Highland Park Poetry began in 2007. Wow! Amazing! Together with the support of friends and followers, we have created poetry opportunities, experiments, publications, contests, readings, open-mics, pentathlons, and more to bring poetry to the community and beyond the 60035 zip code. Thanks to everyone who has contributed time, energy, talent and cash to this endeavor. Here's to many more!
Thanks to Highland Park Poetry's contributors in 2021:
Anonymous
Emma Alexandra
Lois Baer Barr
Jennifer Dotson
Christine Hartman & Ice Hat Creative
Donation made in celebration of longtime participating poet, Marjorie Rissman on the occasion of her birthday!
If you have enjoyed the website, the poetry programs or you just want to keep poetry around and accessible in the community, please make a donation to Highland Park Poetry. Send your gift to:
Highland Park Poetry c/o Jennifer Dotson 376 Park Avenue Highland Park, IL 60035
David Dotson, Photographer
Poetry Book Reviews
As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another
By Marcia J. Pradzinski
Kelsay Books, 2021
64 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-954353-78-7
Review by Sue Roupp
Sometimes one comes upon a memoir offered in a new format. Marcia J. Pradzinski has published a fascinating memoir in a poetry format. Her poetry offers excellent metaphors and descriptions of dealing with family giving us a way to place those described in time and importance. For example, in “When I Ask My Father to Sign College Prep Forms:
“He lights his Camel and stands up
from his chair to face me.
His shoulders
forward and down
as he taps the Camel
over the ashtray. The cigarette,
a teacher’s wooden pointer –
“You’re just a machinist daughter.”
Smoke curls the air,
dissolves his face.
This poem, like the rest of her poetry, is a marvelous combination of telling her story in a briefer poetry format and keeping us turning the page to see what will be next. Here we are clear about how the father thinks the writer should stick to his designated class but in the last stanza we see “dissolves his face” allowing the reader to see her dismiss his warning.
We are introduced to where she grew up and her mom on Walton Street in Chicago via Renovation on Walton Street: “Green wallpaper comes down in strips, green, not as light as mint or as dark as the avocado above the stove and fridge…Green replaced a dusty rose my mother had tired of…/When I was in grade school I wanted to change my mother…strip her clean, trade in her plump body for one like the younger, slimmer mothers I saw at school, take her out of her sensible shoes, put in in stilletos.”
In the Day Slides By
as the sun makes room
for the moon,
I fall into a daze
that shrouds losses
deeper
than my misplaced keys
or coffee cup…until
a train howls pas a sturdy brick façade
Its back lot, vacant and vast
in icy moonlight
kays bare
a wellspring of tears.
We readers can identify with sorrow and losses as we go through life remembering our family or origin and our own struggles to become an independent person overcoming doubts and fears, through a kind of existential ennui until we get to acceptance of who we are doubts and all.
Marcia ends this fine book with “Vespers”
when the last shadow falls out of the day
and the sun turns into the moon
and the vestments above become constellations
nothing is gone but the noise
crowds carry away in their trucks
children dream of in their sleep
and mothers silence with their whispers
When dusk dreams of the sun
As it drifts into sleep
The present becomes the past,
And one day slips out of the shoe of another.”
I highly recommend this memoir poetry book – do buy it, read it, reflect on it – you will be enriched by it – is a book you will return to for its depth and forms, and content. It will reside on your bookshelf for many years.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Sue Roupp is the author of Memoir Writing in 6 Easy Steps. Her forthcoming poetry book is Time Out. Sue is an editor and workshop facilitator offering classes on memoir, poetry, fiction, non-fiction.
Posted December 1, 2021
Revelations
By Ruben Quesada
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018
38 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1943977543
Review by Kathryn Staublin
Three years ago, an independent publishing house called Sibling Rivalry Press released a slim 4X6 volume entitled Revelations. Within it, Ruben Quesada presents a handful of poetic prose, translations, and carefully structured poetry in often unrestricted forms. A total of twenty poems are wrapped in the iconic art of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which crafts a scene filled with isolated chaos and dramatic urgency.
The title of the poetry collection lends itself to the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the mysterious end of times and the deliverance from evil come together in a surge of symbolism: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Revelation 20:10).
The prose poetry is written in a style that nearly mimics stream of consciousness, flowing without interruption from one idea to the next. The result is an intense submersion into a dreamworld fog, disrupted by shards of reality and yet softened by intense visual imagery and rhythmic language. For example, in the poem “II,” Quesada begins with the image of an angel, coupled with “stone roses” and the “sweet coral honeysuckle sap of earth” (lines 1, 2, and 4). The natural elements maintain consistency until the end, when the language shifts to include more disquieting diction: “each coarse head of the field / whips and pivots like the loose neck of a goose.”
Elegant translations of Luis Cernuda’s poetry pair refreshingly alongside a mix of Quesada’s form and prose, revealing the depth of Quesada’s skill and education. Biblical allusions are ripe with spiritual fluency, and yet childhood memories, historical conflict, and flickers of emotional appeals leave the reader somewhere between a present, unsettling reality and the lingering pain of the past.
Quesada’s style contains hints of Ocean Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds) and Anita Endrezze (Enigma). Combined with vague outlines of Brian Strand, this collection becomes an amalgamation of artistic talent, skillfully woven content, and critical thought.
Despite the beautiful language and carefully crafted lines, in the end the reader is left with a phantom thirst, the urge to see one more scene through this poet’s unique lens. The volume is so slim, in fact, that the spine does not even have room to bear the title or the poet’s name. Amongst other works of a similar kind, the collection could be easily left on the shelf—not forgotten, but “[f]uriously made dim” between loftier volumes of the 21st century (“Fall Feeling,” line 16).
Only the voices of giants overshadow the desire for more of Quesada’s work. Until a new, more substantial volume arises from the creator of this beautiful, but brief collection, Revelations must lie in waiting as a thematic whisper silhouetted against its competition.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Kathryn Staublin is a writer and English teacher from central Indiana who encourages her students to write every day, if only for the sake of writing. Her most recent work has appeared in Illumination, Better Advice, and Writer's Blokke.
Posted December 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Calendar Girls
By Tobi Alfier
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2021
26 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798481909332
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with the kind permission of Quill & Parchment
In his seminal poem, “The Human Seasons,” by John Keats, Spring is lusty, Summer is nearest unto heaven, in Autumn fair things pass by unheeded as a thresh hold brook, and Winter, has his pale misfeature. Keats is relating to the seasons as a framework for life. I thought about Keats’ wisdom and my own approach to calendars. For me, calendars with their convenient little squares where I make my lists and check items off as I complete them, mean little more to me than a tool; a utilitarian instrument to get me through the day, the week, the month, and so on. However, upon receiving my review copy of Tobi Al-fier’s Calendar Girls: Poems 2022, I’ve taken the occasion to refresh the brow-ser of my mind, to open the door of fresh perspectives on time and on life. I’m glad I did.
This beautifully appointed 8 ½” x 11” perfect bound calendar, can be imagined as a poetry book with a 2022 calendar or as a 2022 calendar with poetry. Your reviewer prefers the latter. I like to begin each month with the current poem superimposed on the artwork appropriate to each month. Eight photographers contributed to the art works chosen for the final draught. [See listing at the end.]
I know good ekphrastic poetry when I read it. The Greek term ekphrasis, refers to “description.” That is to say, the poet engages in describing the visual subject before her. But there is more to this process that mere description. The poet invests herself emotionally and intellectually in her subject. She is not a forensic scientist; she sings out with full throat and open heart the impact con-ferred by her subject.
In this case, the seasons provide the visual. With a keen eye for nature’s nu-ances and a practiced ear for rhythm and cadence, Alfier writes her represen-tative poems in couplet form. Twenty lines suffice for each month. The style is a perfect fit for the page. She employs a 16-point, sans serif type font for easy-on-the-eye reading.
Most importantly, however, these are good poems. The poet knows what she is doing. Her lines flow naturally, unforced. She does not attempt to rhyme her lines. I appreciate this because invariably a commitment to rhyme at all costs results in contrived artificiality. Instead, Alfier expresses how each month moves her. This is not greeting card verse. For example, she sees January as a month in which . . .
Secrets course through everything.
There’s nowhere to go.
No twilight. No graceful hour
to let the pins from your hair,
shake your mane into your lover’s palm.
April highlights a gorgeous field of red poppies, yellow and white daisies, purple clover, all in company with lush green grasses. For this visual delight, Alfier writes:
Spring is a fading map of winter.
As the sun strips ice from fields,
she exhales. It’s time to put down
her hair, put on her bracelets,
and spin and spin and spin.
Like a skilled lead-guitarist, Alfier’s fingers hit the right notes to fit the music suggested by the photographs.
In June:
The days are fastened to thick, warm weather
as summer begins to begin. Tourists remain
like ghosts in the haunted hell of employment—
calendars still list commitments the way crows
peck at roadkill, heads down, they ignore the steaming
asphalt as they wait for their turns to eat and get the hell gone.
As I noted earlier, this poet does not write greeting card verse, does not deal in Hallmark channel sentimentality. That is what I like about Alfier’s verse. She has an innate sense about what people go through in their lives.
October’s photograph is of an island shrouded in blue twilight, the water re-flects the dark blue, punctuated by gentle white ripples. Of this scene the poet writes:
She wanted a lover so unique he could be an uncharted island,
was perfectly happy to sit by the fire in her moth-eaten sweater,
listening to the breeze through far-off willows, singing songs
remembered by those who’d never left this town and didn’t care.
He was out there, just as surely as the wind made acorns fall
and moonlight flutter across any water. Soon she will find him,
when she walks away from this town that raised her, the way September
moves along to make room for October, with all its shadows.
Friends, Calendar Girls: Poems 2022, can be imagined as a poetry book with a 2022 calendar or as a 2022 calendar with poetry. Whichever way you view this unique work of visual and written art, you will not be disappointed.
Contributing artists: Gábor Adonyi, George B, Aadya Chidanand, Tove Erbs, Dae Jeung Kim, Gael Moisson, Michelle Raponi, Kevin Schmid, r soos.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted December 1, 2021
Click to purchase
A Way of Looking
By Jianqing Zheng
Silverfish Review Press, 2021
77 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781878851727
Review by Lois Baer Barr
Transplanted at Mississippi Valley State University (an Historically Black University) since 1996, Jianqing Zheng has been adopted by and has adopted the Mississippi Delta as his home. His scholarly interests include Blues singers, Civil Rights leaders, and African American poets. He has published photo essays on Emmett Till and Blues artist Mississippi John Hurt and books on the haikus of Richard Wright and Sonia Sanchez. In his 2019 book, Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (see my review on this website), Zheng’s poetry evokes his life as a young student in rural exile being reeducated as a worker during Mao’s revolution.
Now he turns his poetic gifts to haibun. His new collection, winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award, reveals he became a spiritual orphan at four when his grandmother died, and his parents decided he should be a boarding student at kindergarten. Remembrances of the warmth of his grandmother’s bedtime stories and kisses recur frequently in the collection serving to shield him from loneliness as a child and as an immigrant. He brings his sharp eye and emotional memory to cityscapes and landscapes as diverse as a shrine in Tokyo and a lonely sunset in the misty Bayou.
The haibun form, traced back to Basho, links essays or stories with haiku. The themes are often memoir and travel, and Zheng follows that ancient tradition with stunning depictions of ghost towns, blues funeral processions in New Orleans, and the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. His poet’s eye takes us from the Yazoo River that flows near his university in Itta Bena to the Pearl River in China and from the height of Gregory Bald in the Smokies to the well-tended garden of his adopted parents Nell and Don George of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Jheng packs a lot of emotion and humor into the haikus that condense, contradict, and enrich his prose. In Zheng’s imagination, Old Man River no longer just rolls but he “twerks” along. When his son goes to college orientation and announces he’s changing his major, Zheng evokes the boy’s birth: birthcry–/young parents smile/in tears. “Katrina Notes on New Orleans” ends: lunch for evacuees/a boy sops up the gravy/ with a cornbread. Fellow academicians can empathize with his predicament of keeping Friday afternoon office hours in a deserted building where the only sound comes from: two weeks gone…/the broken toilet/still flushing. In the “Eulogy” for his adoptive father, Zheng notes a lonely cat at the window, and we assume that Zheng is himself that forlorn creature. In this final poem of the book, a well-worn jacket awaits the return of the deceased. Jianqing Zheng’s new book of haibun is worth a long, long look.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods with her husband and her pandemic pup Aggie. You can read her poetry in Biopoesis (Poetica Press, 2013) and her stories in Lope de Vega’s Daughter (Red Bird, 2019). Her work is online at Alimentum, Ekphrastic Review, Highland Park Poetry, The Jewish Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, and Southern Women’s Review and in print at cream city review,East on Central, Valley Voices, and forthcoming at Rattle.
Posted December 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Remember: Poems for the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
By Southern Chapter Illinois State Poetry Society
Edited by Kathy Lohrum Cotton
Independently Published, 2021
46 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798471702806
Review by Michael Escoubas
This Review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
In the introduction to Remember, editor Kathy Cotton notes the 20-year-old connection between 9/11 and the September 2021 withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. She reminds us that following 9/11, America had been at war there for some 20 years. It is in the spirit of the Roman god Janus, who wore two faces, one of which looked back; the other looking forward, that the Southern Chapter of the Illinois State Poetry Society offers this new and vibrant anthology.
Remember is organized into two broad divisions: “Remember 9/11,” and “Remember Peace & Hope.” The poems in each division reach the heart with laser-like precision bringing the event and its many tangents into clear-eyed focus.
“The Last Collect Call,” by Jacob Erin-Cilberto, captures (almost in slow-motion, as it were) the surrealistic ambience of that awful moment. A moment when “a fractured winged Molotov floats into a bar,” / “explosions ripping the heart from a nation,” / “all of us below soaked to the skin with ash.” A collection of stunned people grapple with a new reality, one that changed the world forever.
A feature provided by the Editor that I appreciate is a compilation of “September 11, Terror Attacks Fast Facts.” This is an eye-opening list of statistics; but more than mere numbers, the listing opens an imaginative window not often considered in terms of felt impact on families. Spouses kissed goodbye. Children donned their backpacks to catch the bus to school. Untold numbers left their homes, that day, never to return to the life they once had known.
Youth Reaction
Bill Harshbarger’s poem “On September 11” reflects upon the poet’s experiences as an educator, observing his students:
I was teaching a history class
until we all moved to
the cafeteria where large televisions
showed events as they unfolded.
Scenes were stunning and my students
had difficulty distinguishing
"live" coverage from the concept
that it was a movie by film artists.
Their response to the destruction
of the second tower was not
the shock and horror
that some of us experienced,
but rather a kind of admiring surprise
at the extraordinary collision
of an airplane with a tall tower
in New York City.
