(NYQ Books, 2014)
reviewed by Justin Hamm
Okla Elliott’s The Cartographer’s Ink begins with an invocation of a certain light. “The Light Here,” we’re told,
[…] is a light that yellows the periphery.
It is not a light that brightens the center.
It is mixed from an overcast morning
and the electric urban dust.
Such light sounds familiar. At first, perhaps, it seems like it could be the light from a Caravaggio painting illuminating the gritty beauty of its subjects. But no, that isn’t quite right.
Read on and it sinks in. Maybe the source is different, but this light is the light of an old Russian novel, of something written by Dostoevsky. It is a light of melancholy and seriousness, and the whole of The Cartographer’s Ink seems bathed in it—from Tesla, who in “In the Days of New Wonder” watches a brown bear through an open window and sees death, to the landmine that lies in wait and “dreams/the echoing boom/and the wet bloom of meat and bone” to the phone booth in Mannheim, with its “Soot—film on the glass,/the pollution so thick in this city.”
Elliott incorporates a world map’s worth of locations and an entire history book of time periods into the collection, but the light remains the same, and ultimately we come to see it as the light under which things appear most as they are. This is just one of the aspects of the book that holds it together and makes it more than simply a gathering of strong poems.
There are others. Also built into its architecture is a recurring exploration of the life of the mind and the difficulty in reaching an ideal that is out of range—from the aforementioned Tesla to “The Man Who Named Bees,” who shows delicate interest in his field of study but “at night, he slept / beside his wife, / whom he wanted to love / more generously,” to the speaker in “I Want to Be a Buddhist—Or Reading Heidegger Midly Hung-over” who tells us, “I want to be a Buddhist but I can’t because I like whiskey / more than enlightenment.”
Elliott is especially exciting at a line level. He manages to surprise with the phrasing of his lines, but they are built of a readable lexicon, too. There is a playfulness, certainly, but no trickery. The images are clear and imaginative and sometimes hilariously bawdy, as in “A Hot Minute,” when the speaker tells us “I’m facedown on your front lawn, / my eyelids flame-red membranes.” Consider, too, this description from “Shibboleth, Beginning and Ending with Lines from Kim Ch un-Su,” which shows Elliott’s mixture of inventiveness and clarity:
Like cracked brick, like pristine anarchy,
we sprawl on this carpet, my rough fingers
in your hair.
At other times Elliott can be gorgeously plainspoken, such as in the opening lines describing the fish in “Nightfishing”:
By the beam of a plastic flashlight,
I saw the torn shadow
of a carp flopping hard against
the boat’s metal bottom […]
Section II of The Cartographer’s Ink is occupied solely by the long narrative poem “Emerging from Clouds.” The strongest and most intimate poem in the collection, it tells the story of the end of an affair through an accumulation of tiny, perfectly-arranged details that grow into scenes and recollections. There is simplicity to the language in the poem that seems meant to evoke the language of fairy tales, which Elliot uses metaphorically to emphasize that, while the relationship described seems like a simple, happy fantasy, betrayal lay beneath:
That wasn’t the only meeting Lela and I had.
During my office hours back in Mannheim
one week when she was able to escape Dr. Kowalski:
another time, after a reading she gave in Heidelberg;
and again in the rank, cramped space
of a train restroom
The reality of the betrayal is a gut-punch to the reader. As the poem closes, it swells with the impending pain this couple will face, and Elliott wisely leaves us there, imagining the terrible confession.
It is one of many wise moves Elliot makes in The Cartographer’s Ink. In all, the collection comes off as skillful, as weighty and moving. It manages to travel across the map and through time without feeling the least bit scattered. Instead, it allows us to see Elliott’s particular light and the truth of whatever that light lands upon.
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
reviewed by Gary Dop
Charles Harper Webb’s poems pulse with comedy and wit, but the distinguishing feature of his latest collection, What Things Are Made Of, is his unflinching, honest study of contemporary life. Void of contemporary niceties, Webb’s book tackles the things of our lives. With all his usual humor and ease, Webb writes of our simplicity: “Brains hold tight to what they think helps them survive—”
Although this statement could be dropped into a thesis on cognition—familiar territory for Webb, a PhD in psychology—the line is included in Webb’s inquiry into Jackass: The Movie. Here, he navigates the oddness of remembering the ridiculous film and failing to remember loftier material. The line itself may as well serve as the motto for Webb’s critique of contemporary culture. What Things Are Made Of suggests that so much of how we are taught to survive in the world is based on clumsy survival mechanisms and social ruses.
