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 years of celebrating words in poetry!
Thanks to Highland Park Poetry's contributors in 2022 and 2023:
Anonymous
Anonymous 2
Jennifer Dotson
Arlyn Miller & Poetic License
Lakshmy Nair
Marjorie Rissman
Thanks to the Laughlin Gallery and The Art Center of Highland Park for regularly hosting Highland Park Poetry events.
Thanks to the District 112 Education Foundation and the North Shore School District 112 for their support of our 2023 Poetry Challenge for elementary students.
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
1690 Midland Avenue
Highland Park, IL 60035
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Unsalted Blue Sunrise: Poems of Lake Michigan
By Kathryn P. Haydon
Prairie Cloud Press, 2023
68 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9963856-1-9
Review by Jen Meyer
| After living for a time on both the west and east coasts, Kathryn Haydon moved back to the north shore of Chicago. She wanted to mark her homecoming to this third coast of her youth in a meaningful way, to see it anew after her absence. The spark of an idea for reconnection came after seeing a handmade book composed of photographs of Lake Michigan taken daily from one location over the course of a year. Kathryn, a poet, whose work has been published in journals and a previous book of poetry, set out to replicate that photographic exercise with poetry. She regularly went to the same spot overlooking Lake Michigan during her first year back and composed a poem based on what she observed, felt and experienced. This book is a compilation of her Lake Michigan poems.
The poems, the majority of which are untitled, are evocative of the Lake Michigan seasons. The forms they take add to their meaning. Not only do many of the poems use artistic imagery, they have a musicality as well.
The poem that starts with ‘A gull feather lands’ shows the summer in all its glory with squirrels and birdsong. Kathryn ends the poem with ‘Questions roast/in the afternoon sunshine/and answers/are jammed/in a glass mason jar’ which nods to the height of harvest and the introspection we often have at that time of year.
The image of the solitary boat on the lake captures the beginning of autumn in the poem that begins ‘One paper-white sailboat’. The poem is suggestive, with lines like ‘Beach season has passed’ and ‘Sailboat hangs warm’, of those summer hold-outs who have chosen to ignore the arrival of fall.
The poem that begins with ‘The mourning dove calls’ perfectly identifies the midwestern flirtation with spring. It would appear to be spring by all accounts, but ‘We‘re stuck behind the lowered gates’.
The form some of the poems take mirrors the shapes found in the natural environment. The poem that begins with ‘The flock’ is written in the shape of a bird in flight. A few poems have a long, attenuated verticality that mimics the coastline or the horizon. Many of the poems are written in couplets which suggest the ebb and flow of waves. Additionally, other poems feature stanzas that have a diagonal nature that evoke an undulating motion and give an overall feeling of impermanence.
The blocked text of the poem that begins ‘Lake and sky sewn together in a somber cloud’ is unique to this collection. It could be representative of a flag, an arm band of solidarity, a signpost. The mass of the form of this poem calls the readers’ attention to the tragedy of the subject matter.
Like the photographs that were the impetus for this project, the poems have an artistic quality. The collection begins with epigraphs from painters, Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell. Like Monet’s impressionistic paintings of wheatstacks and Mitchell’s abstract expressionist paintings, these poems reveal a newness to the subject matter and artfully capture atmosphere, color and light.
The careful observations translated through poetic imagery calls our attention to the commonplace, a sailboat or minnows, for example, and has us see the ordinary in new light.
The vivid descriptions of atmosphere, as in the poem that begins ‘she wears her veil’, transports us to a hot summer day with phrases like ‘humidity/drapes horizon/fills space’ and ‘blush blue in hazy sunshine’.
So many of the poems have a sumptuous description of color; ‘winter’s dark abyss, robin’s egg, cornflower, murky deep Aegean, azure mirage.’
Not only does Kathryn paint color with words, the visual nature of her work is also on display with the way she describes the light. ‘Sun’s blushing descent’ and ‘hazy moon shines/a single headlight in fog’ and ‘clouds/spray teardrops/fuse/into ice’ are just a few examples of this description of light.
While most of the poems are untitled, in the two with titles, Lake Michigan has a voice. In The Lake Flips the Script, it is as if the lake is looking back at the intrepid poet, a technique used in great works of art like Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait or Las Meninas by Velazquez.
The lake sparkles in this collection. At times, it is wearing a party dress and jewels on its way to a dance. There is musicality and energy to these poems.
Many have the quiet tempo of soft jazz music. Sibilance gives that familiar hissing sound of a wave retreating across the sand, as in ‘waves/whispering/secrets. Locusts buzz’ and ‘a thousand birds sing coded songs’.
Alliteration gives the poetry energy and movement as suggested by ‘wind whips up whitecaps’ and ‘clouds/saunter above swells’. There is playfulness in the engagement with the lake, whether it be wading in the shallows, leaping from sandbars, or marching out to meet the lake.
We give ourselves a gift when we pause our busy lives and notice the beauty that surrounds us. Kathryn’s poetry of homecoming and celebration shows us this gift through an examination of the seasons, form, artistic imagery and musical phrasing.
Studies have shown that coastal environments or ‘blue spaces’ can improve the health of your body and mind. This accessible poetry collection looks outward to the blue environment and lets it inspire. The poems represent a cool and refreshing contrast to the inward focus of our lives these last few years. As you read them, let their restorative effect take hold. Share with landlubbers and lake-lovers alike.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jen Meyer, a reader, writer and painter. She lives in Highland Park, Illinois, not too far from the lake.
Posted June 1, 2023
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Gathering Sunlight: The Poetry of Silvia Scheibli & Patty Dickson Pieczka
By Silvia Scheibli and Patty Dickson Pieczka
The Bitter Oleander Press, 2022
104 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7346535-7-1
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| In Gathering Sunlight, two poets from divergent backgrounds and contrasting styles, combine their skills. The result is an engaging and wise collection which sheds fresh light on the human condition. The book is all about the hard work of “gathering.” Scheibli and Pieczka, have something to say. They are realists. Their poems face life with all its challenges, failures, and sufferings. Poetry is a sanctuary of sorts. Poetry can and should be enjoyed for its magic show of language. However, I hasten to point out that poetry, for Scheibli and Pieczka, is also useful. My goal in this review is to share the harvest Gathering Sunlight has had in my life.
Backgrounds
Among the standout features of Gathering Sunlight are interviews with each poet by the publisher The Bitter Oleander Press, (BOP). Digesting these educational interviews prior to reading the poems increased my enjoyment. From the interview I learned about Scheibli’s love for tropical areas of Mexico and Ecuador. I learned that she is an avid “birder” having compiled a listing of over 500 exotic birds during her intercontinental travels. I learned about a real-life mystical figure named “Chakira,” whose influence permeates much of Scheibli’s work.
Patty Dickson Pieczka’s interview with BOP is no less interesting and brings out both similarities and differences between the two artists. “Beyond These Poems There Be Dragons,” introduces Pieczka’s superb contributions to Gathering Sunlight. I was fascinated by her response to why she chose those particular words. Additionally, Pieczka like Scheibli, is a woman of the earth. She spends time in Shawnee National Forest near her native southern Illinois home. She avers, “Nature has always been important to my sanity and spirituality and is often woven throughout my poetry.
My favorite part of the interviews is when each poet discusses her unique views on the writing process. I found their practical insights helpful.
Poems by Silvia Scheibli
Part I—Duende poems
Chakira, tell me once again
Oh, tell me how the moon
opened your eyes and showed you
a change in consciousness
How you wished that every coyote
should have a black-tipped tail
How the oriole’s hood
was dark until you changed it
to reflect indigo sunlight
Nothing appears natural now—
Now you dream the raven in silver.
How do you dream only in silver, Chakira?
Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca has described the duende form “as a force not a labour, a struggle, not a thought.” Further via Lorca, duende is “an upsurging, inside, from the soles of the feet.” The duende, new to this reviewer, allows the muse to basically take over and drive the poem. One more example:
My friend, Chakira, gave me her chisme
“Listen,” she said.
Pelicans glide on wings
as straight as paddle-boards.
Aero-dynamic frigates ascend
immense, azure skies.
Supplicant, boat-tailed grackles
seek verdant, queen palms.
Caffeinated kiskadees
exclaim an immanent sunrise.
You need to visit Nayarit—
opaline goblet of barefaced dreams—
more often.
Editor’s note: “Chisme” is Mexican slang for gossip.
Such is the mystical nature of much of Scheibli’s work, utilizing as it does, tropical surroundings, feathery creatures and an innate capacity for dream. In all, twenty-five poems comprise this section with titles that drew me in: “Ode to Iguanas in Nayrit,” “Jaguar Crossing,” “Under the Palapa,” and “Song of the Orange-fronted Parakeet.”
Part II—Ecuador Poems
Without a doubt Silvia Scheibli loves the people of Ecuador. This hospitable land with its “lush corn fields & many-colored roses, / ruby bromeliads & golden bananaquits, / scent of cocoa & coffee plantations” holds a large fragment of her heart. Six poems comprise this section. “Echos on the Road to Babahoyo,” reveals the poet’s heart for the land and its people:
Geese & dozens of jungle chickens
scratch endlessly on hillsides
of banana trees.
Escaped sugar cane & emerald mist
engulf abandoned houses.
Bromeliads perch on telephone wires
like mourning doves.
With partially opened wings
black vultures cast a shadow
over yellow hibiscus.
Delicate roof ferns
volcanic rock & golden bamboo
fade into midnight
with our café
con alma socialista.
Poems by Patty Dickson Pieczka
Beyond These Poems There Be Dragons
Like a child, I’m captivated by dragons. Pieczka “Had Me From Hello,” with her title poem which I share in full:
Drifting on an ocean’s
silk and shells, sea-foam
lacing pearls along the shore,
I follow a dream back
to its home in the dark,
unlace the night
to find forgotten things:
half-vanished thoughts, time
curled within my roots,
words melted by a long-ago sun.
I drift to the ceiling
to watch you sleep.
Your dream breaks
over shoal-bound rocks,
shaking loose a school
of silver fears
and familiar strangers
who sail angel-winged ships,
read the 16 points
of a wind rose to navigate
through the moon’s veil
and ghosts of fog
to the farthest edge
of the subconscious.
I found, within the dreamy cadences of alternating tercets and quatrains, challenges to my conventional ways of thinking. Did I note above that poetry should have an element of practicality? Gently, the poet prods me to probe life “to the farthest edges / of my subconscious.”
Pieczka’s poems are preceded by a quote from Dante Aleghieri: Nature is the art of God. With that as a baseline, the poet skillfully weaves nature and human spirituality into a seamless and coherent whole. Her practical mind gifts readers with down-to-earth titles: “Misplaced” is about her father’s question which indicates that he does not know his own daughter. He asks, Who I am? With a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s, this poem speaks to me where I live.
A distinctive feature of Pieczka’s work is the “linked poem.” These poems utilize the last line in the previous poem as a springboard to the following poem. This formulation, as far as I know, is unique to Pieczka. At least, this reviewer has not encountered it before. There are a total of four linked poems in the collection; each superbly conceived and written.
Pieczka’s final poem, “At Horseshoe Lake,” shows both the mind and heart of a poet at the height of her craft:
I pull sunlight from your hair
to make our shadows pour
into the cypress swamp,
where rivulets spill back
to the time we met.
Tupelo leaves brush the colors
left by secrets barely whispered—
words beyond flight
and dream, strung to
neither root nor bone,
words tumbling in shapes
never recognized before.
We unbutton the hours
until day and night
meet briefly at the horizon;
they kiss, still making
each other blush
after so many years.
Gathering Sunlight, taken as a whole, is poetry that satisfies this reviewer’s mind and his soul. Scheibli and Pieczka have created a triumph of the imagination.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted June 1, 2023
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Saudade
By Rosemary Boehm
Kelsay Books, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-16390-215-9
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
| Saudade, which means nostalgia or melancholy found in the Brazilian or Portuguese temperament, is reminiscent of a memoir. The book begins with poems depicting the author's, early adulthood, and takes the reader on a pilgrimage ending in the present time.
The journey takes readers on a journey to Europe, Morocco, South America, and the Middle East, with idyllic stops at gorgeous tropical islands.The author gave me a gritty description of life, i.e. family, friendship, marriage, medical crises, sexual assault, and spirituality, as seen through the eyes of a seasoned world traveler.
Boehm is a gifted writer. She imbues her work with breathtaking imagery. Boehm has a beautiful command of language.
In Not Staying For Supper In Cypress, the author talks about a family trip, which includes a visit to old Aunt Maria. The children find the old lady repugnant. "The kids got kissed. They wiped their faces. My daughter was indignant. Yuck, she's got a mustache."
The opening line in Curiosity: "When my son was still young and immortal, he wanted to die to find out what it's like."
The most chilling line: "His parents have never forgiven him for preferring death."This poem is spookily reminiscent of Flatliners when Kiefer Sutherland's character says, "It's good day to die."
I Am Full Of Empty Spaces, tells the story of the author discovering old family photo albums, and remembering times past. I identify with this as I am estranged from my family and I find myself reflecting on the good old days.
My Best Friend Writes Me A Letter is a sad lament. The author's friend rants about her two failed marriages. She wants to end her life. "I'll probably use razor blades. I'll let you know when I 'm ready." Wanting to die, and yearning for immortality, are interwoven. In the afore mentioned Curiosity, one line reads, "Yesterday my best friend confessed she wants to live forever."
What I love about this book is that Boehm can get to the heart of a poem with one line.
In Fading, the failure of a marriage is summed up by this line. "You must remind me of the good times. How else can I tell the children they were conceived in love?"
In High Noon In Seville, infidelity is described brilliantly in the closing line. "There is a waft of summer sex and perfume of an unknown brand. Your skin can't lie."
Tropical Insomnia reminds me of my own island vacations. "Starbursts on lapping water. The parrot a silent silhouette against Prussian blue." "Stark rainforest. Lake all shades. All refections, all Greens."
Readers can close their eyes and imagine themselves in paradise. Saudade is the definition of armchair travel.
===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 June 1, 2023
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Desert Flow
Art by Adrián Caldera
Poetry by Charlotte Hart
Cloud Hands Press, 2022
78 works of abstract digital art
78 poems in English ~ 78 poems in Spanish
ISBN-13: 978-0-9861649-0-6
Review by Michael Escoubas
To view digital images accompanying poems mentioned in this review, scroll below.
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| Cloud Hands Press has outdone itself with its latest gem. Desert Flow is a collaborative project featuring creations by abstract digital artist Adrián Caldera paired with poems by Charlotte Hart. Although, a student of ekphrastic poetry, I was unprepared for the challenge presented to my sensibilities by Caldera and Hart. My goal, in this review, is to capture some of their synergy as each artist’s work bears the footprint of the other. Theirs is a conversation in art and poetry which flows like a desert in bloom from hearts nourished by love.
Charlotte Hart’s introduction and Ethan Plaut’s foreword helped me understand the genesis and development of Desert Flow. Seemingly, by chance, (I don’t believe in chance, by the way) Hart saw a Caldera digital creation on Twitter in the spring of 2018. Her unsolicited response to Caldera’s work began a long exchange of art and poetry. They have never met and, so far as I can tell, have no plans to meet. Caldera resides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Hart lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Caldera’s rich colorations within his near-genius abstract creations moved Hart, spiritually, emotionally and psychologically. In her words, Looking at his beautiful colors and widely varying shapes gave me a door into my inner life. Let’s discover together some of the delights on the other side of the door.
Can’t Wall the Sky
This sunlight moment
takes me with great speed
over long distances,
very gently, very kindly,
to the house we have built.
A four-dimensional hypercube home
that casts a
three-dimensional shadow
the endless parameters
of our lives:
tenderness
devotion
the splendor of all
no moment small
in the slow smile
of our days
in this world
of change and commotion,
we are secure
five senses
here.
I’m moved by the way Hart takes shades of sun, couples them with lines suggesting distance, movement and dimension, then merging with some of life’s most important heart-feelings.
I Thought It Was You
My heart leapt out of my chest
and beat furiously in the air.
I touched the tarnished silver tube
holding the rolled prayer.
I opened the door and went in.
No, you were not.
Remembered kisses
exquisite pleasure
sensation of yearning
for my treasure
delirium of my disbelief!
Your colors and shapes flew
burnished red, rue and indigo
from the bare branches of my mind.
Your brazen spirit
burst meteor bright tonight
in me
then left me alone.
Hart’s testimony (see my opening) to Caldera’s art opening a door to my inner life, comes to life in this poem. How precisely a work of art breathes life into the human spirit is best left to the individual to know and explain. Perhaps this is what Wallace Stevens once referred to as the “Angel of reality.” What Stevens meant was the ability of poetry to lay bare the poet’s “brazen spirit.” To bring forth variegated colors of life and their latent emotions . . . emotions that “beat furiously in the air.”
My Love Will Live Forever
Unseen as currents
in the air and sea,
forever.
See the seeds and spores
floating in wind,
and the iridescent plankton
illuminating the shore?
Every word we said,
every smile,
every kiss and tear
flow hidden, fresh,
indestructible.
Hart’s poetic style flows from deep within. As demonstrated by “My Love Will Live Forever,” hers is a poetry that is disarmingly simple on the surface. Don’t let this fool you. Each word belongs. Each word is irreplaceable. Poetic devices such as sibilance, alliteration, and thoughtful endline decisions are consistent hallmarks. Rhymes are occasional and usually interlinear. Her cadences are rhythmical and delight the ear with the musicality of words.
The Will of the River
goes in its golden flow.
You know it’s
shimmering touch.
The currents carry you,
sunlight submissive.
You are the boatman
the boat
the river
the flow
the going
beyond
anything can show.
This poem captures, for me, some of the essence of relationship between Caldera’s abstract digital art and Hart’s poetic responses. Within the poet’s contemplations of the art, I sense her love of color, love of energy within the paintings themselves, which resemble dormant desert blooms, already present, but needing water from the poet’s pen to bring them forth.
Just as the river has a will of its own, Caldera and Hart’s, Desert Flow blooms with synergy, once we allow, as did Charlotte Hart, his beautiful colors and widely varying shapes to open the door to our inner lives.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted June 1, 2023
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| Adrian Caldera, Artist - "Can't Wall the Sky" |
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| Adrian Caldera, Artist - "I Thought It Was You" |
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| Adrian Caldera, Artist - "My Love Will Live Forever"" |
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| Adrian Caldera, Artist - "The Will of the River"" |
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Dialect of Distant Harbors
By Dipika Mukherjee
Cavankerry Press, 2022
81 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-933880-93-8
Review by Lois Baer Barr
| The Chicago area can boast a rich heritage of important contemporary writers from around the world. There’s Nami Mun from Korea, Li-Young Lee from Indonesia, and second generationers like Erika Sanchez of Mexican heritage, and Nnedi Okorofur, a Nigerian—American. Alexander Hemon, born in Bosnia, abandoned us for Princeton, NJ. Let’s hope that poet and novelist Dipika Mukherjee will stay here. The daughter of a Bengali diplomat, she has lived around the world. She has a doctorate in sociolinguistics which she has taught along with creative writing on several continents.
Her recent work Dialect of Distant Harbors brings us her personal take on traveling the world and examining your roots. As with so many of our first- and second-generation writers, she brings not only the wonderment of far-off landscapes, aromas, and soundscapes, but the pain of displacement, and xenophobia. Much of her poetry speaks to colonial corruption, violence, internecine wars, and environmental disasters which have spurred the number of displaced or stateless people. In 2023 their number is projected to be 117.2 million according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
As the title suggests, Mukherjee’s book of poetry offers not only dialects (actually distinct languages) but a dialectic between dreams and consciousness, dark skin and light skin, Muslim and Hindu, celebration and protest, tropical heat and ice storms. Her poetic repertoire is vast. The book opens with a ghazal and ends with “Aphorisms from Malaysia.” “Dreamscapes: A Haibun” takes us back to the poet’s childhood in New Zealand. Her persona poem about painter M.F. Husain, “Sempiternal Fire,” is in Dante’s Terza Rima. And there is a riff on an important Buddhist meditation in “Buddham Sharanam Gachchanam.” In this poem she explores the personal tragedy of a brother whose name Amithabha means boundless but who, after an accident, ends up bound to a bed and in a vegetative state.
Mukherjee’s lyrical opening section of poems ends with “Monsoon: Delhi” The sad darkness of a rented house in Delhi that is “lopsided” where “[N]othing fits.” The beautiful sounds and aromas of feeding and feasting contrast with the poet’s sense of the place.
I guess at words in the dark,
hear the sad music of sibilants,
and fear this city of violent needs. (p. 12)
The fourth section of the book contains poetry of protest. In “Dynamite” a blue-eyed boy is allowed to take a photo of the Tribune Tower and say, “Anyone got some dynamite” and still be “on holiday/freckled and free/” p. 35. While in “Dreamers, 2017,” she writes, “The Dream is so pale, too pale” (p. 38), and in “Foreign Passport” the poet’s nine-year-old son is held by security at O’Hare for four horrific hours. The security guard explains this aggression to Mukherjee: Do you know how many people were killed in the Twin Towers? The poet protests by asking the guard what relation that has to her son. The guard answers– You are a guest in this country. (p. 39) Finally, “Say the Name” protests not only the destruction of a Sikh Temple in 2012 in a suburb of Milwaukee, but the way it was reported. The names of the perpetrators were presented in the media eliding the names of the Sikhs who died. Mukherjee gives voices to the survivors and highlights the names of their deceased loved ones by using all capital letters.
It is hard to pick a favorite in this collection of finely crafted work, but “After the Ice Storm” gut punched me. In this poem the cruel cold beauty of trees glazed and bent by the weight of ice evokes memories of a grandmother bent over Dipika as a young girl. The “quasimodic” old woman holds her still “Between tight bony knees” as she “kneads [my] scalp with coconut oil/ mixed with the essence of hibiscus.” (p. 25).