I did not judge them—
they had not yet seen enough of life
to realize what had just happened
to hundreds (indeed thousands)
of people at that moment.
Twenty years later, we all
can understand the horror
of that infamous day.
Irony of 9/11
I remember how ordinary the day had begun for me. Employed at a printing company, I was mostly bored attending to the routine things that comprised my typical day. Then news reports began to filter in . . . for some reason, my thoughts centered on the irony of the terrorists “weapon of choice,” The airplane. Candace Armstrong captures my emotions in her poem “Living Beneath a Flight Path, I Wonder”:
Could the Wright Brothers have surmised
manipulation of their invention,
glory to terror in warring skies,
ugly stain upon their jubilation?
Attacks from the air, no longer a question,
reminders of long-ago Pearl Harbor
this retaliation of destruction,
unleashing twenty more years of war
on a world weary of starvation’s gun.
Oh joy! Being earthbound no more!
The freedom of flying
abused by evil’s misapplying.
9/11 Captured Pictorially
Of special note is Cotton’s judicious use of captioned photographs spread throughout the collection. The images offer a commentary-in-pictures. Thoughtfully spaced in relation to the pace and logic of the poems, this feature adds immeasurably to the book’s aesthetic appeal.
Healing and Hope
I often like to say, Now it’s the poet’s turn. So much has been written, judged, and legislated about the 9/11 period of our history. It is the purview of poets however, to ring the bell of healing and hope. The power of language is brought to bear powerfully in Remember. I was particularly moved by Mike Ruhland’s “Twenty Years After”:
Spots of black smoke
on a little blue ball.
Once. But then again, and again.
Black smoke peppers the orb.
Never ending heartbreak.
The death of innocents again.
Grief rains down.
Please send mercy,
the kind that falleth as gentle as the rain.
Gentle as the rain, is a perfect description of what many long for at this moment in our nation’s history. Remember: Poems for the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, is a collection worthy of “delivering the goods,” on such a noble aspiration.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted December 1, 2021
Click to purchase
to everything there is
By Donna Vorreyer
Sundress Publications, 2021
84 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1951979096
Review by Gail Goepfert
It is likely many will be come to Donna Vorreyer’s book, to everything there is, familiar with the opening line from the Biblical verse found in Ecclesiastes 3. That familiarity reads like a door ajar; however, if I had but a few words to pinpoint the thrust of this book, I would use Vorreyer’s line, “I struggle to name the ache that godzillas its way/through the bright cities of my bones.” I wish I had written that line myself; it’s a masterful use of “Godzilla” as verb, and it bears the mark of ruin in grief’s path. The reader navigates with the poet her grief over the loss of both parents. The heft of it. The eddying pull of it. The deliverance from it, however slight.
Even if we have been there ourselves in our own narratives, Vorreyer’s poems seem to ensnare the reader in the narrator’s sorrow. I feel like I was thronged by the shadows of her ghosts and grief on page after page. The poet pushes back against loss when she schools us in her efforts to trust the holy in the ceremony of “Ash Wednesday;” even so she acknowledges her struggle to “beat back [her] animal.” The mark of ash she leaves church with . . . “says I am no slave to the snake though/I still ache to touch its tail.” She also grasps for, later and often, the need, the desire to trust love. It’s a way to survive, leaning into love and lover as reserve. These tender moments thread through the book, allowing griever and reader to breathe, to find one’s way back to the life that is left—looking “for something to buoy me in my grief.” In “Shimmer,” she writes,”
I don’t want to rise and leave
your head still on the pillow.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Me, dragging all my Marley chains.
You with your ring of iron keys,
your strong patient hands.
Though I am grateful for these interludes, grief is the crux of the book as the speaker both anticipates the agony that comes with loss and death and lives in its belly. She flails about emotionally. She questions: “Tell me, what moon, what stars could I have conjured, what light, to brighten all her troubled sleep?” She strikes out: “I tell you, I am fed up/with all this wanting.” She confronts the inevitable: “I could not keep her.” The poet’s voice confesses she feels used up in “Once Upon Another Time”: It took a lot to snuff that fire, but this world has hushed me to ember.” Denial sits with her daily. Even despair surfaces:
I catch myself longing for a lake, a canoe, for something
fluid in which to drown.
My solace waits in water, but here I am, caged in a dark
room with only and lamp and a lump of clay.”
One of the grimmest images of sitting with grief occurs in “Poem With Her in a Dream as Astronaut:
She [her mother] circles somewhere up there
unmoored, and I am here
my heart in my hand, dripping
like a slab of calf liver.
In “After,” a poem formed from lines in Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, there is guilt and regret: I came back from the funeral, going over and over afterward/ what we should have done instead of what we did.” How does one then exit this torment?
Vorreyer writes of finding some solace in the world she must pilot as she walks in the cemetery for the first time, her eyes open to what is left behind. Oddly, it feels thankfully like a homecoming.
Wind stirs the grass and the Queen Anne’s lace
into song each blade pitch perfect
Even my shadows sooted brutes
reconnect into a sort of applause
How can I be lost in a world
that cracks its heart to please me
pushing life up and up and flowering
despite everything?
At one point, Vorreyer lets a title speak for the movement of the narrative. “After the Death of My Mother, My Father Begins to Fade Away.” The poem is a call and response of sorts; she melds emotional rawness and image exquisitely, I want to tell you that I cried/ … I never thought that I could/… miss someone this much with lyrical meditations on the natural world—blazing forsythias, rivers spackled with sun, an oceanic breeze that is “only the beat of barn owl’s wings” until the speaker realizes that even the herons grieve with her—“in their grief, the herons will not feed,” dragged into a sense of unforeseen oneness.
Not surprisingly, the poet returns to the love that is her sustenance as surely as bread and water. I am moved by these moments. She writes:
. . .“I’m
safe and oh so lucky, walking
out the door each morning
wrapped in
the armor
our certainty.”
And later, she speaks of connectedness with her love:
Like tug captains, we tow the old burdens around
the world—you at the wheel, my eyes on the horizon,
blending our thoughts with the cadence of waves.
…………………….
But skin still seeks skin. and when we cannot sleep,
we slip out onto the silent deck, like the old
astronomers, look up and sing out for new stars.
In grief, love.
The titled last section of the book, “A Lament Becomes A Lantern,” is a theme hinted at throughout the book. Light is noticed, wrenched free in order to survive. Surely life has its limitations, and in a poem titled just that, the poet writes: “I am searching for new boundaries to what I can bear. It is all that I can hope for.” And later, “spring will come when spring will come.” I want to believe that connection and revived presence come as we wait with Vorreyer for that season of spring.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gail Goepfert is a RHINO editor; her third book, Self-PortraitwithThorns and second chapbook, Hard Business of Living, will be released in 2021.
Posted November 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines
By Ed Werstein
Water's Edge Press LLC, 2021
85 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-952526-02-2
Review by Michael Escoubas
From the get-go I was attracted to Ed Werstein’s Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines. First, the volume returns me to my days as a journeyman printer for a large commercial printing company. These were the days of “hot-metal” or “letter-press” printing. I spent my days with ink-stained hands, setting type one letter at-a-time in a special tray called a “stick,” and melting “pigs” for use by linotype ma-chines. The aroma of graphite still permeates the air of my mind along with the soft tic, tic, tic of linotype matrices falling into place forming “slugs” that were then made into pages by the skilled hands of printing craftsmen.
Second and by far the most important feature which attracts me to Communiqué, is what this unique volume has to say about life in America, past, present and future. The poems, formatted like newspaper headlines, complete with source-bylines, speak to where we live. They boldly address ideas and trends that cannot be ig-nored by thoughtful folk. This is the job of poets, to face life head on, and write the truth. This is what Werstein does as well as any poet this reviewer has met in recent years.
Werstein sets the tone with a quote by recently deceased poet and social activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021):
“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”
As a Ferlinghetti disciple, Werstein showcases a similar “low tolerance.” Where the poet stands on the issues is never in doubt. As a reviewer, I found myself pausing (as thoughtful folk should) to exercise my right to agree or to disagree. Quite often, I suspended judgment pending additional study.
Like the newspapers we encounter each day, Werstein’s volume is divided into sections which include National and Local News, International News, Weather, Sports, Business, Politics, a special section entitled: The War Report, Science, Religion, and Obituaries.
To offer a flavor of both format and content, I reprint in full, “Dear Emmett”:
Woman Linked to 1955 Emmet Till Murder
Tells Historian Her Claims Were False
--New York Times, January 27, 2017
Dear Emmett,
You’re dead, your mother is dead, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam,
The men who murdered you and were acquitted, are dead.
The investigation was officially closed long ago. “Bow thy head
O state of Mississippi, Let tears of shame course down thy cheek,”
wrote Langston Hughes at that time. And there is still so much hate
in Mississippi. They had to re-make your memorial in 2019.
It’s bulletproof now.
Emmett, only the woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, who accused you
of ogling and whistling, is still alive. Now, with death approaching,
she wants to recant her testimony, to unburden her troubled soul.
I wish she had a soul. I wish there were a
hell for that soul to suffer in.
Your hell, Emmett, was here on Earth. Is justice
60 years late any justice at all?
Emmett, you’re still gone. Is America any
Different than on the day you died?
This poem, and many others of similar power, reached me . . . I found myself troubled, truly troubled with this haunting question. I’m still troubled.
From International News, “Teaching Women How to Fly,” uses an NPR story about a 1911 garment factory fire in New York City, to call out the treachery of the wealthy and privileged. Real issues about working conditions and care for the safety of workers cry out for attention even today.
“Flag Football,” leads off the Sports Section, by offering a sober reflection about NFL players taking the knee of protest during the national anthem. This action brought out the consternation of the Trump administration. They were . . .
Simply kneeling, to call attention to an injustice
suffered by others, and to call attention to the fact
that they saw this as an American problem.
The poem goes on to develop the chasm between Trump’s nationalism and the reasoning behind what the players intended to convey.
On style, Werstein is a studied craftsman, writing primarily in free verse, but using other forms, or inventing his own, for greatest impact on his audience. “May 4,” is a must read, prose poem which revisits the tragic Kent State University shootings of 1970. This tragic event claimed the lives of four innocent students during the height of the Viet Nam war protests. This reviewer cannot ignore, the poet’s in-sights about the war, and hold a clear conscious.
No fewer than four Villanelle’s are sprinkled throughout the volume. This util-itarian form lends itself to the touch of sarcasm which wends its way through much of Werstein’s poetry. “Change of Seasons,” is about an injury to famed Green Bay Packer’s QB, Aaron Rodgers, would that his replacement be a Rodger’s clone! “Do Not Go Gentle Off That Overbooked Flight,” not only channels Dylan Thomas’ classic poem on death, but shines an embarrassing spotlight on how a passenger was treated by employees on an overbooked United flight.
As I worked my way through Werstein’s headline news, I asked myself, “Is there any topic, any issue in American life that this poet DOES NOT HAVE an opinion on?” I couldn’t think of any. That is precisely why Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines, belongs on your bookshelf and in your hands. Don’t delay, order your copy today.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted November 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Big Questions, Little Sleep, 2nd Edition
By Linda Imbler
Bowker, 2021
214 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0578655765
Review by Kate Hutchinson
Renowned Illinois poet Allison Joseph has said that every poem is an elegy. Kansas poet Linda Imbler would certainly agree, as all the poems in her new collection center on time, loss, and death. Big Questions, Little Sleep, Second Edition (Amazon, 978-0-578-65576-5) is a sprawling, 192-page attempt to answer some of life’s toughest questions.
It’s unclear why Imbler decided to publish a second edition of an earlier book when she has 66 new poems included here that might have stood on their own. She has indicated which poems are new by using a larger font for them, and they are mixed in among the older poems. Two main sections divide the book, “TIME” and “DEATH.” A sub-section labeled “TRIBUTES” contains some of the book’s strongest pieces, poems which honor some of the musicians, writers, and artists that have touched Imbler’s life – including B. B. King and Tom Petty. Her poem titled “Bowie” (p. 121) is among the new poems and is one of the few short pieces in the book:
Frail but unswerving,
His death unnerving,
If we’d begged him to stay, would he
With pain and loss of dignity
Now the Starman channels Lazarus,
Major Tom floats free to represent us.
The rest of the poems in Big Questions, Little Sleep consist of poems that are generally much broader in scope, where kernels of specific details are infrequent. Imbler is fond of metaphor, and as most of the poems are about time and death, she uses them liberally. In “Pillow,” a new poem, she states: “At my pillow’s command,/Morpheus draws forth,/ slips between the sheets,/ and mirrors the pale ones,/ regrettable as lost or found,/ vestiges of angels or beasts . . .” (p. 65). The syntax here gets lost, but we understand that she is haunted by dreams of the dead. In “Before the Sand Stops,” also a poem from the original book, we see a list of life-ending signals in a dying body:
Before the eyes’ slow roll back,
and the final, keen fail of the organs,
in the bitter winter of his life,
within this expected altering of circumstances,
the wasted, wizened man,
with the bony and angular face,
prays for a loophole from death.
We are left to wonder if the poet intended this to be a universal statement or if she had a particular man in mind – her father, perhaps? In many instances, I found myself wishing she had included more details that would make the poems more personal. Since time and death are such abstract topics, they become much more interesting when the writer puts a personal stamp on them.
Many of the poems in this collection focus on lost time and nostalgia, such as “Moment” (p. 19) and “Michael’s Memories” (p. 55). In this last poem, we see a lovely description of old Michael peering into “the window beyond the glass” of a bookstore, the “glare of the fluorescents reflecting off/ the lily whiteness of paper,/ the touch of supple leather and the smell of binding glue.” In the second stanza, Michael is now outside at a campfire scene from his youth, where
. . . friends [tell] genial and generous stories,
wearing vests for warmth as midnight draws near
and upon still burning coals lie
the vestiges of burned hot dogs
and dripping marshmallows.
These are the kind of sensory details that make poems come to life for the reader, and Imbler shows us here she is capable of taking us to a particular place to share her bittersweet feelings about time gone past.
Most of the poems in Big Questions, Little Sleep are written in free verse, which suits this poet and her wish to fully probe her abstract thoughts. Imbler’s use of form and rhyme in some poems is less artful, though she has shared two sonnets that include some nice turns of phrase, like this final sestet in “A Cup of Tea,” (p. 59), one of the recent poems:
She has a way of telling those old tales,
breathing life into personalities,
keeping tea and family lore flowing.
For me not to listen would be betrayal
of her and my ancestors’ memories.
So my love for tea and my family keeps growing.
