse, and even here, he writes with commendable restraint: A cyclone of leaves and dust whirls/ . . . like the blinding/ restless grief// she must have felt on the bridge, high/ above the ragged treetops, Donna Lee,/ lost in the air// above the tracks. The rustling wind dusts my eyes. The passage ends with his too-late lament, Donna Lee, don’t leave.
In “St. Francis Night Shift,” Blair speaks directly to the irony of trying to help people who don’t want to be helped. I’m an aide, but who do I aid,/ holding a patient down,/ as the nurse peels off jeans and underwear/ to expose the white flank of buttock/ to the needle? In “Doctor Strong,” a code phrase for “patient is violent, we need help!” we learn that Blair is sometimes the one helped and at other times, the helper. Sometimes I am Dr. Strong: my hands pin elbows and forearms, or pry a patient’s hand from an aide’s neck.
I looked up the web site for St. Francis hospitals (there are many, all associated with the Catholic Order of St. Francis). One of their guiding principles is that they “never make inappropriate or negative remarks” about their patients. Though many of the characters in this collection behave quite badly—punching out the medical staff, screaming, soiling their sheets—Blair holds true to this Franciscan ideal throughout the book. Not once does he stoop to disparage those who are afflicted with mental illness.
The title poem bears an epigraph in which the author reminds us that St. Francis himself was sometimes “laughed at as a lunatic and driven away with many insults and stones.” In contrast, The Divine Salt regards the mentally ill with compassion and respect. St. Francis would have been pleased.Richard Allen Taylor
THE TRAIL WE LEAVE
by Ruben Palma, translated by Alexander Taylor
Curbstone Press (2004) 166 pages, $14.95
FictionRuben Palma’s biographical notes at the end of this book provide the theme upon which the stories read as variations. Born in Chile in 1954, the author moved, with the help of the Danish consul in Argentina, to Denmark twenty years later. The present collection brings a sequence of characters torn between a Latin American past and a Danish present.
Ours is an age of foreigners. Blond haired European countries are now dealing with cultural presences other than their own, and even the Swedish national soccer team includes a player named Ibrahimovich. As commonplace as foreignness has become, nobody is ever quite as impressed by the fact as the foreigner him- or herself, and Palma explores his own state of mind through the actions of his created characters.
The story, Carlos and Charlotte, finds Carlos torn between his Danish wife, Mette, and his Danish teacher, Charlotte. As he relates the complexities of shifting allegiances from one to the other, Palma reminds me of Czech novelist, Ivan Klima, who often weaves a subtle tale around infidelities. In Klima’s case, his work addresses the betrayal of trust between the people of his country and their pre-1989 government. The Ultimate Intimacy is a brilliant novel chronicling change and questions of trust through two characters, each of whom slips through the bonds of matrimony into what seems a deeper relationship. If Carlos had been a Dane, his role in Carlos and Charlotte would have been very different, and less evocative than is the case here. There is misunderstanding in Palma’s story, the result of an anonymous postcard sent by Charlotte in which she tells the recipient of her feelings even though he does not know who it is from. Charlotte’s loyalties are tugged back and forth as well as Carlos’, and without leaving her native country she, too, has to decide where, and with whom, she belongs.
The Return of Roy Jackson tells of a Columbian boy with childhood writing ambitions, who later ends up in Denmark and faces various conflicts as he tries to pursue his creative life. The story is lifted by Palma’s amusing observations (in the voice of a Spanish publisher) of what kind of Latin America a European audience would expect to read about: “. . . where families lived packed together under wretched circumstances, promiscuous relationships, where the brother went to work on the sister as soon as the parents fell asleep.” Palma’s plot here may be a bit contrived, but his points are well taken and expressed with a sense of humor,
In Adam and Shaha a Chilean meets a man from Bangladesh eager to declare his enthusiasm for Neruda; Edgardo and Teresa are two Chileans in Denmark quarrelling melodramatically; Zapatito is an odd looking Chilean for whom ping-pong becomes a language in itselt and throughout these and the other stories we find issues common to all heightened by the fact of foreignness. Of course, we are never far from the reasons the Chileans seek refuge in a cool, European climate, but the stories are not weighted down by politics.