In “Dialect of Distant Harbors” Dipika Mukherjee laments that her own son does not know Bengali, “The seventh most spoken language in the world.” (p. 56) She wonders how rooted her child will be. Or will he be an inveterate traveler like her. In the opening poem, “Wanderlust Ghazal,” the last stanza says:
Wanderlust is a disease. Incurable. Deep from within, it
chortles,
The light of the moon cannot be rooted, Dipika, do not
even try! (p. 3)
Rich language and images as well as finely honed narratives make this collection a delight to read. Dipika Mukherjee’s poetry proves that the more local and precise the language and narratives, the more universal they are.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr of Riverwoods, Illinois is a literacy tutor at Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America and the author of three chapbooks. Tracks: Poems on the “L” was a finalist at and is available from Finishing Line Press. Her novel, The Tailor’s Daughter, is forthcoming from Water’s Edge Press.
Posted May 1, 2023
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Ripples Into the Light: PhotoPoetry
By Artist Vandana Bajikar & Poet Michael Escoubas
Cyberwit.net, 2023
73 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-9395224680
Review by Michael F. Simon
| Ripples Into the Light is a collection of 34 images, photographs and acrylic on canvas, and 34 poems. As Michael Escoubas states in the Preface, “Upon viewing examples of Vandana’s work I asked permission to write poems about her pictures. …. As the poems and photographs grew in number, it occurred to each of us (separately) that a collaborative project might be possible.” Ripples Into the Light is a very enchanting collaboration. Though the poems are ekphrastic, the pairing of image and verse feels immediate: this just happened.
This review will focus on the poems. The images are truly wonderful, but I’m neither a visual artist nor an art critic. I’m a poet and occasional reviewer of poetry.
“First Intimations” page 15, captures the spirit of the book. These lines are written in the first and third stanzas of that poem:
… winter’s leaves
blown by wind
skittering along paths…
Soon the muskrat
will leave his burrow
to feed on roots and fish,
Winter’s leaves blown in an ephemeral world will return in a cyclical world. The fish, while worthy of poetic admiration elsewhere, is helping the muskrat thrive. Life becomes life, as in the last stanza:
This is life, the world
visible, reborn, blooming
with intimations of good things,
heralded by bluebells in spring.
The beauty of creation in a common spring flower, the bluebell. The entire book offers this perception of detail within a panoramic horizon, balancing foreground and vanishing point.
In the poem, “Winter in Yellowstone” buffalo snort with their “breath rising in plumes” giving artistic balance as the “stream meanders toward the tree line.” The poems have been carefully phrased to fit the photography.
Visual art is often an interpretation of what the light reveals and what the eye believes. The poem, “Ripples Into the Light,” reminds us of the power of water to both resemble and reflect light as we are “… washed clean/ by the mingling of sun and mist.”
In the last two stanzas, we revive and are re-inspired:
We feel empowered as living water
finds its way into the heart’s
secret places … washing away
yesterday’s pain. A melody is heard,
sung by a voice not our own,
in moments that ripple into the light.
“White Water Over Mossy Rocks,” page 7 and “Spirit of Wahclella Falls, page 25 introduce personas into this collaboration. They offer perspectives which express an added depth to the work.
Mist falls upon her face
in a moment of realization
as silver strings
roll over mossy rocks.
Is God present? Does he live
in her, in this place,
in passions of the earth,
as waters tumble and toss?
She pauses, startled by a moment
of reckoning. Is Life
about such moments?
In the poem “Spirit of Wahclella Falls” (page 25)
He came here to rest
among the deep greens and yellow flowers.
He had found a sanctuary of sorts.
The mist was cool fingers
on his face. The falls, crashing
on rocks, moss flourishing
in the glinting sun signaled peace.
Our daily world makes us world-weary. Ripples Into the Light reminds us that the remedy to the heartbreak of our day-to-day is in Mother Nature’s world. This collection is not one to enjoy quickly or once. The real joy in this work opens more slowly than that as the reader’s imagination, the images and the poems mingle and react with one another.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Simon is the author of God's Cowlick: Poems and is a regular contributor to East on Central and Highland Park Poetry. He lives in Oregon with his wife Janet on a forested hillside with over 300 acres for hiking.
Posted May 1, 2022
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The Path That Beckons: Poems About the Journey
By Mary Beth Bretzlauf
Independently Published, 2023
87 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798378321957
Review by Carol L. Gloor
| The Path That Beckons is a promising first book that deals with both the profoundly personal and objective observations of the world as it is. This dichotomy is best reflected by the most successful of the poems, and others that are less so and could be improved, or perhaps forgotten.
The most successful of the personal poems are in first person, or an imaginative persona. “Thai Floating Market” and “Clean Slate” are the best of the former. The poem “Thai Floating Market” puts us on a boat in Bangkok floating through a catalog of sensory images. The fragrance of flowers “in every color” covers the “hideous durian fruit’s odor.” “Juice from mango sticky rice” runs down the poet’s chin. And the poem ends with a surprise question, “how have we lived until now?” “Clean Slate,” also a very personal poem, succeeds in specificity and thus avoids the sentimentality of many poems dealing with the decline of an older person. The poem witnesses that decline in a series of images, each showing another step in forgetfulness. We go from the “days you would forget to eat lunch” to “you hold a baby doll these days,” to the poet’s realization that “your mind is a clean slate.”
Other successful poems create an imagined persona so carefully we are willing to accept it.
“Hotel Housekeeping” is told in the voice of the housekeeper, as she cleans one room, noticing “the gray-white sheets tossed aside” the “knock-off paintings” that must be dusted, until she leaves “this dismal room/. . . /then onto the next.” Another very successful poem is “Fly Away,” in which a butterfly speaks of being “always on display--/a stained glass fluttering about” whose important mission is to “pollinate the world/with color and grace/while there is still time.
The less successful poems are those that deal with politics, and those in which the poet reveals a certain judgmental or self-congratulatory tone that just does not ring true. “Dear 45” and “January 20, 2021,” both political poems, dissolve into generalities and tell us nothing we do not already know. Harder to deal with are the others, like “Rudderless,” “Death of a Friendship,” and “Doors.” In “Rudderless” the poet takes aim at those she believes to be “slackers,” primarily young people, who are lost in a fog “unable to see their way out/or even the ambition to do so.” “Death of a Friendship” begins well enough, but definitely goes astray with the stanza “I found a different road/found inner peace/and I lost you/on the journey.” That same self-congratulatory tone comes again in “Doors,” in which the poet deals with her job history, moving from “a place where my creativity/wasn’t solicited or appreciated” to “a creative community that accepted me/where I can broaden my mind and skills.” This is more the language of a self-help book.
Despite these lapses (and they are lapses from the majority of the other poems in the book). The Pathway That Beckons is a generally good read, for whatever path you might be on.
===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 May 1, 2023
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God's Cowlick
By Michael Feld Simon
Independently Published, 2023
98 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8373302074
Review by Bill Cushing
| According to Michael Simon, “most of the poems [in his new book] were written” in the Pacific Northwest, the place he has made his home for over 30 years. Against such a backdrop, Simon’s work presents him in almost direct lineage with the American Naturalist movement of the 19th century.
“Hearing Just the Tones of Their Resort Conversation” reveals his understanding of the natural world while applying that to humanity as
Her speech was pitter-patter tap,
bouncing from tree to tree like a woodpecker.
His speech churned through the ground
making small rumblings like an earthworm.
“Walking in One place” brought me back to Annie Dillard’s 1974 memoir Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Then, as if connecting with a New England writing compatriot, there is a Thoreau-like atmosphere seen in both “Running Naked, Panting Hard” and “If a Tree Falls in the Forest and No One Sells It.” Not far afield, readers can note a tone of nature versus knowledge exhibited in “Long Ago They Traveled Only at the Speed of Sound” where “across a wilderness bigger than vocabulary/names have shrunk the world” and “both your head and mine are cluttered/with what we haven’t finished pondering/but don’t know how to use.”
One of the attributes of the naturalist movement hinged on its combination of science and nature. Here again, Simon’s words reflect such a mix, or perhaps the better word is a “blend,” of those two spheres.
For example, “Insomnia” advises readers to
never continue a bar conversation
with someone who tells you this, no matter the equations
written on napkins.
What’s the “this” Simon refers to? Read it and learn. This is similar to what readers encounter two pages later in “What’s the Matter,” a neat play on words. In the poem, we meet the atomic particles beginning with electrons that “hang out in their clouds,/in clusters, never in crowds.”
He also nods to the obvious that most of us miss when he proclaims how “Stars are more numerous than numbers.”
In his poem “Professor Dawkins and Goat Lake,” he presents a daring balance of not only the natural but also the analytical where
every perception arises
from the little necessities
of matter and energy. I agree
God is not necessary.
Likewise, “Speaking the Word Divine” presents a title that hints at an upcoming mystery of seeming contradictions. Then, there are the mythic attributes of “In the Beginning” that are decidedly not based in Christianity. This theme continues in “What Belief Sounds Like.” Simon’s narrator admits that
If I were to tell you
Hope is a color
I’d be lying. Hope is a compass.
The narrative voice here is equally American and advises readers to “Loaf like Whitman, Intoxicated.” There are philosophical musings inherent in “Something to Think About While This Cobbler Cools,” another piece that shows how well Simon can shift from the macro to the micro. In “Big Snow Here and Abroad,” he depicts being snowed in from the perspective of a narrator who notices
No electricity now for four days.
No way to run the pump. Our one ambition
is to melt enough snow to flush.
He finally admits
I envy the man
with two BTUs to rub together.
Buddy, can ya spare a joule?
“Memories of I-80: An Old Trick Teaches an Old Dog” is a great play on words—and talk about “turning a phrase,” Simon recalls “driving your VW cross-country and discovering/that perfect pull behind a tractor trailer rig.”
The writing here is not entirely cosmic, natural, or phenomenological; there are numerous touches of the personal. “Skinny Died When I Was 25,” focuses on a grandparent who “descended from the same ape/who gave us Einstein and Rube Goldberg.” The poem “Walking With My Ancestors” presents a contemplative series of couplets that move back and forth between the world and the bloodline.
A final aspect of note inherent in the writing here is the strength of description, which is seen in lines depicting “rocks that pretend to be birds,” or when “shadows are shrinking, the sun is/barbed like a cholla thorn.” Observe the images seen—and felt—as
Waves swallow the cormorant, the rocks
the light and air, the morning; and receding,
the morning, the air and light, the rocks emerge.
The beach is a sky of rock and water,
gray spilled to the edge, blue here and there.
One thing is certain in God’s Cowlick: given the words on these pages, one wonders what Mr. Simon did with “the syllables I throw away as I write.”
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Bill Cushing didn’t begin writing poetry until his late thirties and is now trying to make up for lost time, having now passed 70. His fourth and most recent collection, Just a Little Cage of Bone, was released by Southern Arizona Press and reviewed on this site in early April.
Posted May 1, 2023
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One Bent Twig
By Tricia Knoll
FutureCycle Press, 2023
82 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1952593390
Review by Joan Leotta
| Opening the pages of One Bent Twig by Tricia Knoll takes us into a small forest. Knoll’s skillful use of imagery, forms, and free verse take us on a stroll introducing us to her own deep love and appreciation for trees and to the many ways we owe a debt to these guardians of nature. She also alerts us to the ways that we, humankind, are sadly ignoring the value these giants of the world of flora, much to the detriment of our world. I was thrilled to be offered a copy of the book to review because, having read many of her poems over the years, I am a fan of the way Tricia Knoll uses images and rhythms that carry her meanings directly from her pages to our hearts.
Knoll’s opening poem, Funeral in the Forest, talks about the fall of an old maple tree. Her eulogy for this once-living creature evoked tears. I recalled my mother’s simple words about trees: “Trees are important.”
Knoll says she grew up with a deep appreciation for trees. In her second poem, the book’s title poem, “One Bent Twig, “ Knoll lets us know just how closely she identifies with these wonderful beings. As a city girl, my appreciation was limited, but I was always, thanks to my mother, aware of them, but Knoll’s work has certainly deepened my appreciation of trees and their role in our lives as individuals and on the planet.
After reading Knoll’s collection I find myself thinking of trees not as an accessory for the garden or even of the many things around me made of wood and their connection to me. I see trees now as cousins—first friends, related. Knoll ventures farther than the usual feel good sentiments of “forest bathing” that are so popular now—using a walk in the forest to restore oneself, and even to boost our immunity. She confirms a sense of personal relationship, even attributing to trees a role in her development as a person in her poem All I am, “I am all that trees forget, the passing of footsteps…”
However, she does not ignore the sadness of life when trees are forced to partake in horrible things like lynchings. Her description of these wrong doings, is bold. She also describes the way trees are often relegated to the background for our lives. I had to admit I can fall into this pattern, forgetting what Knoll points out, how deeply related we are to trees.
But the book is far from negative. She plants seeds of hope for a better future in many of the poems. In American Chestnut she says, “hope inserts like a sliver..” Her choice of the almost extinct (thought once abundant) American Chestnut tree underlines her overall hope for the survival of our planet and the return of trees to a more prominent place in our society.
The penultimate poem, Sequester encourages us to protect the tree species remaining to us, and our job to“ repair for damage by our ancestors.”
Her final eloquent, elegant but simple words in “Notes on One Bent Twig” are presented as a series of couplets each a brilliant, wise, and profound defense of and hope for trees in our future.
Knoll ends the book with the hope that the natural order of trees living much longer than we (think of the 200 year old tree I the opening poem). She notes that would mean that today’s children will be long gone and the trees will remain, as the natural order of things. Trees are meant to outlive us, to carry wisdom from generation to generation on our behalf and to protect the world in forests for time well beyond the span of a human generation.
This is the perfect book to read now since soon we will be able to shed the indoor mindset of winter and walk outside among the trees and flowers. Reading it now, in winter, made me long for the days when trees would once again be verdant. I thought I appreciated trees before reading this—now I am much more aware of how vital they are in our lives. Everyone should read this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Joan Leotta of Calabash, NC, plays with words on page and stage with stories and poems from real life and her imagination, usually dealing with food, family, and strong women. Her newest poetry collection, Feathers on Stone, was published by Main Street Rag in 2022.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Just a Little Cage of Bone: Collected Poems from Bill Cushing
By Bill Cushing
Southern Arizona Press, 2023
99 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-960038-10-4
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
| When I first am introduced to a poet through their poems, it’s like meeting at a cocktail party and being thoroughly entertained and enlightened. This is the case with Bill Cushing and his latest collection entitled Just a Little Cage of Bone.
In fact, one of his poems, Crashing the Apostle’s Cocktail Party, encourages you to be the wallflower observing the evening, waiting for something to happen, and knowing the evening is complete when,
Jesus appears just before the bar empties out,
grabs himself a Rolling Rock –
“Second one this week,” he claims between quaffs.
Topics like sports and faith intersect with living and dying, like Chuck Yaeger’s Prayer:
Allow me to die acute
knowing the best of us aren’t born, that those
who attain greatness make themselves
by experience and with eagerness, and at that moment
of truth, there are either excuses or results.
In Playing Ball in the Hereafter. Henry Aaron and Don Sutton are rivals in heaven playing in an eternal season. Basketball, Vin Scully, and horseracing have their moments in the spotlight as well.
His bio says he’s lived in many places across the country, and we get a glimpse of those places in several pieces like An Elephant in Iceland and Los Croabas.
His poem entitled Haka, captures the defiance of the Ukraine:
The air shimmers from muscular vibrations....
the warriors offer unbroken stares,
challenge anyone who dares engage:
“Take my head. Gnaw on my bones, suck the marrow,
but never doubt what ferocity we’ll return to you.”
Deeply personal poems Feeling Judas, Medicine of Moths I can relate to being in that position myself. In his poem Marathon, I am running along with him, experiencing the same rhythm of breathing and I can hear the slap of rubber soles against the pavement as he marks the miles.
Mr. Cushing introduces us to some characters who have intersected with us at some point in our lives. In Approaching Auschwitz, we are introduced to a young soldier standing outside the gate on liberation day. At Pete’s Hut One Saturday Night, the handsome pool wizard, being ogled by three young ladies, and the elderly neighbor, Mr. Kunstler, from the old country in First Work.
His loss of loved ones is evident in several poems. The contemplations of life and loss, and shelving items and memories resonant with the reader. In A Brief Eulogy for an Atheist I found myself asking, how often do the dying wish for one more day when their day would be spent not able to engage with loved ones? Is it out of greed for more time or the disbelief of an afterlife? This was one of many poems on the subject that I felt was like a warm sweater hugging me in the quiet moments.
Now that I’ve spent time with this poet, I intend to read his previous books: A Former Life, Music Speaks, and …this just in…
I look forward to the next cocktail party – er, I mean, his next book as well.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mary Beth Bretzlauf is the author of The Path That Beckons: Poems About the Journey (2023). She is contributor, editor, and member of the Highland Park Poetry events team and serves on the boards of East on Central and the Illinois State Poetry Society.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Feathers on Stone
By Joan Leotta
Main Street Rag Publishing, 2022
56 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59948-43-8
Review by Tina Cole
| I chose this collection from a random list as I was drawn to the metaphorical possibilities in the title. I was not disappointed. This book takes us on a journey, in three sections with such a variety of subject matter: family relationships, culinary delights and ekphrastic poetry. I found a quiet voice in skilful poems of everyday experiences shot through with wise detailed observations.
These poems surprise yet are always deeply humane, subtle and honest. Leotta’s poetry finds plain language for moments in time, for the gentlest and harshest touches of human experience as in, ‘Feather to Stone’; ‘your hardness deflects my tiny self’. Her phrasing captures the elusive, unspoken tenderness that inhabits the everyday whether teasing back the layers of family relationships as in ‘My Father’s Late Night Suppers’, or opening the door to personal revelations through observations on art as in, ‘Two Women at a Window’:
I know these girls
both of them are me.
Section One focusses the reader on an exploration of the title and its meanings in poems that parallel the natural world and personal relationships. The voice is always compassionate and resolving. I particularly liked both ‘Feather to Stone’ and ‘Feathers on Stone':
Your stone self is
stuck
in equally hard earth
incapable
of understanding that my
very softness
my lightness is my
strength.
You are forgiven.
and this is the voice I hear throughout the work. However, Leotta is never a sentimental describer of nature but a writer whose own awareness of her surroundings enables an examination both of her own and all personal relationships. She is a fine observer of the interaction between people and places, sights and sounds. She deftly invites us to savour the narrative and accompany her through various stages of her life. Many poems use humour as in ‘Our Crepe Myrtle Resists Autumn’. The Autumn tree as a metaphor for her own aging:
I often
stand before my mirror
with various creams
attempting to delay
my own autumnal changes.
Section Two is a collection of vignettes, the doors to memory are opened through recollections of family and food related experiences. Leotta invites you to step inside her world where you will find echoes of Philip Levine and Ted Kooser. To read these poems is to see moments cast in a spotlight, small moments that carry a much greater impact. In ‘Quilt’ we are carried back to childhood memories, each moment unspooling before us. A child and her grandmother:
Now each square’s
a pathway back to childhood
when my cheek
on grandma’s coat
could quiet the discord of a
too busy world.
Her subject matter is diverse. Taking a trip on an old wooden escalator in, ‘Kaufman’s Escalator’, playing with dandelions in, ‘Best Use for Dandelions’ and darker subjects; ‘Feast of Memories’ a narrative about Nazi death camps that although stark and filled with disquieting imagery still contains that calm, optimistic voice.
Section Three contains ekphrastic poems in response to Murillo, Rothko, Magritte and Pocahontas’ cloak. Particularly interesting to me was, ‘Magritte’s Apple Explains it All’. A poem about the powerful image of a huge apple completely filling a classroom, where Leotta explores the relationship with her own mother and the lack of her mother’s appearance in her dreams. This is a poem of resolution; I found the conceit and imagery particularly impactful and personal;
She does not come in dreams because she has never really left
my waking moments.
She fills the room of my consciousness, my crisp green apple
of a mother, larger than life – even in death.
Perhaps the wonderment of this collection is that Leotta writes about such familiar moments and the power of them is that we can recall these poems when we see physical reminders in our everyday lives. Her poems spark our imagination and equally our memories of the humdrum and ordinary and how much this is valued. In these pages you will find a simple and direct style and an alertness to quiet yet moving moments. I recommend them to you.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tina Cole lives in the U.K in rural Herefordshire. She is a retired Head teacher, (Principal), who has worked with children aged 5-15. Currently as a poet and reviewer, she leads workshops with both adults and children. Her second collection, Forged, (Yaffle Press) was published in 2021 and focuses on themes of heritage and generational trauma. She has just finished an M.A. in creative writing/poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Crystal Fire: Poems of Joy & Wisdom
Edited By Maja Trochmczyk
Art by Ambika Talwar
Moonrise Press, 2022
188 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781945938580
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
| The Sublime Senses
Until the heart stops
it desires.
Until the mind stills;
it aspires;
Until the senses
take their leave
they deceive—
such dreams they weave . . .
I chose this poem by Ella Czajkowska, as the perfect lead-in to my review of Maja Trochimczyk’s stunning new anthology Crystal Fire: Poems of Joy and Wisdom. In two succinct quatrains Ella’s poem captures my emotions. While defining abstract terms such as Joy and Wisdom is like trying to nail jello to a wall, key words such as “desires” and “aspires” speak to me. I desire Joy; I aspire to Wisdom. Both words are beyond my reach.
Stanza two, hints that I must take a pause and allow the subtleties of the imagination to inform me. Through the superb efforts of 12 talented poets (8 women, 4 men) fresh light has been shed upon your reviewer’s quest. More on this later.