There is much to like in this large collection, as Linda Imbler is a wordsmith whose lifelong passion for tackling some of humanity’s thorniest issues is abundantly clear. However, it is this reviewer’s opinion that less might have been more when so many poems cover the same ground. Self-publishing has opened a whole new realm of possibilities for writers, which is wonderful; in choosing this route, Imbler must have had good reasons to re-issue many of her previous poems. She also, it seems, chose to publish without an editor who could have tweaked the confusing syntax and punctuation in many of the poems. There are no acknowledgements listed in the book, so we must assume none has been published elsewhere.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Kate Hutchinson is a recently retired high school English teacher whose third collection, A Matter of Dark Matter, will be released by Kelsay Books in early 2022. She is on the board of Chicagoland Poets & Patrons and is active with several local poetry groups.
Posted November 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Orchard Days
By Heather Corbally Bryant
Finishing Line Press, 2021
107 Pages
ISBN-13: 978 -1 64662-526 -0
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
Orchard Days, is a beautifully crafted book of poetry that uses images of apples, trees, and orchards, to depict family history, spousal abuse, and the injustice meted out to women since Eve in the Garden of Eden. The placement on the printed page makes the reader's journey effortless. Apples and Orchard Days occupy the first two pages. At the Aquarium and Shark Tank, Sydney Aquarium, are on pages three and four.
The setting for many of the poems is an apple orchard, and is often referred to as "Our Orchard." Apples, the opening poem, talks about the author's memories of time spent with someone she cares about. The last line reads; "There came very close or so I thought to our days of Eden."
A Witch ties Irish history to apples. The witch steals silver apples from trees and is asked; "Did you not know it's bad luck not to leave a few apples on the ground after harvest for the fairie folk?" Who does this witch symbolize? A mother? A lover? What does the theft of the apples represent?
I love how the color silver is interspersed. “A witch plucking the silver apples from our trees.” A line from White Fox: “Silver against phospherescent blue. White Fox is a word rainbow. Runs off into a pint green forest.”
One of the strongest themes of this work is family history. The author's relationships are hugely impacted by the revelation that she came into being through artificial insemination. Where I Come From describes her angst. "I do not come from where I once thought. No one would be the wiser, but for a slip of the tongue."
The author and her husband also faced infertility. Their twins were conceived from implanted embryos. Can infertility issues be passed from one generation to the next? Several poems- Embryos, Birth Petri Dish, Eccyesis, depict the emotional roller coaster of attempting to get pregnant. Implantation. Some embryos not taking root. Finally the good news. "You are expecting at last!"The News is a bittersweet poem of the beginning of new lives; the twins have just been born- and the possible end of life. The author's father battles cancer.
As a mother, the author is fiercely loving and loyal. Northern Leopard Frogs, and, East Barehill Pond paint the deep mother child bond as expressed through a shared love of nature. She also pays homage to her daughter in My Daughter In Third Grade, and To A Daughter Age Nine.
This writer is a survivor of spousal abuse. Her writing took me on a tour of the dominance, control, and rage: key components of the abuser's personality. The author found the courage to overcome. She left the fear, pain, and damage behind by leaving the situation to create a good life. To The Edge Of The Light and This Dream I've Had, paint a chilling picture of love turning into evil horror.
The voice in this book is that of every woman. Every woman, every man can relate. Your mind barely processes war and terrorism, then you try to help your children through their questions. The Old Shirley Meeting House tells the story of a mother watching her son play his piece in a piano recital, while remembering the day she and her boy waited for her husband at the train station on 9/11.
Orchard Days teaches us that life is a mishmash of good and bad. War. Hate. Love. Forgiveness. Nature, apples, animals, family, parenthood, all part of the same stew.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jacqueline Stearns holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Media Communications from William Paterson College now University. She is honored to have been published in Highland Park Poetry and several Montclair Write Group Anthologies.
Posted November 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Poems to Lift You Up & Make You Smile
Compiled By Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, Editor of Your Daily Poem
Parson's Porch Press, 2021
100 Poems with Contributor Biographies
ISBN-13: 978-1-955581-09-7
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is previously published by Quill & Parchment
In an age of Covid-19, Poems to Lift You Up and Make You Smile, takes on special significance. This anthology is needed now, as never before. However, before sinking too deeply into the pandemic season to justify the worth of poetry, it is im-portant to remember that there has always been something that, as a people, we want and need to put behind us. The collective calling of poets in any age, is to tell the truth, sometimes with a bit of an edge, but always, in this writer’s mind, with a view toward finding the best in people and illuminating the path to hope.
This has been Jayne Jaudon Ferrer’s enduring passion for the last 11 years as editor of Your Daily Poem. YDP is a valued destination for some of the best- known poets in the country. Yet, Jayne is known for her welcoming spirt to new poets as well. She has a sharp eye for poets on-the-rise and gives many their first significant exposure. Moreover, Jayne’s single-minded goal has been “to share the pleasures of poetry with those who may not have had the opportunity to develop an appreciation for that genre.”
All of this is reflected in Poems and therein lies its appeal. The careful selection of 100 poems, chosen from an archive just shy of 4,000 poems, does exactly what the title says.
As one might expect, the work is comprised of two divisions: Poems to Lift You Up and Poems to Make You Smile.
Poems to Lift You Up
Kevin Arnold’s “One True Song,” reminds me that, in a world that values big achievements, it may be the simple things that count the most:
Our simple acts may be the warp and weft
Of the substance of our lives, what is left
Beyond the gifts and wills, the trusts and estates
After our belleslettres or plein air landscapes
What if our day-to-day actions, in the long slog
Of life are our lasting legacy, our true song?
Arnold’s deft use of couplet rhyme and understated style draws me in, lifts me up.
“Life Lines,” by Randy Cadenhead, contains much of the sage advice I grew up hearing, these excerpts draw back the curtain on the kind of person this reviewer is striving to become:
Walk where you have never been
and wonder at the beauty of the world.
. . . . . .
Be moderate in all things,
except goodness.
. . . . . .
Be moderate in all things,
except goodness.
. . . . . .
Listen to the music
you can find in silence.
What strikes me as important about this anthology is the role poetry can play in our everyday lives. The above noted poem, and so many others, remind us that we are neighbors, that we share common challenges, that we are united in our suffer-ings and in our joys.
Phyllis Beckman’s “I Am, for the Time, Being,” illustrates the point:
This morning I was musing when
This feeling came along
Reminding me I’m comfy, that
I feel like I belong.
So glad I’m not so worried
About what’s next to be
That I miss the present “now”
That life has offered me
When all these special moments
Are noticed one by one
The richness of just living
Can bubble up in fun
So thank you to the giver
Who urges me to take
My time, though it is fleeing,
A mindful life to make!
I am, for the time, being.
Beckman’s judicious use of commas made me slow down, caused me to think carefully about the poem’s underlying meaning. It’s what good poets do.
Poems That Make You Smile
I was already smiling as I reached Poems’ transitional mid-point! There’s just something about being “lifted” that feels good.
Let’s lead-off with a poem about America’s pastime, Carol Amato’s “Baseball in Connecticut.” This well-crafted visual poem is about a player at the plate wielding a bat that “was never kid-sized.” This is a can’t miss delight with an unusual ending.
Michael Estabrook’s poem “Laughter,” is for anyone who, in their twilight years, doesn’t want to be a bother to their children:
My mother called today
wants to pay for her funeral
in advance “so you boys don’t have
to worry about it.”
But I’m not sure how
one does that, who do you pay
after all she may live
another 15 years so I say
just write me a check you can trust me
$20,000 ought to cover it.
Been a long time
Since I’ve heard her laugh so hard.
Estabrook’s conciseness, clarity, and studied restraint is a good example of a poet picking up on how funny life can be. I’m certain there was a measure of serious-ness that prompted Michael’s mother to phone him with her heart’s concern; but it is poetry that elevates tender moments to the level of art.
This collection is sheer delight; bringing out the best in people and in life, illumi-nating the path of love and hope.
As a side note, Poems to Lift You Up and Make You Smile, is not a money-maker for the editor. A significant portion of sales revenue is earmarked for Parson’s Porch, a food, ministry program that provides bread and milk on a weekly basis for those in need. Sometimes a lift and a smile is all a person needs to make life worth living. Yes, yes indeed.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted November 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Poetry In An Age of Panic:
Poems of Strenght, Vulnerability, Loss & Triumph
By Terry Loncaric
Kelsay Books, 2021
132 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-63980-011-7
Review by Joseph Kuhn Carey
Poets are often watchers, gazers, seers and absorbers, channeling the wind, moon, trees, waves and sun into words and Terry Loncaric is one of the select few who can grasp the glowing crystal ball of life’s ebbs, joys and flows and create a tangible tapestry of large & small details and insights. In her newly published poetry book, Poetry in An Age of Panic: Poems of Strength, Vulnerability, Loss & Triumph, she searches long and hard throughout her coast-to-coast American travels for truth, justice, love, prayer and grace and finds it in the secret nooks and crannies, like a modern Diogenes with both a bright lamp and a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass in hand.
There’s a panoply of bright colors and textures spread throughout her book and the writing touches on a wide array of topics, from poems set in Santa Fe, New Orleans, Florida , California, Chicago and Maine, to painter Georgia O’Keeffe, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, her father’s forty years of rough, gritty work in the Gary, Indiana, steel mills, a vivid lecture in college by Gloria Steinem, the horrible, tragic demise of George Floyd, her encounters with students in high school hallways as a teacher, America’s recent political turmoil, Kamala Harris’ impressive career, oceans, walks in quiet woods, young and mature love, bold flamenco dance and sensuous hot gypsy jazz, the smell and look of morning coffee, a beloved pair of Earth Shoes, the soothing ways of nature, the powerful loss of her mother and her journey through grief to restored faith, the cosmos and her place in it, the joy of snow and brandy, the magic of tasty food in all its multitudinous forms, and a true, deep love of her cats, who buoy her up with their endless devotion, touch and easy daily erasure of all worries and woes.
In one of the earliest poems in the book, “Glorious Flight,” Terry delves beautifully into what draws her to poetry and sets her journeys of exploration into motion:
The poet in me
is awakened by mystery,
the shadows of trees,
the trajectory of stars.
Logic may steady my course,
but each time I veer
from the path,
mystery sweetens my life,
stokes my spontaneity,
reminds me of my longings,
never wrecks my soul
with suffocating limitations
Mystery keeps changing
my itinerary,
keeps me in glorious,
unpredictable flight.
Soon thereafter, in “The Pleasure of the Poet,” she delightfully expounds a bit further on the poetical impulse and states:
I love that moment
the words
swirl
in your
head,
perform
their crazy dance
then,
with elegance,
creep
upon
the multitudes…
To see
your
words
flip and fly
like acrobats,
fueled by adrenaline,
that is the pleasure
of the poet,
that surge of
absolute risk,
not knowing
exactly
where your words
will swoop,
then land.
There is a joyful theatricality to some of the poems, too, along with many well-woven references to painting and sculpture as part of the poet’s writing approach. In “The Grace of Light,” Terry explores artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s colorful, vivid works:
Shafts of radiant light spill
from freckled clouds,
some people see God’s
penetrating gaze,
Georgie O’Keeffe saw
a horizon that could disappear
inside a swirly, fiery canvas.
In nature’s light,
I feel the vastness of my life,
the meandering paths
of hope and restoration,
the steepness of my imagination,
the strength of the earth’s
soothing embrace.
In this silvery stillness,
I am swimming inside
Georgia’s gush of colors,
melting into
this perfect moment
of grace.
In order to contemplate the complexity of the cosmos, of course, a poet must have fuel, and Terry also wonderfully details the joys of coffee (“A hiss and a whistle, dancing brown beans”), sweets (“the fierce aroma of chocolate that smacks my senses”), alluring exotic meals (“delicate courses of Chinese food, crunchy and tangy, plump strawberries dipped in cream cheese and whipped cream, washed down with tiny, sneaky cups of fiery sake”) and, most of all, in “Lobster Ecstasy,” a memorable encounter with an absolutely perfect simple sandwich at a roadside stand in the twisting forests of Maine:
As I zigged and zagged
along forests, the
ocean, and quaint
little towns,
I almost missed it,
the humble lobster stand
with its aroma of
succulent, sweet meat
on a huge buttery
roll, wrapped tightly
in paper, like a baby
in a blanket,
no fancy extras,
just the mouth-melting
crustacean.
The best meal
I ever had on a picnic
table with strangers.
So good it made me
want to moan out loud.
But, throughout her book of poems, Terry is also searching for the inner soul of nature, which can offer soothing balm in this current world of turmoil, stress, and panic. In “Miracles of Life,” a walk outdoors gives her “a chance to grasp miracles of life,” while she “admires the patience of flowers budging slowly through the soil then twisting into the warmth of the sun” and observes as a “honey bee lingered inside a tall wildflower, their colors magically mingling, a whirling pin wheel of splendid shades.” In “To Be A Tree,” she wishes to blend in further with the great outdoors:
To have long,
strong arms
that shake and
bob in the breeze,
to feel the brush stroke
of every season…
Oh, to be a tree,
to remain permanently
tangled in the wild roots
of so many generations,
to outlast the foibles of humans,
who embraced my roughness
and admired my beauty.
There is so much to admire in this marvelous and meaningful collection of poems, which was truly a pleasure to read. Terry Loncaric has traveled near and far across this sprawling crazy quilt of American states and she’s spotted the essences and secrets in the spaces between the musical notes and the sweet silences that separate word from word. As the opening single epigraph line of the book states, “Only when we leave the traffic, can we slip into the silence, and dwell in the sacred space of poetry.” Terry has most definitely created a special spiritual “church” of words, thoughts, love and faith in Poetry in an Age of Panic, and, as she so nobly declares in her poem, “Polarities” (as one who has sought and found wisdom and wishes to humbly pass bits of this peaceful gift of knowledge on to any poets, readers and students who follow behind):
I never give up on love, truth or peace,
and when my life seems scattered,
like a thousand puzzle pieces,
I never stop rearranging it.
In contradiction, there is clarity,
in falling, there is rising,
in breathing, there is hope,
in hope, there is transformation
So, take a meaningful, rewarding walk in the winding woods of life with Terry Loncaric’s fine poetic wine at your side and “find joy in the confetti of these ordinary moments we so bravely share.” After all, as she so ably and thoughtfully notes in “World Citizens, Now and Forever,” “…we are a Beatles song sung by many voices,” and doesn’t singing (and poetry) connect the heavens and earth and softly soothe the worried, blues-filled soul?