Webb, the humorist provocateur, playfully dismantles our constructions and returns us to our simplest things—pleasure, taste, our historical moment. What other 21st century poet would dare to cry out, “I adore my privileged American life!” In “At Lamaze,” where the above line appears, Webb is not employing the privilege buzzword to tackle its expected associations of race, class, or gender, but he also does not shy away from acknowledging and celebrating the benefits of American life. Most other poets would feel obligated to soften their exclamation, to feign a sense of the humility in recognizing an unjust world. Webb, however, finds the moment where false humility is unwelcome and where a singular voice drops pretension in order to fully appreciate a good thing.
Webb knows that the father in a Lamaze class celebrating life—via yoga, sitcoms, and electric garage doors—cannot suddenly consider the larger world. The father says, “Forget global warming and overpopulization,” and this is not meant to dismiss the world, but to present the honesty of a father—and, of course, to make us laugh. The father rejects everything that hinders celebrating what he now sees: how fortunate he is to have modern medicine that insures his child and wife will survive delivery and that, years ago, insured his own survival through a difficult birth. There is no space here for the father to give an aside to the troubles of others. This is unfiltered fatherhood, a man consumed with one family and survival. The poem closes: “I know for sure I’ve won life’s lottery,” and we find no lingering falsity or superiority, only unhinged appreciation, gratitude.
This freedom is refreshing, and nowhere is it on greater display than in the collection’s opening piece, “Nostalgia’s Not What It Used to Be.” The poem, a burst of Webb at his most sardonic, considers the ice cream truck from a postmodern literary theorist’s vantage, but rather than applying a theoretical lens to the ice cream truck, Webb applies a full catalog of postmodern lenses, which ultimately serve as absurdist mockery, and one might say, deconstruction, of postmodern theory:
The products sold reinforced a Capitalist hegemony—
Fudgesicle (racist), Eskimo (not Inuit) Pies, Torpedo
(military-industrial imperialist), Popsicle (no Momsicle), etc.
The sugar in our treats deconstructed sweetness into cavities,
obesity, diabetes. The (always) man in (always) white—
who pulled, from the back of his condensation-smoking-truck,
products iced with polluted air which our tongues melted,
loving the cold jolt—may have been a child-molester,
exploited immigrant, or untreated dyslexic.
Webb rejects the expected angle—the inclusive delicacies of politicized criticism—to show that clunky theory can steal us from, well, the ice cream. Thankfully, his poems end with more than a dismantling; Webb regularly pushes toward the thing that matters, the taste that is good.
In “Bimbo Limbo,” for example, we laugh our way through his lusty recollection of ex-girlfriends. Here we receive the untethered male gaze without the filter of 21st century pleasantries, which provides a more honest platform from which the poem can spring to its truer aim, our mortality. His bimbos, we learn, have been lost to the likes of “breast cancer, car wreck, some disease I’ve never heard of,” and it would be false to pretend that the speaker’s memories are more heightened than “Britney’s heavenly thighs” and Jessica in cutoffs. This is a poem, after all, about the dying human, an animal, and the animal need not pretend virtue when considering those like him who are, “keeping heads out of the river, enjoying the swim / and view, though the current’s picking up.”
There are other poets, no doubt, who venture down these waters, but Webb, ever the adventurer, takes the unexpected branch. Suddenly these ample bimbos in Catholic limbo have semantically freed Webb to shift celestial limbo to the venue for bimbos doing the limbo—“How low can you go?”—for his speaker’s satisfaction. Even here, Webb can’t end with absurdity. The poem closes with a stanza to elevate the memory, the hope, the loss, and the bimbos, who are no longer objectified figures, but have become catalysts for the thing that matters:
A place where that happens can’t be too far
From heaven, especially if my old girlfriends are there,
God being Beauty, after all, God being love.
This is this poet laughing and smiling, not the poet believing in God and the afterlife. Webb finishes his trek with the honest, corrected memory, the realization that the experiences lost, imperfect as they may be—the experiences we’re all going to lose when we slip under the current—are among the supreme things, the fullness of beauty and fleeting love. This poem, and the whole of What Things Are Made Of, reminds us that an honest angle and a laugh are at the core of things that keep us alive.