The book is illustrated by the multi-talented Ambika Talwar. One of her works precedes each featured poet’s contribution. I mentioned earlier that growing in Joy and Wisdom requires slowing down, taking a pause. Ambika’s paintings play a key role . . . they whisper Joy. Here is an example entitled “Quiet Rainfall” (image posted below the review).
As I reflected on Ambika’s painting, paired with Marlene’s poems, something struck me: Painters and poets share similar concerns, namely, bringing Nature’s message of beauty and spirituality to live in people’s hearts. Da Vinci said it, Poets paint pictures with words; artists write poetry without words. Hitt’s poem, “Words from the Garden,” gives me a sense of “Quiet Rainfall,” here’s an excerpt:
Rose and Petunia, Lantana and Sage . . .
A passing breeze lifts my hair as I sit pondering
the beauty of the life that surrounds me.
Bushes with plain simple leafy life
display themselves and I speak their names,
Savor the sounds my lips make . . .
Hitt’s inflections and phrasings surround me with a sense of raindrops assuming (but not imposing) their rightful place in the world and even in human life. Could life be about that? Could it be that Joy and Wisdom have something to do with such perceptions? Hitt’s sensuous phrasings continue,
. . . Xylosma, Sweet Jessamine, Plumbago Blue
and Bougainvillea Magenta, Oleander, Fuschia,
bright yellow Palo Verde, iron wooded and thorny,
Wisteria surrounding it all to make me feel safe.
While Trochimczyk’s goal is not an ideal coordination between paintings and poems, the paintings do set a mindfulness tone as readers step into each section.
Frederick Livingston’s “Rainbows Dreaming,” brought me up short with a touch of Wisdom I had not considered before. I have italicized his Wisdom lines. The poem was inspired by Snoqualmie Pass, in Washington state.
Now I know
the blankness of snow
is only rainbows dreaming,
teaming with streaks of red paintbrush
little lanterns of columbine
tiger lilies prowl the scree slope
yellow asters multiply the sun
the hungry green of spring leaves
purple-blue lupine flooding the valley.
Who would ever know
these slopes were covered in snow
one mere moon ago?
What else have I not seen
and called “empty” in my ignorance?
What dreams within me may erupt
from thawing soil,
simply waiting for ripe moments
to answer the generosity of sunlight?
Before launching into the poems themselves, I was blessed by Maja Trochimczyk’s two and one-half page preface. This personally revealing summary of her motivations for giving birth to Crystal Fire is indispensable reading. She also defines her use of “Crystal,” and “Fire,” in her title. Don’t miss this part.
I also appreciated reading the extended biographies of each poet at the end of the volume. Each contributor offers a unique take on the subject matter, thus adding a touch of virtuosity to the whole.
In an age of vitriolic talk, of political and moral uncertainty, amid the dark clouds of Covid-19, Crystal Fire draws back the curtain on Love, Joy and yes, Wisdom.
As art and poetry work together, I’ve come to an ever-deeper appreciation of Wallace Stevens’ very practical saying, “Poetry [and painting] is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” I can’t help thinking that Maja Trochimczyk, Ambika Talwar, and the talented contributors to Crystal Fire, would agree.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted April 1, 2023
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| Ambika Talwar, "Quiet Rainfall," acrylic 1997 |
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| Ambika Talwar, "Initiation," acrylic 2003 |
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Hot Thicket
By Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem
Nomadic Press, 2022
87 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1955239189
Review by Barbara R. Saunders
| Fire in the Mind, Body, and Soul
Danger, courage, and transformation are the themes of Hot Thicket, Cassandra Rockwell Ghanem's debut collection from Nomad Press. In this universe, cruelty gilds both love and desire, and raising one's voice breaks the cycle. The courage Rockwell Ghanem speaks of isn't the sort that comes from pulling back the shoulders, putting on a brave face, and powering through fear. Instead, courage is the heat that rises from deep scars life scorches into every being.
A fine-arts painter, Rockwood Ghanem sets the tone with a cover image that evokes the burning bush of Exodus, alight with divine fire but not consumed. In this speaker's lived experience (the poems read like the words of a single narrator), relationships – with her mother, lovers, her ancestral homeland, and the earth itself – present hurt and harm she has no choice but to survive.
The inevitability of getting burned starts in childhood. In "Felled II," she writes, "When I was a child, my mother told me to lick the end of a battery to see if it had a charge – ." The child immediately transforms this instruction. "I tried to stick my tongue in a light socket … a tiny hollow rectangle gave me the sense/that there is a universe beyond these walls."
Education in torture starts early too. In the prose poem "Shadow Box," the speaker accompanies her mother on a trip to capture monarch butterflies just after metamorphosis, when "their new wings sparkled, iridescent in some places and powdery in others." Then she witnesses her mother casually smoke a joint before slipping the butterflies in a killing jar. The resulting display of these mounted beauties is "The ache I learned to write by."
The destructiveness turns inward, and the speaker becomes a woman who can coldly remark that her lover's wife tolerates their affair because "He will destroy me and she knows it." Still sex offers one path of return to the self. In "Thickness," the speaker recalls an encounter with a fat man, declaring, "Hold my roundness in your roundness/We will step into the great expanses/And take our space."
One of the longer poems, "The Physics of Desertion," is a meditation on the speaker's separation from her father and connection with her daughter. It hints at the root of the despair she can't shake: a sense of displacement, with overlapping cultural and personal dimensions. "I hear the fatherland rises/again and again like a phoenix … I see the orphan image and wonder/if I'll ever get there, Lebanon."
"Speak of Violets" appears almost exactly midway in the book. For me, it is a highlight. A string of spare couplets unites stories of ancestral trauma, personal betrayal, and harassment at work. The innocent wildflower, the violet, invites its linguistic cousins – Violated. Violence. – into the speaker's senses ("Now I know how they taste, bitter/like baking soda, smell of sweat and dirt, sound of wood and metal") and her very body ("I pluck them stem stamen/from my tender areolas, labia, lips").
Rockwood Ghanem is a creative writing instructor in Bay Area high schools, and her talent as an educator shows in some editorial decisions: An introductory essay provides a preliminary explanation of the symbolism in fire. A sardonic piece called "Table of Contents" prepares the reader for the emotional range and intensity of the poems. The book closes with a robust readers' guide with juicy writing prompts.
This collection fulfills the promise set down in the beginning. These writings offer unflinching guidance through the question "What can we do, collectively, to create more of the flames that burn away illusions, and less of those that destroy innocence and beauty?".
===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 March 1, 2023
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as if a caress
By j. lewis
Cyberwit.net, 2022
127 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8182539105
Review by Tricia Knoll
| as if a caress collects accessible poems that grow out of Jim Lewis’ many-layered experiences that include being a dishwasher, silversmith, computer programmer. The list is long. His description of his poems on Amazon affirms, “I use the term caress to mean basically any gentle contact made with the hand.” The title poem as if a caress says it this way:
october’s evening light as if a caress
soft brushing against my pain
whispers, as mother did then,
that the coming darkness
is not to be feared.
In these poems, we hear the guitar he plays, the music he makes. He describes relationships with family: what to whisper into the ear of a newborn baby, his patience when he helps his father establish a dial-up connection, his delight in being let loose in a candy store as a child, what he learned about his ancestors in “haying with tom.” The touch is gentle.
Lewis has practiced as a Nurse/Practitioner working with people experiencing mental illness. That contact is evident in his empathy for people in difficulty – what he refers to as “soft places in the heart.” In “When the Flavor Goes,” he asks, “What would you do, if mental illness/crushed you so hard that even tears lost their flavor?” He has a reverence for what heals, knows the meaning of broken within the measures of shy smiles, tiny hands and searching eyes. “erasing mistakes” addresses removing the telltale graffiti of despair.
His poems raise questions for the reader. Are you a cat person? (I’m not a cat person and apparently Lewis isn’t either if you believe “i never cared for cats.”) What really is division by zero? What kind of mindfulness permeates the toasting of the perfect slice of sour-dough bread? Have you ever heard the “powerful and pointed and piercing” voices of a choir in “preaching to the choir.” How is it that we can continue to find wonder in a new moon after 50 years of seeing moons? He asks if we give way to depression, who will mind the pets? His poems contain hope for humanity. He works to remake himself to recognize goodness in everyone he meets.
Readers can expect interesting craft from a man who serves as the Editor of the popular online literary journal, Verse Virtual. In “fat rain” he gives us an image of elbow room for fish. My favorite metaphor is in “cancer woman” where Lewis describes the narrator’s spelling as sloppy as the soup in a hobo’s cup. He compares Princess Diana to the fox in a fox hunt. Humor haunts many poems like “how to seduce a poet.” Old friends present themselves like good books. Fat rain is compared to the soft touch request for money.
I’m fond of a poem toward the end of the collection, “Tonight I Will Make Soup:”
Tonight, I will make soup
naming aloud each child of mine
letting the swirl that trails
behind the stirring spoon
absorb and dissipate my fear,
knowing that this soup
will bring them home
where they are loved.
Yes, there is a great deal more to these poems. He reflects on feelings when a famous person dies, acknowledges the pandemic, physical pain, and sadness, but stays true to his promise about the caress that the touch will be gentle and sometimes with humor within each and every poem.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tricia Knoll’s sixth collection of poetry, One Bent Twig, came out in January 2023 from Future Cycle Press. Website: triciaknoll.com
Posted March 1, 2023
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Anamnesis
By Denise O'Hagan
Recent Works Press of Canberra Australia, 2022
78 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-6451808-8-6
Review by Michael Simon
| The title drew me to the book; it was a word that I hadn’t seen before. Anamnesis refers to uncovering or discovering knowledge that is hidden. In this collection of over fifty poems, the knowledge many times is knowledge of family, revealed to us in remembrances, laments, griefs and nostalgias. The images and language of the poems conceal the forms and poetics which are used very effectively. In a Petrarchan sonnet, I walk on sea shells, page 44, the first three lines could be a carefree day at the beach:
I walk on seashells, I walk on oyster shells
And tread the fine-grained sand between.
Gaze at the rippling water’s pearly sheen
The images grab you and pull you along into the beauty of the walk on the beach, the natural flowing iambic rhythms echo the waves; then, at the turning, the images pull you into the harsh realities of human life. When you re-read, you realize that the poem is an 8-6 sonnet. The rhymes are effective and easy on your “poet’s ear”. They are natural to the verse, deepening the meaning while remaining unobtrusive. As a poet, this is exactly the kind of poem I would steal!
The poem You’ve got his eyes, i.m. Patrick, page 20, invites the reader’s mind’s eye to observe a contest between compassion and the inevitable, though we know the inevitable is bound to occur.
The poem starts with the root of the compassion, childhood experience, hearing herself described as having this one’s eyes, this one’s smile, feeling like a child of mixed parts
I considered myself a composite being,
A patchwork of pre-existing features,
Not an original, certainly not unique
As a mother, she made repeated efforts to not do it, to not identify her sons as the eyes or noses of others, a genetic inevitability.
I was careful later, with my own sons,
Not to bequeath them a cast of traits,
A sense their aptitudes and by extension
Their paths in life were preordained,
Determined by genetics.
Then, one day examining old photos, one shielded son says of his great-uncle,
“Mom, you’ve got his eyes.”
I nodded and thought
Of my mother, the echos and reverberations
She’d pick up in things and people
That others didn’t see.
And my son, he had her mind.
O’Hagan’s language and her control both seem precise and effortless. In her poem, If I could, page 22, after cataloging every possible “If I could” to save her son, she posits touching “That space which lies at the slippery heart of grace.”
In Limbo, page 26, begins
We can circle around the fact of it
And, like the gulls, swoop and swipe, and try
In vain to get the measure of it, but when it happens,
The inevitable yet holds the greater shock.
An appetite for whimsy, page 57, holds these wonderful lines
The place writes herself, this
Wild slash of a gully,
… …
Awestruck on an ordinary, extra
Ordinary day…
This book has a lot to offer, especially if you read slowly and more than once, as if uncovering something. The anamnesis we explore in these poems is the understanding that our own experience allows us a clearer perception, as expressed in Mother and Child, page 21
I recognized myself in her, and shivered; she was all of us.
This collection of poems includes two sonnets and a villanelle. For a writer, working with a form can help uncover what we have to say. For a reader, studying a poem in form can help you understand and empathize in ways you wouldn’t have predicted.
Anamnesis is Denise O’Hagan’s second poetry collection. It is both inviting and rewarding, with perhaps a challenge or two. I strongly recommend it to both readers and writers.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Simon grew up in Illinois then, about forty years ago he moved to Oregon. He has been learning to write poetry for many years. He has just published his first book, God’s Cowlick.
Posted March 1, 2023
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When the Daffodils Die
By Darah Schillinger
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2022
71 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798985070422
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| Recently my wife spent two weeks visiting our daughter helping in the care of her newborn. Upon her return home, I surprised her with a vase of burgundy roses. The roses were decorated with baby’s breath and a white ribbon. My wife was overjoyed as she entered the house. The roses maintained their beauty for a good 10 days. Sadly, on about day 11, we noticed a blackening on the petal’s edges as they began waning and drooping. Finally, they were done. This experience came to mind as I reflected on Darah Schillinger’s collection when the daffodils die. Though the roses died, it was their life that brought much joy.
At the tender age of 22, Darah Schillinger understands life’s fragility. Just as daffodils are among the first flowers of spring, so they tend to fade and die all too soon. I want to show that Schillinger’s debut collection is emotionally rich with life-vibrations, even though there comes a time when the daffodils [must] die.
Schillinger opens with “ripe,” a poem which aligns the poet’s life with the natural world:
I am unfurled
open and wide
hands shoved deep—
the deepest chasms between my collar bone
into the space between my ribs
where white daisies grow
and yellow roses prick my lungs
where fields of grass and budded fruit blossom and drop
into the layers of my flesh
where the sun pulses
gently and my heart,
ripe for picking,
falls full onto the earth.
The poet’s sensitivity to life, her immersion in its spiritual waters is impressive. “Where fields of grass and budded fruit blossom and drop / into the layers of my flesh,” suggests a life-affirming intensity rarely encountered by this reviewer.
Even the title “ripe” forms a kind of theme for the collection. I think of maturation. Schillinger isn’t pretending to have arrived either as a person or as an artist. I like this quality. It is essential to growth. I mentioned the poet’s life-affirming intensity, a moment ago. “Distance” illustrates this quality in a poem about her beloved.
I want his smell sunk into my skin
at the temples
where the hair meets my face.
Just as she knows that daffodils must die, life, with all its joys, permeates her writing. She asks,
What can I do when he leaves but wait for him to come back
just as it all starts to fade from my sheets
Consistent with her thesis that “daffodils” must die, it is their life, their presence, in moments that “taste of almonds” that claims the day.
Schillinger’s titles entice me: “someone told me once that their bones are like trees and I laughed,” “winter in Pennsylvania,” “couples therapy,” Brood X,” and “ I love meeting people lined with tattoos,” are but a few “teasers” rich in poetic content.
I return to my argument that Darah Schillinger is a talent on the rise precisely because her mind is “ripe” with life-vibrations. Her poem “Mother’s Day,” is a prime example of a special daffodil that infuses her world with life:
our Mother’s love is constant and vibrant and holds me
fast to her chest
when romance leaves deep bloody crescents in the skin of my arms
and a throbbing hollow dissatisfaction
in in the clay of my stomach
Mother loves me even when I don’t love her back.
(Blessed be.)
I submit that this heart-daffodil will never die!
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted March 1, 2023
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Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion
By Kelly Sargent
Kelsay Books, 2022
35 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781639801350
Review by Lynne Viti
| It’s well known that from early childhood, many twins invent and share a private language. In Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion, Kelly Sargent goes one better, painting a portrait of identical twins who must learn to accommodate the challenge of one twin’s profound deafness. The hearing (though admittedly hard of hearing, as she’s deaf in one ear) twin communicates with her sister using sign language and private gestures, born of necessity and inspired by both twins; inherent creativity when it comes to language in many forms.
Sargent’s suite of poems draws heavily on autobiographical source material—a deaf sister who could silence the hearing one merely by closing her eyes, so as to shut out the hearing twin’s attempt to argue via sign language—
My twin sister used to shut her eyes
To shut me up when we argued.
Born deaf, she held the advantage in any girlhood fight
The irony here is clear—the “disadvantaged” twin seizes the advantage, besting her hearing sister.
Sargent and her identical twin were born prematurely in Luxembourg; one, three pounds at birth, was born profoundly deaf. Both babies were soon surrendered for adoption to an American couple. For the first few years of their lives, as evidenced by the poems “The Mushroom Caves in Madrid” and “Devouring Grace,” the family lived in Spain; these two poems recount the childhood exploration of mushroom caves in Madrid, and the Chinese restaurant in that city their parents took them to, near where a Little Bear statues in a fountain “waved his immobile paw to my twin and me…”
Even as a young child, the hearing twin—the speaker in all but one of these poems—attempts to teach her deaf sister to pronounce the words she can so far only spell out in sign language—“blue-ber-ry, ba-nan-a.” We observe the hearing twin holding her sister’s small hand to guide her: “I wrap your tiny hand around my throat…for you to feel the sounds vibrating within.”
Other poems shift the tone to mystery—the leitmotif of the poet-twin seeing in the mirror her own image which is simultaneously the image of her deaf identical twin:
She crosses
Intuitively between night and day
With starved, skinny, bird-like arms…
Then suddenly, this grotesque creature is brushed aside by a more comforting memory: “We blink away Night…we toast to Midnight.”
Sargent’s language is imagistic, highly visual, blending snapshots of the natural world of beaches and sunsets with the mysteries of the twin’s private one: “…we were/wrapped securely in a vast, uninterrupted galaxy…”
Throughout the collection, Sargent sets up vivid scenes of the past, then quickly brings readers into the present, when the speaker frames these accounts of her and her sister as children as memory: “A mourning dove coos/pausing/to remember.” Here, the cooing dove harnesses sound just as the speaker harnesses a voice that is unavailable to her twin in the same way.
Sargent deftly captures the experience of a child—now an adult—who is intimately entangled with her deaf sibling, the almost-self who remains apart from the hearing world. In the book’s penultimate poem, Sargent assumes the persona of her sister, aiming to describe for us, her readers, how the deaf person perceives the spoken word through sign language:
Fingertips pave slick exclamations,
punctuated by nails sinking low into clamminess
I sculpt hyperboles.
Kelly Sargent does more than deploy poetry to invite readers into the world of sisters who must overcome a language barrier posed by deafness. She demonstrates that sign language is only part of their mutual solution—the real magic lies in their invented language of touch, their mutual respect, and their sisterly love.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lynne Viti’s most recent poetry collection is The Walk to Cefalù (Cornerstone Press, 2022).
Posted February 1, 2023
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Periods, Pauses and Other Poems
By Jacqueline Nicole Harris
Self-published, 2021
33 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0578968612
Review by Judith MK Kaufman
| Jacqueline Nicole Harris is at turns, defiant, sardonic, self-deprecating and self-celebrating. Her most recent publication, Periods, Pauses and other Poems, arrives at a particularly difficult time in the poet’s life, published in the aftermath of a number of losses, in particular the death of her beloved mother. If anything, loss seems to have strengthened the poet’s commitment to putting her sensibilities out on a platter for all to see and understand.
In “Write Happy,” she tells us that her attitudes are just performance art. But we know what is real to her when we read “Blackness and the Palate of the Human Tongue,” in which the poet describes four stages of a child growing up black in terms of the four tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter.
While she strongly identifies with the community in which she grew up and continues to live, a part of her decided to reach out to a community she did not know, and she surprised herself by finding a more welcoming place than she thought she might find. That surprise has everything to do with her poetry.
This is a poet who chose to investigate the poetry scene in a place not too far from where she lives in North Chicago, yet (she must have thought) very far from who she is. In the poem “Preoccupied” the poet describes the time she spends sitting on a bench in Sunset Park in the city of Highland Park. She tries to write, but her ink is stifled by all the serenity, where children play nearby without swearing and dog walkers pick up their pets’ deposits. Despite her initial discomfort, Jacqueline chose to investigate and ultimately join the poetry community of Highland Park/Deerfield, where she found an unexpected welcome for her own very different poetic expression. (By way of explanation, Jacqueline and I are both long-time members of the Deerfield Library Poets, a group that has been meeting for a number of years for the purpose of sharing and improving our poetry.)
As an editor of poetry, there are a few aspects of Periods, Pauses and other Poems that I might change: there is no table of contents, and the poetry could be formatted in a more organized fashion, perhaps using double columns so that individual poems do not end with just a few lines on a new page. But what is important in Jacqueline’s poetry is her point of view, her honesty with herself and her readers, and a fierce determination to express who she is and how she thinks with the rest of the world. In this she is quite successful.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Judith MK Kaufman is Editor-in-Chief of East on Central, Highland Park's own Journal of Arts and Letters. Judith is the author of Caught Laughing: The Esther and Bernie Story.
Posted January 1, 2023
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Tracks: Poems on the "L"
By Lois Baer Barr
Finishing Line Press, 2022
30 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8-88838-053-6
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
| [S]itting is death" ; these three words close an early poem in Tracks; Poems on the 'L' (Finishing Line Press, 2022, finalist, New Voices Contest). This invitation to move compelled me to share the active poetic gaze that characterizes all twenty-three poems in this new monograph to movement by Lois Baer Barr. Tracks, Barr's second poetry chapbook, after first prize-winning Biopoeisis (Poetica Publications, 2014), captures a pre-pandemic period during which the poet commutes by car to a writer's studio at Bryn Mawr station, before jumping on the "L" train to tutor second grade children as a "reading buddy" at George Manierre school. Partially inspired by Ross Gay's Book of Delights, an intertextual reference in "Dare on the 'L' I", she affirms, "I will dare to go beyond my limits every day for a year." Barr notes that after reading chapbooks on the train, she often arrived at the school early, "bursting to write a poem about the 'L'" and this became a writing habit that ultimately grew this volume of poems (Interview, 12/22/22).