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Joseph Kuhn Carey, of Glencoe, Illinois, a real estate manager by day and a poet by night, is the author of two full-length book of poetry: Black Forest Dreams (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Postcards From Poland (Chicago Poetry Press, 2014). His poems have also appeared on the insides of buses, in storefront windows and poetry/art exhibits, within cinematic videos created by his son, Joey, and in numerous Highland Park Poetry and Illinois State Poetry Society collections. He has also released two CDs of original songs for children along with his brother, Bill (“The Caboose is Loose” and “Mighty Big Broom”).
Posted October 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Forged
By Tina Cole
Yaffle Press, 2021
28 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-913122-24-9
Review by Lynn White
I am so pleased to have the opportunity to review this collection of poems. Forged in a different age they are now part of a past which speaks to my own growing years and “the person who left roots behind, tried to grow an oak without them” as “I put away my accent”. I wonder how many others have been there and done the same, countless, I think, and all will find so much here to trigger those fickle memories of their “freeze frame(d)” times. And for the ones who stayed rooted, there is just as much to love in these words, in the characters and eccentricities that live on in the family stories or newly fashionable crafts of “Peg rugs and wool winding”, in the ring of memories from the sounds of “a stick down across railings” and in the shock of meeting a childhood friend from a lifetime ago, or maybe much less, and discovering one of those “golden-curled girls who quickly became crone” and spread like their mothers “Lurpak wide”.
The quotes I have chosen above begin to illustrate the beauty and depth of the language used. It made me think of the prose and poetry DH Lawrence at his best, for example, in the dreams of the sea and “the tide-tongue licking a sky”, the man who “considers himself old, like the edge of winter when the frost has lidded the earth” and the many, many evocations of the tight knit industrialised community with it’s “bravura of cackle speak that squabble squawked” and the “factory worn father cycling five miles home on an old bone shaker”, “the muddy boots abandoned on the sodden mat” with “the workhouse fears and the dread of idle hands”. All speak strongly to his writing of a still earlier time.
The stirrings of Under Milkwood are also strong in the way the characters and their times are drawn - “the throats swarf-rattled, hair machine oil slicked” and “mouths oozing a slurry of black pudding excuses” and the grandmother who “sits palms blessing black leaded heat” and how in the end “When no one is looking death curls inside”. No one could fail to visualise and be moved by these characters placed so strongly in their time and place.
It seems that ‘Forged’ speaks to a time “When so much of the world was off kilter, it was hard to hold on”. But isn’t that now? So, although rooted firmly in a particular time and place it also speaks to our times - whenever and wherever they are, whoever and wherever we are. And still we never “notice the shrinking, (as) time wore them down, faded tightened skins, dulled their glow”. This is a universal statement, part of all our lives, our own fickle memories and customised past which we revisit again and again.
So, I’ll end where Tina Cole begins with her quote from Brecht’s ‘Motto’: “In the dark times/ Will there be singing?/ Yes, there will be singing./ About dark times.” ‘Forged’ is rooted in such dark times but in the singing of her words Tina Coles brings the sunshine streaming through them.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lynn White’s life was forged in a very similar environment to that described in this collection of poems. She now resides in a small post-industrial town in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
Posted October 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Dearest Papa: A Memoir in Poems
By Thelma T. Reyna
Golden Foothills Press, 2020
65 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-578-64373-1
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review was previously
published in
Quill & Parchment.
In the foreword to Dearest Papa, her memoir honoring her late husband, Thelma T. Reyna avers, “Our lives, all lives unspool with time, unexpected paths take unexpected turns and the unexpected awaits at each curve in our journeys.” No one, least of all Thelma and Victor, expected anything other than a successful minor surgery that day; followed by dinner already planned at their favorite restaurant. Something unexpected raised its ugly head. The arts, and poetry, lends itself to the unexpected, to those things that give a “gut-punch” to the lives of regular people, changing them forever, often growing them to new heights not imagined before.
Thelma’s compelling memoir is arranged in five parts: I. Beginnings, II. Endings, III. Mournings, IV. Balms, and V. Resolutions. Some 12 pages of photographs are salt and peppered throughout the book. These judiciously placed photos depict a smiling, confident Victor, a wedding picture, family members, sports trophies and other treasures that lend a special poignancy to Reyna’s superb poetry. Her poems arise from a sharing of life between two people whose love remained undeterred even by the unspooling of life due to something totally unexpected that changed the trajectory of their lives forever.
From “Beginnings” I was struck by the poet’s openness about shared love. This is evident in an excerpt from “Pete and Tillie”:
When my breasts were young and round, my husband named them
one night as we lay in afterward euphoria.
Pete.
and.
Tillie.
He tapped each one with a fingertip light as a feather’s tip. Monarch
knighting heroes with the delicate touch of a sword. Pete and Tillie.
What comfort, what ease, resides in Thelma’s heart as she lifts the veil on intima-cies shared. Caresses not of lust but foreshadowings of deeper love reaching be-yond physical borders.
Poems throughout “Beginnings” paint a portrait of Victor’s dedication to his students as an educator, his love of sports, his impressive physical appearance, and stamina.
“Timeless Teaching” bears witness to Vic’s advocacy for a troubled student from a broken home. Because of his testimony the student was allowed to stay in school under Vic’s mentorship and tutelage. This was teaching that paved the way for a kid to have a better life
I was surprised that poems about “Endings” were placed early in the memoir. As I worked my way through the collection I easily understood why. Endings, I reasoned, naturally belong at the end. Not so here. As Victor walked barefoot through his house one day, he was bitten by the family cat. Victor thought nothing of it, said nothing. I would have done the exact same thing. The event was like a comma in a sentence, something one barely notices. However, this triviality led ultimately to infection, infection to gangrene, gangrene to ampu-tation of Vic’s right foot. The poem, “Cat Bite” is a must read to understand the full picture.
“Papa,” as Victor was affectionally known, tolerated the amputation procedure well, even against menacing odds. It was a different procedure, minor by com-parison, that resulted in Papa’s death. The prose poem “Moment” is one of the best descriptions I’ve read about what a patient knows or understands at the end of life.
Within the context of endings,” I proudly reprint in full Thelma’s heart presented in “How Poems are Born”:
While walking room to room, to tuck
bedsheets in around the edge, to
wash my cup in morning light of
sink
drop soiled laundry in the tub, wipe coffee
stains from tile, sweep lint from sofa cushions
crumpled flat, fill cubbies with his
books
fingers, hands, legs move like ‘motons
clearing dust, while poems rush in like
fools, disembodied, spinning reels of
recollection
stringing phrases, weaving words he spoke,
parsing empty spaces of the life lived here, making
sense of him and me and death, the poems are
born
Moving ever-so-gently into “Mournings,” Thelma recalls small things, things just between “Papa” and herself. His favorite cologne, the fragrance of the man, so much more that the liquid he splashed on. The “Potty Cat” that greets her every morning, with those mesmerizing green eyes. And the house itself that “will never be / the same again.” She wonders if there is really such a thing as “Broken Heart Syndrome,” where “Disasters shred our fibers like thieves picking / pockets in broad day.”
“Ordinary Things: Tanka Sequence,” echoes Mother Teresa’s timeless saying: Do small things with great love. The poem is divided in to 3 divisions of four tanka sequences each: 1. Work; 2. Self; 3. Family. Each paints a subtle picture of the man, his doings, his leavings, his loves. Don’t skip this one.
What shall we do about life when the best part of life is gone? I find so much value in section IV, “Balms.” I can’t help thinking, that without poetry, Thelma’s loss would have been unbearable. I felt her leaning into poetry, reaching deeply into poetry for what she needed, for ways to both understand what happened, (even as if looking into a steamy mirror), and beyond mere understanding, rising toward redemption, toward hope, toward peace.
“So Much Goodness in This World” is a prime example. Four sestets highlight the goodness she finds; here is the opening sestet:
I marvel at unconditioned love,
The givers giving when cameras are off,
Microphones still or gone,
Without name tags, the press,
Tax breaks or trophies,
Unpaid.
After “Balms” Thelma is far from finished. Section V. Resolutions, suggests con-crete actions about how to live and what to do to sustain the life and values of her dear Papa. I was struck by “Candle,” a simple, yet profound resolution that lights Thelma’s path . . . let it also light everyone’s path:
Death is not the end of the light;
It is putting out the candle
Because the dawn has come.
--Tagore
aurora’s
fingers
pinch
flame
spread
iridescent
skirts
on
clouds
fan
gray
away
dawn
can’t
die
light
never
snuffed
galaxies
prove
this
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted October 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Not As It Seems
By Pat St. Pierre
Kelsay Books, 2021
36 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1954353732
Review by Irene Savine
The other day, I found myself saying to a committee member of an arts project I’m involved with: “Writers need readers”. As the words came out of my mouth, I realized its truth. The writer may write without expectation of being read, yet still, the need exists. The reader who meets that need may be taking a risk - a book demands a responsibility of witnessing what the writer needs to say. In Pat St. Pierre’s collection of poems, “Not As It Seems” the reader takes on that responsibility from the first poem, “The Family In The Red House”, and then throughout the poems in St. Pierre’s book.
St. Pierre takes us on a journey about her family and relationships knit together with nature poems. To get there, the reader has to be willing to walk with her. She starts with “The Family In The Red House”, a poem that offers us an echo of Frost as the poet is out walking in the woods. When the poet sees a decaying house, the reader surveys it, along with her, at a distance. We readers are sure she’ll have the sense to stay outside, but she doesn’t. In we go, seeing the disquieting things she sees: decaying food, a single unmade bed. The occupants of the house left in haste, but why? When the poet discovers a trap door, and the skeletal remains of a family in the cellar beneath, we are struck by the unexpected image. Definitely, this is not what it seems, but what it stands for won’t be revealed unless we keep reading.
St. Pierre continues the theme of houses and the families who occupy them in the poem “The Shadows”. This time, the house and its occupants age together, but are haunted by the death of a previous resident. The aged owner wraps a child ghost in her shawl and the two are silent forever more. What happens to them, again, is a mystery. Does advanced age bring the once young owner of the house closer to the past? Or does death come to her in the form of a ghostly child? The reader can only guess while being chilled by the ghost story the poet tells.
I did wonder what the poet feels about both of these houses as the poems primarily relate images and not her emotions. St. Pierre is a cool observer. However, in “Memories of You” the poet admits to being haunted by someone she loved who caused enough pain that she can’t recall good memories anymore. Perhaps the houses are the relationships she’s had within her family and the poet feels herself dying in those houses in different ways. The next poem, “Loneliness of the Heart”, is in second person. Maybe the poet is talking to herself about the pain of revealing oneself to a distant other or perhaps it’s an observance of someone else. Either way, the two poems hint that strong feelings are happening beneath the surface.
Nature is integral in St. Pierre’s writing, we watch autumn and, frequently, winter (fitting for an Illinois poet) descend. “Winter Arrival” gives us the hazy, wobbly feeling of driving in a snowstorm and then we are presented with the title poem, “Not As It Seems”. Here, the poet is concerned with what happens when you follow your heart, but the outcome is not the happiness we’re promised when we choose heart over head. Has the poet’s heart brought her to the red house only to find herself abandoned? Rainbows and rainstorms, an early transition to autumn follow.
St. Pierre has her own family to confront and toward the end of the book, she does. Her mother kept a secret from her, her son predeceased her. As readers, we can now understand why it is St. Pierre needed to write as she finally turns her observing eye on herself in “Planting Flowers”. Consistent with the title, she’s not doing what it seems. She isn’t out planting in her garden, but cleaning family graves on Memorial Day. She can’t face her son’s headstone and leaves the cemetery awash in tears like the rains in her earlier poem,”The Rainbow”. This is where the poet is her best - when she leaves the metaphors behind and scrupulously observes her own emotions in response to her experience and nature’s delights and threats.
We’re left with one last sunburst in “The Seasons Of Love”. Here, St. Pierre describes love as the changes of her beloved seasons, always ready for renewal, despite the shadows. On this hopeful note, the collection ends. Our job as witness is over and we’ve been quietly enriched by the journey.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER:Irene Savine is a creative writer and marketing communications professional. She lives in Highland Park, Illinois with her husband, two kids and a very entertaining beagle.
Posted October 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Shoes: Poems About Footwear
Co-Edited By Jennifer Dotson & Mary Beth Bretzlauf
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2021
103 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8523568879
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is previously
published by Quill & Parchment
Several years ago, my wife fulfilled one of my life-long aspirations by gifting me with a pair of cowboy boots. Since finding comfortable footwear has always been problematic, my new boots, fashioned from fine leather with a decorative design are the most comfortable “shoes” I’ve ever had. I mention this rather obscure event as I prepare to review Shoes: Poems About Footwear. They say that the best poetry derives from life’s common things. So true. This collection fetes the feet of the lives we live! Not only that, out of this most common of themes something else emerges: Being real, being authentic. The truth (which is always the poet’s goal) becomes manifest as the poems in this collection inevitably reveal the kind of people we are, amid the lives we live.
First off, I was struck by the cover artistry. The front cover, designed by Monica Cardestam, pictures an incredibly “high” high-heel with a bow and spangles. It is doubtful that anyone would wear such a shoe. (Ladies feel free to correct me on this one!) By way of contrast, the back cover, designed by Gail Denham, features a pair of worn-out work shoes, scuffed, cut, completely spent by wear and work. Thus, contrasting metaphors greet us tongue-in-cheek with a spoonful of truth.
Shoes is organized into four sections: 1: Working Shoes, 2: Comfort and fit, 3: A Closet Full, and 4: Fashion Statement. We work, we seek pleasure, we accumu-late, and we seek to set ourselves apart in a world that often demands conformity.
All of this and more finds expression through the erudite poems included by co-editors Dotson and Bretzlauf. Highland Park Poetry Society, Highland Park, IL, has established itself as among the premier poetry societies in the country. Its membership is worldwide. Thus, the diversity and quality of each poem bears witness to HPP’s well-deserved reputation.
“Empty Boots,” by Tricia Knoll, opens Section 1, with lessons from history that left boots empty after “The Trail of Tears,” or empty because of gun violence. “My sign says empty shoes / for the shot deads.” Caroline Johnson’s “Blue Shoes,” incorporates players from Greek mythology imagining the role shoes played in the stories connected with each.
On another level, I’m especially drawn to the vibrant sounds of Joan Leotta’s “Shoes from Two Dance Classes”:
Click Clack, clickety.
Tap shoes
beat out a soft
tattoo along the stone
floor of grandma’s
porch and our kitchen
linoleum.
I tried to love the
soft satin pink
ballet slippers
from my other class,
but they were so
aloof, never speaking
always tsk tsking
me to tighten the
so we could silently
glide wherever.
Sigh. I’m a click clack,
tap, tap kind of girl.
I gave away those
ballet slippers,
very lightly worn,
but kept the tap shoes
until only my hands
could fit in them,
and click clack
them on the floor.