The Trail We Leave is set, appropriately, in airports with Palma returning to Denmark from Chile. He hears, over the intercom, the name of a friend from way back. Zurita becomes a vehicle for Palma the author to explore how it feels to look both ways, back to Chile and ahead to Denmark, to childhood and to the life that awaits him when the plane touches down again, back at what has become home. This title story effectively weaves a path through the doubts and illusions that arise from living in a new country and then going back to visit the old one. It lays bare the feeling of being pulled in two directions at once that permeates the book, a feeling impossible to dispel.David Chorlton
A BOOK OF MINUTES
by Cathy Smith Bowers
Iris Press (2004) 77 pages, $13
ISBN 0-916078-58-2, PoetryCathy Smith Bowers’ third book of poetry, A Book of Minutes, is structured like the Book of Hours, a medieval prayer book. Those familiar with Bowers’ earlier work will discover her current departure from previous free-verse poems. The “minute” consists of 60 syllables (8,4,4,4 / 8,4,4,4, / 8,4,4,4) with rhymed couplets.
Nothing here is lost to brevity, for Bowers continues to be fully engaged with language. What is different is that, while she possesses the same skill in writing poems about relationships and loss, she is now using humor to move beyond what is often both frightening and painful. She is, at times, having fun with language and form, thus with the reader. It’s as if this form has provided her with a microscopic lens in which to examine even the everyday things—from the herb rosemary and the vegetable okra to parts of the human body. And if a lens enables one to see what is there, it also enables one to see what is not there. In the poem “Mystery of the Sphinx,” when asked to join in admiring a contented cat near a windowsill, the speaker says: I’d look up, too, but/ all I saw? Fat/ cat on a chair/ just lying there.
Along with the lighter verses in this collection are poems rich in depth and metaphor, such as “Flying to Sausalito with My Sisters”: In a cloud above the Badlands/ Rosie’s right hand/ newly bandaged./ Beside her, rage/ disguised tiny carcinoma/ grazing Trisha’s/ wrist. Under my/ arm the knot I’ve/ just discovered.
So much import in that one word “Badlands,” for it is indeed now the territory of these three sisters who are flying to visit their dying brother. There’s also the beautiful, poignant poem “When Beth Died” (dedicated to Rebecca McClanahan) that reveals how helpless one feels when someone dies, and how difficult it is also for those who wish to offer consolation: No cards, no casseroles. Just you/ at my closed door/ offering to/ do my nails. How/ tenderly you worked, as if in/ fear my fingers/ too might break.
In language as flowing as conversation, Bowers manages again and again to mold the words in service to the form. However, when asked if she always stuck faithfully to the form of the “minute,” Bowers said that while that was her intention, sometimes the poem had its own agenda and she’d defer to that.
To do them justice, all of Bowers’ poems need to be quoted in their entirety, but since that isn’t possible here, I urge you to read this book. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by the titles “For My Dog Who Listens to All My Poems” and “To St. Lucy of Syracuse, Protectress of Writers,” poems that might bring all writers who take themselves too seriously down a notch. Not bound by a specific number of syllables, the longer titles provide information that frees these short poems of such details. Sit and read until you arrive at that very last page where the illustration at the end contains a heart at its center, for that is exactly what this book is all about.Gail J. Peck
DWIGHT’S HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES
by Meredith Sue Willis
Hamilton Stone Editions, 186 Pages, $14.95
ISBN: 0-9714873-2-4, FictionPart of the current literary Appalachian Renaissance, Meredith Sue Willis is the author of seven previous books of fiction, including 2002’s Ordell at Sea, and the earlier novels Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, Trespassers. She has also written a short story collection, In the Mountains of America, a children’s book, and two books on writing.
Though Willis’ first two novels both took place in West Virginia, she now seems content to write about West Virginia from the remove of a state or two (Willis now lives in South Orange, New Jersey). In her fiction Willis employs an effective expatriate gambit, allowing the land that she obviously knows and loves to inform her writing, while at the same time immersing her characters in settings remote from her home state. As a result, an unstated longing for the crags of West Virginia permeates this collection, especially the title story.
Willis’ new book, Dwight’s House and Other Stories, includes a novella, and four short stories written in an eclectic array of styles. Willis is at her best in this collection when she alters our understanding of the world through an unusual perspective. In the wonderfully peculiar and very short story “Attack,” for instance, a man imagines a plane bombardment, or so we think. This story refreshingly never offers us a precise answer regarding what we experienced, and Willis permeates this story with a keen childlike imagination, a sense of the surrealistic.