Barr moves us into some momentary uncomfortable places in the text: "yesterday, 4 p.m. two men/were shot on the Argyle platform/fourteen-year-old boy arrested" ("Woman may go blind after attack"), "the chubby kid across from us whose eye is swollen shut" ("Today I worry"), "the rat that brushed our feet in a New York subway" ("Cabrini Green II"), but more often as reader, I am happily jostled by the poetic eavesdropping, seeing and being seen, on the train and off the train, by the quick snippets and unfinished stories of those the poet accompanies. I am struck by the intimate speculation of "Inauguration Day" as it ends with train doors that frame a lesbian couple in a tender moment on the platform and the train whisks us away from the possibility of closure.
Accomplished author Lois Baer Barr, emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, avid traveler, observer of human nature, with her self-avowed "love of public transportation" (Interview, 12/22/22), underscores in this text her call to tutoring children in Chicago, which came to an end, along with the writer's studio, during the onset of the COVID pandemic, and has since restarted for her in other venues, fueled by the author's curiosity to know others by capturing parts of their story. In the course of these pages, Barr works to break down potential barriers of age, race and class and describes her tone as "casual", wanting "to talk to the reader" (Interview, 12/22/22). In this volume, fully aware of being observed and perceived as an older woman who merits a seat on the train, she stands in stark contrast to others she describes, such as Elder Dillman, a young missionary she engages in conversation, "from a farm south of Salt Lake City" ("Dare on the 'L' II"). In addition, she refers to politicized Chicago figures and beyond: Cabrini, Dr. King, Wrigley Field, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Chairman Mao...
In "Social Science Study II", dated as May 2019, she takes note of those who read from paper (19%) vs. those who are tied to electronics (78%) or are dozing (3%"), all the while part of and yet distinct from those who surround her on the train. The poetic narrator chooses her seat, or more often standing place, poised for maximal observation, the senses playing a key role in her rapid sketches. "[T]he clatter of the tracks" ("The Patty Crowley Apartments") is an example of playful instances of assonance Barr uses such as "the meter of the wheels" ("Social Science Study I") and "Chit-chat distracts." ("Cabrini Green II"). These are coupled with effective alliteration, "The guy with robin's egg blue bangs" ("Inauguration Day"), "the girl with the long blonde braid that swishes my shoulder" ("Today I worry") as a way to sketch a quick character portrait. These sensory portraits are drawn with memorable details of speech or look: "Addison, he says with a Slavic Ah. Then Addison with the flat Chicago 'A'" ("Today I worry"); "Brandy has long eye lashes, a rhinestone stud in one ear, dreadlocks and a huge smile"; "—Hey, I'm a boy!" ("Reading buddies at George Manierre School"). Her artistic talent is evident in the images that sparingly line the pages here, leading the reader to sketch quickly alongside her, to see, touch, hear and even smell the experience, from "tweedy wool sneakers" ("Social Science Study I") to "organic Peruvian coffee" ("Edgewater Studio").
Linear progression in the volume is often suggested by poetic stops, such as "Sedgewick is next!" ("Reading Poetry about Maoist China") which easily lead into the next poem. The settings, not always on the train itself, are yet framed by boarding the train, with the school as a primary destination and the ultimate descent in an epilogue, "at home", holding fast to what is "gone" ("the steep stairways, crowded platforms, unreachable straps") during a pandemic that shut down the option of daily displacement.
This author also features more detailed prose portraits in her writing, as in her chapbook of stories, Lope de Vega's Daughter (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019). Barr has also published and performed short stories featuring commuters; she imagines her father's daily bus ride to his law office and back after the onset of Alzheimer's in "Transit Authority of River City", and her story, "Train of thought", takes place on the Metra train (Highland Park to Ogilvie Station).
The cover art, a photo of Bryn Mawr Station, visually emphasizes the tracks that take the reader along with the poet on a quickly moving encounter with others. In essence, the poet "tracks" her inklings of story and character by observing and asking questions, albeit some left unspoken ("I realize I can't go up to each one to see whether they’re playing Candy Crunch or reading War and Peace." ("Social Science Study II"). We are invited to journey with her and lose ourselves in between poems, as our mind may wander off track and envision the lives of others, suggested by the high-rise housing of the cover photo, and mentioned by name in poems such as "Cabrini Green I", "Cabrini Green II" and "The Patty Crowley Apartments".
The writer's studio described in the begining of the volume along with a blessing, offers a preliminary morning coffee break musing on writing before the action of writing in motion begins. Barr's work in the end leaves one wanting another ride, imagining the next stop. A reader's response to this volume will likely be a kind of anxious curiosity, of a kind that stimulates reflection and envisions a standing pose at the train pole, readied for escape onto the next platform. This reader appreciates the slender line of dramatic tension that shudders into Barr's poems as the train veers around the next corner, and we spy the next dumpster with abandoned mattresses, contrasted with an envisioning of condos with hardwood floors and granite kitchens ("The Patty Crowley Apartments") or when "at home", we contemplate our scattered dog's ashes that will surely "bloom", with a "white-flowered beauty" akin to the "tender wounds" of past and future losses. The inner voice, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ("Fail Better I") is a mantra found within two poems in this volume, and we see the poet repeat her efforts to engage with the journey while juxtaposing images of life and death, of dream and disappointment. What guides us successfully through the movement of Tracks is the implication that we too are "buddies" who accompany the 'whistle of wheels' "through the long curve east..." and we become the prized, observed passenger when the narrator cajoles in her poem, "Gentle Reader,": "Gentle reader," I ... want to be your reader too".
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn, PhD, is the author of two volumes of poetry, Outside-In-Sideout (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Co-ïncidences in French and English, illustrated by Monique Loubet (alfAbarre Press, 2014). She is a member of Highland Park Poets and Bluff Coast Writers, along with Lois Baer Barr. She has been a professor of French, teaching creative writing, translation, literature, film and language at Lake Forest College since 1990. She has published ten book-length prose translations by Algerian, French and Lebanese authors as well as original poems in varied journals such as East on Central and Last Stanza, anthologies and is a regular online contributor to the Highland Park Poetry Muse's Gallery.
Posted January 1, 2023
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What Can Be Held Briefly
By Diane L. Redleaf
Visible Evening Press, 2022
e-Book
ISBN-13: 9798986244129
Review by Carol L. Gloor
| Diane L. Redleaf’s What Can Be Held Briefly is an unapologetic celebration of a new grandchild, and, more broadly, of family itself . Her dedication is not only to the child, but to her entire family, “precious and held tightly for as long as can be.”
Always the tension with such a theme is dancing on the edge of cliché, that can only be addressed by facing the duality of family, how we both love and hate them. The love of family is evidenced throughout the book. In the poem, “You Have Many Parts,” the poet describes her new grandson as having “parts” from other family members (“Your mom’s eyes/Your grandpa’s hair,”) all of which are “Perfect/Loved.” And many of the poems trace the development of the baby boy, all expressed with close attention and specific images. In “Tyrant, Pint-Sized” the baby is crying into a scream, and the family attempts “…to fathom/which ministry will quiet the infant beast.” Then in the title poem the poet addresses the boy’s growing skill at holding “…your own bottle today/until it gently slides from your lips” Then the boy learns blocks (“Stacking Up”) and working at puzzles “(Puzzle Pieces”).
All this could well devolve into a baby book, but what saves this is the poet’s sometimes touching on the ambiguity of parenting, and expanding the single boy to the imagined future world in which he will live. In “Tyrant, Pint-Sized,” the poet remembers that
. . . years from now
We will have forgotten these days.
Your parents, even they so devoted
will cry out for you.
And in the poem “First-Time Parents,” the poet considers her own direct parenting of her two children as well as that of the new parents. The poet cannot tell the new parents “. . . what you need to know./ He will tell you what none of us knows.” In “Generations,” the poet reminds the new parents that the boy will become “whole in pieces taken from you,/in pieces he might wish never to have been given.”
Yet the book is not quite saved from such almost too sweet sequences like the “peek-a -boo” stanza in the poem “Next Time,” and the playfulness of baby toes in “Heaven.” Since the project of this book is not only the grandchild, but the poet’s children and the poet herself, what is missing is the incredible difficulty of parenting, which those who have experienced it know well. Where is the smell of baby shit encountered at 3AM? Where is the dry-eyed exhaustion of yet another sleepless night or the continual cleaning up of that food that baby from the plate the baby throws down (in the poem “Next Time”)?
But these failures do not destroy the validity of what is there. What is in these poems needs to be developed more concretely, more shockingly. If one is to discuss parenting, even grand-parenting, one needs to tell the hard truths, and tell them hard. The poet knows that she and her children and the baby boy live
In our pod of blossoms,
this life knows its privilege,
Its selfish inwardness,
Its lucky draw.
We know the arrangements are temporary.
From the poem “Charmed Life, Pandemic Style.” Yes, these “arrangements” are indeed temporary, as are they all. We just need to feel the “arrangements” more specifically; we need to feel the punch in the gut that comes with actual parenting.
===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 January 1, 2023
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...this just in...
By Bill Cushing
Cyberwit.net, 2021
43 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8182537460
Review by Gail Denham
| Beginning with aspirations to become a journalist, poet Bill Cushing was captured by a comment at a journalistic conference. The woman speaker said: “If you want to improve your writing in any form, start writing Poetry.” The speaker went on to outline the value of poetry by way of the discipline of using words, perhaps “miserly” but definitely efficiently. By the next day Cushing began writing poetry and explored all its aspects.
Many of the poems in …This Just In… are ekphrastic, one of my favorite forms of poetry, which uses art, photos, or perhaps a viewed image on which to focus – to stir your imagination and poetic voice.
Some poems show an evident leaning toward journalism also, as in “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, which interjects current news headlines into the poem.
“folks are praying
over plates piled with meat
and mounds of vegetables;’…
and “Downtown tavern shooting”
or “Prostitute arrested.”
He ends the poem with “Life goes on forever and forever.”
In the poem: “Getting Old Is” Cushing speaking of:
“…an emaciated
Santa stands at the curb…
eyeing the entrance to the
free soup kitchen in the church.”
In this poem he also speaks of a drifter:
“all his belongings hang, bagged
at his side – almost a part
of him…
this traveler—this vagrant
wreckage, this canary in our
coal mine…”
Haikus, free verse, and ekphrastics help make this book a good read, quick to the point, and stirring the mind to consider what we see about us. This, to me, is a true mark of a good poet, to notice everything.
In Cushing’s poem “Impotence” he says:
“On a table littered with twisted
metal, stale beer mixes with smoke.”
Cushing speaks of talking to someone at a bus stop – about “The Nature of Snow”, of the funeral of a man’s son, in which his son’s image is projected on a screen at front of the room – a solemn scene. He writes of the military with compassion.
…This Just In…, Bill Cushing’s book, is short, but full of glimpses into the lives of those he views around him, and “news” happenings. I believe he mixes a touch of journalism with good poetry. Cushing has authored several other books which were well received, and is widely published.
===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 January 1, 2023
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What is Another Word for Intimacy
By Amanda Baker
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8985070439
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
| This book is not just another poetry collection dedicated to romance. Every facet from the rhyme scheme to how the poems are placed on the page, catches the reader's eye and draws them in.
As a poet myself, I love Amanda Baker's rhyme patterns which in some pieces are simplistic.
The Fruit Gum Variety Pack: "Like a piece of gum stuck on the bottom of my shoe. Now everywhere I go I have a little bit of your residue.'
In Imagination and Creation, which details a person who is talking to a lover about understanding her thoughts and emotions, we have: " I let go of power to be your equal. Transparent feelings make us people."
Page arrangement kept my attention on the writing. Some poems are one paragraph straight down lines underneath one another.
Other pieces are several paragraphs written in the same style single spaced.
The dedication is written on a diagonal, beginning with the first line on the top left, and the last word on the bottom right.
Other writings have words separated by lines. /
Simplicity is what makes this collection so original. Baker utilities everyday objects to depict relationships.
In the afore mentioned The Fruit Gum Variety Pack, gum alludes to the author's connection to someone important in her life. Upon careful examination, Baker realizes this person may not matter as much as she thought.
Green uses an old green dress as a metaphor for a woman's past and present.
Leave Me In Your Pocket, is a brilliant poem. An imaginary pocket is the catalyst describing the ever changing dynamic of romantic love.
"I never put anything in my pockets. I don't invite anyone in because I don't want to turn mine inside out."
"Okay maybe I invite you in my pocket."
Spare terse language give some of the poems individual flavor. In My Love Language: "I would love you in all ways because I wouldn't have to write poems about you."
In Take Me To The Mountain spins the tale of Baker's flip flopping about what she wants in a relationship. The narrative takes the form of: ,"Take Me To The Mountains, no don't take me to the mountains."
The words are simple. I shout, "Take Me To The Mountains but don't fall in love with the idea.'
Music Is Everything is a dynamic piece where Baker utilizes music as an analogy for a romantic entanglement. Again simple language. "You are an arrangement, a four chord song. Melody and lyrics. I hear you."
What Is Another Word For Intimacy, is a book teenagers and adults of all ages can identify with. Who among us hasn't been profoundly affected by romantic love?
===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 January 1, 2023
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Ode to Toni Morrison: (and COLLECTED Poems...)
By Jennifer Brown Banks
Cyberwit.net, 2022
76 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8182538887
Review by Barbara Eaton
| There is no dross in the poetry of Jennifer Brown Banks. Direct, to-the-point, intelligent, and often witty, her poems speak to her experience and ours. Her latest book, “Ode to toni morrison” (and collected poems...) covers the pandemic, the death of her mother, the deaths of Toni Morrison and the artist formerly known as Prince, the joys and fears of parenting, what she calls the “Daddy Deficit,” and many more of the trials and triumphs of life.
The title poem, “Ode to Toni Morrison,” expresses the poet’s wish to have met the Nobel Laureate “Perhaps in some/Quaint coffee shop,/ With an assortment of herbal teas/ And pricey brews,” the young poet “Full of awe and admiration,” “Hoping to emulate.” But, alas, this meeting never took place, since Morrison passed away in 2019. Her works, however, remain “Etched/ In our hearts.”
“Ain’t it Silly? Really!” is a clever little poem about the trivial reasons for family feuds:
“because they disagree,
Over ancient history.
Or money.
Or sibling rivalry.
Or hurtful words
Uttered mistakenly.”
The poet points out that this is selfish and wrong-headed, undermining “Bloodlines that God assigns.”
“In Memory of Arabella,” a tribute to the poet’s mother, Banks compares her bond with her mother to that of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Her mother was her “biggest critic,” as well as her “most loyal/Fan.” They spoke nearly every day, about “girl stuff,” and the troubles of life. Her mother raised five children, and later returned to college to earn a 4-year degree. Keeping her sanity through it all. The poet concludes: “Her legacy/ Is the gift/ That keeps on giving.”
My favorite poem in the collection is “Parenting is Like Baking a Cake.” It is a conceit, an elaborate comparison of cake baking and parenting. The conclusion is characteristically optimistic: you “hope/It rises.”
I enjoyed the poet’s energy and optimism. If you need a shot of energy and optimism, you need this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted December 1, 2022
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Talk Smack to a Hurricane: Poems
By Lynn Jensen Lampe
Ice Floe Press, 2022
52 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-895637-07-6
Review by Lois Baer Barr
| The title of Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut poetry collection Talk Smack to a Hurricane is a metaphor for growing up the only (she thought) child of a mother who was hospitalized several times for mental disease during the poet’s childhood. The first hospitalization was when Lampe was an infant. Her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic depression (terms used in the sixties). Her poem “Delivered” says, Nothing but the best 1960s psychiatry. The hurricanes in her mother’s life were electric shock therapy, a lobotomy, numbing drugs, and being shut in with other debilitated people. Lampe spares no words of anger for the medical personnel who diagnosed and treated her mother. She gives voice to the storm her mother endured in “Locked In/Ward, Looking Out/Ward,” a hybrid form one could call a stream of conscious sonnet.
lips red there isn’t a door with a right side here where they make me
empty other patients‘ bed pans choke down pills chew a towel every
time they fry my brain Every brain has a wrong side sometimes two
In the course of the poems, one learns that the narrator has not only survived an absent mother, but also an abusive one. Just like a hurricane, the slap to the face hits the young child from out of nowhere. “Talk Smack to a Hurricane” opens with the mother punishing the daughter for saying “Damn” by filling her mouth with soap suds. Yet, the third stanza reveals a mother who took good care of her daughter by getting her counseling:
Years later/I huddle
on cushions at sessions
she pays for . . .
Almost every poem that deals with abuse also reveals the mother’s love for the child. And the child loves her beautiful mother. In “Tutorial” the daughter looks up to the mother as the ideal of feminine beauty. Lampe names her mother’s bra, girdle, pearl lipstick, Vidal Sasoon haircut, white oval shades, and a Corvair to drive away in. In the first line of the first poem of the collection, we learn that her mother is protective: She grips me, the ceramic bird/at the five & dime she can’t bear/to put back on the shelf. Finally, in “Filtered,” the poet writes, her hands were mostly gentle.
This slender collection should be on poets’ shelves if only for the wonderful examples of fresh ways to use poetic forms. As I said before, “Locked In/Ward, Looking Out/Ward” is a modern sonnet. Lampe credits poet Jericho Brown for a form called the duplex that’s used in “Crazy Rents a Duplex.” At the heart of this collection are six erasure poems from the long letter Lampe’s mother wrote her parents the day the poet was born. After her mother died, the author discovered the letter. The collection ends with two prose poems, “Coda I” and “Coda II,” also formed by erasure of her mother’s letter.
Lynne Jensen Lampe treats other important themes in this book. There is feminist rebellion throughout. She asks, Why are women are always explained away by flowers? Her maternal Jewish roots are another theme that recurs. Mengele’s unspeakable experiments on children and antisemitic slurs sit side by side with sweet memories of Passover.
I hope I haven’t made this collection sound bleak. It is one of the most hopeful and well-crafted works I’ve read. The poem “Chiaroscuro” shows how love and light survived even in the most painful times:
our feet to the floor
every morning. A new dance
in the kitchen, throw open
our curtains to the sky.
Finally, the fierce love between mother and daughter makes this an inspiring collection to read and re-read.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr’s poetry chapbook, Tracks: Poems on the “L,” is due out soon from Finishing Line Press. You can read her short fiction in Lope de Vega’s Daughter available from Red Bird Press. Visit her webpage at www.loisbaerbarr.com
Posted December 1, 2022
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Odes: Poets Praising People. Places & Things
Edited By Jennifer Dotson & Mary Beth Bretzlauf
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8-218-03079-9
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quilt & Parchment.
| In an age of fault-finding coupled with often hypercritical rhetoric (think about the world of politics) how refreshing to encounter a volume devoted to poems of praise! This is not surprising. Editors Jennifer Dotson and Mary Beth Bretzlauf are known for lifting readers’ spirits toward the good in life. The poetic gems in this volume showcase poems about people, places, and things. Its modest asking price is attractive considering what you get: contributing poets from 15 states and the UK, a wide array of styles and diverse “takes” on their subjects, poems by children, poems by established poets, poems from folks new to publishing. If I were teaching creative writing to youth, I would use this volume to illustrate the universal reach of poetry and poetry’s ability to opine on a wide range of topics. Covers 1 and 4 display attractive designs by gifted members of Highland Park Poetry. Toward the back of the volume be sure to catch interesting biographies of each contributing poet.
A moment ago I mentioned poems by children. What better way to begin a review? In the “Odes to People” section, I share “Eyes as Blue as the Sky,” by 3rd Grader, Louella Kornfeld:
She has eyes as blue as the sky,
Hair that shines so bright.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful Mom.
When she smiles it lights the world.
She’ll love me more than this world.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful mom.
She’s unreplaceable, and out of this world.
She watches me grow oh so.
And I think for myself what a wonderful Mom.
I love you Mom, Happy Mothers’ Day.
This fledgling poet is already using simile and repetition effectively, along with good end-line decisions and a strong closure.
Some years ago I wrote a fun poem entitled “Thing-a-ma-jigs.” It spoofed the entire world of jigs, gizmos, gadgets and other odd devices. I feel a connection. Odes to “Things” comprises the largest of the three sections, 33 poems in all. The editors grant a wide berth of poems in this category. A “thing” might be rain, or black curly hair, or feet, or big hats, or flowers. Just about anything can be a “thing.” Since I am an inveterate chocolate lover, I was all over “Ode to Chocolate” by Highland Park, Illinois resident Marjorie Rissman:
only the sweet smell of chocolate baking arouses
the house to joyful anticipation of luscious frenzy
whether it be brownies or Bundt cate, the aroma
drives us up a wall waiting for the baking to be done,
the cooling to begin, the sampling to be undertaken.
meanwhile the scent is more alluring than perfume,
the taste more mouthwatering than most, the sight
more dreamlike than remembered. I prefer the
baking to the eating, the aroma to the end result
and wish chocolate could fill the air everywhere.
If you have a favorite place to be, “Odes to Places” will not disappoint. My personal bucket list includes a visit to the United Kingdom, specifically London. Cramington, UK resident Adrian McRobb, is my transport in his poem, “Thames”:
Fog clings to water moving with the tide
dim figures to and from under muted lamps
dark ghosts of boats drag sullenly pat
as the meniscus pendulums with movement
weed draped ladders gently sigh in sympathy
pontoons new invisible drum the banks
city spires tower above the river’s shroud
The Tower traitorously lets the water through
as hamlets cling to its condensating base
shadows glide in damp folds of grey cloth
lamenting the turn of their sundial’s hour . . .