(Elixir Press, 2013)
reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb
Antarctica, the expanse of ice, the blues and whites, the temperatures with their sustained lows, the wilderness and wild that is there—seals, petrels, terns—and the humans who wrap themselves in layers of down to work and study in an unforgiving environment, a place of surprising life and obvious death: this is what Susan Allspaw’s first book of poetry, Little Oblivion, would have us consider.
Allspaw tells us, in her poem, “Burial,” that “the ice is trying / to tell me a secret it’s been keeping // for years.” That’s a clue to these poems, free verse poems that exhibit moments of narrative, though the real story is Allspaw’s examination of ice as “other,” of place as mystery, of landscape as the story-teller and mirror for what haunts and intrigues her. For Allspaw, this ice and landscape is father, mirror, and companion. We’re not just reading a poetry of place, of ecology, but a navigation of map and meaning, a reflection of “our nakedness as wonderful as icebergs.”
That nakedness is how we get to the overarching feeling—longing, for both meaning and connectedness—that dominates these poems. A poem early in the book, “Heading into Dion Island, Antarctica,” starts us on our journey to the ice—though to enter this challenging landscape, we must also recognize what we’re leaving—on a mission to count penguins and eggs.
Twenty centimeters of ice below the bow,
seven knots, and the barometer falls on us like bad news.
Yes, the good news is behind us. Yet, this adventure is a letter to her father, a man no longer with her. “Writing the dead is not easy,” she says, cleverly writing both to and about “the dead” in this case. “Pity dead fathers / can’t see us trawling for science, wanting to write home,” and we’re in Allspaw’s landscape, the place of craft and examination where she tells us about so many delicate things at once, recounting the science, her concrete mission, but linking to longing, to the human grasp of what’s already gone and can’t be regained, no matter how intelligent the writer or scientist.
[…] Dad, the sun rises in the north here, and the Southern Cross
is pointing with us, south, where we will census
what hasn’t been born yet. I can’t reach him through the salt water.
Sea smoke, my father. Brash churned with tide.
We experience the place, the past, an address to a father, but then the first-person brings us back to reality, to the more abrupt present. The voice of the letter, this story-teller attempting to send mail, faces the constraints, the reality, of this unforgiving place, of life. The tide and ice and water become both her father and the barricade that prevents her from reaching him. Allspaw has guided us to this lonely and poignant ambiguity.
Allspaw, who serves as support for the US Antarctic Program, is in the grip of that paradox. In the poem, “Weightlessness in a Red Parka,” she writes: “I walked on water / for hours. I lay in a seal’s old cradle, ready to curl up / for my own hibernation.” There is an almost religious attachment conveyed; we’re close to transcendence, something out of body, closer to animal than human. In other poems, this attachment is conveyed using remembrance and comparison, frequent tools in these poems used to bring in other worlds. In “The Body of Ice Remembered,” a male diver, one of a young crew who’s “excited about everything they see—smoking Erebus, / distant splashes of seals making holes, even the slush / forming on top of the dive hole,” also remembers his girl in Colorado.
His body will sink in the water
because when he isn’t in it, he is loving that girl
in Colorado, swimming through her,
all her parts.
Colorado is an alien word here, a collection of syllables that stand out as foreign because we’re so far from the vocabulary and vision of that kind of landscape. The western girl may as well be on the moon, and the divers and scientists feel this, too, according to Allspaw,
[…] if only that girl
in Colorado could grow like a glacier, if only
she could move with the freedom of icebergs.
If only he could stay down, below the surface,
his breath forming a body on its underside, then hands
wouldn’t matter, then deep water would be enough.
So we are again merging with the landscape, wishing what was distant could merge with the rich experience of the ice, the deep water, an experience that can make the “other” world seem superfluous.
The lessons of Antarctica continue through this volume, reflected facets of human learning from what is essentially a desert landscape. “Even ice over ice creates heat,” she teaches us. This heat and longing is what Allspaw shows us about her Antarctic life. It’s how a vast plain of snow and ice can become her father, her obsession, her life. In this book we are down-clad and trekking, we are naked and groping. We are deep in the sticky dryness of this vast southern-most continent. This long meditation gives us a gorgeous understanding of compulsion: “When we leave, / it clings, the damn child, / the obsessor, the stalker. / The ice never learned to let go.”
(Spark Wheel Press, 2013)
reviewed by William Neumire
If a pun, a limerick, and a sonnet got together to drink and impugn America for its dehumanizing free market economy and idiosyncratic stupidities, and things got a little sloppy, and they had a one-night stand, this would be their child. Steven Schroeder’s second book of poetry, The Royal Nonesuch, is silly-thick with sound like a braid of tongue twisters and mad gabs.