Who among us hasn’t felt the life-tensions Leotta outlines in this poem?
The economical language of Chinese poet William Marr opens Section 2, “Shoes New and Old”:
with every step
the pretentious
new shoes
jeer
at the memory
of
the old
Profound truth contained within the device of understatement. Continuing with the oriental forms, I identify with the “comfort” showcased in a haiku by Charlotte Di-gregorio:
Good Friday . . .
walking to confession
in worn shoes
Yes, worn shoes, how we need them to take our feet to the doorstep of the soul’s deepest needs. Julie Sheldon imagines a centipede shopping for “New Shoes.” The humor and vibrant visuals in this poem are captivating! For a practical take on the value of shoes, I appreciated Daniel J. Fitzgerald’s poem, “Benefit”:
I walked a mile
in another man’s shoe,
wondering why my feet didn’t hurt.
Of course they won’t,
you silly person.
He broke them in for you.
You are reaping the
the benefits of his journey.
I smile reading the poems in Section 3, “A Closet Full.” I often chide my wife for the shoes she leaves laying around the house. I call them landmines. The abun-dance of shoes and the things we do with them fill our lives with truth and joy. Shoes are versatile, they represent a lifetime of memories, as Judith MK Kaufman observes: “there are Baby Booties, Mary Janes, Saddle Shoes, Sneakers, Penny Loafers, Little Heels, and of course High Heels.” Don’t miss the ending on this one.
Sliding into Section 4, “Fashion Statement,” readers encounter poems about old blue pumps being washed out to sea, stilettos that blister heels, Doc Martens that are “Bright and shiny, comfy but bulky.” There are “lost shoes,” shoes that define Nancy Pelosi’s ability to “Command Congress,” black leather school shoes that never get polished as a matter of principle. There are “frumpy” shoes, rental shoes and shoes that transform life altogether. Is there anything that shoes can’t do?
While the foregoing question is wrapped in fun, Jennifer Dotson’s, “Pantoum for Mrs. Hardcastle,” seems to anticipate a response:
Putting on the costume changes the actress.
The black shoes with pointed toes and fluted heels
begin to alter my posture, my step, my gait.
The corset tightens, straightening my spine.
The black shoes with pointed toes and fluted heels
are suggestive of the eighteenth century.
The corset tightens, straightening my spine
to become Lady Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer,
Something suggestive of the eighteenth century.
The wig towers above my brow with sculpted, powdered curls
and I become Lady Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer.
Contours of shadow and light make my features visible.
The wig towering above my brow with sculpted, powdered curls,
and my speech transforms to her British syllables.
Contours of shadow and light make my features visible.
A critic said my voice could summon dogs from afar.
My speech transformed to her British syllables.
My being altered—my posture, my step, my gait—
a critic said my voice could summon dogs from afar.
Putting on the costume changes the actress.
Note: Italics in the last line by the reviewer.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted October 1, 2021
Click to purchase
No Batteries Required
By Ellen Dooling Reynard
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2021
78 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1735023045
Review by Carol L. Gloor
No Batteries Required, by Ellen Dooling Reynard, is a charming little book. It combines memoir, musings on daily life, observations of nature and animals, and even humor, to give us a picture of a creative, and an emotional, life.
Some of the best poems are close descriptions of domestic and wild creatures. “Black Cat” evokes a cat on the prowl when its space has been invaded:
[the cat] then straightens to tiptoe
one paw in front of the other
on a balance beam she alone can see
Similar careful observation enlightens “The Cricket,” who “appears from nowhere/to sit on the rim of my water glass/After flexing his various legs”. In some of the poems these careful descriptions evince a love for “Other Creatures,” [the title of the third section of the book] beyond observation, which combines with other moments of the poet’s life. “Right to Life” begins with a rough bear, then, through several deft turns, moves to preventing the men’s’ attempt to kill the bear, “The creature lumbers into the shadows/and the men lower their rifles,” and ends with the protection of the poet’s unborn child, “As rage melts, I put my hand on my belly/and feel the stirring of my unborn child.”
Other poems reveal an emotional honesty in confronting past and present, with careful and original language. The lovely poem, “Your Hand,” moves from a youthful moment, “Your finger touched mine/ and my hand caught fire,” to a moment many years later, “I remember how you held/ the pencil, the brush/ your hands/your hands.” In “Ladybug,” a child of four becomes fourteen, then eighty-four, all the while watching or ignoring a ladybug, until old age blends with childhood in the timeless observation of the old woman, like the child, observing a ladybug “blend with the red-orange rose petal.” “Fabric of Friendship” sustains a metaphor of thread, yarn and weaving as relationship through three stanzas, to ask whether a friendship will endure through a whole life: “is the warp and weft still strong/enough to weave new rows?”
Finally, the poet is bold enough to try humor, with some success. In “A Riddle,” the poet riffs on the word “fly,” using several cliches and then gives the answers in backward letters. In the title poem, a pencil is comically compared with a word processing program, “one end for ENTER,” the other for DELETE.”
If there is anything not to be liked in this book it is the tendency toward too much narrative and occasional oversimplification. “Easter 1949” occurs in Montana snow, an incredible enough image, but spends too much time getting to the gravamen of the poem, that the poet’s father had planted an Easter egg in the snow especially for her. And “Old Age” begins with a cliché, “the best years when it is no longer/necessary to prove anything to anyone.
But these lapses do not detract from the essential careful observation, emotional honesty, and original language which permeates the book. All in all, a good read, like a conversation with a close friend.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Gyroscope, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets.
Posted September 1, 2021
Click to purchase
The Bold News of Bird Calls
By Edward Morin
Kelsay Books, 2021
102 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781952326707
Review by Lynne Viti
To label the arresting poems in this collection nature poetry alone would be to miss the breadth and richness of Edward Morin’s subject matter in this, his fifth collection in four decades of teaching, writing and publishing poetry, translations, reviews and academic essays. In a volume packed with long-line free verse (with a few exceptions, when he ventures into a tight rhyme scheme, usually to have a little fun with the subject matter), Morin gives the reader plenty about birds—robins, wrens, sparrows, swallows, swans, ducks, grouse as well as house cats, toads, and a neighbor’s particularly surly dog. His powers of close observation are evident in the very first poem, about blue jays— “sinister as Dutch elm disease”—and juvenile cardinals, who sing “with the modesty of talented beginners.”
Morin’s conversational tone and language and his gestures of familiarity with his reader often belie the seriousness at the heart of so many of these poems. In “Elegy,” the middle-aged speaker memorializes his colleague from the time of their first teaching jobs, where the two of them ‘craved to write fine stories/and bring as many students as we could/by sleigh over the moonlit tundra where/Hemingway and Chekhov had left their tracks.” After both he and his friend are denied tenure, they continue their separate professional journeys “know[ing] what stories/sound genuine (and why), what gives us hope/ in life and art, and is most likely to endure.” Here, Morin’s language and subject hearkens back to Keats’ pondering immortality through the poetic art.
The strongest works here are not Morin’s studies of nature and particularly, birds, but narratives plucked from a long life—the tale of a paint store robbery told in “Valentine’s Day, 1972,” when Morin was minding the store and left shaken, on the floor, his hands bound behind his back. In fourteen stanzas full of exquisite and jarring detail, he allows the reader to share his fear and later, his need to tell and retell –both to his lover and us—the story of the robbery and its aftermath. His PTSD is evident, both to him and his girlfriend. The next day, as he sums up in curt, understated language, he quits: “It was only a job.”
Politics, tales of an ex-wife, lovers, a second wife, a flashback to a train trip at age four, from Milwaukee to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit grandparents who “smelled wrong/and spoke an unintelligible tongue” are interspersed in no particular order with an elegy for a high school debate team buddy (“Old School Ties”), his factory worker father who “kept our few possessions in good order” (“Bolts in the Blue”), a close study of phragmites in the Erie Marsh (“Mighty Phragmites”), and the tale of his fall from a ladder that resulted both in an ankle fracture—and a spectacular self-mocking poem. A meta-poem, “Poem as a Deconstructed Car” chronicles a spontaneous sports-car boosting caper, whether real or imagined, nonetheless intriguing.
There’s much more, the clever and funny “The Bernie Madoff Hustle,” “Epithalamion,” likely an occasional poem for the wedding of friends, and the collection’s final, and in my view, best section, “The Passage of Swans.” In this last group of poems, Morin paints the portrait of a large extended family, with marriages that stuttered an flew apart, and some that endured. All this is seen through the seasoned eye of the poet, for whom old friends and loves, family, wrens, robins, Presidents (Nixon and G. W. Bush), toads and University Presidents—are all grist for Morin’s omnivorous poetic self.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lynne Viti's most recent book isDancing at Lake Montebello(Apprentice House Press 2020). A lecturer emerita at Wellesley College, she has published two chapbooks,Baltimore Girls(2017) andThe Glamorganshire Bible(2018) from Finishing Line Press. She blogs at lynneviti.wordpress.com
Posted September 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Time and Tide: An Atlas for the Grieving
By Denise Thompson-Slaughter
Plain View Press, 2021
32 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781632100870
Review by Bill Cushing
Denise Thompson-Slaughter, a writer residing in western New York State, has published two earlier books of poetry as well as having her work appear in journals such as Nine Cloud Journal and the Tipton Poetry Journal. She also has published prose, including the recently-released study of the paranormal, Cleaning the Coincidence Closet: Exploring the “Inexplicable.”
Now she offers a new chapbook of poems, Time and Tide: An Atlas for the Grieving. Dedicated “to the Grieving, with special thanks to the medical personnel and first responders during the Covid-19 pandemic,” it is only natural to expect that the 21 poems contained in these 26 pages focus on the effects the virus had on the people of the world over the year of Covid 2020.
Titles such as Covid 19–20, New York City and The New Normal encapsulate the recent year of lockdowns where she recalls how “I am quarantined at home with my many ghosts” in My Ghosts. In The Purell Bottle Is Half Full, she delivers a perspective on that bromide that brims with dark humor as she asks
In such times can death be kind?
Can death be timely?
How lucky were those who died of old age right before the Black Plague?
Those who had heart attacks in Nagasaki the day before the bomb fell?
It Could Have Been Worse offers its own strange form of optimism:
It could have been Ebola
or the Black Plague or the Red Death,
something bodily gross, bloody.
It could have lasted a decade.
Thirteen times as many could have died.
It could have been worse.
But then again, it could have been better.
The poem 2020 reads like poetic Vonnegut as Thompson-Slaughter notes how
The numerals looked so round and pleasant,
like a date from “The Jetsons” TV show—
simple, clean, easy.
She goes on to observe how the last year was like
1918, 1929, and 1968 rolled into one
with unprecedented new horrors on top.
Then she works through an alphabetical listing of some of the horrors of that year to end with the line “Could it get any worse? Don’t ask!” Meanwhile Mourning Tote employs multiple meanings of its title while it examines the impact of mandatory lockdowns on the human psyche as
We think of all the thousand ways
we’re fragile and prone to mistake,
while others we for granted take.
The year advances as it will,
but we tote up our losses still.
One of her most powerful poems concerning the year of the virus is the poem Lament, which opens with the stanza
Imagine
death without rituals,
grief without hugs,
mourning without companionship,
comfort without community.
She follows this with an observation on Personal Protective Prisons, an apt metaphor for the trend in masking. Yet here she sees it as means by which we “climb Maslow’s pyramid of needs.”
Still, her best writing focused on Covid, perhaps ironically, are the two Pandemic Haiku. I won’t give them away here as these two deliver a real gut punch to readers.
The writing here also examines modern lives as well as universal ones. There are a number of poems that stand as personal political statement. These include titles such as Murder of an Innocent written in memory of Breonna Taylor, Where Does It End? (for Daniel Prude), or A Nation’s Women Mourn, an abbreviated acrostic that acts as a paean to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Thompson-Slaughter is at her strongest when her writing is more universal in perspective. Against the Tide, the opening poem, presents readers a narrator with
arms wrapped tight around a wooden pylon
connecting earth to the river of time.
as “Barnacles begin to cling, but I don’t care” because, as Thompson-Slaughter notes,
Eventually the spring floods come.
The raucous river is full of new water, new life, new eddies and
sites of interest, even to me.
My grip loosens and the waves pull me from my post,
wash me further downstream
with my hands full of splinters,
bobbing like a cork,
anchorless.
The Club No One Wants to Belong To identifies with and clarifies how it feels as a parent who experience the loss of a child when she asks,
Don’t you get sick of everyone saying
“I don’t know how you do it”?
There is no how.
There is only to die or to keep breathing
then explains
But the only superpower you’ve got
is putting one foot in front of the other.
So,
we do it again today.
These are reactions that I can easily attest to.
The beauty of chapbooks—when done right—and their challenge to the writer is packing as much skill and creativity in a short span of text. Denise Thompson-Slaughter meets that challenge in Time and Tide and does so while covering a variety of topics.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Bill Cushing is a retired English teacher currently residing in California. He is the author of two poetry collections, A Former Life and Music Speaks. His newest chapbook, ...this just in..., is also available from CyberWit.
Posted September 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Kindness in Winter
By Sally Nacker
Sally Nacker, 2021
42 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-954353-37-4
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review was previously published in Quill & Parchment.
In the winter of his life Leo Tolstoy devoted some 17 years to compiling a journal of wise sayings that he felt would serve the world for generations yet unborn. Of kindness, Tolstoy had this to say,“Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.”
I thought about Tolstoy’s dictum as I enjoyed the poems in Sally Nacker’s latest collection, Kindness in Winter. While I sense no motive in Nacker’s work to “save the world,” or to promote a moral agenda, I find embedded in her poems a heart for life, an empathy for the world which surrounds her. The season itself, speaks a word of kindness into her being, into her soul.
A complaint about reading poetry that frequently reaches my ears runs variously as follows, “I don’t read poetry because poetry is so hard to understand.” On a personal note, I want first and foremost that my readers understand my poems. So does Sally Nacker. These are poems written to be enjoyed. I begin with the title poem, “Kindness in Winter.” The poem’s protagonist is a nine-year-old girl named Scarlet:
Young Scarlet stands in deepening snow—
where she knows the doe
knows she has stood
at the edge of the wood.
The doe turns her ears toward the soft, recognizable sound
In the snow on the ground.
She listens from far in the wood—
and from a place of long-ago. Good
Scarlet feeds the gentle doe
red apples in the twinkling snow.
I picture the softness of the scene, the open and kind heart of Scarlet. I’m drawn to the color contrast between Scarlet, the red apples offered, and the twinkling snow. In a mere 10 lines we have a winter scene. But this is more than a scene contrived. The poem is a tone-setter. In a world often characterized by violence and the get-out-of-my-way push to achieve one’s selfish ends, this collection is refreshing.