For those who may have yawned their way through Shelley and Keats in Freshman English, take heart . . . Odes: Poets Praising People, Places & Things, will have you smiling all the way to study hall.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted December 1, 2022
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Alice's Adventures: A Modern Version of Lewis Carroll's Classic, in Verse
By Paul Buchheit
Kelsay Books, 2022
61 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1639801831
Review by Judith MK Kaufman
| As a child I listened to my mother reciting the poetry from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The favorite in our house was from the latter, the beautifully mocking satire of those two impossible characters, The Walrus and the Carpenter. Mom would recite that poem from memory, and I learned to do the same.
Paul Buchheit now offers us a new version of the first half of that tale with a twist: instead of featuring occasional poems, this author presents us with the entire story in verse. The language, while somewhat modernized, maintains the style of the original 1865 classic. At first, I found it a challenge to read this book-length poem; while the rhyme occurs in couplets (aabb rhyme scheme), the thoughts do not necessarily end with the rhyme. One generally needs to continue reading through a phrase of the line following the couplet to complete the thought. For example, at the end of Chapter 3, The Tiny Doors:
“I’ll never fit my head
through there, and even if my head gets through I dread
to think about the rest of me! Oh, how I wish
that I could crumple like a telescope, and squish
inside the keyhole!” And considering the strange
surroundings, Alice thought her size might really change.
When reading to myself, this didn’t work for me. After a few pages, I decided to read the whole thing aloud, even though no one else was in the room. And that’s when this book came alive for me. I found it a beautiful challenge to read the extended poem in completed thoughts, while still appreciating the end-of-line rhyme. I thoroughly enjoyed the process!
Lewis Carroll’s story has been somewhat simplified for young readers, yet the language of the classic has not been harmed at all. The original 19th-century sketches have been updated by artist Manahil Khan, while maintaining the sense of humor of the originals and the uniqueness of the characters. Just as with the original, Alice’s Adventures may be read to younger children and shared with older ones, with many pauses along the way to discuss the imaginative events, the chaos, the strange wisdom of the characters, and the language of the writers (both Mr. Carroll and Mr. Buchheit). I can’t wait to share it with my own grandchildren!
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Judith MK Kaufman is Editor-in-Chief of East on Central, Highland Park's own Journal of Arts and Letters. Judith is the author of Caught Laughing: The Esther and Bernie Story.
Posted December 1, 2022
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Breaking Cover: Poems
By Michael Maul
Amazon Books, 2022
126 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798831760415
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| Among the richest of childhood experiences were hunting trips with my father. An expert hunter and bird dog trainer, Dad skillfully worked Lady, our German Weimaraner setter around brush piles in our pasture. He had a good sense about where to find pheasants and quail. Dad cautioned us boys not to panic when our quarry “broke cover.” Inevitably, as Lady went on point, in icy air still as death, Sunday dinner exploded from the brush. 12-gauge shot did its predictable damage. Home, we trudged, with Lady carrying a bird in her tight jaws.
I recalled those hunting trips the moment I read Michael Maul’s title Breaking Cover.
In this review I want to showcase certain poems which “broke my cover.” Poems which startled me, causing a hiccup in my life. The best poets know how to make readers think.
A Word about Style and Format
Maul’s style is conversational. He writes as if he were talking with a friend enjoying soup and biscuits at Pinera’s. Each of the four “books” contains either 15 or 16 poems. However, the individual books do not adhere to strict divisions of theme or content. Many poems rhyme. While I’m not a big fan of rhyme, I like the way this poet uses internal and end-rhyme. He does so without betraying, “Oh, now I have to think up an ending rhyme because, after all, I’m committed to rhyming no matter what.” Observant to a fault, virtually nothing escapes this poet’s notice that cannot be made into a poem. Titles! Maul is good with titles. Who wouldn’t want to read “On Seeing a Teen Girlfriend’s Blouse Displayed in a Vintage Clothing Shop”? Or “Things I Have Heard About You”? Or “To Chinese Hackers Who Stole My Poems”? To readers, I say, “Buckle up for a wild ride!!”
Breaking Cover Book One
I was enchanted with the 7-line poem “Few Finer Things”:
There was a time
when I could image
few finer things
than storks and angels
coming and going,
beginning and ending
our lives with wings.
Poets say familiar things, but they say them in fresh ways, as if it were the first time they were ever said. Here beginnings and endings, alphas and omegas are seen, ascending on the wings of words. Note: “things,” “going,” “ending,” “wings.” Each word knowing where it belongs.
Breaking Cover Book Two
“I Know There Are People” broke my cover in a lovely poem which sheds light on the human condition. From selected stanzas:
I know there are people
who are largely invisible to me.
I don’t know their names,
or where they stay;
I know they are not
who I see on TV.
The poem identifies them as sharing similar life values. But they share them without drawing undue attention to themselves. They know:
We will all be sick, we will all be loved,
we will all doubt ourselves.
We will be given riches unearned.
Knowing joy, knowing sadness.
And when we hate each other,
we will be hating ourselves.
Yes, and yes again, this poem breaks my cover with its truth.
Breaking Cover Book Three
I am stopped “dead in my tracks” by “She Carried Me Just So.” This tender poem chronicles the poet’s mother who had miscarried three times before Michael was born. Ravaged by tuberculosis, she was so proud of her one surviving child, that:
In all the early childhood photos,
including some not far
from the birthing suite,
my mother was always pictured carrying me
strapped to her chest somewhat perilously
with me world-facing out.
Maul writes about his mother regarding him as a special gift to her:
Which is why when we went out
she suspended me from her chest
like a gift
she brought to show the world.
But she was, of course,
the world’s gift to me.
Fighting through years of mother-to-be
then decades of devotion.
My cover is broken by this poem because it brings to mind longings for my own mother who suffered too.
Breaking Cover Book Four
“New Widow in One Chair on the Porch” transported me to a time I dread to face. That time when either me or my wife will put away one chair the other always occupied:
She still sits there
in the shade
hearing sidewalk walkers talk.
But you can see shadows
formed around her eyes,
like the stains on concrete
where, for years,
his matching chair long sat.
This poem, and so many others, broke my cover, like a covey of quail rousted out from the underbrush. Can’t think of anything better for my personal growth than that.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted December 1, 2022
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Leave It Raw
By Shakira Croce
Finishing Line Press, 2020
30 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-64662-265-8
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
| As a reviewer the first thing I consider about a collection is the title. Leave it Raw. Who would use those words for a poetry collection and why? I don’t want my food served “raw.” I want it cooked according to the recipe. I don’t want my body rubbed “raw” by the clothes I wear. I want garments whose textures and styles are kind to my body. In conversation, I dislike “raw” language that irritates my sensibilities. Give me well-heeled vocabulary and good verbal manners. Leave it Raw. What is this?
Poet Shakira Croce invites her readers to join her on a journey. It is a pilgrimage of sorts. Croce visits familiar places and experiences. These include making sense out of life after losing everything in a fire (“The Remains”). “Homecoming” returns readers to those long ago days when:
King and Queen
walk down the 50-yard line,
but she feels the arena of eyes
still on her.
“Commuter’s Pastoral” studies a once robust man in the dim light of old age. I give these examples merely to point out that Shakira Croce is a gifted poet. Her poetry paints compelling pictures of reality. Hence, her title, Leave it Raw. When poets tell the truth, the results get our attention. I interpret “raw” in the sense that Croce takes a “fresh” perspective on her subjects.
Croce’s writing style is verse libre. She uses it well. Line break decisions result in pleasant reading cadences. Her poems look good on the page. She varies presentation between couplets, tercets, quatrains and poems without stanza breaks. Croce does not employ end-rhyme. I’m impressed by her craftmanship. Interlinear rhyme, assonance and alliteration are hallmarks of her work.
Earlier I used the term Pilgrimage. Croce includes a poem by that title. I reproduce it here as Exhibit A in my thesis that raw means “freshening of life”:
We can make up time in the air,
the captain explained,
or at least that’s what I understood
between the fuzzy intercom and
broken English,
not mentioning we’d lose
six hours crossing the Atlantic.
They say animals have a different
internal clock, without feeling
passing weeks and years.
Yet the butterfly with a tear
across her right wing
returns at noon each day
to that same turn in the road,
darting between rosemary and dandelions drying
in the honeyed weeds.
The sense of smell is the strongest
for us all to find food, a partner.
Flowers waiting to procreate on a cliff above the sea
bring me back to where I was born.
After spending a lifetime thousands of miles away
that simple power lets me know my home
is not where I live
but a long climb up from Roman rocks and ruins
to the stuff springing from
the uncut earth.
In “Pilgrimage” the poet considers the meaning of place. During a tedious flight across the Atlantic she muses that even a wounded butterfly has a strong sense of belonging. The butterfly returns again and again to those environs which propagate life. The “raw” truth is that occasionally, if we’re looking, we gain a fresh perspective—and life can never be the same again.
This is precisely why Leave it Raw should be in everyone hands. The best poets take the commonplace and infuse it with freshness not thought of before.
Best of all, Shakira Croce’s poetry reflects a good mind. Hers is a mind which takes a deep dive into her subjects. “A Second Honeymoon” demonstrates that Croce knows where her readers live. Two quatrains follow:
Last night I don’t know why
we were fighting.
I think you felt like
everything was on your shoulders.
. . . . . .
It’s time to plan
a break from working our way
up, shift scenery, and
rest our limbs from the climb.
We have come full circle. Leave it Raw, is a pilgrimage down the road of life. Reserve your seat on the plane and buckle up.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted November 1, 2022
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American Male
By Steve Henn
Main Street Rag Press, 2022
41 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59948-917-9
Review by Ed Werstein
| I believe that a little humor can be an effective tool in poetry, making the poem more memorable. In Steve Henn’s poem, “I Could Have Said This But Instead Controlled Myself,” the opening poem in his collection, American Male, Henn uses humor to good effect. In it the speaker speculates about the nature of God: maybe God loves sports, maybe God loves a champion who gloats, maybe God loathes humility, etc. My favorite lines were these:
“...maybe
The Nuclear Arms Race
jolts up God like
an eleven year old in front
of a tv-full of pro wrestling
sucking down his fifth
can of Jolt! Soda”.
An absurd idea, right? The irony is that religious differences are one of the main things that human beings have warred about throughout history. That kind of pointed humor permeates the poems in this collection. The next poem, “Are You Picking Up What I’m Putting Down?”, contains the lines:
“...isn’t it just like a man to require
reassurance when pretty much the only problem is
he’s being an idiot?…"
This poem also contains the term “toxic masculinity,” and that is what American Male is, an indictment of toxic masculinity. This book explores the many facets of male toxicity from the relatively harmless adolescent pranks of the high school locker room, to the cruel (sometimes bordering on criminal) abuse of both men and women. And in the poem, “A Small Reckoning or Bob-O-Matic”, he lays it right out:
“...this type of thing was always done
by boys…”
While the collection is permeated with effective uses of humor, that is not to say that there are not poignant and downright serious looks at the various manifestations of maleness. To me the title poem, incorporates all of these to great effect. In the first stanza he describes:
“adults who determined that unleashing
a hypercompetitive 9-yr-old contestant
nearly foaming at the mouth
with crazed lust to possess
whatever ball happened to be in play
and put it right where it belonged
would prepare him admirably
for 21st Century American capitalism
or prison or the Senate…”
I find that funny and deadly serious at the same time. This poem also contains one of the most memorable lines in the entire book: “What nascent genius saddled the American Male with yardwork?” I’d like to know the answer to that question too.
Henn goes into detail about why he doesn’t fish and doesn’t golf. His temper is one factor, but I found one of the other reasons that he doesn’t golf the most compelling:
“The President plays golf too.
Any President. Take your pick.
And there I rest my case
‘cause no ambitious 9-yr-old
with his faculties in tact, capitalist
or otherwise, wants to grow up
imitating that buffoon.”
Henn’s careful titling of his poems added to my enjoyment of this collection. Sometimes I don’t think poets pay enough attention to choosing the right title for what they write. Henn does. From the evocative: “World’s #1 Dad”, and “Once We Got It, We Don’t Want It”; to the humorous,: “How in God’s Holy Name Is This Boy Ever Going to Survive”, and “They Mustache Him Some Questions”, about the deposition of mustachioed National Security Advisor, John Bolton, by the committee investigating a possible Trump impeachment, I was often drawn right into a poem by the title even before reading the first line.
These are important poems written at a time when America is waking up to a problem we need to solve. They are both personal and universal, and delivered with a dollop of humor. I highly recommend this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ed Werstein, is a Board member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he won the Lorine Niedecker Prize for poetry from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, judged by Nickole Brown. He lives in Milwaukee. www.edwerstein.com.
Posted November 1, 2022
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Chronicle of Lost Moments
By Lara Dolphin
Dancing Girl Press, 2022
35 Pages
ISBN-13: n/a
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| Among the many aphorisms uttered by Wallace Stevens is this gem: Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right. I have always treasured that quote because it gets to the heart of poetry and why people write poetry. As I immersed myself in Lara Dolphin’s latest chapbook, Chronical of Lost Moments, I was impressed by Dolphin’s eye for detail and heart for the ironies of life. Her poetry demonstrates an affinity akin to Stevens. More on this later.
I lead with the poem which opens the collection: “As The Earth Regards the Anthropocene”:
All our stuff (the concrete the asphalt
the gravel the plastic) outweighs every
living thing on the planet from the Pando
aspens to the pygmy possum—
creation waits for us and while it’s easy
for gestures long-delayed like a greeting card
lost in the mail or a flight stuck on the tarmac—
it’s almost lunch and I’m at the donation center
chatting with Dave as he helps unload a trunk
full of gently-used clothes books and toys—
he’s told me that he’s five months sober
he won’t get the kids for the holiday
I tell him about my job the long hours
the low pay my car that won’t stay fixed
so there we stand among the stuffed animals
and kitchen appliances feeling
the weight of the world on our shoulders.
The title segues into Dolphin’s themes: “Anthropocene” refers to human activity as it relates to climate and environment. I researched Pando aspens and the pygmy possum. A large Pando aspen grove in Utah is in grave danger from several outside influences. I did not know that this tree grove, with its lovely yellow foliage, is the single largest organism in the world and has been around for thousands of years.
There are fewer than 2,000 pygmy possums left in the world. This cute creature is prey to several predators and suffers from a reduction in food supply. These potential losses may seem trivial to some but not to Dolphin. Moving into the heart of the poem, the poet chronicles a series of “ordinary” things common to daily life. These “lost moments” pile on and weigh us down . . . while “creation waits” for meaningful human responses to challenges that could have irreversible impact on life as we know it.
Stylistically, Dolphin writes in free verse. When she uses rhyme, she uses it well. “Lost In L.A.” illustrates:
There is no worry of wind or snow
or time or place in Godot’s Hyperloop below
sidewalks where children run and play
near streets where out-of-towners lose their way.
No trains, parades or fire trucks
no snapping turtles, so safe of ducks
will slow the traffic as it flows
to listen, for what, no one knows.
Where cars sail by on electric skates
and no one sees and nothing waits.
While a variety of environmental themes permeate Dolphin’s Chronicle, poetry as fun and entertaining is important to her. “Pace of Play” pokes fun at baseball. It’s slow pace is about as boring as waiting for the oven to heat. Don’t miss this one!
Dolphin’s heart for her husband showcases one of many tender moments included in Chronicle. Her innate pathos shines in “The Best Time To Plant A Tree”:
we were classmates in seventh grade
hanging out at band practice
riding the same bus home
we made out in high school
then went our separate ways
four years of collect passed
before we met again
and another five years would pass
before you got serious and I got smart
and you asked me to marry you
the fifth anniversary is wood
so let’s plant a tree to celebrate
we make a hole two times larger
than the nursery container is deep
for our hearty Appalachian Redbud
as we dig I try to remember
the last time I told you I love you
that you are my lifesource, my breath
I should have told you twenty years ago
the second best time is now.
I thought the author should have used the title, Chronicle of Lost Moments Recovered. The tenderness and maturity enshrined in the above poem is precisely why. In it Lara Dolphin understands that poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted November 1, 2022
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Long-Distance Romance
By Barbara Eaton
Book Baby, 2022
242 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1 -66786-026-8
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
| Long Distance Romance is a beautifully crafted poetic autobiography. It takes the reader on a fascinating, often tragic journey. Ports of call include family, female friendship, disappointing lovers, education, incest, and mental illness.
Eaton paints her family in shades of love, tenderness, happy memories, pride, and regret. The opening poem, Father Daughter Dance, tells the tale of a young girl and her dad, at a Father Daughter gala. Eaton sets the stage right down to the color scheme. Readers envision pink and white streamers, girls in pastel dresses, fathers in black suits. Eaton wants her dad to be the tallest, handsomest father there. She notices his overcoat isn't new. Eaton realizes she loves her dad, even if he isn't the spiffiest man in the room.
The Best Gift talks about how family traditions are marked by Eaton's mother's cooking. I identify as my mom also expressed love through creating food.
In Pumpkin Patch, Eaton, her two sisters and their parents take a trip to a pumpkin patch. When Eaton returns to the family car with her pumpkin, her sisters are insensitive and treat her cruelly. Neither sibling wants Barbara in the car. Neither one wants to sit on the hump in the middle in the backseat.
In The First Spring Without My Father, we are taken to the funeral of the author's father. Eaton describes military rituals: the playing of Taps, a folded American flag. The line "Please don't put the earth back top of the casket," brings me back to the day of my father's burial. I recall not wanting to leave Daddy in his grave all by himself. Eaton doesn't begin processing her father's death until the following spring.
One of my favorite poems is Pink Cupcakes, a lovely description of a Christening party for Eaton's great niece. Four generations of women are present: Eaton's mother, Eaton and her sisters, her niece, and the new baby. Everyone holds the newest addition to the family. When it's Eaton's turn, she is in baby Heaven.
Listen to me, is a dark disturbing description of the sexual assault the author suffered at the hands of her grandfather. Eaton is traumatized and eventually deals with mental illness. Seclusion talks about Eaton's stay at a mental hospital. She's put on suicide watch.
Having an active dream life, I enjoyed Eaton's dream poems, especially Traveling in My Sleep, which depicts the author's drive to graduate school, a journey which macabre twists and turns. Along way, Eaton ends up in Duluth, and takes a swim in a frozen lake. Then she finds herself driving to work.
Eaton is a Ph.D in Shakespeare and medieval literature and she brilliantly uses this knowledge in her work with several of scenes and characters from Shakespeare’s plays referenced. This book includes sonnets written in the bard's style, golden shovel poems, conversations between Shakespearean characters. These include A Dialogue Between Titania and Oberon, and Twelfth Night, Viola and Orsino.
Much of this book deals with Eaton's graduate school years, and her subsequent romantic entanglement with her Shakespeare professor. They each have assigned roles: she the wide eyed young woman, agog with hero worship; he the jaded older man, stealing her innocence, exploiting her love. Going To Santa Barbara, tells the sad tale of Eaton traveling from Illinois to Santa Barbara to visit her lover. Upon arriving at his home, she is turned away!
Eaton is also involved with Jack, a faithless Romeo, who dates a girl who lives across the hall from Eaton's dorm room. Grudge Poem 4, A postcard From Paris, is Eaton's memory of Jack traveling to Paris with a buddy. After his return, Jack never contacts Eaton, despite sending her a postcard which read, "We have a lot to talk about."
Eaton writes about female friendship. Two Secret Gardens, describes a friendship between Eaton and a girl she met in college who now lives in Germany with her husband. Eaton, yearning for an exciting life in California, never realized her dream. It's a nostalgic piece about shared good times between close friends.
In Her Shoes, introduces the reader to a young woman who shares Eaton's youthful career struggles. She is a lawyer, Eaton is a Shakespearean actress. They've had their ups and downs, and are still together, still sisters.
Barbara Eaton is every woman, writing about life experiences we can all relate to.
===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, 2022
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Erasing Influences
By R. Bremner
Moonstone Press, 2022
28 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781-954499-87-4
Review by Margaret R. Sáraco
| R. Bremner’s collection of erasure poems gives a different slant to old poems. Erasure poems, according to the Academy of American Poets, can also be categorized as blackout poems. If you are unfamiliar, they can take on a variety of forms. As much as poets love form, they equally love breaking the rules.
When writing an erasure, you can challenge a poem by obscuring parts of it to see what remains or begin a new conversation with a poem so something new opens. Poets use a variety of techniques including a black rectangular block to indicate to the reader where the words are scratched out. Poets can delete text and leave white space where words were erased or reformat it entirely so the new and revised poem doesn’t inform the reader where text is missing. Bremner uses the latter two techniques in his chapbook, Erasing Influences.
The author is not afraid of reworking famous poems that some can recite by heart, like in this this example of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”:
Two diverged in yellow
sorry I could not be one
As compared to Frost’s famous opening lines, which Bremner reduces:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Bremner, who has published seven books of poetry including Absurd (Absurdist Poetry from Cajun Mutt Press), and Hungry words (Alien Buddha Press), has a visual acuity of how the words are presented on the page, paramount for erasure poems. The choice of what needs to be removed is as important as what should remain. What it looks like on the page makes erasure poems intriguing, and Bremner satisfies that poetic itch nicely.
In the author’s note, he writes, “All of the poets whose poems I have erased in this volume are greatly respected by me.” The eclectic mixture of poems include: “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath, “Because I could not stop for Death (479)” by Emily Dickenson, “Mothers” by Nikki Giovanni, “My Shoes” by Charles Simic, “I Loved You Before I Was Born” by Li-young Lee, and others. He even includes Jim Morrison of The Doors (1960s rock band) for “Soul Kitchen.”
Erasing Influences will beg you to find the original poems from this diverse group of poets. You will want to read them side-by-side inviting comparison to continue the conversation Bremner has started for you. As the reader, you complete the artwork: poet, poet, reader—a perfect triple.
There are several poems by John Keats, including “To a Friend who sent me some Roses.” The original poem reads:
As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the sky-lark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert;—when anew
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields:
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh-blown musk-rose; ‘twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that queen Titania wields.