A nonesuch is a person or thing without an equal, but in Schroeder’s collection, it alludes to the scam run by the duke and the king in Huckleberry Finn in which the audience, expecting a drama, gets instead…nothing. Bitter over the philistine sensibilities of the townsfolk, the con artists scam two different audiences like this, and before the third can pummel them with rotten food, the pair make a run for it. How does this translate into Schroeder’s poems? In “Better Consider My National Resources,” the reader gets a microcosm of the whole collection’s bent attitude, as the speaker riffs on “The National Anthem,” “This Land is My Land,” and other chants of Americana: “Oh say can you see my cheese fries…I only regret that I have but one life to give for my third job at / 7-Eleven.” It’s a joke bitter with debt, the failed promise of the American dream, and most of all, a joke bitter about loneliness amidst plenty.
The book moves forward in four thirteen-poem sections, each poem a little 13-line sonnet (a scam in itself) with sporadic stanza breaks; it is reminiscent of Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures in form. The poems are accusations documenting the collapsing expectations of this myopic, conned speaker:
In that last dusty library book,
the vocation least likely to become obsolete
remains bookmaker.
There’s an underlying and absurd desire manufactured by an even more absurd, amoral free market economics at work in poems such as “Imbecile, Donkey, Flax-Head, Dope, Glump, Ninny and Fool,” whose speaker begs, “please oh please / may they name this disease after me.” In half-rhymes, iambs, and homophones, the book regularly details money’s Marxist role in devaluing people and engendering loneliness:
Cash makes you fun. A check can stop
without your help and when it wants
Credit cards only hurt themselves…
To save
your country pay until you’re spent.
Schroeder also plays this game of homophones throughout the collection, as in “Where the Bank Fails”: “Lenders weigh debtors down with pounds / Of Krugerrands and launder their hands / Tender in the green-eyed current, see?” Note the sly slipping of currency into current, see and legal tender into “tender in the green-eyed current.” It’s smart and funny and acrimonious all in one grand blur.
With titles clipped from pop culture (such as “I do not think it means what you think it means,” lifted from The Princess Bride, itself a grand mock), this is an indictment of whatever vestige of “the American dream” remains, as the reader can see in a jaded take on Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “America, your song was too big to fail / Your song cost more than itself.” The poems slip like this from funny into somber, like a tough guy deflecting pain with humor, and then finally cracking.
Chained to each other and cleverly phrased in this language as tongue-in-cheek game, Schroeder’s poems constantly set up and break from expectations: “After a break // on whatever levels of the word, we can make up / reasons to repeat these moves we make, Love.” Here, in “Each One Goes Alone,” we get that comforting, euphemistic cliché, “make love,” broken by that direct address comma in such a way that both meanings come through, though—as is usual in this book—the conventional meaning is tainted and fraught with contempt, or at least strong critique. But cynicism gives way to internal collapse soon enough in most of these poems, as in “Code Name Is The Only One,” where Schroeder writes “your password is passive-aggressive… // Why can’t you guess this picture I encrypted / in invisible ink? It’s obvious it’s loneliness.” And loneliness here gets the last echoic silence after the laugh.
On Poetry’s podcast a while back, Don Share declared, “language makes lying possible.” These poems, as much as they accuse and complain, are odes to that language of lies, and to the greatest lie: that all of this belittling madness is not ephemeral,
When we closed your eyes for good, you looked
like you were checking the lids for pinpricks.
When we closed ours, we could deny everything.
It’s always there, that hollow sense at the end of the joke, that hangover after the party:
Add in bed after any of my statements (in bed).
We’re Pete and Repeat sitting in a boat.
If I complement you, will you compliment me?
When I’m with you, don’t whisper implications.
When I’m incognito, tell everyone I’m cute.
When I’m gone, say I was beautiful.
A reveler in oxymorons and ironies, Schroeder rolls through The Royal Nonesuch with his cheeky, stinging mojo on full-tilt: “This bunker-buster bomb is user friendly, idiot proof and child safe for the entire family to enjoy, eight to 88 / This gun wants to tuck your kids into bed / This one would fuck anybody.” He’s a gamer and a scam artist to the very end, where he offers his “Transgressions” index, a sort of categorizing of the sins his poems illustrate, everything from “bad advice” to “substance abuse.” And though this collection can feel, at intervals, like it strikes the same note too many times, it’s fast-paced, double entendre, witty jabs and word games make it too much fun to put down. It’s a good laugh (itself difficult to pull off so intelligently in contemporary poetry) that also gradually builds a poignant sense of pathos for its conned and broken speaker.