To be sure, Nacker does not restrict herself to just one season. She touches all seasons and, with little effort, links common experiences to them. “Old Age,” is but one example:
Despite all likely lonelinesses,
illnesses, and losses,
my wish is still
to one day be very old—to sit
beside the windowsill
like now, and know
the birds that come and go—
to quietly observe the snow
dissolve into a field of flowers.
Power in language looks away from itself. With stunning simplicity Nacker cap-tures the aging process in terms that make the inevitable palatable.
Nacker’s background is New England; Connecticut to be specific. “Early Spring” captures a simple life any one of us might aspire to:
The man and his wife live simply,
turning the wood in their stove.
It burns like thought and poetry
In the making, throws love
On the cool spring morning. Behind
their little house a garden grows
spinach and greens, the kind
uplifting faces of new primrose.
This poem causes me to conjure applewood smoke curling from the chimney, the sweet fragrance of biscuits baking and dew sparkling on early spring grass.
Continuing with examples of seasonal poems other than winter, you shouldn’t skip over “Edge Habitat in August Rain.” This gem pictures a woman sitting quietly in the rain while birds flit and frolic “as though she were not there.”
Similarly, if you like poems wherein the weather and human beings meld into a single being, make a note to read “David’s Art.” Watercolors splashed over the paper, coloring / the blank world with a heaving and tossing / of my own heart.
By way of poetic technique, Nacker’s poetry is fraught with rhyme. But she does it effortlessly. I am not a big fan of rhyme. Poets often force their rhymes, straining self-consciously to think of just the right rhyme to fit in the line. Nacker is like Javier Baez fielding a grounder at shortstop. The batted ball, the pickup, the toss to first base are of a piece, a work of art contained within itself. This is the treat for-tunate readers have in store when they purchase a copy of Sally Nacker’s Kindness in Winter.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted September 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Melancholia
By Alan Balter
Kelsay Books, 2020
41 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1952326301
Review by Mike Freveletti
There are books of poetry that you read all the way through and there are books of poetry that you pick up, periodically, when you need a little perspective. Melancholia by Alan Balter is a collection of poetry that acts as a time capsule. Vignettes touching on moments from a past life, verse on the nature of nostalgia, ruminations on age, love and, of course, death. Balter’s poetry is profound in its simplicity and while I didn’t find it subversive, I did find it illuminating.
Throughout my notes taken while reading this collection I kept coming back to what appears to be one of Balter’s major “themes” in his poems: time. A specific type of time, age, in his hands is multifaceted at the very least and continuously evolving. Take for instance the poem “Imagine” which appears close the middle of the book, “six bedrooms each with a bath en suite/ with marble tile and golden faucets/ but nowhere a place for the boys to strut/ their stuff and tease the girls a while”.
It’s a portrait of growing up and how over time, like all things, how we grow up changes. What’s most important, in terms of environment, for a child to grow up happy? Is it a lot of money and cool stuff? What I see in this poem is an image of a somewhat lost view of domesticity. Completely gone? No. Fading? Kind of. In the cosmos of Balter’s poetry there is the slight notion that the words he chooses take us back to a less complicated time even if that’s not necessarily the case.
A character in some literary movie once said that nostalgia is denial. You choose to ignore the present because it’s too painful and instead revel in the past. I love the movie and the line but disagree with the sentiment. In the poem “Lost” this reader got a heavy dose of nostalgia and it struck me as one of the best poems in the whole collection. Lines like, “the first love poem I ever wrote/ and the sad novel I almost finished,” made me think about my desk full of love poems and the many shelved novels. The plight of the writer. The poem ends with the poet thinking back to old friendships, “maybe they’re all in a quiet place/ on a slope near a mountain stream gurgling/ waiting for me to find them again/ or maybe they’re lost forever”. That stanza almost took me back to my yearbooks from school.
Many of the poems here represent situations that are common but common doesn’t necessarily mean happy. One such poem is called “Depression”, a word that resonates with me personally but what Balter does at the end is ask the age old question, “am I living or am I dead/ and which one is second best?” A timeless question that’s always contemporary no matter how many times we ask it. Here’s another poet asking the right questions.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mike Frevelettiis a poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted September 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Second Story
By Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
110 Pages
ISBN-13: 9780822966531
Review by Lois Baer Barr
Denise Duhamel says she became a poet because of a poetry course she took in college. That made all the difference. A transplant in the Miami area since the first decade of this century, Duhamel is the daughter of working- class Rhode Island parents, and she pays homage to their traditions, ethics, love of education, and their influence on her in many poems in this volume. “Poker Hands,” the second poem in the book, is an elegy to her father centering on his calloused hands and the myriad things they can accomplish, in contrast to her own “weak hands.” Even more telling, in the antepenultimate line, she reveals that the first time she boarded an airplane and would “travel farther than you and mom had ever been,” her purple nail polish was already beginning to chip. She would study abroad, she would attain advanced degrees, but she would still be a girl with a thin veneer of polish.
The first poem of the book centers on Duhamel’s political commitment and one of her most urgent topics, global warming. Living and teaching in Florida, she knows firsthand the upheaval and human suffering that climate change can inflict. “Folkways” begins with the poet seeing the sea coming closer and ends with a homeless man who showers at the beach where the upper classes rid themselves of sand before heading home. The man sometimes simply bathes in the sea, and his words to the poet are ironic and prophetic.
He says maybe his luck is changing,
Maybe one day soon
The ocean will come to him.
At the heart of the book is a long poem about Hurricane Irma. I admit I stopped reading “Terza Irma” my first time through the book. It’s thirty-one pages that cover Duhamel’s evacuation and return home during the upheaval caused by Irma (9/5 to 9/18 2017). I went back to the poem for the sake of the review, and realized it is well worth savoring slowly. The poet relates the utter chaos of trying to get out of harm’s way when the highways are parking lots. The reader is brought into the confusion and fear the poet and her friends experienced when they didn’t know where to go or where to find the basic necessities. They see damage everywhere as they return home. It becomes personal when Duhamel gets to her first-floor condo to find sea water and mud everywhere.
I hoist my suitcase up the stairs, brace
myself as I open the door, slip
on water in the hall and come face
to face with my books, the white shelves drip-
ping. I pull down Dante –the pages
heavy, wavy as potato chips
There is also humor in “Terza Irma.” The rather clunky separation of dripping into two lines to make it rhyme with slip/chips. The pratfall and the salty metaphor just make the poem more poignant to this reader. I enjoyed the satirical portrait of her neighbor, the new age yoga instructor, who becomes overbearing in her attempts to teach Duhamel how to deal with the loss. Irritated and impatient, the poet just wants to get the woman out of her apartment so she can rub some Tiger Balm on her sore muscles and go to bed.
As far as structure of “Terza Irma,” Denise Duhamel follows the terza rima form with rhyme on first and third line of every three-line stanza. The form (aba, bcb,cdc, etc.) is used in Dante’s Divina Comedia and she follows this form for the entire length of the work. It is not heavy-handed, and I was so interested in the plot, the personalities of the good friends, and the kindness of the condo superintendent, that at first, I only noticed that it was done in tercets. Now (thanks Wikipedia) we know why the first ruined book she pulled from her shelf was by Dante.
She deals with humor about the menace of spam with her found poem using words from an email sent by someone called Mindy whose subject line read “I Love Sex in all its Forms” Duhamel followed the links offered in the email and created her entire poem with language from the sex websites.
Also, very political are her two clever prose poems called “Forty-five…Noun.” The titles are written as dictionary entries complete with International Phonetic Alphabet guide to pronunciation. The first poem emphasizes the ubiquity of guns in society now and take us back to days when we Ops only knew about cap guns or Davy Crockett’s rifle. She ends it by saying that when she mentions forty-fives to her students, they think she’s talking about a gun. “When I teach David Trinidad’s ‘In My Room,’ a poem about a pensive boy listening to 45s, my students ask if he is listening to guns.” The second poem called “Forty-Five” is a rant with all the hilariously sickening names applied to the president of that number. It ends:” “See also Trump: code name for Meth.” One wonders whether she was influenced by an article in Rolling Stone by Annamarya Scaccia, “’Donald Trump’ Tops List of New Meth Nicknames” in the May 30, 2017 issue.
Another thread that weaves throughout the book is her love life. Love Poem #6 and Love Poem #11 should be called love/hate poems as they deal with the struggles she and her ex-husband have had with their relationship.
Because of her use of simple language and highly original images from mythology and pop culture, I didn’t realize at first that her work is often written in classic forms. There is an artful sonnet, “The Unreturning, 2019.” “I Love Sex in All its Forms” is a pantoum. She also has a pantoum about the Covid19 pandemic. But the most wonderful pantoum is about becoming her mother. Its repetitive nature underlines her fears that she is, like her mother, losing her memory. Another poem reveals her as a devoted but somewhat baffled aunt to six boys under six who all look very much alike, in “A Sestina of Grand Nephews.”
Denise Duhamel has the confidence of a successful poet whose work has received important prizes. She not only uses Italianate forms, but she pens her own brief version of Ginsberg’s masterwork “Howl.” In her interview with Tim Green for Rattle’s weekly YouTube/Facebook reading and open mic (Rattlecast #86), she addresses that divide between rap and academia that no longer exists. A Distinguished Professor at Florida International University, I would say she bridges that gap artfully. Maybe she built the bridge herself. Anyway, I invite you to cross over and climb up to her Second Story. All good poems have a second story and, like her work, maybe a third or a fourth. From now on, I’ll be climbing stairs behind Denise Duhamel to wherever she may lead. I’m a convert.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods with her husband and her pandemic pup Aggie. You can read her poetry in Biopoesis (Poetica Press, 2013) and her stories in Lope de Vega’s Daughter (Red Bird, 2019). Her work is online at Alimentum, Ekphrastic Review, Highland Park Poetry, The Jewish Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, and Southern Women’s Review and in print at cream city review,East on Central, Valley Voices, and forthcoming at Rattle.
Posted August 1, 2021
Click here to purchase copy
Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound
By Yvonne Zipter
Terrapin Books, 2020
92 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1947896291
Review by Marjorie Skelly
Yvonne Zipter writes of the outdoor natural world in surprising ways that invite her readers to both look at and see that world more comprehensively than we currently do.
The book begins with the poem “Summer Lament,” the first few lines being “Catalpa blossoms clot the sidewalk/ like too much joy/ or an explosion of faith….” This beginning sets the stage for other arresting nature imagery. One can start to feel as though Zipter is our tour guide taking us on a journey that we have never been on before, one that ignites the everyday lives we lead into places where the mundane is somehow transformed into magic, something precious that we just might have overlooked in the absence of Zipter having written this book!
By the time we get to the last poem, “Blue Wild Indigo,” we have hopefully better learned the art of paying close attention, both to the ways we read and interpret poetry and the way that the natural world unfolds our senses if we have the patience to stay with nature instead of running through it as fast as we can to get some place other than nature. At least that is the way that I interpret some of my own reactions to nature at times.
That said, Zipter invites us to not just see, hear, smell, and taste nature. In the poem “Blue Wild Indigo,” we even learn about the history of this plant that once yielded the “dye prized, once, by shamans,/slavers, rag traders, and kings….” And, of course, Zipter stays with nature long enough to see the Blue Wild Indigo’s interior consisting of “seeds lined up/ like piglets at suckle/ like rowers in a scull,/ like socks in a gentleman’s drawer, like/ footlights glowing golden against the pod’s/ black backdrop, ready to illuminate the next/ stage of their cycle: heroes of their own story.”
I would be remiss not to comment on the cover of this book which encapsulates in many ways and in one picture, the intent of the book. The Greyhound dog is looking at us readers with just as much intensity as we might have if we looked at him/her carefully. The Greyhound looks at us with one eye open and the other covered with a freshly picked red rose. I won’t bother with my specific reaction to this book cover as your reaction should be yours, not mine. But…with a title like “Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound,” who would not want to open the book and read it? Who would not want to experience such killer lines as “I let the grass run its fingers/ over the naked back/ of my foot.”? (From the poem “Into the Opening” on page 61).
So, sit back with a glass of wine, or another favorite drink of yours, while you read this book, and perhaps you will have the same questions that I have: Who can always tell what is ordinary, extraordinary, mundane, spiritual? Can heaven be right here on earth? What might I be missing, not seeing?
When I closed the book, and thought about it for a while, I realized that the questions might be more important than the answers.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marjorie Skelly is the author of The Unpublished Poet.
Posted August 1, 2021
Click to purchase
The Purpose of Things
By Peter Serchuk
Photography by Pieter de Koninck
Regal House Publishing, 2020
86 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1646030194
Review by Gail Denham
What’s missing in The Purpose of Things, a book of poems and photographs? Flowery language, excessive metaphors, and hyperbole. For that, I give thanks.
For me, this is the best poetry book I’ve read in a long time. It’s simple, down to earth, creative and fun. Not just fun, but also full of meaningful comparisons, and statements.
The book is the brain child of author Peter Serchuk. This author has collaborated with the unusual photos presented by Pieter de Koninck, unusual photos that somehow end up fitting the poem.
Whether this was planned or simply happened, I cannot say. However, I know that the poems work well with the photographs. As I read, I am led to unusual connections that come together as you read the poems and view the photos.
Which came first – the chicken or the egg? It matters not. These combinations of poems and photos broaden the understanding of each. I’m definitely in love with this style book.
The book’s theme and title is “The Purpose of Things” Illuminating the Ordinary. This has always been important in my writing career, whether in story, essay, or poetry. “Write the real,” I counsel attendees at writing workshops. “Do not be afraid to talk about a shoelace, what lives under the bed, the kitchen sink, or even a flat tire. Listen in to conversations in restaurants or other public places. Take notes, collect unusual words and record images in your mind. Everything counts. Your observations carry weight, and further – could encourage or influence the readers of your work. Write the real.
In “The Purpose of Things”, I would point out a few lines that spoke to me. For example: beside a photo of rather worn shoes, Serchuk writes: “The purpose of Shoes is “The chauffeur always waiting when…you wear your welcome thin.” Trees: “A coat rack for the fog To shadow every field.” Maps: “To praise the names of dying towns whose dot the world forgets.”
A photo of weeds growing through a fence: Serchuk writes, “To shame the greenest thumb. To praise what won’t be tamed.” A pair of glasses sitting on a book compliments Serchuk’s words: “To hack your way through fog to find a cabin in the woods.”
So much un-spoken wisdom comes through the lines of Serchuk’s poems. A photo of water surging over soap goes with: “To learn how quickly anything can slip right through your hands.” I must end, else I quote the whole book. “The purpose of Faith”: A close up of candles in a sanctuary accents Sherchuk’s “To point your compass north before the dealers call your bet.”