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy,
I thought the garden-rose it far excell’d:
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me
My sense with their deliciousness was spell’d:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whisper’d of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d.
Compare this to Bremner’s version:
“An erasure of John Keats ‘To a friend who sent me some roses’”
I rambled in
time:
I saw wild nature
I feasted on
thought
and truth.
In this moment, the reader is down a road, perhaps rarely taken, and what they might find is space to think differently, and perhaps discover something else entirely.
=== ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Margaret R. Sáraco’s full length poetry collection, If There Is No Wind (Human Error Publishing), was released in 2022. She has published her poems and short stories in many journals and anthologies. She was a semi-finalist for the inaugural Laura Boss Foundation Narrative Book contest and received Honorable Mention for a poem in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry contest.
Posted November 1, 2022
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To Talk of Many Things: Selected Poems
By Richard Greene
Jumble Books & Publishing, 2021
239 Pages
ISBN-13: 9780645343762
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| As I sit before my writing table on this date, September 8, the news is dominated by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. She was 96 years old. Her remarkable reign spanned 70 years, 15 British Prime Ministers, 14 American Presidents. Queen Elizabeth was a living witness to an incredible amount of history.
I thought about that as I finished reading Richard Greene’s superb collection, To Talk of Many Things: Selected Poems. Also, in his 9th decade, this amazing writer calls upon the resources of his life and times to create a collection rich in nostalgia, history, and practical life experiences. I found myself pausing, placing myself within his poems, thinking, Ah, yes! I remember that very thing so vividly.
When Greene announces that he is talking about many things, that is precisely what he means. Through 239 poems, there are few subjects that DO NOT find a place within his purview.
Richard Greene writes in Free Verse. His diction is crisp, friendly, accessible. He invites readers to join him on the patio for coffee and bagels shmeared with honey nut spread. However, don’t accept the invitation if you are looking for easy answers to life’s hard questions. This poet is wise, funny and best of all, ironic. Good poets surprise you at the end. I was continually surprised and chagrined.
I begin with “Confession”:
I’m a serial poet.
many times I’ve committed poetry,
taken an image, a feeling, a thought, a phrase
and manhandled it into a poem
I plead in mitigation
that it’s a crime of passion.
Or is it temporary insanity?
Your reviewer never saw that ending coming!! It’s like that throughout the collection. Just when I thought I had the poet “pegged” he turned the tables on me. That is exactly what makes this collection stand out.
Greene’s poems are about life, about things he saw or liked. “First Snow” was written in November of 1952 and reflects a certain “universal” mood:
Rain comes
painting a thousand mirrors
on the pavement,
a dense panorama
half formed
as in a dream.
Vehicles ply with caution
the melting streets,
the landscape in pools.
Then snow.
A man hurries by my window
his coat collar turned up round his chin.
As noted above, Greene has a special capacity for placing readers “in” his poems. The commonplace is among the poet’s favorite themes. After all, among the possible purposes of poetry, is elevating the ordinary. This happens in “Everyday Things”:
The sky that’s always with us
in light or darkness,
a radiance of moon,
the seasons,
the tree behind the house,
the birds that sing so tirelessly in its branches,
the shadow of leaves on a wall,
a spouses touch.
Should we cherish them any the less
for being commonplace?
Poems with titles such as “Firefly Time,” “Pie,” “Old Furnace,” “Smiles,” “Pudding,” and “Rain,” delighted me in elevating the ordinary—this is what poetry, at its best, should do.
Greene worked much of his life in a government position which afforded him travel opportunities to the “uttermost” parts of the world. He devotes several poems to his experiences in exotic places. You won’t want to miss these. I was especially moved by “Earthquake, Port-au-Prince, 2010”:
If we could hear all the cries from Haiti
we’d clap our hands over our ears
our faces twisted in pain.
If we could hear all the cries
from around this world
on almost any day
We’d be pressed to the ground
as if by a raging hurricane,
but we’ve learned not to listen,
or maybe never learned to hear.
My wife and I recently observed our 53rd wedding anniversary. Greene includes several tender and wise poems about marriage. “Silver Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” resonated with both me and my wife:
as if some cunning craftsman
had spun metal
into silken thread.
It was chestnut brown when we met.
Her skin, all smooth then,
has begun to show fine webs
and is slack under her once firm chin.
But, when I look on her, I think
this is the girl I wed
and feel the need to kiss her cheek
or, if she’s bent over some task,
the nape of her neck
or, if she’s sitting with the hem of her dress
resting on her thighs,
to reach out and touch her knee.
Richard Greene dedicates this collection to his 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. McCracken. Didn’t most of us have a Mrs. McCracken in our lives? I can’t help thinking that on a spring day in May, Mrs. McCracken, walked by Richard’s desk, peered over his shoulder, and found him writing something like this:
It was fine today,
this fifteenth of May,
flocks of fleecy clouds
grazing in cornflower fields
watered by yesterday’s rain.
To Talk of Many Things, by Richard Greene, will not disappoint. This collection does more than merely “talk.” It invites readers to walk in fields watered by yesterday’s rain.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted October 1, 2022
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Self-Portrait with Thorns
By Gail Goepfert
Glass Lyre Press, 2022
88 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-947-783-788
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| In one of the poems from a recent collection by your reviewer, I took on the daunting task of writing a poem about Frida Kahlo’s iconic 1929 painting, The Bus. In researching Kahlo’s life, as I prepared to write my poem, I learned about the incredible suffering she had endured. Here is an excerpt from “Broken”:
How much suffering can one life take?
the bus crash at age 18
the crushed foot
the dislocated shoulder
the broken collar bone, ribs and leg
the same leg would get gangrene
and yield to temptation
the spine and pelvis splintered into pieces
your life, like that of Jesus, disfigured,
acquainted with suffering.
My brief linkage to Frida Kahlo’s life became a clarifying lens in my reading of Gail Goepfert’s moving new collection, Self-Portrait with Thorns. Goepfert’s choice of title is a shortening of one of Kahlo’s most famous works, Self-Portrait with Thorn, Necklace and Hummingbird, (1940).
It is hard to say which of Frida Kahlo’s 200 paintings is the most famous or the most valuable. Today, Kahlo’s paintings are considered priceless national trea-sures by her native country, Mexico.
Of far greater import to her disciples is Kahlo’s life-example of her life. Her lifelong joust with suffering has served to infuse fresh vigor into sister sufferers. Gail Goepfert is among those. As author Emily Pérez points out, Frida Kahlo “serves as mentor, muse, and mirror” for Goepfert, “as she negotiates her own life with chronic pain.”
A Word about Style
Goepfert’s writing style reflects her subject. Of the 47 poems comprising the collection, roughly 15 feature indentations which dance all over the printed page. The majority reside flush left against the margin. While I am not a fan of “wildly” indented poems, Goepfert has convinced me otherwise. Presentation on the page is often crucial to message. I have not always appreciated this. How does a poet depict acute suffering? How does she present chaos? How does she convey anguish that seemingly has no explicable beginning and no ending in sight?
These poems slowed me down. I became more deliberate. Enjoyment increased. Goepfert’s style has everything to do with substance. Here is an example from “A Mind on Pain”:
a fistful of amber
buffets the window—
the blind’s slats
splinter
light into golden bars
still morning
lie down just a minute breathe
The poet’s decisions about phrase-placement and even line-spacing are strategic. Part of a plan to move the reader in a certain direction. The best poets know how to do this.
Clearly, Goepfert has studied Kahlo’s life and work. This does not mean that her poetry plays the role of sycophant. An excerpt from “Guilty” offers a marvelous contextual perspective on what the artist’s life means to her:
Guilty [The Poet Says]
of falling in with worshipers
who would make Frida an icon,
I’m swayable when the earth splits,
drawn to her spine and flaw
and ripeness—she, an incarnation
of fresh courage. She does not veil
her image behind a scrim of muslin.
I too latch on to her painted mayhem
in undiluted color on canvas,
mingle with her idolators.
The poem continues toward a lovely conclusion in which the poet finds in Kahlo’s life a “pattern” for her own life . . . “the rough fabric of her.”
Self-Portrait with Thorns is an ekphrastic collection which responds to the great diversity of Frida Kahlo’s work. It is hard to produce one definitive term to describe Kahlo as a painter. Surrealism comes to mind. However, Kahlo refuses to be run into a corner. I have seen the term “broken woman art.” I like that. Kahlo’s paintings constitute a kind of self-awareness with many tears. The many facets of her sufferings are more than most people ever experience. Yet, there is no extreme in common experience that Kahlo’s life doesn’t touch. This is the key to Goepfert’s collection. She and so many other women have, at last, found a sister that knows and appreciates who they are and what they go through.
A side benefit for this reviewer has been an increased interest in going online to view the art of Frida Kahlo. I was captivated. I was moved. Her paintings spoke to me.
I wondered what it might be like to sit in Frida Kahlo’s presence, if only for a moment. Goepfert anticipated my question, in her poem, “If I Could Lunch with Frida, I’d Tell Her Why”:
I’ve turned my gaze to her body
punctured, crooked
like a young cypress
bent to the spoils of wind—
willing her limbs to swallow
what comes.
Our bodies, hers and mine,
have an appetite for pain.
What is there to do when
betrayal wears pants—or skirts.
In the glow of a cigarette’s burn,
she tosses ash. Swears.
Withdraws. I bottle up.
Fish for the solace of sea.
We scrabble about for remedies.
Frantic. Feed an obsession for answers.
Does she catalog hope
the way I do—
by the timbre of a doctor’s voice?
by the list of doctors yet unseen,
the treatments yet untried?
I window her eyes—
will myself
to be fierce like Frida.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted October 1, 2022
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apparitions
By Amelia Cotter
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2022
54 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-578-34331-0
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| Sylvia Plath was one of the 20th century’s most important poets. While Plath’s poetry reveals the mind of a genius, she was also among the most troubled and tragic poets of her time. In his book, We Begin in Gladness: Essays in How Poets Progress, Craig Morgan Teicher, writes, “The voluminous critical conversation about Sylvia Plath has tended to orbit a few topics: her suicide, of course, and the ways mental illness and madness perhaps predicted her death and marked her poetry.” Indeed, Plath herself, describes her mental condition just prior to her death with these words:
“owl’s talons clenching my heart.”
I thought about Plath as I read Amelia Cotter’s bold new collection, apparitions. Unless a person has lived with mental illness, (as Cotter has) it is impossible to appreciate the level of anguish involved when owl’s talons clench the heart.
Cotter’s collection features modern haiku, prose poetry and haibun, all skillfully knitted together to chronicle a journey from darkness into light.
The introduction sets the stage. Using key words: anxiety, depression, isolation, and trauma, Cotter speaks to readers where they live. She then counterbalances with: hope (found in connection with people), reconciliation, redemption, resiliency. Having experienced two occasions of suicide within my extended family, I quickly sat up and paid attention to Cotter’s plain-spoken outreach to the hurting.
dog’s distant yelp—
my helplessness
measured in yards
This modern haiku pulls back the curtain of despair which visited Cotter’s life. When I say “visited” I don’t mean a quick hit, then blue skies. I mean an uninvited relative who takes up residence, unpacks his suitcase and settles in. Her prose poem, “The Second City” describes a life-threatening diagnosis:
I battled Stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of 22
with a fiery fortitude and fearlessness that, over time,
has come to burn more like a decorative, scented candle
than the Great Fire it once was.
This well-crafted poem goes on to profile a raft of challenges that brings into stark relief the symbolism of the dog’s distant yelp—
It is also evident from the above excerpt that Cotter came to terms with her diagnosis to the point where it came to “burn more like a decorative, scented candle / than the Great Fire it once was.”
This is what I like about Cotter’s apparitions. This poet is a fighter. Her use of the term “apparitions” suggests phenomena that rise unexpectedly, then recedes as mysteriously as they appeared. “A Haunting,” describes a childhood experience in which the author is chased by a rabid German shepherd. The frightened youth ran for her life until:
I ducked between two cars for the safety of the sidewalk
and the condo building my friend lived in. It
It [the dog] darted suddenly up a hill and disappeared around a corner,
as if it had never been there at all.
At some point beyond a multitude of ghostly figures entering and exiting her life, Cotter’s narrative reaches a “volta” or “turn.” Cotter decides, within her life and within her poetry, to shed darkness as one sheds a bad night’s sleep. She fights upward and outward, like a swimmer giving all her strength in a push toward the surface.
In an age of ever-increasing numbers of people suffering from various forms of mental illness, apparitions by Amelia Cotter is a must read. Cotter’s work sets forth the importance of decisions made amid the crises of life. “Pearl Divers” is a gem waiting to be opened:
Haven’t I always been some composite of lonely and
sad? Jonathan, too. We can either navigate this together or
on our own, searching hopefully in each other’s direction.
confluence
of winding rivers . . .
your hand in mine
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted October 1, 2022
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A Matter of Dark Matter
By Kate Hutchinson
Kelsay Books, 2022
85 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781639801060
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| I love book titles. I usually process titles easily. However, Kate Hutchinson’s newest collection A Matter of Dark Matter, drove me to Webster’s. Why? The term “matter” may be the most common word we never think about as we say it. Matter is physical. Matter is intangible. The finger that bleeds when I cut it matters to me physically … OUCH!!! But it also matters intangibly because it captures who I really am under duress. (A few unrepeatable words usually follow!!) The distinction between physical substance and spiritual revelation quite often takes me to task. Thus it is that Kate Hutchinson’s unique collection offers an intellectual and emotional smorgasbord of poetry.
I also love book covers. Hutchinson’s visual, created by Taneli Lahtinen, masterfully adds to the mix of wonder suggested by Hutchinson’s title. Life has limitations. Conversely, life is transcendent, the human psyche desires more, pines to reach beyond imposed limits. As human beings, we are like a candle’s flame tearing at the wick. What is left after the flame disappears?
A Matter of Dark Matter is organized into five untitled sections. Each section is impressive in its variety of poetic styles and literary devices. Hutchinson is intellectually sharp as well as emotionally sensitive. A rare combination. I like the way she bridges the gap between the world we experience with the five senses and the impact that same world has on the human spirit.
Let’s explore Hutchinson’s title poem in this regard:
A Matter of Dark Matter
Dark matter is like an overflowing cup,
the present moment resting at the surface,
the great beyond bubbling up into supernovas.
Above the rim, time accelerates into
the mystery of the dark, overwhelming
the five percent that we can see and touch.
What lies out there, above the holy grail of time?
No one knows, though Einstein told us
It was not nothing. A matter of some consequence.
Darkness matters–a thought unsettling
to those of us who live in light. So how
reassuring to know dark matter is not full
of Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs)
but Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS)–
NASA’s little joke spinning around us,
helping us believe no particle wars seem
imminent in space. Still, light years away
float the memories of collided galaxies,
one called–of course–Pandora’s Cluster.
Here, tiny sparks still hurtle out into
the vast darkness, their fate unknown.
For Hutchinson, dark matter is like an overflowing cup. She is aware of the present moment resting at the surface, as well as the great beyond bubbling up into supernovas. The poet embodies both the largeness of space as represented by science, with where we live: in the present moment. Her reference to the holy grail of time, suggests a quest motif. Life for this poet is never static. She is “all in” about life. Life is finite. Life is infinite. In the end all of life matters. Her quest is for the “holy grail” of a meaningful life.
For this reviewer the title poem provides a basic framework for the whole. Through a variety of forms: sonnets, unrhymed quatrains, villanelles, golden shovel poems,* free verse, and poems with indentations dancing all over the page, Hutchinson’s journey is a journey freely shared.
*The last words of each line in a golden shovel poem are words from a line found in another poem or text, used in order.
Childhood memories are important for Hutchinson. In part III, many poems with titles like, “Around the World in Fourth Grade,” “After Ice Skating,” “Lions Park Pool,” “Busse Woods, 1970,” and “The Anointing,” paint compelling scenes of a young girl coming of age. These exquisite poems placed me in the poet’s skin. Light and dark mix and mingle. Mystery and majesty become a single being.
Poet Joanna Klink has written, “In my poems I am trying to find my bearings through a world that at times feels remote and inchoate and struck blank with noise.” Kate Hutchinson feels something similar. The poet needs these poems; she intuitively senses that we need these poems.
With Klink’s insight in mind, part IV features several poems about Hutchinson’s middle-adult years. These gems cast light on losing one’s last parent, musings of a mother who, “After your children are asleep, you open / a window to breathe deep the lilac air … [she wonders] would you choose all this again?” This is tender, contemplative writing. In other poems Hutchinson takes on issues such as depression, agoraphobia, and the aftermath of a nervous breakdown. In “Jettison” she faces the reality that even her children will not want those things which, for her, are treasures. Here is an excerpt:
To approach our waning years is to decide
when something’s usefulness outweighs
its sentiment or pure delight. How will we know
when it’s time to part with the beads and baubles,
to strip down to seashell white, empty shelves,
a clear mind, and simple mat on the floor?
In Kate Hutchinson’s work we encounter a finished poet. Her poetry has touched my life. At the end of her volume, she ties a ribbon around the holy grail of time, by writing a poem entitled, “It All Matters: An Abecedarian of 2020.” Do yourself a favor, don’t miss this poem.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted September 5, 2022
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Human Cicada
By Carlos Cumpián
Prickly Pear Publishing & Nopalli Press, 2021
112 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1889568102
Review by Yolanda Nieves
| Carlos Cumpián’s much anticipated book of poetry, Human Cicada, is his fifth collection of poems—a breadbasket of delicious truth-telling iced with magical reality. The words come together in a kaleidoscope of memories, ancestral voices, and reflections that read like testimonios—first person accounts of historical events through first-person perspectives. The poems, a highway connecting a life of experiences in the inner-city with images excavated from hallow memories forged in the American west and in American south, Cumpián’s poetry allows us to cross bridges that deepen our understanding of the everyday events that flutter by while we forget to notice. The poems also act as arrows that point to the Brown and Black bodies who metaphorically live under the bridges of our cold-steeled society—those who scavenge for food, sage broken bodies, and can’t remember their personal links to geographic spaces. Like the cicada sound, created by the insects’ tymbals that drum against its body, this book of poetry trembles with the loud music of life’s troubles and uncelebrated triumphs. The words show us how we can live many lives at the same time and not lose the essence of who we are. The poems, as a collection, toll a bell—una campana of counter narratives urging us to remember to honor the voices of our ancestors and take note of narratives that have been largely ignored by mainstream publishers.
Human Cicada kicks back at the “one-voice” and “one-tongue” monotone so often prominent in traditional poetry collections. Unapologetically, Cumpián shares his poems in English, Spanish, Spanglish, Nahuatl, and Lakota. The intersection of languages creates a constellation of movement to the poems that give the reader a glimpse to a deep historical essence that has been largely ignored in mainstream literature. In that way, Cumpián guides our consciousness to remember people whom we are taught to forget. In “It is dream” Cumpián writes:
We emerge from the dark charcoal blanket of night,
our ancestors foraged for more than food,
they generated the genius seed of all Toltecs.
It is too big for hooks, spears, arrows, or nets.
There are poems like “Beauty and the Blade” and “Daughters” where Cumpián reflects on the day-to-day events that color the lives of women so often deemed invisible. Other poems examine our humanity with a clear justified voice of social criticism that relate the spiritual and tangible complications of being Mexicano, Latino/a, indigenous, and multilingual all at the same time.
As our lives continue to be imbued with unreliable information from media sources, and with no one stepping up with a clear plan on how to uplift our humanity toward one another, we must rely on our writers and poets, like Cumpián, whose powerful poetry blossoms from strong roots and declares how the embodiment of human goodness remains in the hands of everyday people. The poems will make you want to shapeshift into a poet. In the poem “Yo Homie, Mexica Tiacauh!” Cumpián’s words resonate as a call to action to speak truth to power:
Don’t be afraid to say it! We affirm that it’s our turn
To go forward, advancing as you help others.
Let’s not be reduced to fragment phrases,
Leaving but a few palabras to heat our chocolate
And our chili, mi estimado amigo con su cara
De nopalito, let me ask you,
Tehuatzin ti Mexikatl? /Are you Mexican, valiant one?
Finally, the valiant collection of memories set to poetry in Human Cicada, acts as a guidebook on how to (re)-view the world, both past and present. A portal that so rarely opens for readers of poetry, Cumpián’s writing is an example of what happens when poets listen to ancestral voices that whisper in their ears. It is like the sunrise that sheds light on a cloudy horizon; voices that have been ignored are lifted to the sky as the written word. Gladly, our poet accepted the call to listen and write Human Cicada. And like the sweaty garment worker embraced by her lover at the end of the day, or the parents who sign in relief with the quiet of children sleeping, we can welcome the Human Cicadas’ song into the canon of fine poetry.
=== ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Dr. Yolanda Nieves, a lifelong Humboldt Park ( Chicago) resident, is an Associate Professor of English at Wright College in Chicago. A multi-genre writer, her research and creative work centers marginalized voices.
Posted September 1, 2022
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The most beautiful garden
By Nikita Rimal Sharma
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8985070408
Review by Carol L. Gloor
| Nikita Rimal Sharma’s first book, The most beautiful garden, is a story of a young woman learning to speak in her own voice, not in the voice others expect, especially the stereotyped voice of an Asian woman. She explores her roots in family and place, and the way in which she both loves them and needs to separate from them.
Her love of family is most evident in the lovely title poem, in which she speaks of her mother’s dresses and physical presence as a garden:
My Taa dresses up everyday
in the brightest shades of yellow and red
. . . . .
a fragrant bush of roses—
enamored by beauty,
guarded by thorns.
But as the last line suggests, with “thorns,” this bright dress can also be a prison of meeting others’ expectations, as in “Mental health of a South Asian woman”:
So she hides
behind the mask of vibrant red outfits and dangling bangles
. . . . .