(Main Street Rag Publishing Co, 2014)
reviewed by Diana Anhalt
Katie Kingston’s latest collection, History of Grey, explores lives that lie in-between—in that area beyond judgment, which is neither black nor white. In addition to the grey in the title, colors vibrate in these poems. They are exhilarating and full of life. Fusing history and legend, they cover a region encompassing Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Traveling from past to present and back again, they imply that the past informs the present; the present the past. Time flows like the river, El Rio de Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio (The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory), introduced in the book’s opening and its voyage speaks of struggles and perseverance.
The first of the book’s three sections introduce two figures, Umaña and Bonilla, roughly translated from Spanish as Human and Beautiful. Part history, part legend, the two are reputed to have set out in search of Quivira, a utopia noted for its great wealth. They meet their fate on the banks of the Colorado river, El Rio de Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio. According to legend, when Bonilla and Umaña die, their souls end up in that grey area, located midway between heaven and hell. In the poem “Flood,”
Bonilla laughs. His mouth fills with water,
a traveler of mirrors toward sea
with a voice like bees in the crabapple.
The opaque world of indigo rapids splashes
his rugged lips. He cares about sound,
how the river evolves its own name,
Purgatorio, Purgatoire, Picketwire.
More recent history—the 19th and 20th centuries—is depicted in the second section of the book with a series of highly lyrical poems, many in the first person from the points of view of women. Often they portray their lives on the frontier, their struggles and yearnings. The personas speak for themselves and are never idealized, never self-pitying. They inhabit that middle ground marked by uncertainty—a grey area undefined by right and wrong, a place not unlike purgatory, where suffering is the norm. This is their history. Like most women of the time, they exist on the margins of society, and here Kingston captures their voices, the reality of their day-to-day lives. Catherine German, a girl held captive by the Cheyenne in Kansas in the second half of the 19th century, wonders whether she has been stolen and sold again. A laundress at Fort Kearney, Wyoming, writes in a journal of her night visitors and the pleasures she takes in her simple life. Among the most compelling is a Colorado miner’s wife who studies her daughter’s hands “as she lifts chunks into wheelbarrows”; a woman whose own mother told her “it would be this way / child after child, the sky without pelicans”; a woman who finds solace in her own voice, “whispers the color blue / just before snow releases down feathers, / eclipses the sun.”
Because of their honesty and simple, straightforward tone, “Unwritten Letters from Josefa Carson to Kit” are particularly moving. In this poem, Josefa’s words are punctuated throughout with the refrain, “I remember your fingers,” evoking their intimacy. She writes:
I am waiting for you, dear husband,
to return with your company of Ute,
your tobacco pouch sweetened with candy,
pockets teeming with buffalo nickels,
to return with your feet blistered,
your hair sullen, your skin tinged to rosa.
Characteristic of Kingston’s writing is her ability to individualize her subjects and avoid stereotypes in order to capture their sense of reality. This is evident in a poem like “Stampede,” where the speaker remains anonymous:
In my wilderness warriors
rise up like hornets, women like spiders.
Flutes serenade wheatgrass. Water
lifts its voice. I see blue windows,
yellow willows, red clouds. I see
turquoise, drums, corn dances.
In my wilderness I hear pick axes,
chisels. I hear horses.
To a great extent, her ability to use vivid, evocative language makes her work so memorable. In “Relocation of Old Sopris Cemetery” she writes:
[…]When I leave,
names trail me like children, sun
spilling down their backs
into their shoes. Sunshine
flicks celadon through poplars,
bleaches tombstones, turns
white pickets to grey. Erases.
Although grey may figure in Kingston’s title and much of her work here deals with life’s grey areas, color—though sometimes muted (white, black, rust)— appears throughout. Her work is insistently visual and often references works of art. They appear in such poems as “Bonilla’s Portrait,” “Bonilla as Artist,” “History of Grey” and “River Canvas,” where she writes:
I have been thinking about your painting all weekend,
the breast dissected into angles, the coffin floating
like a barge through the faces of the living, a woman’s neck
in layers of white. And what is that color, the one
that resembles a vein of rust in candlelight?
This last example from the third section of the book is one of thirteen poems that take place in the present. Here Kingston alludes to her work as a teacher, drawing from her students, her youth, and to scenes from everyday life.