The other stories in the collection are just as carefully rendered. In “Another Perversion,” a pedophile recounts his first love—a boy he met at a camp of all faiths in West Virginia. Here Willis allows her first person narrator to recount his story in the third person, as if the narrator denies the confessional nature of this story altogether. It is a harrowing brand of fiction.
“Tales of the Abstract Expressionists” is perhaps the tightest story of the collection. In this story, fourteen-year-old Alina walks the dog of an old half-blind elderly neighbor. Alina is a teary-eyed ex-hanger-on of the group of 50’s Abstract Expressionist painters including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and De Kooning. At one time Alina worshipped a lesser known (and presumably fictional) artist of the group by the name of Robert Outrey. Over the course of the story we find out that Outrey shattered her heart and her spirit, too, but what makes this story special is the narrator’s growth that parallels Alina’s spiraling story.
The title novella is a marvel that successfully experiments with point of view, rapidly gyrating between the four main characters in the piece—Dwight, Fern, Susan, and Elaine. Willis pulls off this exhilarating As I Lay Dying technique quite nicely, managing to probe the inner states of each character, as well as allowing the innate conflict to surface in an almost organic fashion. Within a rustic Massachusetts setting, Willis introduces us to Dwight, an abusive and malicious man from West Virginia who envies the sleek modern cabin of the Jewish couple by the lake; his withdrawn wife Susan; Fern, who hates her stepfather; and Elaine, the neighbor who has retreated to her lakeside cabin to come to terms with the lump in her breast. In superbly piercing, almost brittle prose, the story ultimately manages to portray class conflict, the roots of anti-Semitism, the consequences of adultery, as well as render a family’s freefall.
In Dwight’s House and Other Stories, Meredith Sue Willis’ eclecticism and layered prose releases us from the moorings of “regional fiction.” This is a significant book from an accomplished author much deserving of a wider readership.Nathan Leslie
LIFE AS A WEED: MEDITATIONS ON PLANTS UNBIDDEN
by Ken Burrows
Whitney Press, Inc. (2004) 236 pages
ISBN 1-932155-46-5, NonfictionKen Burrows’ book, Life as a Weed: Meditations on Plants Unbidden, reads as if John Clease’s high wit merged with Henry David Thoreau’s earthiness, and then it invited Joseph Campbell and Jon Stewart over for a party. This serves, then, as a warning not to be surprised how a book about weeds will make you laugh, ponder, rub your forehead as you try to remember the mythology you should have learned. You’ll wonder why your parents never told you the real story about mistletoe.
Many of us may be lucky enough to know a master gardener who doesn’t make us experience a dose of botanical embarrassment just because we can’t distinguish a dandelion from a pansy. This book also doesn’t condescend. Burrows informs the reader about the particular nuances of a whole host of plants and weeds, and by the time you’re through each chapter, you have empathy for their misunderstood history, past, present, and future.
Burrows writes, “[o]ur weed policies are determined by developers and planners and garden columnists in newspapers (who are all, I think, closely linked to Homeland Security) who behave as though we really want a world perpetually weed free, all green lawns, regimented shrubs, well-behaved annuals, decorative and disinfected mulch and marble chips, eternally, synthetically neat like a cemetery. But though we go along with the plan for suburban innocuousness, I know all is not lost. There’s a bit of wild in weeds, and even though America the Synthetically Beautiful has dedicated itself to reducing all space to pavement, shopping malls, and ‘landscaped’ symmetry, I suspect in the end the plan will fail. There is a powerful underground ready to burst out of the slightest loosening of vigilance, and they have a surprising number of sympathizers. The FBI, or whoever is in charge of garden security, backed by the lawn mower, herbicide, fertilizer, and greenhouse lobbies, will quickly remind you that most weeds—in fact, probably most all—are illegal immigrants and have no business being here anyway, as if this justifies the persecution and cleansing that characterizes the modern suburban yard.”
While Burrows pokes fun, the book also showcases intricate, helps-to-identify-illustrations by Ed Perzel, a retired Associate Dean from the University of North at Charlotte, whose watercolors can be seen in Ashe County, North Carolina. The illustrations are a wonderful addition to the witty portrayal of plants and weeds that were explored, examined, and exalted by Burrows, without having been asked.Julie E. Townsend
THE LEVELLING WIND
by Kell Robertson
Pathwise Press (2004) 47 pages, $5.35
PoetryI have to level with you—I’m not familiar with Kell Robertson’s earlier works. I’ve seen a short interview with him and a few scattered poems here and there, but for the most part I come to The Levelling Wind with little previous knowledge of his work or prejudice about it.