“A good woman sacrifices, compromises, smiles always
While the poet embraces her Asian heritage, she is also determined to use that heritage in her own way. In “Unresolved trauma” she speaks of “the remains of my childhood” as “crumbled letters from unrequited love” which she must now read and “Let the tears flow/cut the nets/wipe the shadows.” In “English is my second language” she describes how her “tongue rolls thicker, /invites second glances when I say water,” but clearly, she is willing to continue this struggle.
The strength of these poems is their specificity and use of sustained metaphors. In “Stone, the pit bull terrier,” a dog is lovingly described:
his meaty body sat on my lap, barely fitting,
warm, tiger striped, soft to the touch, strong,
smelling of lavender shampoos and musty rain.
The poem “Raindrops on my window” has an almost Emily Dickinson quality as “a droplet of rain runs through my windowpane and joins another droplet. / They flow together as if they were never separate”. In “House of anxiety” fear becomes “a clear glass house” which both protects and imprisons. Again sustaining a metaphor, in “(not) just a match stick,” the poet becomes that match stick which at first seems “feeble” but then becomes a “light of other light sources.”
But too often these fine specifics are drowned in generalities, particularly at the end of poems. In “Space” the poet compares her voice to a painting, but ends with generalities of “kindness and healing/for you and others,” language right out of a self-help book. Or in “You watered my wildflower roots,” the poet addresses her lover as one “who saw the twisted corners of my being,” an acceptable beginning, but then that insight devolves into “understanding, love and space,” generalities that could describe any nice feelings, when what we are really looking for is more about the lover’s hands, eyes, mouth, etc. Or even worse, some poems are just generalities, little sermons that take us nowhere. In “Maybe this is how we can make the world a better place,” we are advised to “love people when it’s hard to do so,” to forgive people for “everything they aren’t,” and express “gratitude for everything they are.” And in “Gunshots” the poet takes on our endemic gun violence in a series of standard phrases and ends with a question about the lives of those killed, stressing that they were “living, breathing, growing” people, when what we really need is a focus on one specific life we can care about.
The book is worth reading for its aforesaid gems, even though they sometimes might be hidden or overshadowed by meaningless generalities. And for the poet, this is a fine beginning, but she needs to get out her blue pencil for her next book.
===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, 2022
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February's Rose
By Bing Hua
Translation by Yingcai Xu
Finishing Line Press, 2022
140 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1646627820
Review by Michael Escoubas
*This review is published here with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| The esteemed early 20th century novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) once wrote:
“Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Art must spring out of the fulness and richness of life.”
Although Cather was a novelist and Bing Hua a poet, I sense an affinity between them. Both understand the purpose of art. Both instill the idea that life and art cannot be separated. Both know love. Both know disappointment. Both know loss and the joy of recovering stronger and better in the face of loss.
February’s Rose, superbly translated by Yingcai Xu, portrays life with a strong sense of where people live. Intuitively, the poet captures the ironies of love. She does this in smooth, economical lines. With no end-line punctuation, readers enjoy close access to the poet’s mind and heart. She comes across as genuine and accessible. Her poems resonate with tensions of self-understanding; fears of what to do next, and joys triumphant in the human spirit.
Organized into seven sections, February’s Rose, combines seasonal themes with cor-responding seasons of the heart. The sections include: I. The Sunflower, II. February’s Rose, III. That Summer, IV. The Lotus’ Obsession, V. Never Invest in Love, VI. A Hand Fan, and VII. The Scarf of the Moonlight. Even the section titles evoke interest.
Notice the confluence of city, nature and love in this excerpt from “The Sound of Silence”:
On the busy modern street
Who runs to the spring of heart
Bathing in the morning rays of materials
And keeping off from the moonlight of sexual desire
Loneliness
Is the biting wind of winter
Long black hair
That drifts in the wind
Lacerates the air
When the sound of silence
Wafts over from the distance
Nobody can hear it
That is the gurgling of a rill
And the throbbing of a mountain
You won’t want to miss how the poet uses the sound of silence to create a memorable moment of love.
Love is Bing Hua’s overriding theme. She includes virtually every month and season of the year showing connections between the outer world of nature and the inner (and often invisible) world of human nature.
Bing Hua’s talent for personification is displayed in “The Amorous Knot of June”:
Closer and closer, the blue sky
Walks on white clouds into my heart
In June’s garden
Every night, new plants sprout
Every morning, new flowers bloom
June’s ocean
Is a dream to embrace the blue sky
Is a wing to heave splashes
A white sail glides to the distance
Lightly and evenly stretching out
The colors of the blue sky and the ocean
On the wind-touched riverbank
Two coconut palms stand hand in hand
But cannot tie the amorous knot
Here, the poet is in love with nature. She invokes a kind of emotional completion, which is satisfying to her contemplative heart. Never one to provide an easy answer to life’s challenges, “Two coconut palms stand hand in hand / But cannot tie the amorous knot.”
The poem “Spring” brings Emily Dickinson to mind:
I wonder what type of fan spring uses
That has fanned the grass green and flowers red
I wonder what type of comb spring uses
That has spruced up the gardens and streets
I only see
A fresh and bright rose in the garden
Blooming in the most eye-catching place
A wedding float in the street
Coming from where birds come
O, spring, you are so sweet and charming
I want to be the bride of spring too
Love, for this poet, extends beyond human love. Bing Hua feels encircled by love. Possessed by the world’s beauty, and like Dickinson, her work is punctuated with wonder.
As with her section titles, her poem titles attract interest: “Come on Over,” “Why,” “My Longing for You Is Like Snow,” “Fish Begin to Chuckle,” “Teeth,” “Dust,” and “The Scarf of Moonlight,” to name but a few.
Throughout February’s Rose, Bing Hua’s poetry exhibits craftsmanship, maturity and clarity of purpose.
All of this is superbly illustrated in “If I Were Wind”:
If I were wind
I would fly and fly
Till I alight on his shoulders
If I were wind
I would blow and blow
To blow my love into his heart
Yes, Willa Cather would be proud; because, like Cather, Bing Hua’s art springs from the fulness and richness of life.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted September 1, 2022
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A Letter to You
By Darius Strong & Lola Writes
Independent, 2021
58 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8434106788
Review by Barbara Eaton
| “A Letter to You,” by Darius Strong and Lola Writes is a sweet little book. The idea is a good one: following the progression of a love relationship from first crush through dating, the honeymoon phase, disillusionment, and, finally, reconciliation. “He Say,” is a wonderful poem, with rich, fresh imagery. “Write me a love note,” too, is an outstanding poem. Some of the others, however, are a little predictable as love poetry.
I want to tell the poets that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, that youthful angst doesn’t last forever. If it is meant to be, your love will ripen and deepen as the years go by. By all means, give this sweet little book a chance. The whimsical words and definitions that begin each chapter are delightful, as are the illustrations. A valentine of young love. And love must be protected and nurtured wherever we find it.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted September 1, 2022
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Stash
By Miriam Sagan
Cyberwit.net, 2022
48 Pages
ISBN-13: 9788182539266
Review by Tricia Knoll
| Miriam Sagan could be called a writer’s writer. To me that means she covers the terrain from memoirist, poet, essayist, blogger at Miriam’s Well, and teacher – beginning with little slips of paper of youth and continuing to sneak-write poems at a Zen monastery when she was supposed to be studying Buddhist texts. She does all of this with an open heart and skilled craft.
Stash suggests that a stash can be a little box full of your old treasures in your mother’s attic. Or a mind holding snippets of memories, bits of the past that are the perfect subjects for short and flash poems that provide insights into how to be, how to live, how to love. She metaphorically explores the past’s boxes, some of which may be translucent. She writes in “Stash It,” “ I experienced these times with some innocence. I didn’t necessarily know what things meant until later.”
These twenty-six pieces of prose and poetry combine many examples of the stash. Sagan offers compact memories: first painting class, dyslexic encounters with words and texts, visits to the Plaza Hotel that freed the family from everyday routine, love making in Manhattan, reactions to My Lai that governed her reaction to war forever, an appreciation of Paul Klee’s painting “Night Fishing.”
Time has given her a perspective on these memory bits resonant with meaning. She addresses husbands, time, parents, self and love. At the conclusion of “Why I am Not a Monk” she writes:
I tell myself, thinking of the corruption of the world and how it has worn me down. I’m going to take vows and shave my head.
Then I just write some haiku instead.
naked zazen
by the small pool, long-bodied
wasps skim along
windowsill Buddha
in his robe, me
in my nightie
As for many of us, parents have their roles here as both strict guidance counselors and forgiving nurturers. Her mother answers a complex question about a Nazi breeding program in “Lebensborn” with one word and Sagan records, “Yes, she said, That was all but it was enough.” After a time at the Plaza Hotel with her father during the Hong Kong flu pandemic, she concludes, “In many ways, my father was my first and ongoing introduction to the complexity of human reality.”
What’s remarkable in Stash is that her finely-hewn stories about her memories inspire readers (that would be me) to examine our own memory stashes, vignettes that glitter like the snow globes Sagan describes shaking in “In Autumn.” At the end of book, she concludes with “Winter,”
Evening, snow so cold! New notebook.
soon I’ll be leaving
a line of footprints
on the blank page
Yes, I loved this collection for its openness, humor, storytelling, and the magic Sagan pieces together as she reviews what her stash meant. Her stories helped me recall my own.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She has five published collections in print – Checkered Mates out from Kelsay Books in 2021 and Let’s Hear It for the Horses from The Poetry Box in 2022. Two more collections are coming out in early 2023 – One Bent Twig from FutureCycle Press and Wild Apples from Fernwood Press. Knoll loved the haiku workshop she took from Miriam Sagan. Website: triciaknoll.com
Posted August 1, 2022
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iLearn, iTeach
By Kathrine Yets
Cyberwit.net, 2022
47 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-9390601554
Review by Bill Cushing
| In her third chapbook, iLearn, iTeach, Wisconsin poet Katherine Yets returns to Cyberwit for another volume.
Divided roughly into two halves that follow her chosen title, the first part, 11 pages long, moves the reader through remembrances and lessons from childhood, whether those be the poet’s own or her view of what affected or afflicted others. That section is followed by the bulk of her pieces that focus on her life and memories as a teacher.
The second “half,” actually the bulk of the work, focuses on her time as an educator. Even the “Acknowledgements” notes give “the biggest of hugs to my fellow teachers and the students who I have worked with.”
With titles such as “Meeting the Parents,” whose children are seen as “My Zombies,” Yets delves into her professional world as candidly as she does the personal in the first section.
One of the strengths in her writing is imagery. In spite of its title, “Creative Congestion” opens with strength as Yets notes:
An infection in my soul
Chakras out of synch
The colors pallid
Where did my rainbow go?
However, Yets doesn’t rely solely on deft manipulation of image to buttress her work. Most of her poems are first-person narratives that expose the deeply personal aspect of a life.
The volume opens with “During the War,” a short narrative of memory based on viewing the photography of Brittany Sanchez. “When I Was 13” represents the confessional aspects of the work first seen in Yets’s collection and ends by informing readers:
and I am writing poems
about a life that seems so distant
but was mine.
Her honesty can be particularly brutal when relating a bad memory. This is seen when “My Mother’s Lover” immediately moves into “Joists,” a fitting title not only because it plays with the sound of “joy”—a word repeated in the last line—but also because the poem acts as a plank joining the memory of this piece with the previous poem as well as the next one, “Unlove.”
When Yets delves into her professional world, she is equally straightforward. “An A” could have been observations of a Tracy Flick clone except the student in question “swore like a bartender.”
“Learning Haiku” presents a scene wherein the narrator learns by teaching, discovering while her students are “coughing their words,” they’re “enriched with their ideas.” What makes this revelation so poignant is the choice of the preposition “with” instead of “by.” This lets us know that the enrichment isn’t a cause-and-effect process but one of symbiotic growth and maturation.
“My Favorite,” a touching scenario that deals with the narrator trying to reassure a child who has apparently been bullied or denigrated in some way, reappears later as part of “Journals.” In it, Yets reveals how:
I wanted to tell you I loved you,
and everything would be okay
today, tomorrow, and the next day,
but I think you knew.
Still, it is how Yets closes each poem that really captures one’s attention. She becomes like a poetic O. Henry, surprising readers. Witness the closing lines of “Unlove,” which focuses on the rationalization of an abusive husband seen through the eyes of his daughter who learns:
How to wrap memories in newspaper
and keep them in a box.
There is a universality to “Avoiding,” which dwells on the distractions we all seem to use to postpone work tasks. The speaker drifts, albeit with purpose, while she wonders:
What does my eye color mean?
Google, Google, Google.
Scroll my walls.
Wash my walls.
That picture on the wall looks crooked.
Yets finally admonishes herself by realizing that she:
Should probably do that
After I watch this cat video.
Her endings and their strong diction are clearly seen in the title poem, “iLearn, iTeach,” a compare-and-contrast exercise as one standing before students recalls her own time as a student. The poem pivots from complaint to self-reflection while Yets simultaneously gives Gwendolyn Brooks a nod at its close.
The work in iLearn, iTeach reflects that of a poet who is not only observant but meticulous in recording and conveying those observations.
===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 August 1, 2022
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Ode to El Camino de Santiago and Other Poems of Journey
By James E. Green
Resource Publications, imprint of Wipf and Stock, 2022
29 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-6667-3600-7
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| James Green describes Ode to El Camino de Santiago and Other Poems of Journey as a variety of poetic styles with the connecting link of “journey.” The interesting part is that “journey” involves a range of applications. The term can indicate a trip, tour, travel, excursion, voyage, flight, and probably a lot more. That said, Green’s verse features a sophisticated “layering” of journey.
From the outset Green’s love of travel is evident. Peripatetic to a fault, Green was an officer in the United States Navy. His academic career has taken him to Southeast Asia, India, Europe, Morocco, and to various locations in the UK, especially Ireland.
El Camino de Santiago in English means The Way of St. James. (The James in view is James, Son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles.) Encompassing approximately 500 miles beginning at Saint Jean Pied de Port, France, determined sojourners trek through Spain’s challenging terrain, reaching their destination at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia.
Travel, for Green, is more than simply moving from one place to another. The poet is a tour guide on a reflective journey that nurtures the inner person. On a personal note, I regard writing poetry as a journey toward ever-increasing spiritual depth. Thus, when Green avers that journey is “more than mere travel to other places,” he hits me where I live.
The layered subtleties of Green’s work are amply illustrated in this excerpt from the volume’s title poem, “Ode to El Camino de Santiago”:
To find El Camino de Santiago
begin wherever light and shadow mingle,
wherever questions stubbornly stay tangled
in threads of worn-out pieties and the soul
speaks to a longing for discovery
of the pilgrim’s way, points the heart’s compass
toward healing and offers silent witness
to that part of you that is solitary.
Before a journey begins, travelers must take inventory to ensure they have everything they need. Similarly, for Green, the “journey” begins by taking stock of our lives, by facing places of uncertainty … those places where “light and shadow mingle.” It is the lack of clarity, quite often, that presents challenges. There are times when “worn-out pieties” simply aren’t enough to get us through. Green understands this. Hence, his verse “points the heart’s compass,” toward what can only be found when one appeals “to that part of you that is solitary.”
A point of interest for me, aside from the spiritual elements inherent in Ode to El Camino de Santiago, is being placed in the action. Green’s poems are poems this reviewer enjoys because they are good poems. Many describe landscapes, snowcapped mountains, (“In the High Sierras”) swamps (“The Okefenokee”) and seascapes (“Summer Solstice on the West Coast of Ireland”).
I was fascinated by “Morning on Soi Charoen Krung 85, Near Wat Worachanyawas, Bangkok.” This unique poem describes morning at a market in Bangkok, Thailand. Green captures the odors of boiling peanuts in cauldrons, fish packed in ice, monks collecting alms, stray cats, the blare of taxi horns as a neighborhood greets the day. These are priceless. Indeed, they are the very “stuff” of meditation. How can we go deeper in life without an appreciation of people … people alive, breathing, struggling, living their lives by the lights they have been given?
I noted earlier the rich layering of James Green’s verse. In “Tonight There Are No Stars,” a lovely sonnet, Green blends the most basic form of travel as a means of touching that part of you that is solitary.
Tonight there are no stars, there is no sky,
only yellow smudges from streetlights glow
like ghosts eyes from inside the fog that lies
heavy laden like a melting cloud low
to the ground while gauzy silhouettes appear,
fade, vanish, regather themselves in a hush
like phantasms hovering in mutable air
beyond the scope of sound or realm of touch.
It’s why I like to walk alone on nights
like this: The edges soften, silence speaks,
opaqueness mutes what stirs disquiet, lights
awakening, as low-anchored mist leaks
onto my skin, into my pores, and thought
dissolves into a presence stillness brought.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted August 1, 2022
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No Distance Between Us: a journey in poems
By Marianne Peel
Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2021
86 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1945049200
Review by Candace Armstrong
| Be prepared to travel to Lesvos, Israel, Ukraine, Nepal, China and finally Close to Home in this book of free verse soaked with vivid detail as the poet takes us on her journey to uncommon tourist places. The descriptions of the people she encounters stand out in the reader’s mind long after the page is turned.
So the title is apt because she artfully tells us there really is no distance between us in this mostcolorful and interesting human family. Touching poems from the Kara Tepe Refugee Camp inthe Lesvos section highlight the poet’s ability to make personal connections such as in The Manand His Words (p. 7) which begins:
I wanted to hold the hand
of the man who wrote English words
on his palm, that he might know
layers of meaning, the underbelly
of each word.
In The Courtyard, in Nepal, is a beautiful tribute to her farewell from the Blind School with a song from Lakshmi. The poem ends:
We don’t need light to see
We don’t need light to hold one another,
shadow to shadow, singing our way
through the absence of light. (p. 29)
Most of the poems are set in China where the poet taught, and my favorite is In Your Country which ends with the poet saying her students gave her a Mandarin name meaning:
a songbird that sings through the fog
a skylark carrying melody
like breadcrumbs or seeds
between the hinges of a broken beak. (p.35)
Saturday Night At the Symphony, Close to Home, describes the sweet rapture of a poor woman’s improvisation of a conductor as she listens to a symphony she can’t afford to attend from the steps of her fire escape on Saturday nights.
She arabesque her way up the fire escape, took flight
among stars, pulsing to the rhythm of her improvisation. (p.48)
These are only short examples of the moving language in this collection. The reader is filled with a genuine sense of connection as the title implies and, speaking for myself, the images expand inmind even more after each reading. Marianne Peel’s heart for both people and poetry can be felt on every page.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Candace Armstrong writes in the beautiful woodlands of Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. She joined Illinois State Poetry Society in 2013 and has published several poems as well as short stories and one novel, Evidence of Grace, self-published in 2021. She enjoys gardening, reading, dog-walking, cooking and of course, writing!
Posted July 1, 2022
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Aquifer: Poems Evoked by Water
By Ellen Sander
Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022
St. Paul, MN
35 Pages
Review by Lois Baer Barr
| It turns out Ellen Sander, a poet from Maine, was a peripatetic rock and roll chronicler who has written about the Stones, Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and many other icons of the sixties and seventies. Her poetry, however, takes a very quiet turn away from steel guitars, drum sets, and amps. Her poem “Gymnopédie” is a wistful nod to Erik Satie’s haunting compositions. Her allusions to other poets reveal Sander’s subtle poetic sensibility, for example, the sparseness of haiku, as well as the work of Robert Creeley and Wallace Stevens.
The metaphor of the title suggests that we as readers will have to dig below the surface to find what we seek. The search is fulfilling. Sander’s work is evocative and musical. Her poems reveal themselves bit by bit provoking a rise in pulse rate or a stirring in your gut when she explores feelings you have had but could not describe. The poems deal with water of all kinds: drops of dew, scalding hot tea, tidal waters, the sea as final resting place of Egypt Air Flight 804, the seascapes painted by her father.
Poet Claire Milliken states that Sander’s poetry is “especially attuned to time.” I read this book in one sitting, and I must say that time stopped for me. The collection begins with an evocation of dawn, one that is not at all rosy fingered. The last poem is “Day’s Final Hour.” A simple cup of latte, when sipped with a friend, can stop time. Or time can explode as it does in her elegy to her friend Euan.
All of a sudden, a flight to Quebec
and that night the sheets lay
against the Serengeti of your chest
moved with the sirocco of your breath
We ransacked the shimmering plains
your monsoon thunder fading
At first reading this stanza seemed out of place with the rest of the book; however, it reflects her experiences in the sixties and seventies, especially the raucous globetrotting and sex.
The most striking and original feature of her poetry is the unusual punctuation. The commas in some of the poem titles seem misplaced or strange. “Water, folding” or “outing, This” are notable examples. In another poem, “water over water,” the comma may be a single drop of water or a metaphor for the saving grace of a single word, if it is the right one. In “day’s final hour” the poem starts with a comma. And two other lines begin with commas.
, grace
notes a dusky
shadow cat
suddenly
In the poem’s final stanza, the poet sits alone. The comma is a metaphor for a stitch to mend a coat, a soul, a world.
, winter
coat in lap
, I
thread in hand
mending
Also innovative is her placement of words on the page. Her most unusual spacing is for a “barn jacked by rain” the divisions of lines, spaces, even words taken to their smallest element, that is spelled out letter by letter, suggest the crashing force of water in flood. In a poem about an island in a storm, the empty spaces surrounded by words evoke the whirling waters engulfing the island.
Sander’s language is rich and inventive but not daunting. Her first poem is called “daybreakage,” a noun I intend to borrow to mean those mornings where you are never fully awake, and everything goes awry. Haiku is used as a verb. She cites Pascal in French and two of her titles are in French and German. I knew the meaning of Licht, (Iight). “Coucou,” I learned from Google, is an exclamation in French that serves as a playful “hi” or “hello.”