In an attempt, perhaps, to illustrate the flow of time, how history repeats itself, she terminates where she began, in the past. In her final poem, Bonilla gives Umaña directions:
If you want to get to the heart, study the underbelly
of clouds just after daylight, learn their vaporous language
before it dissipates. The bone sky knows marrow,
knows sorrow.
While Kingston possesses the skill to create gorgeous imagery and give life to voices that are singular, what sets her apart from other merely competent poets is her ability to summon complexity of meaning. She transforms the “in-between,” the gray, into more than just a place or situation. In her words, these become a frame of mind. To that she adds language of depth and dimension. Long-legged and bold, these poems travel through centuries. They cross many lives and bring her full circle, starting the collection and ending it with a river called Purgatorio.
(Lavender Ink, 2013)
reviewed by Kate Savage
A sweet title introduces poetry that is also all-at-once deliciously sour, bitter, salty. Sara Henning’s debut collection speaks out of hard-bit scars, a secular stigmata of suicidal fathers, brutal lovers, animals rescued or left for dead, a cruel mother, and the motherly ‘bad girl’ next door. There are dahlias and peonies in these pages, but they grow on spit and sulfur. Her words heft the weight of those trash bags from her gut-wrenching piece “Dead Reckoning”:
so full of his things and her sorrow
they could have held dead bodies.
This is a confessional text, heartfelt and autobiographical—and yet it skips away from the traps of naivety and self-indulgence. Henning explains in her opening poem:
My father taught me how an artist disappears behind the walls of his work,
that the dismantling of composure is cutting cobalt from a rattle, soft ochre
from a tabby’s fur, a father from removal’s intense red.
Henning knows how to cut herself out of the whole cloth of her craft. She disappears behind the walls of her work but never manages to hide.
The resulting pieces reveal a peculiar kind of snipping and stitching, a demon handicraft of domesticity. In “Self-Portrait as Stitching a Summer Body, Philomela,” she begins: “The striking thread carries so many portals, occlusions.” Thread, which would bind us in homey togetherness, operates through striking, tearing, cutting—making an opening and a break. We are brought together by all the ways we are separated from each other. Any moment of apparent nostalgia for togetherness and home is always revealed as more “occlusions.”
It’s worth noting the allusion to Philomela in the title. In Greek mythology, Philomela was raped by her sister’s husband, who then cut her tongue out to silence her. Mute, she weaves a tapestry to tell her sister the story, stitching to reveal a wound. When the sister reads what happened in the tapestry, she kills her son and feeds him to her husband in an act of revenge. Finally, the sisters are turned into birds (Philomela to a nightingale) to escape the cycle of vengeance. Henning’s quiet sign-post to this brutal story tells us something of the weight of weaving and cutting in this volume—and also the weight of “family,” with both its unspeakable violence and its fierce solidarity.
Another stitching poem explores the inevitability of brokenness. “Twine and Needle” is an attempt to compose a face—specifically the face of childhood:
Shortly after my birth, my face shattered to pieces.
When surgeons attempted to construct a new one, each attempt fell to the
floor like exhausted porcelain.
The shattering that splits us off from others is shown in this poem to creep internally as well. Our only face is a failure to construct one; our identity grows out of the dissolution of a self. As with Philomela, Henning’s poetic voice seems to grow out of the scar of a tongue’s removal.
Her more fundamental similarity with Philomela, however, is her need to communicate an actual narrative. These poems aren’t primarily ‘about’ ideas or moods: Henning is a story-teller. The events that happen in these lines are described with clarity, as in this scene from “Requiem with Dog, Dead Sparrow, and Wisteria”:
I too wouldn’t turn
against the piston syllable of love holding
me down. Once, I slept with my leg wrapped
in a towel, the other wrapped around
a lover who cut me, blood like snuff mouthed
loosely, spit in the rust of a can.
In the morning, he threw the towel’s
wet elegy of fever in the trash.
The solidity of events in her poetry allows a nuance—and even a muddling—of its attendant emotional responses. Like the bees in “How She Loved Me,” Henning is constantly dovetailing “to where soft and terrible is the same pithy center.” Her second piece, “Home,” seems to offer in its first line an uncomplicated, nostalgic metaphor for returning homeward:
Like listening
to a river that heads toward the sea [. . .]