That said, I’m here to testify to the power and emotion generated by these twenty-seven poems, personal accounts or perhaps fantasies from an aging cowboy poet who is appalled at what the world has become. Robertson’s title comes from a quote by William Butler Yeats, but Robertson’s poems are as far as you can get from academe. These are gritty accounts of life lived at ground level—in bars, cheap motels, in the saddle, the nursing home, the death chamber.
He begins, in “Return,” with the lines I’m turning into a language/ forgotten a million years ago and concludes that that language is incomprehensible to me/ and crazed to everyone else. In a longer poem, “The Old Man Goes Home,” he talks about visiting the place where his granddad’s Kansas farm once was, now a shopping center: all this asphalt and concrete/ plastic and steel. The security guard asks, what I’m doing here if I’m not/ going to buy anything.
Robertson is also described as a singer-songwriter and four of the poems included here are titled simply “Song.” The first invokes Hank Williams’ barroom blues and concludes all of the noises heard in the dark/aren’t imaginary. The second begins I heard a song once/ out of the wind of a Kansas prairie but a happy song it’s not, and Robertson concludes it never stops blowing/ a hard wind through/ what’s left of me now. That wind also blows through the other two songs.
There’s a bit of grim humor in poems like “Easter 1983” and “Compassion Is No Longer” but for the most part Robertson is deadly serious as befits his subjects. In a four-page prose poem Robertson describes life in a homeless shelter at Christmas time—more grim humor but also a reflection of his determination to carry on no matter what hand he’s dealt. He concludes with five “Mountain Songs,” the last of which begins like Yeats I’d sing in my bones/ as age turns them brittle and ends with the hope he’ll wear a grin/ and a foolish look, leaping/ for the love in myself/ and the senseless rabbits.
The Levelling Wind is a series of level-headed looks at life on the street and in the saddle, a sometimes bitter look at how the world has changed for an old cowboy poet. I guess I can identify with that, not as a cowboy, but as another aging poet who despairs at what the world has become. Despite all that, Kell Robertson is a gifted poet and The Levelling Wind is a highly recommended read.
Neal Wilgus
MY SUMMER VACATION: POEMS 1994-2004
by Kevin Keck
M2 Press (2004) 69 pages, $10
ISBN 0-9707802-1-4, PoetryKevin Keck’s poetry collection My Summer Vacation: Poems 1994-2004 bursts open your expectations, kicks in the door to your psyche, and makes itself at home, back from some lurid camp experience and needing like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to tell you all about it. Keck’s subjects, though ranging, all connect in a deep sense of wanting.
There’s the character J. who wants to be loved like a rock star and who would do whatever it takes/ to have nubile Belgian girls with retainers plaster his face/ over their beds. In “J. (two),” J. envying bankers wants all this/ for himself, the numbers, the abstraction of a whole/ greater than the sum of its parts. The speaker in “Leaving for Syracuse” wants to wither/ back into bed, slip the covers over [his] head/ and forget about going. A serial killer wants brunettes. A husband and father wants an end to night terrors. Or consider the lover who wants to be notoriously something.
And perhaps it is this undefined want with sexual implications that best reveals Keck’s muse, a poetic of the sensual but also the bittersweet sands of life shifting between our grasping fingers. It is no accident that one of his poems is entitled “Archeology” and another one “The Archeologist.” He digs into the emotion of our wants. Perhaps also not coincidentally, the images of a tooth or teeth reoccur in several poems, rooted images: the story sucked from your tooth or a note of authenticity, like a crooked tooth. And tellingly in “Meditation,” the speaker is melted by a meteor, Except/ for one molar, plucked from the singed// soil by a boy . . . he one day/ chucks it into the Mississippi where it careens/ to the Delta, building up, however little, this world.
But most importantly, these poems collected over a decade, like the molar building the delta, grab the reader, engage the reader, call to the reader to be read again and again, from the uproarious “Poem Assembled from a Lover’s Emails” to the devastating “Winter Pastoral” where He could have been going anywhere. Home, work,/ to the place where what we no longer want or need/ is sifted and spilled into a great river of broken/ things, and things which no longer matter.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