I highly recommend this collection not only for the poems, but it is a joy to behold with its beautiful cover, font, and paper. It is hand sewn and numbered with a little swan on water sketched on the last page.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr has published chapbooks of fiction and poetry. Tracks: Poems on the ‘L is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press where it placed fourth in their New Voices Contest for 2021.
Posted June 1, 2022
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Blue Flame Ring: Collected Poems
By Tinker Greene
Poltroon Press, 2022
110 Pages
ISBN-10: 0-918395-38-0
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
| Blue Flame Ring is an eclectic buffet, offering readers a wide range of subjects including loss, subsequent grief, friendship, house sitting experiences, interspersed with house cats, nature, music, and travel. The book is a patchwork of chapbooks published together in one volume.
The title poem talks about the author's backpacking trip through the Sierra Mountains. Greene faces a sudden snow squall. He is forced to choose one of two paths, think Robert Frost. His options are a chute, or a high route over a rock slab. Greene chooses the chute. He descends and finds a hole in a rock and spends the night there. Greene realizes he's battled the forces of nature and won!
Grenee shares the grief he and his wife endure when their son is killed. They also lost Greene's brother the following year. I sympathize with the loss the author is dealing with. In 2002, my family lost my father when his car was hit by that of a drunk driver.
Part 2 of What I remember About 2002 describes the call letting Greene know his brother is not long for this world. He talks about the drive to the hospital to be at his sibling's side, only to arrive too late to communicate with him. While My Brother Was Dying, describes Greene waiting in the hospital, monitoring his brother's progress. My family and I were at my father's side for thirteen days. On the thirteenth day we lost him.
What I Remember About 2002, part 5 depicts Greene and his wife dedicating a memorial to their son, a grove of trees in Big Basin Redwoods. The grove is a retreat for them to visit with their son, honoring a beloved person through nature.
Greene is a generous poet sharing the stage with other artists. Good Evening by Philippe Soupult, is the first poem readers see when they get past the title page. Slightly Blurry Window, appears on page sixty and was written by Giacome Leopardi in 1819.
The reader is taken to a time of relative peace and reflection when Greene shares a stop gap in his life, housesitting for a friend.
Some of my favorite works detail the adorable antics of house cats. Sleeping Cats, Los Panteros, and A Morning capture the personality and spirit of Greene's two cats.
Music played an integral role in Greene's youth. Hoagy Carmichael Reminiscing About theCornetist Bix Beiderbeke Indiana 1920's, gives readers a birds eye view of two great musicians jamming. The Five Spot is about a Manhattan jazz club Greene hung out in when he was young, listening to Thelonious Monk. Greene wonders if this is the part of his life that has impacted him the most.
Greene shares the good and the bad about travel. What I Remember About 2002 part 8 talks about a frightening time in Mexico. Greene left his cash at the SRO checkpoint. What I Remember about 2002 Part 1 recounts a romantic trip to Quebec.
No matter the location Blue Flame Ring is an amazing journey from beginning to end.
===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 June 1, 2022
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Mile Markers
By Tom Moran
Cyberwit.net
36 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-81-8253-839-9
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind persmission from Quill & Parchment
| As I opened my heart to Tom Moran’s excellent debut collection, a saying by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) came to mind: “A poet is someone who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy, but it isn’t.” Heaney, arguably one of the greatest poets of recent times, is known for the lyrical beauty of his poems and their plain-spoken truth about everyday life. Bullseye!
Growing up in the rough neighborhoods of Chicago’s suburbs, Moran puts readers “in the game” of his life. From the get-go, Heaney was right. Tom Moran feels things deeply. This is poetry’s first requirement. Moreover, words do not come easy for this poet. I sense a certain struggle here. That is, he wrestles with his writing. Again, Heaney, This may sound easy, but it isn’t. That is why these poems are good poems.
As I worked my way through the book, I stopped cold at “Each Dawn.” I was reminded of what my mother told me to do on cold and windy days:
I walk backwards
in the wind
to shield me
from the cold.
Walk backwards
against my poetry,
hide from raw truth.
Walk backwards
from a sunrise,
to drown
in the carpeted night.
I turn,
face my words,
walk across a field
of unwritten poems.
Here, the poet struggles in his psyche: the irrepressible need to “walk across a field / of unwritten poems.” As Mile Markers so poignantly illustrates, Moran’s backward walk into the wind is a journey of growth. It is a journey of learned poetic depth. “Google Maps” reflects on childhood experiences where, as a child standing on the corner of “Stoney Island Avenue, / he raced across eight lanes of traffic / to get to kindergarten.” This took no small of amount of courage. In the same poem, I experience, “how my stomach tightens / walking through a viaduct.” And,
the warm bakery I took harbor
on winter mornings walking to St. Felicitas,
looking for my place in this louder world.
Ah! The aroma of fresh bread and raspberry scones reaches my nostrils!
Moran is no stranger to darkness. “A Gift” is a haibun. The poet exploits this form perfectly using prose to describe the death of his friend Mike. Mike’s life ended at age fourteen when he walked in front of a train. Other friends made a suicide pact. Another died by an overdose of heroin. There are more. But through the darkness, life emerges as an inexplicable gift:
People fly off the potter’s
wheel as wet clay.
God molds a humble mug,
grace sustains the firing.
I return to Heaney, This may sound easy, but it isn’t. I get the feeling that Tom Moran has seen a lot of life. I sense poetry to be a key to Moran’s understanding of life. Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” I don’t know if Moran is familiar with Stevens’ aphorism of not. But the ending of “Moonflower,” a tribute to the poet’s wife Christine, shows his depth of understanding:
We are two raindrops
folded into one;
wait on the day when we’ll realize
Jesus has everyone’s eyes.
We are bits pulled from sourdough batter,
set aside to add to the next batch
to keep the recipe alive.
Mile Markers has nourished the recipe of my life, keeping its nutrients evermore fresh, evermore alive.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted June 1, 2022
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apparitions
By Amelia Cotter
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2022
54 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0578343310
Review by Pauline Kochanski
| Amelia Cotter is a prolific writer, poet & storyteller with a number of history and poetry books to her credit. The collection of haibun and haiku in “apparitions” is a personal journey that exposes Amelia’s thoughts, feelings and fears in an open manner that keeps her inner critic at a distance.
Haibun is a Japanese form of writing which includes prose or a prose poem and a traditional Haiku. Haiku are three-line brief poems generally with a focus on nature. The lines are broken down in syllables, the first line is 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables and the third line 5 syllables. Since Japanese and English are markedly different in syllabication and construction, English versions of the structure were developed; American Syllable based 5-syllable, 3-syllable, 5-syllable or in the 3-word, 5-word, 3-word basis.)
The format of haibun was first used by the haiku master, Matsuo Basho in 17th Century Japan and one of his best examples “Narrow Road to the Deep North” clearly represents one of the main requirements in traditional haibun - combining travel writing with prose. Though the pairing of the prose and the poem can be related in direct or indirect ways, the haibun is not always about a physical road travelled.
The writing and reading of poetry can transform our lives in a manner no other writing form can achieve. It allows a sense of peace or it can pull us out of a reverie into the sun, the wind and the realities of life. Poetry grants us a method of accepting the harshest of realities and make them accessible. Bringing “apparitions” alive is what Ms. Cotter has accomplished in her haibun and haiku. Allowing something remarkable or unexpected to arise.
Even in her fear, she has power and self knowledge which becomes evident in the writings here. Many single lines speak loudly to the triumph and losses of life. How to traverse the insensitivity of others and the attempt to release that which does notn support the best in us.
A single line from “The Second City,” says so much about feeling that the reader does not need to know more.
Embracing life feels at times impossible.
In the following haiku (and many haiku are not titled) Ms. Cotter reveals her ability to see what she is doing at the time she is doing it; an accomplishment of self preservation and self knowledge.
Itch
Of old wounds
I pick myself
Apart
And finally the one called “Hibernaculum” reveals the truth of where ever we go we are always with ourselves.
My weapons come with me everywhere I go.
I am ready for the fight, come lightness or weight of days.
spring thaw —
the barren ground swells
beneath a billowing sky
Fears, anxieties and feelings that Ms. Cotter exposes are personal to her. By expanding these individual personal sentiments beyond herself she allows these emotions to reveal themselves as universal. Her personal words and thoughts manifest into broad reaching essential primal feelings.
As a reviewer I bring my history and reason to evaluate the written or visual art presented. The emotions and feelings, so deeply embedded in these haibun and haiku made my initial reading difficult. Though, after additional readings of these works the personal emotional difficulty of the many feelings represented diminished.
I found a fellow traveler who is one of those artists that grants permission to speak personal truths publicly.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Pauline Kochanski is an exhibiting artist, writer, teacher and meditator.
Posted May 1, 2022
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Doctor Poets & Other Healers: Covid in their Own Words
Editors: Thelma T. Reyna, Frank L. Meyskens, Jr., and Johanna Shapiro
Golden Foothills Press, 2022
130 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7372481-0-1
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
| About life, poet-physician John Keats wrote: “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.” It is fair to say that Keats (1795-1821), himself dogged by illness (tuberculosis) throughout his short life, was conflating life and poetry. As the poems and essays contained in this volume demonstrate, poetry is a conduit for experience. As co-editor Thelma T. Reyna avers in her preface, “Let us listen to their voices. Let us hear their broken hearts and see their tears.”
Let us hear, indeed. During this season of immense suffering I felt the pathos expressed in these poems and essays. Few would deny that America and the world are only now emerging from a scourge we pray will not return. Division, uncertainty, and skepticism have wrapped America in a cloak of cynicism. If there is one thing that struck me about Doctor Poets & Other Healers, it is that each of these frontline soldiers care about people. They are not about political division. They are not about blame-placing. They are about healing.
What They Witnessed
“In Praise of Home School,” by Anna Dunlap, highlights one of Covid-19’s most controversial outcomes. An excerpt:
Some say shelter-at-home is a wasteland
of boredom bathed in cathode rays
of ruminating on things long hid—
slackened bonds of coupledom,
slender reeds of habit,
how family depletes us.
Dunlap’s poem develops the grim reality of isolation. She gives a rabbit social distance as she walks. She reflects on her childhood . . . when “time / was a pleasure to kill—swaying / in a hammock of faded quilts.” This wise poem delivers an in-depth message that “home-schooled” this reviewer’s heart. Don’t miss this one.
“Life from the Other Side of the Tray,” by Pamela Shea, moves from the “intrigue” she once knew as an OR medical assistant to the grim reality that now, her husband, “who usually stands tall / now looks small on the table, pale and barely breathing.” Shea is now on the other side of the surgical tray. This compelling poem has a powerful closure.
How They Were Impacted
Jo Marie Reilly felt an overwhelming sense of futility. Reilly, a gifted writer, pours forth her heart in the essay, “In Need of a Prayer.” After helping patients in dire circumstances as she can, Reilly trudges homeward at 1:30 a.m., more dead than alive herself. As she motors away from the hospital the radio blares “The Prayer,” by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli . . . the lyrics seem a fitting commentary:
When we lose our way
Lead us to a place
Guide us with your grace
Give us faith so we’ll be safe . . .
Rodica Stan, is a Ph.D., in biochemistry, from Romania. An accomplished poet, Stan captures impact in her sobering poem, “Status Update”:
I am healthy. Sanitized. Masked. Vaccinated. Alive.
My tears collect in empty espresso cups,
As I mourn my father’s death, alone, asphyxiated,
As I fear my mother’s death, alone, across
An ocean and two continents from me.
There is COVID everywhere;
In the space among us, them, all . . .
In filtrating the air, our intellect,
History, death, and the earth that inters us.
S.O.S.
How They Responded
In her moving prose narrative, “Preventing the Scarring of the Soul,” Dr. Lorna Rodriguez-Rodriguez writes about the grief she felt as her sister Raquel risked her life caring for Covid patients in Spain. During the chaotic period when PPE were in short supply and treatment protocols were changing hour-by-hour, Raquel died. A pall of unspeakable grief descended like a shawl on Dr. Rodriguez. Her story about witnessing the impact of illness on others underscores the overriding truth about our healthcare warriors: They are a people for others. They are people who give their best even when they have nothing left to give. Out of the emotional ashes of Raquel’s death, Dr. Rodriguez rose to a doctor’s ultimate height: the unstinting care of her patients.
In “Grateful for Time,” Dr. Shannon Zhang, writes of a patient, Ms. W. Diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, Ms. W. was weary of seeing so many doctors. She “just wanted to be left alone.” In the succeeding weeks Zhang began developing a friendship with Ms. W. This happened amid the frenetic atmosphere of Covid care. At a juncture when improvement signaled discharge, Ms. W. grew worse. Surgery was performed. In the aftermath, her patient, whom Zhang had grown to love, began to decline.
“Despite my head running with the “to do’s” of that day and her unwillingness to engage in conversation with me due to fatigue, I stayed with her as she slept peacefully.”
“During my last day on service, I greeted Ms. W. one last time, leaving her room before she could see my tears. I thought back to my first day with her and how I hastily swept out of her room to accomplish my tasks. Ms. W. reminded me about the humanism aspect of medicine: sitting by her side when she was lonely, removing excess bandages to make her more comfortable, and spending a few extra minutes with her even with the m any other things to complete that day.”
As I read through the wonderful poems and essays contributed by these 29 gifted healthcare professionals and writers, I wondered how to end this review. I needed look no further than the tender heart of Dr. Shannon Zhang . . . a heart shared by each contributor.
Editor’s Note: Co-Editors Thelma T. Reyna, Frank L. Meyskens, Jr., and Johanna Shapiro have included photographs and extended biographies of each contributor. These bios testify to the broad spectrum of professional backgrounds and literary expertise that make this volume standout in the ever-growing library of Covid-19 literature.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted May 1, 2022
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Art Work
By Terry Allen
Kelsay Books, 2021
101 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1954353107
Review by Ally Frank
| Terry Allen’s Art Work Poems is a book of various styles and lengths of poetry, all connected by the base image that is ‘art’. Not only does Allen refer to written art, he dives into fine art mediums, playwright, dance, and many other styles of art and their relation to life, love, connection, and history.
Even within the first section of the book, it is made clear to the reader that art has played in big role in Allen’s life, a fine example of this being the poem Name that Dog on page 23. The book itself features specific works of art from all points in history, giving it a very fluid pace and cluing the reader into the statement the book wants to make: that art is one of the most important foundations of life.
Terry Allen references that art can be not only a personal interest, but a conversation starter among those who are separated fundamentally, inferentially claiming that everyone can relate to art and that art is what connects all of us.
The book features more traditional poetry, but also some monologue-style pieces, which I think provides a nice balance in the speed of the read. I would venture to say some of my favorite pieces in this book are of this style. More specifically, I very much enjoyed both Latin and Happy Endings, which can be found on pages 57 and 58, respectively. Both of these I found to be very relatable and understandable, even as someone who does not enjoy traditional mediums of art as much as this book may require you to. I found that they put forms of art that everyone knows of in a way that everyone can relate to. I found that Latin even covered some of the personal reservations I had about the book. It covers how the language of Latin is viewed as only ancient and religious, not having any relevance to present-day life, but then brings up things such as Suduko, trivia and Harry Potter, all of which can be enjoyed just a bit more with a basic understanding of the language. I found that this book was directed towards those who love art, all forms of it, which is a demographic I do not find myself in. I did not relate to the parts of the book that stressed how art can be a conversation starter or how important it is to learn about historical art, simply because it is not an interest of mine. However, like Latin proposes, there are certainly many benefits to having a basic understanding of this topic, and I feel as though this poem allowed for a lot of relatability for readers who may be in the same boat as me.
Overall, I enjoyed the cadence and connectedness of this book. I found it to be a nice paced read and I loved most of the language choices. I, however, being someone who does not share Terry Allen’s love and passion for art, did not find it relatable, which is at no fault of his. I would recommend those who love looking at, studying, investigating and exploring different styles and time periods of art give this book a read.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ally Frank is an 18 year old poet who currently has two books out. Her books, “late night thoughts & all the things i never said” and “telephone line” are both available for Amazon. She is currently a high school senior who will be attending Purdue University in the fall to study psychology and American Sign Language/Deaf Studies. She has been writing poetry since the age of 11 and published her first book in November of 2021.
Posted May 1, 2022
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A Dreamless Night: The Selected Chinese/English Poems of William Marr
By William Marr
Chicago Academic Press, 2021
258 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798761154803
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
| Of the great Chinese poets of history, Du Fu, (712-770, Tang dynasty), arguably was the greatest. Although this description may apply to many, I use the reference here simply to highlight that William Marr, like Du Fu, seeks to build bridges. Du Fu made poems out of the cloth of everyday experiences, bridging the commonplace with the profound. This is what good poets do.
William Marr doesn’t look for subjects about which to write. The subjects find the poet. Witness his latest collection, A Dreamless Night:
The poems are presented bilingually with the Chinese and English texts on facing pages. I found it fascinating to imagine which Chinese letters fit with their English counterparts. Thus, a bridge of fellowship is formed through language.
With seeming ease, Marr provides a multitude of crossings for his readers. Whether you favor nature poems, or poems about history, faith, family, birds, animals, endangered species, or the bricks and mortar of city skyscrapers and the people who inhabit them, A Dreamless Night has a poem for you.
Marr’s economical use of language is instructive. There is time-worn cliché: Less is more. In this poet’s case “less” is exactly right!
I want to display this “less is more” feature through several examples:
Story
The dog has her eyes closed
but the old man knows she’s listening
Her warm back is moving
closer and closer
Notice how simple life occurrences become occasions for poetry. The crisp diction and lack of punctuation strip out everything not pertinent to the poem. This is a hallmark not only of Dreamless Night, but of Marr’s poetic canon.
Another example:
Bird Cage Again
Open
the
cage
let the bird fly
away
and give
the sky back
its
freedom
Not only is this a prime example of language economy, but its message illustrates situational irony. Marr is a master of this technique. At first reading I assumed that “freedom” was a reference to the captive bird’s release. However, the poet surprised me! The typographical technique of extra line spacings increases the “open air” effect conducive to the poem’s freedom theme.
I appreciate Marr’s ability to bridge the visible outer-world of nature with the conflicting inner-world of human experience. Even when one is emotionally undone (which your reviewer often is) nature offers consolation:
This Little Bird
Having a cold
fighting with the wife
blinded by the sun
excuses are abundant
Yet this little bird
sings the morning
into gold
Personification takes center stage in:
Snowfight
crying a cry of joy
a snowball
whizzes toward you
it lands right on the bud
waiting to bloom
on your beaming cheek
The poet’s bridge between sound and emotion, while commonplace, is made fresh and palpable in:
Rainy Season
Over and over
repeating always the same old stuff
drip drip drip
chip chip chip
O how desperately we long for
a deafening thunder
or an overwhelming shout
SHUT UP!
In poem after poem, I heard my inner voice whispering, “Yes, yes, you know what is being said, you have experienced this.
Marr builds a bridge to romantic tenderness in:
Sharing an Umbrella
Sharing an umbrella
I suddenly realize the difference between us
Yet bending over to kiss you
gives me such joy
as you try to meet me halfway
on tiptoe
Who among us hasn’t been there? Who among us cannot imagine such an intimate moment? This is part of William Marr’s genius. A moment becomes the summation of a lifetime. Thus the power inherent in poetry.
There is virtually no important topic untouched in A Dreamless Night. Marr’s treatment of death is cryptic but effective:
Old Woman
Like a worn-out record
the deep grooves
on her forehead
repeat and repeat
I want to live
I want to live
I want to
One of the profound casualties of our dependence on manufactured power sources is brought front and center in:
Blackout
a powerless night
when people suddenly noticed
the existence
of the moon
and stars
While the poem “Blackout” carries with it a touch of irony about modern necessities, the abiding value of A Dreamless Night, for this reviewer, is exactly the opposite of its title. This seminal collection points to a world long neglected: a world wrapped in the shawl of truth and love.
Something to dream about in the light of day.
===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 on Quill and Parchment.
Posted May 1, 2022
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Underground River of Want
By Kathleen Gregg
Leah Huete de Maines, 2021
27 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-64662-599+4
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
| I have always marveled at how seeming randomness returns later to infuse life with meaning. Case in point: Kathleen Gregg’s lead poem recalls how she felt on a fateful day when paramedics strapped her dad onto a stretcher for transport to the hospital. The distraught family holding fast to each other, as the radio blares, I wanna hold your hand.
The collection: Underground River of Want.
The poem, “January 1964.”
Not long thereafter . . .
A cold tug of alarm shivers
through my body. My sister gathers me in.
Unasked questions are swallowed, churn
in my stomach for one terrible week. Until,
the dreaded call from mom; a bedside
summons that wrenches
the two of us from sleep.
This excerpt from “January 1964,” which channels the Beatles classic, sets the stage for a thin volume of poems which is thicker than blood with emotional depth.
One of the purposes of art is to serve as a “rudder” during tough times. When seas are rough the goal is not to capsize the boat. Underground River of Want, is ample proof. I sense that Kathleen Gregg understands this. Without poetry the ship of her life founders.
“Loss” is a key theme for Gregg. Through a series of losses the poet invites us into the surging sea of her father’s death, sexual trysts, and her failed marriage. These amputations become the source of growth within her suffering.
I am moved by the poem, “Father-less.” Without her father to tell her “No” she is in want of an emotional compass when a boy’s eyes say, “I will touch you.” This poem is of central importance. The collection’s title finds its meaning here. Still in mourning, the next several poems explore the emotional vacuum left by her father’s loss.
It is important to note that poetic form plays an important role here. The poems early-on feature gaps in word-spacing and erratic indentations. This is purposeful writing. Gregg’s use of form represents how she is feeling . . . she is showing a disjointed life. Her pain is expressed through poetic form as shown in this excerpt from “Heartbreak is a Winter Wind”:
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