Which she then troubles with a clarification: “Fresh to salt.” Going home isn’t a return to freshness; it’s salty, with the sting in a wound. “I let hole replace wholesome,” she writes in “Zuihitsu Beginning and Ending with Wildflowers.” If you want to find something wholesome in the title A Sweeter Water, you may: or you may read it as a longing to fight one’s way upstream and get the hell away from home.
As with the nightingale’s singing, Henning is capable of loveliness in these lines. But when the speaker in “Philomela” describes herself knitting and stitching, the reader can’t quite decipher if she’s cross-stitching Home Sweet Home for the mantlepiece or cutting herself. Henning looks deep into the emptiness of home’s cliches, and fishes out the unsettling.
Henning’s poetic creation is always a double-movement; here nothing can escape either its own shadow or its own luminescence. She writes in “First Striptease”:
[. . .] sometimes we kiss deeply
just to turn away, so one day we won’t feel the holes
in our bodies so desperately, so one day they
can’t help but startle us.
She strikes a distance from her poetic subjects, but finds this space only serves to magnify. It’s as though Henning is capable of binding together lack, in one solid mass, and simultaneously breaking apart all possessions with a claustrophobic gasp. This paradox is the seat of her versatility. Compare the dense paragraph-poem “Lost Things” with the structural dissolution of “When You Ask if I Ever Really Loved You.”
From “Lost Things”:
I begin my list: tomcat with feet flexed in a seizure of pleasure, belly chasing
sun; hen rescued from a truck jumping against the heft of her body for a
crust of bread; brother plucking sorrow from my lap like peonies. No one
wants stories about fits of nostalgia, mothers, birds that call with the sun in
their mouths. No one gives a shit about your brother even if he’s blitzing
through the binding of the same lost father. [ . . . ] The tom was cold when I
touched my face to his fur; my brother is marrying a woman I have never
spoken to, and yet this urge is here to name things which I am not: hen’s
wing ripped off by a dog, mother burning my childhood on a pyre, childhood
expunged from my body like a struggling sack of sugar.
From "When You Ask":
When you love
another woman,
you’ll plant in her
the same brutal
seed that won’t stop
pulsing, and I’ll
forgive her [. . . ]
Henning rides the ridge between escape-from and longing-after, marrying an overflowing brain with an animal whimper. All of this makes her a new artist of that very old subject: Love. What is A Sweeter Water but a particularly fresh, nuanced, and troubled love song? The honesty, novelty, and grace which Henning brings to this task makes her a poet who deserves to be read and reread.
(New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013)
reviewed by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
Mark Irwin’s poems juxtapose the preservation of memory with a poetics of the inaccessible. He asks, “Tell me...how we hear music / in silence, or a dead person’s voice / in our minds (that child’s swing / blown back and forth).” These lines perform a kind of mining through memory that takes us to an edge where sound and language are ultimately inaccessible and are conjured up only through an associative image. The remembered voice is conveyed through an image of absence hermetically sealed in parentheses that can never be completely opened. It is around this point that poems revolve in the collection Large White House Speaking.
The recurring theme of preserving the past is introduced in the first poem, “On Sundays, Sometimes.” Irwin uses language to plumb a line toward memory:
I’ll start in the afternoon and follow the words of a new sentence
...I’ll open a photo album and descend
into its cellar where people are walking toward me, out from
the white chancel of each corner
In these lines, time is transformed into place and place represents a time preserved. “Memory is love’s quarry,” a phrase from the poem “Creation,” describes this fusion. In “April,” the fusion exists through a link between a father’s football helmet and a bronze Corinthian helmet. The former is found in an attic and is described as “scratched and dusty in the dormer’s blast of sun.” This family artifact is decaying from the elements. But a memory has preserved another image associated with the father—a brassy pole and shiny firetruck from the speaker’s childhood. A brightness exists in memory that becomes dull in the present. That brightness returns when one literally touches the past: “In London once / I touched a bronze Corinthian helmet whose pitted crown / was dented from blows.” This helmet corresponds with the football helmet, yet its existence conveys a certain defiance of time that the other helmet does not have.
Irwin’s poems explore both a desire for the past be tangible and the unnerving discovery that sometimes only abstract words can be a source of preservation. “April” expresses one of the few moments when the desire to feel the sensations of the past is fulfilled. The poem “Elegy” takes the opposite view. There is again an attempt to revive the past in the lines, “I am polishing the lens of a telescope to make / the distant more bright.” However, here the past is represented by a daughter and a marriage each lost in some way. There is no preserved artifact in the attic nor in a museum to represent what is gone, what cannot be retrieved: “—A glove, a ball, a house collapsed. A carcass of vowels wept.” In “Elegy” the speaker seeks objects and hears them from decaying letters that become a strange metaphor of absence. The house with its inhabitants is no longer intact. These interior letters that provide shape to words are simply sounds. It is the sealed, parenthetical phrase turned inside out with the loosened letters falling into a void.