The Purpose Of Things has only 79 pages. It’s a book to keep nearby to read again and again. Plus purchase copies for fellow poets. Thanks to the author and the photographer as well.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gail Denham says, "Writing keeps me sane at times - Have had stories, essays, poems, and newspaper articles, plus many photos published in magazines, newspapers, books, over the last 45 years."
Posted August 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Resonance
By Gary Beck
Cyberwit.net, 2021
135 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-818253-706-4
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
Resonance is an eclectic work that combines writings dealing with themes of frontline workers, progressive politics, history, and romantic entanglements into a deftly written cohesive whole.
Dire Prediction begs the question, Will societal changes i.e. outsourcing jobs thus eliminating indispensable blue collar workers, deprive Americans of safety and protection provided by firefighters, police officers, and service people?
Radiation Rhapsody is a chilling poem that fuses two worlds together-Everyday life: The A train stopping at Times Square, sparrows hanging out on windowsills: with the theme of nuclear annihilation. School children hide beneath desks. Their fathers construct rockets. People suddenly silenced by a blinding flash.
Rant tells the story of a left wing militant, preaching about oppressed citizens rising up and throwing off the chains of tyranny. He forgets his ideology when a sexy woman passes by.
Much of this book deals with romance.
1. Brief encounters with people who can't be forgotten.
2. Long term relationships where both partners do little more than go through the motions.
3. Long standing liaisons ending badly.
Resonance is a charming mix of free verse rhyme and vivid imagery that grab the reader's attention. Lines that caught me include: "My life's perpetual burning, impaled on tortuous spirit," and "Cut, parry, lunge, disengage."
From Zoo Threat: "The leopard prowls from wall to wall, cursing the bars with flame eyes."
Religious references are interspersed within secular themes. In Haunted, a group of people are together giving serious thought to life choices. One line reads: "Captured by the serpent's spell."
Overview depicts a person escaping into the realms of fantasy, has this to say: "While wings of iron ravish God's pure realm."
Opium Escape: "We devoured each other like wafers," is part of a jilted lover's recollections of a woman he loves. The afore mentioned rhyme patterns breathe life into the pieces they inhabit.
Sequoias is about a person wandering through a copse of dying sequoias who finds beauty in nature's sadness. "The path unfolds in awe as I catch my breath, all splendor gone in such majestic death."
Respite describes a stranger walking along noticing the happiness and joy of playing children. The man realizes he can never recapture the magic of childhood.
This book also follows a life in chronological order. A baby is born, reaches boyhood, attends school, becomes a troubled teen. He gets married when his lover becomes pregnant. He gets trapped in a dead end job.
From The Voice of One Man Singing About the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, “Old Age speaks of someone nearing the end of life, wishing for one last stab at living before the inevitable.”
Resonance brims with offbeat wisdom, as it takes poetry lovers on a journey of reality, using humor and irony to reach its destination.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jacqueline Stearns holds a bachelor's degree from William Paterson College (now University). She is proud to have her work include in Highland Park Poetry's Summer Challenge Muses’ Gallery on Shoes. Jacqueline's work has also been published in several Montclair Write Group Anthologies.
Posted August 1, 2021.
Click to purchase
Nature: Human & Otherwise
By D.C. Buschmann
Independently Published, 2021
62 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8550-9000-8-6
Review by Michael Escoubas
Originally published for
Quill & Parchment
As I began working my way through Denise Buschman’s debut collection Nature: Human and Otherwise, I happened onto a poem that, for me, serves quite nicely as an anchor to the whole: “Disengaging to do Other Work.” The poem is about “leaves disembarking / from their life source / without pain,” to engage in doing other work. This other work involves enriching the soil, giving the gift of life to other trees, humbly and efficiently contributing to the cycle of life.
Leaves are small, organic things which may escape our notice unless we pay attention. Buschman DOES pay attention, that is the whole point! Buschman sees small things like leaves, she sees how they matter, how they do their part. To be sure, people are not leaves; unlike leaves, human beings share the gift of speech, the attribute of consciousness and responsibility for their actions. Yet, the anchor I propose seems to apply. Consider the poem, “Small Things Are the Stuff of Life”:
Americans are vibrant blocks
in a living quilt, shades and hues
shapes and sizes, stitched together
into a colorful, cohesive Picasso.
Then, in an incisive commentary on contemporary journalism, she continues:
But, the media divides and separates
like Playtex Living Bras.
In their eyes, homogeneous and harmonious
quilts are a non-story.
Long-nosed puppets, politicians
over promise, under-deliver.
You and I have to make
our own peace with one another.
The poet sees, really sees, the world around her. In the art of living, we often, and in diverse ways disengage to do other work, important work like making our own peace with one another.
In a famous quote by Jane Kenyon on the calling and commission of the poet, Kenyon had this to say:
“The poet’s job is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name.”
--From A Hundred Daffodils
As I trace Buschman’s thought, I find no hint of over-stated piety. She is a dedicated student of the human condition.
She is good at putting into words those feelings so important, and yet so difficult to name. Who among us would resent this reminder about the dangers of engaging in “Gossip”:
A snake lurks
in the dark
infuses carriers
with venom
sinks fangs into
prey
by proxy
Buschman’s poetry showcases variety and craftsmanship. The poems are an interesting mix of free verse, rondeau, haiku, a collaborative piece, two prose poems and several poems with as many as 12 indentations which delightfully fuse form and message.
Enticing titles drew me in: “Giving Birth to a Dancing Star,” raises the curtain, “The Futility of Darkness,” made me curious about why,
The sun slips
steadily
through
empyrean
“Green Beans, Potatoes, Ham & Charlie,” brought back memories of my childhood when my parents insisted that I could not get down from the supper table until I ate ALL my green beans.
“A Blessing,” is dedicated to James Wright; Langston Hughes is channeled in “Nature’s Medicine.” I have read Hughes, Buschman’s take is faithful not only to Hughes’ style but to the truth about his world.
The poet’s titles piqued my interest; her content made me stay.
As a reviewer I seldom purchase poetry books. I receive a steady stream of them in the mail. However, I would order this collection in a heartbeat. Where else would I learn about “Nature’s Hairbrush”?
Twigs and branches
black and brittle
flew off trees
during the storm
as if a giant hairbrush
had winnowed
the stiff, lifeless tresses
empowering the living
to dance
unfettered
in the breeze.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted August 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Holding My Selves Together
New & Selected Poems
By Margaret Rozga
Cornerstone Press, 2021
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7333086-6-3
Review by Christine Swanberg
“Gravitas” is the word that describes Margaret Rozga’s Holding My Selves Together. In this full-length, 141-page collection, poems are grouped seamlessly from each section to the next: Alice Marathons, The Last Six Miles are the Hardest, Even in Beauty, and Holding My Selves Together. We have the magical, mythological Alice as the collection swells into poems of a wise elder reflecting on social justice begun in the 60’s and a life filled with commitment to create a better world. The sections transcend into a broader world of beauty and garden, Covid, ending spiritually with personal reflections.
In this collection are a dazzling array of forms, some experimental and many very challenging. We encounter persona poems, prayerful poems, imperative voice, family honor poems, and poems about heroes and friends of the past. Themes include reflection on past activism and wistful yearning that it had solved more problems. Other sections explore search for beauty, transcendent questions and renderings on the nature of being itself.
The selves listed in "Conjugating Pronouns” nail down the identities in an accessible manner, for me the linchpin poem in the collection. Here are the beginnings of the lines:
The gardener gets herself dirty…
The grandmother talks fractions…
The editor seeks to create…
The sky-watcher learns…
The poet feels…
The citizen knows…
The activist now…
Yet the collection’s magnitude morphs these various selves into a story that is much art as narrative. The breadth and depth of the chapters are exquisitely captured in the book’s arrangement into sections. Each section ends with a poem that leads into the next session, a clever poetic foreshadowing telling us to get ready for what is next. As a longtime poet myself, I have noticed a tendency for poetry books to revolve around a single theme. This collection explores more than one theme in more than one style, revealing a committed poet who has been devoted to her art and to her commitment to social justice for many years. An important poet, once Wisconsin Poet Laureate, reveals a life of commitment, which invigorates the reader.
The last section often alludes to life during Covid. I appreciated “A Pandemic of Misses” in which Rozga’s repetition of “I miss” feels as though we were having a conversation. Several voices join on what they miss. A few lines from that poem include:
I miss eating with other people, I said.
I miss our Yoga class, my sister said…
I miss soccer, the granddaughter said…
I miss school lunch. I miss school breakfast, the grandson said…
Rozga has a penchant for choosing themes and words that are not just personal but also important to the world of social justice. The poetry has a collective and personal voice combined skillfully. This is very hard to do without ranting and raving, but she does so quietly but firmly in many narrative poems of past marches, jail visits, and working for fair housing. I wish that younger readers could see all the work that many tried to do and the wish had happened faster and stabilized into a fairer reality. I recommend strongly reading the second section, The Last Six Miles are Hardest. Poems such as “History,” “Alabama Bound,” “Arrest the White Girls,” “Five Gestures of Freedom,” and “At James Chaney’s Grave 50 Years Later” engage the mind and heart.
A short excerpt from “Alabama Bound”:
Sit-ins. Boycotts. University Doorways.
Interstate buses. City jail, county jail.
Bull, the dog, firehouses. Jim Clark, his horses.
Deaths, more deaths.
I would add more selves to Margaret Rozga’s litany of identities: wise elder, lover of justice, brave guardian, and virtuoso poet. The collection is satisfying at every level. Those who love extremely challenging forms and styles to ponder will find them. Those who resonate with causes for social justice will resonate with those accessible poems. Lovers of the earth will find quiet garden poems. Those who seek spiritual connection in poetry will find it in these pages.
This collection is nothing short of a feast, a banquet of delicious poems, one after the other. It is an important book by an important poet.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Christine Swanberg is the first official Poet Laureate of Rockford, Illinois and widely published, awarded, and collected.
Posted July 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Smoke the Peace Pipe
By Roz Weaver
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2020
61 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1735023014
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
Creative writing is a well-recognized form of therapy. Reading poetry written by a poet-therapist aimed at describing and showing a path towards self-healing, can also be effective therapy for the reader. Roz Weaver, UK therapist, poet, social worker and spoken word performer, demonstrates the power of creative expression through poetry to heal from physical as well as psychological trauma in her first chapbook, Smoke the Peace Pipe. The cover, by Joanne Baker, illustrates the metaphor which is fully elucidated in the final poem of the same title.
Written in free verse, each poem hangs upon the use of complicitous duality, antithesis with an encouraging twist. In this way, Weaver takes us in, invites us to be part of the "I" and the "we" of her poems, both rain and rainbow. The sorting of the pieces of self comes through not as a puzzle but rather as an accounting, a series of declarations that question, that encourage, and that always recognize the pain, in alternating concrete and abstract terms. As she notes about the text's title, it expresses "...the intention of paying regular visits to the parts of ourselves that don't sit comfortably, how we can learn to bear what we thought was unbearable, and how by doing this we can make space for the possibility of a bigger picture" (61).
From the first poem, "How Trauma Dresses at Daybreak," duality and complicity are already present, communicated by an intimate, informal and knowing poetic voice: "I woke this morning in parts", "...washed my body in two minds/one mine, one a critical mother". The declaration of the damaged state, "I am missing whole pieces of woman" leads the rest of the work through the process of self-reconstruction. In the second poem, "Raw Soup for the Skin Soul", the "we" is present, inviting the reader to see the duality of body/mind, of conflicting emotions or voices, and also inviting us to participate in the struggle aimed at a positive end: "...I will get us through", "...joy wins the war in the end." What is inferred then is the 'chicken soup for the soul' cliché, reanimated here, both burning hot in its 'raw-ness' and also comforting in its description of what has been and what can be accomplished. It is the "Brainwork" of poem three that posits the idea, "I think I'll visit myself more often" and suggests that we "sit across from our fears" (9), brushing out the dust and the dark. Weaver urges us "home", to practice the "gripping" and the "letting go", to step into versions of the self, to unveil what has been in hiding ("Home is Where the Spirit Goes", 11). At the same time, rainbow and storm cohabit, and an important declaration is made "...to live/meant leaving" ("Double Rainbow", 13). The consistent use of physical and metaphysical imagery (e.g. "love coming home", 29, picking "my power up off the floor", 31, creating "a map of my body", 33, laying the "groundwork", "and not seeing hope as a chore", 41) parallels the self-knowing and healing process mentally for poet (and inspired reader), and aptly described as visceral experience.
Peace comes to the self-healing process in the latter third of the text, through a coming to terms with memory scars, and honoring the self-body as "Goddess" (57). Weaver notes "...peace waves,/ where healing is a boat", 47; "There's a peace in the dawn that guides us all; an opportunity /for the heart to lead", 52, and finally, holding the self, "until every part is loved as truth" (59). In the end, Weaver reiterates realistically that this process, while love of the self is being regained, remains so much "unfinished business" as "We, wild spirits", "long lost siblings" find ourselves (59). In this final poem, "Smoke the Peace Pipe," Weaver clearly puts together the pieces of self ("you") and aligns them with others ("we") who have also unleashed the truth of their lived trauma and are fully awakened to life. Here she elucidates the communal sharing of the symbolic "peace pipe" of the volume's title, as a physical and spiritual processing, emphasizing both transcendence and connection. And so from the first poem, descriptive of personal pain ("the war I wear in my chest", 5), Weaver invites us in the final poem to "Welcome home each particle of your being," to inhabit a new wholeness of "our everything alive" (59), effectively bringing us with her through the raw process of baring the damaged body-soul and then reconstructing it within a poetic, loving conversation with the self.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn has been a Professor of French at Lake Forest College, teaching language, literature, culture, film, translation and creative writing since 1990. Cynthia is also the author of two poetry collections, Outside-In-Sideout (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Co-ïncidences (alfAbarre Press, 2014).
Posted July 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Common Ground
By Kathy Lohrum Cotton
Deep Well Poetry, 2021
103 Pages
ISBN-13: 97986111359884
Review by Michael Escoubas
Originally published for
Quill & Parchment
As I write this review (late April) President Biden has just completed his first address to a joint session of Congress. Senator Tim Scott hasgiven the Republican rejoinder. Listening to both men recalledpoet Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s latest collection, Common Ground. Whether you believe in Providence, Fate, Coincidence or just plain Randomness, you must admit these ducks fell nicely into a neat row. It seems that the most dominant theme in American life is healing divisions
and finding “common ground,” even though defining exactly what that is, remains elusive.