The poetics of the inaccessible is aided by telescopes and telescopic poems, as in “Augenblick” which begins by looking into the eye of a dead robin then shifts to a glimpse of the setting sun into which the speaker sees “closer far.” In that instance, the speaker sees a moment from his past: “I remember Katherine now… / Some things you can never hold.” The poem “Ghost” addresses this relationship with the past head-on:
Sometimes your name’s
a dress like an iron/ bell the years
swing shadows from/longer than home.
Can you hear/that word peal? I’m going
there now,
carrying the windows/from inside
all the vowels
The question plaintively expresses desire for sound to be tangible. The speaker wants to touch sound itself, and an attempt is made through the remarkable last line “I’m going there now”—as if sound is a place. These vowels and their sounds are now the opening to that place, to the bell’s peal.
The drive toward an interior space is contrasted by other poems that move almost cinematically through an exterior pastoral world. Images of trees, leaves, sunlight, insects, and the presence of other animals exist in these poems to clarify time into a tangible present. Yet the poems are both entranced by and skeptical of the natural world. The recurring seasons and their seeming beauty testify simultaneously of continuity and inevitable death. The poem “Red Feather” elucidates the former idea: “The owl / blinks its glass eyes / in a tree. Sometimes I think the red feather’s / the word is.” Likewise, in “Moment” the juxtaposition of singular images gives a nod to the pastoral hope of cheating time through recurring common events: “Years. It was cold. You wore / red mittens…/ Summer. The late light / upon us. Blue coppers, just hatched….” Yet it ends with a sense of oblivion: “... then you are sent to a country of nameless people / where there is no time.”
There are two poems in which a brutal death coincides with images of the natural world that convey continuity. “Pastoral” defies the connotation of that word by referring to the rape and murder of a young girl whose body is found beneath an elm, “A balloon, red, was tied, bobbing from a limb / above her.” The childish image of the balloon in the tree and the reference to growing grass create a haunting contrast to the girl’s life cut short. In a poem about Matthew Shepherd, “Shoes,” Irwin places the image of people leaving “their offices and homes in that quaint / mountain town” next to the image of Shepherd: “He was tied, naked to a fence, then beaten.” Here it is the continuity of the sky that creates a brief, if inadequate, refuge.
In poems such as “In Winter,” Irwin plays more gently with notion that time and death stalk the pastoral. The former poem describes the lives of two widows. One husband is memorialized through the simple gesture of tracing a map, the other as his widow hangs bedsheets in which he died out to dry. The speaker acts as conduit between these women and their dead husbands. When he helps the one widow hang the sheets, their hands accidentally touch and for that moment, he breaks the loss that time awards through death.
Large White House Speaking is divided into four sections and while there are poems focused on memories, they never settle into nostalgia. Instead, there is a restlessness that indicates it is not enough to restore the memory and the people within it. Instead, these poems explore how language unlocks memory to fulfill a desire for the sensuality of those lost moments. It is that desire that compels so many of the poems and creates the deft metamorphoses the reader encounters in seeking lost sensations. Often, after several transformed images, the only result is untranslatable sound. This happens in “The Mirror in my Parents’ Room” in which the mirror has trapped within its silver, the Milky Way’s “phosphorescent, streaming light” which hums “infant sounds.” “Ars Poetica” conveys an unsatisfied hunger for the sensations of words,
So many words I put
together, pushing them along their way, packing them
with light, loss, smells, tastes
silence, seasons, and the lost
seasons of an hour
The speaker responds to this hunger with a desire to “unwrap the cellophane from what we mean.”
The complexity of these poems is a pleasure as is the thematic insistence that pushes toward an elemental space. To focus on sound as being the doorway to that space creates unusual relationships between the words and their context. The sense is that if Irwin could shake these words from their context he would detect the heart that beats inside the letters. When he comes close to doing this, there is almost a euphoria at the discovery, as in the final lines of “Survey”:
And there are those, who, almost
after a lifetime, only listen.What
ushers us through the years? Yellow leaves
swirl past a stop sign. It is
a ringing you/can feel.