Enter Kathy Cotton, stage left. With quiet assurance and ripened poetic skills,Cotton offers a collection of poems which bear directly on what many are seeking. Remarkably, these poems were written “prior” to the advent of Covid-19. Which
is to say that her theme is timeless and does not need a worldwide pandemic to justify its existence.
An epigraph by no less a luminary than Walt Whitman, sets the tone: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It is the gift of language that humans alone possess and share. Appropriately, the poem “Finding Common Ground,” opens the door to Cotton’s quest:
Before the extravagant feast,
the flowing wine of words,
let me break bread
at the table of
a neighbor starving
on broth-thin bromides,
elders who chew
old shibboleth scraps,
the child choking down
force-fed fear.
I got the feeling early-on that this poem represents the poet’s life. Helping a person in need is more important that just setting words down on a page. Only then:
let my pen touch
the waiting page,
let the ink’s dark nectar
spill out
every ripened syllable
of words worth sharing.
Stylistically, Cotton does something I’ve never seen before. At the end of many of her poems, she adds key words in a delicate light-face font; subtly highlighting a theme she wants readers to consider.
The volume is organized in three sections: “Quiet Words,” “Shared Words,” and “Last Words.”
In an age of loud talk, street and gun violence, and folks insisting that it’s My way or the highway, Cotton’s wisdom is like a warm cup of Chamomile tea slowly sipped.
In my youth I recall how the evenings took on a unique fragrance after a soft rain, Cotton took me back in her poem “The Scent of Rain,” where her old Lithuanian neighbor:
who stands in rain-spattered pajamas,
breathing, just slow-breathing
in the middle of his wire-fenced yard—
. . .
This cloudburst soaking
his drought-brown garden brought
him from his bed, quick like a child,
wordless with wonder at the scent of rain.
While Cotton writes primarily in verse libre, her skill in formal verse is evident in the villanelle, “Words of Peace”:
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
as both the mind and heart communicate—
a balance of withholding and release
through conversation shared: the centerpiece
of knowing when to speak and when to wait.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
not toppled into dogma or caprice.
It chooses not to flatter or berate,
but balances withholding and release
to find a common ground where conflicts cease
to rage alone, a place where pain abates.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace:
both hope and understanding can increase
when empathy is speaking’s gentle mate.
It balances withholding and release:
a spoken and unspoken masterpiece—
consideration, rather than debate.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
a balance of withholding and release.
Titles in Part I, entice me to reconsider my life perspectives, titles such as: “Quiet Friend,” “Gift of Your Silence-Keeping, “Inner Balance,” and “Slow Thaw,” hang like medals on a service-member’s coat; commendations won on the battlefield of life.
Moving into Part II, “Shared Words,” I found myself focused on “The Sweetness of Doing Nothing.” This poem explores the tension between “busyness” as a virtue and Dolce far niente. (Translated in the title).This shared word is one your reviewer needs to hear. Perhaps I should emulate the poem’s protagonist and, “stretch full length on a Montana stone.” In this section shared words become “strands of simple kindness, a treasure to pass down.”
I recall special evenings tiptoeing into my children’s rooms to read stories and say their prayers.
The ease of those moments, the quietude of being with them, things we shared before clicking
off the lights, returned to me as I entered Part III, “Last Words.”
I lingered long with “Sweet Cluster” where:
I fell asleep to the lullaby
of a family’s last words
of the day, to soft sounds
of Mother and Father kissing.
As the section title suggests, the poet treats the subject of loss and death. Cotton does so with impressive tenderness and restraint. Many of these poems could be read as testimonies to loved ones who have passed on. While platitudes often accompany loss and death, the poet’s treatment is fresh and original. She remembers her brother, the “only shaved face in a little house crammed with petticoats.” Ed was, “the last of all who knew me from my beginning.”
In “The Last of Life,” death is compared to:
Winter’s longing to shed
the weight of every last leaf,
to stand proudly stripped,
wind-whipped to the marrow,
baring misshapen limb and scar.
The “welcome home”
rivers sing to scattered streams
and oceans whisper
to heavy rainclouds.
The ripple
of a zephyr’s soft breath
across ripened fields.
So, this
is how it feels
to love the last of life.
Indeed, Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s Common Ground, closes with a blessing I wish for everyone who buys this superb volume:
Leave something
of sweetness and substance
in the mouth of the world.
--Anna Belle Kaufman, “Cold Solace”
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted July 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Languid Lusciousness with Lemon
By Joan Leotta
Finishing Line Press, 2017
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1635341454
Review by Barbara R. Saunders
Joan Leotta declares her stakes in a one-word line. It’s near the center of the first poem of this collection, the title poem, “Languid Lusciousness with Lemon.” This charming book of poetry is a meditation on immortality. Food, for this poet, is a metaphor for life itself—constant but temporary, and meant to be consumed with joy. Every harvest can remind us to be grateful for the living earth; every recipe, of our own agency; and every meal, of the possibility or the realization of love.
In some pieces, the narrator remembers how her elders imparted lessons. She marvels that her grandmother could “summon birds from an empty sky” with the “tossed crumbs and crusts” from breakfast toast. The older woman explains, “Everyone hears when called to the table.” On apple-picking trips with her father, the narrator learns “apples taste better when you know them by name.” And the narrator’s mother demands an apprenticeship before handing over a cherished pizzelle cookie recipe because, she says, “Words are not enough/You need to learn to feel/When the dough has just enough flour.”
The narrator applies this wisdom about food and relationships to the family she generates herself. A bag of peaches from her husband, she observes, signifies the promise of a life filled with sweet adventures. “We cook many into jam and pies together … we dare all this and more -- together.” Speaking of an afternoon of tasting savory bivalves with a daughter, she says, “I savored the found pearl/of our togetherness.” At the family dinner table, she notices, “love is spoken -- loudly, and by all.” A few humorous poems turn inward. The Turkish delight in a novel finds its sticky way onto the narrator’s hands, and a session of strawberry chopping discharges the anger from a marital argument.
There are a few poems unrelated to food. These fit squarely into the theme of family. “Kitty Hawk Hang Glider School,” brings us back to those wondrous birds as the narrator’s son takes “A solo flight. The first of many yet to come.” In another poem, only the smell of coffee shows up—a ghost, like her father, in a dream. This poem, “Dreaming across the Styx” contains my favorite line of the collection: “Instead of Charon,/my own beloved father/waits, patiently, to/ferry me across the Styx/in his white 1960 Thunderbird.”
Though domesticity is a focus, the poet’s heart opens to encompass the world beyond the hearth. Food serves as currency for bonding with fruit vendors, waitresses, and neighbors. When a young man in Istanbul angrily tells her that Americans don’t appreciate his culture, she tries to change his mind over coffee, “talking across the Bosphorus of our diverse lives, until his anger waned.” And she laments, in the closing piece in the collection, that breaking bread together can’t always save us. A young man who shares his Ramadan goodies with her dies at the hands of ISIS.
A solo performer as well as a writer, Leotta skilfully balances autobiographical elements, such as clues to her Italian heritage, with intellectual ones, including the references to T.S. Eliot that pepper the collection. The message, both exciting and comforting: Sweet meets tart, nature’s bounty meets human craft, stay-at-home mom meets Jordanian fighter pilot--such is life!
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara R Saunders hails from New York and lives in Berkeley, California. Her poetry focuses on biography and myth. She’s at work on a memoir, Dead Dreams.
Posted July 1, 2021
Click to purchase
The Kingdom of Birds
By Joan Colby
The Poetry Box, 2020
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-948461-60-3
Review by Caroline Johnson
If you have a dreamy, nostalgic notion of birds, be prepared to consider a darker, more complicated side of our feathered creatures in Joan Colby’s The Kingdom of Birds (The Poetry Box). In this last collection of poems published July 15, 2020, just one month before her death, Colby describes birds as a “calligraphy of the higher kingdom” as she contemplates crows, doves, geese, hawks, flamingos, owls, turkeys and more in a smorgasbord of observation and scrutiny.
“Be calculating as the cardinal,” she writes in her sestina (“The Life List of Birds,” 31-32), “who goes to the block unflinching.” This is an apt metaphor for her observations of all the birds in this collection, none of which can escape the poet’s masterful eye. Even the tiny hummingbird she sees as sinister, as it “hangs like a furious angel” attempting to prepare “to assault the hydrangea” (“Photograph of a Hummingbird,” 33). In this short poem she compares the hummingbird’s hunger to a rapist’s lust, and to the moment when a poem “stabs into the corolla of the mind / And sucks it dry.” In other poems she describes the merciless ravens (34) and the dancing cranes, who cannot escape their animal nature.
Colby was a prolific writer and this collection was her 25th book of poems. Throughout this collection Colby deftly weaves bird imagery with thoughts on human nature. “I have fashioned your nests in my mind,” she writes. The book also doesn’t skimp on contemplations of our mortality, as she writes, “The object / has to die / so we can see its / utterness, its suspended miracle,” an allusion to Audubon’s photos of birds (38). Colby seems to be on the lookout for the real bird, not the illusion, as she scoffs at the “lawn fakes” of flamingoes, “sluttish as five inch heels,” and hallows the dignity of Canada Geese--“Look. Their necks stretch true” (46)--which she also compares to war veterans. In “Swallow,” she makes another brilliant comparison, comparing the act of swallowing to the namesake bird:
“Soaring at dusk, to feed on the wing,
Forked tail like a serpent’s tongue,
Every year returning
To the steep loft, harbinger
Of a thousand summers…
In a lonesome bar knocking back
Shots of Jack Daniels
Swallowing the hard words
Left unuttered.
That reflex, the last to fail,
You refused the tube while
You could still speak…
…your last breath
Coalesced to a lump of sorrow
In our throats, unable to swallow this.” (52)
The book has several poems about hawks, and Colby approaches each with a different lens. “What the camera sees is beauty,” she writes in “Redtail”, “What the hawk sees is blood,” (55). Later in the book she describes a red-tailed hawk whose predatory nature is “written in wingspread / In will and heart” (“Hawks in the Morning,” 87-88). Colby has created a tribute to birds, which she calls a citadel: “I can’t decide whose side / I’m on,” she writes, describing a hawk eyeing a fledgling robin, and the crows that carry the hawk out of their territory (“Sunday Birds,” 67-68).
Throughout the book, we see birds as scavengers, sometimes as graceful friends, but always with the same complexity that humans have. The poet understands the rules of nature, the “sense of grab, / the rules of blood.” Her landscape is stark, real, like that of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and her vision is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” only she covers many species of birds.
In “Parrots,” she discusses domesticated birds that have been “caged for a half century,” and asks, “How can I keep / Birds that could outlive us?” Most of these poems, however, were inspired by Colby’s keen observation of wild birds she saw at her horse farm outside Elgin, Illinois. Then, at her feeder, she writes, “In the new Jerusalem of my backyard, I aim / The telescopic lens to frame / Who shall be singled out and saved” (“Myself as Jehovah,” 70-71). Indeed, to Colby, birds are almost a religion, if we look deeply enough. She also calls them symbols, omens, or harbingers, such as crosses and anchors.
In one of her last poems, she comments on the musicality and shape of birds and their flocks, with their melody on the treble sky: “Birds in chords or trills resound / Autumn fugues of sky” (“Bird Theme”, 78). And don’t forget the wisdom of the owl, who “infects your dream” like a greedy capitalist, and swallows, “The world you sought,” (“Contemplating the Owl,” 85-86). In the title poem, “The Kingdom of Birds,” Colby continues to compare birds to human behavior: “We’re / Just like this, grabbing and getting / …Our hands are made for grasping” (84).
Colby ends this collection with a prose piece, “Bird Watching,” which is a two-page description of a woman preparing for end-of-life arrangements with her spouse, all the while observing birds outside her window. Despite her breathing machine, respirator and hospital bed, “Susan kept watching the birds.” In the end, she says to her husband, “Don’t forget about the damned birds” (89-90). Rest in Peace, Joan Colby. Thank you for your gift of poetry. We won’t forget you or your poems, either.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Caroline Johnson serves as president of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. Her first full collection, The Caregiver, was pubished by Holy Cow Press in 2018.
Posted July 1, 2021
Click to purchase
Archived Book Reviews posted April - June 2021
Checkered Mates by Tricia Knoll (review by Joan Loetta)
Riding the Waves of Bliss: Seasons of Life Poems by Shai Har-El (review by Barbara Eaton)
Spoken by Melanie Weiss (review by Elizabeth Joy Levinson)
Truth or Dare: Poetry by Marissa Rose Farella (review by Arlyn Miller)
Confluences by Gari Light (review by Lennart Lundh)
Black Forest Dreams: A Journey Through Germany by Joseph Kuhn Carey (review by Terry Loncaric)
Honey from the Sun by Patrice Claeys Boyer & Gail Goepfert (review by Marcia J. Pradzinski)
Music Speaks by Bill Cushing (review by Carol L. Gloor)
Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory by Heather Corbally Bryant (review by Gay Guard Chamberlin)
When the Virus Came Calling: COVID-19 Strikes America edited by Thema T. Reyna (review by Michael Escoubas)
Running Aground by Elizabeth Joy Levinson (review by Aleca Black)
I have Grown Two Hearts by Zoe Siobhan Howarth-Lowe (review by Tina Cole)
poetry of the engineer by Curt Vevang (review by Cassandra McGovern)
Dead Shark on the N Train by Susana H. Case (review by Mike Freveletti)
Archived Book Reviews posted January 2021 - March 2021
How Do We Create Love by Michael H. Brownstein (review by Jacqueline Stearns)
Pictures, Postcards, Letters by Lennart Lundh (review by Lynne Viti)
Becoming Vulnerable by Joshua Corwin (review by Mike Freveletti)
Haiku Rose by Colleen McManus Hein (review by Hope Atlas)
Porch Swing Rhyme by Lavern Spencer McCarthy (review by Curt Vevang)
Central Air by Mike Puican (review by Carol L. Gloor)
Dancing at Lake Montebello by Lynne Viti (review by Terry Loncaric)
Decennia by Jan Chronister (review by Carol L. Gloor)
The Samurai by Linda Crate (review by Cynthia T. Hahn)
Beyond the Moon's White Claw by Patty Dickson Piecza (review by Michael Escoubas)
Inside Out: Poems on Writing & Reading Poems with Insider Exercises by Marjorie Maddox (review by Teresa K. Burleson)
Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot (review by Lois Baer Barr)
Dragonflies & Algebra by Dennis Trujillo (review by Ed Werstein)
Apricots to Za'Atar: Across Oceans and Time Memoir Meets Persona in Pantry of My Life's Menu by Emma Alexandra Kowalenko (review by Dr. Jonathan Gourlay)
Time is Not a River by Michael Minassian (review by Lavern Spencer McCarthy)
Other Maidens by Toti O'Brien (review by Linda Imbler)
