E-Reviews
Review by Maryanne Hannan
MOVING HOUSE
by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
WordTech Communications
PO Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106
ISBN-10: 1934999725
2009, 98 pp., $18.00
http://www.wordtechcommunications.com/
At the 2007 West Chester Poetry Conference, I attended a panel discussion on “Catholicism and Modern American Poetry.” One of the speakers struck me as bold in defining the operational intersection of her spiritual tradition and artistic imagination with the world. “Catholic poetry,” said Angela O’Donnell, “reflects and embodies a particular disposition towards the world. It is corporeal—perhaps even bloody minded, in its insistence upon an embodied, incarnate faith—it is grim in its acknowledgment of the presence and power of real evil in the world—and it is ultimately hopeful in its assertion of the meaning of suffering and in its persistent search for God even when he seems to be absent.” She calls this attitude “an Incarnational awareness.”
Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University where she teaches English, Creative Writing and American Catholic Studies, O’Donnell has been willing, through her reviews and critical writings, to wrestle with the hydra-headed monster, “What is Catholic Poetry?” and describe at least a head or two. Now she has published her own first full-length poetry collection, Moving House. To my relief, she left both critical theory and religious dogma at the door.
Moving House ranges through a heady mix of topics against an autobiographical backdrop, the bleak days of O’Donnell’s childhood through the quiet chronology of a move in her maturity. The first sections contain poems of her Pennsylvania coal-town upbringing, the death of her father, her mother’s edgy widowhood, an arsonist cousin, her grandparents’ graves, gardens and warped floorboards. There is no excess sentiment, no confessional tugs to these poems—merely the most telling details to render the larger story.
The first specific reference to Catholicism occurs in “Other Mothers”:
Other girls’ mothers
didn’t like my mother,grew green-eyed in the grocery,
cold-shouldered us at Masswhere she’d stay in the pew,
marooned, at Communion
A mother ostracized for her propensity to take on lovers and a weekly venue for this censure to occur might reasonably be expected to trigger anger against the individuals and institutions involved, but there are no traces of anger or references to the process of forgiveness and reconciliation. It just is.
The latter part of the collection, in which the title poem occurs, proceeds chronologically with the poet’s move from Baltimore to New York City and continues there to post-9-11. Throughout the book, houses function as containers of lives and spirits. In her grandmother’s home is “holy Mary on the western wall.” Home is the nexus of experience for the living, and now the poet must abandon the home where her children lived for another unknown existence. She will carry with her the home of her mind, truly portable. So many poems in this collection revolve around a deep, nearly personal relationship with figures from Anne Sexton, Andrew Wyeth, Dante to the ever-present Melville that it was a surprise to find out that “Reading in the New House” is not the same:
I find my mind
yearning for what’s lost
to me, all that’s left behind
…
My mind’s on fire,my heart a lonely hull,
my gut a knot
these two eyes wells,
all thought distraught—
Many of these autobiographical poems appeared in O’Donnell’s chapbook, Mine. What gives them new life and even added depth in this collection is their placement alongside poems from her other chapbook, Waiting for Ecstasy, a collection of poems religious in tone and subject matter. The inclusion of such disparate material, arranged so that a poem about Maria Goretti and other girl martyrs coexists with a poem about making an apple pie, struck me as thematic, a bit of O’Donnell’s Incarnational awareness, invisible unity at work.
I experienced pleasurable jolts in the bold juxtaposition of these poems, never knowing what would come next. For example, a poem about her mother’s lover, “Blues Man,”
the kind of man
who’d walk in the house
and make the women cry,
but first we’d feed you, frythe mess of fish you’d caught,
broil the frozen steak
is followed by a quiet meditation on the poet’s visit to the grave of Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Glasnevin Graveyard”:
Under rainy gray sky,
a soft day, as the natives would say,
you lie in strange earth
poet among the dead and dumb.
“Saints’ Lives,” listing all those gory-girl martyrs,
St. Agatha’s breasts, sliced and served.
St. Lucy’s mild eyes upon the dish.
And St. Cecilia succumbed, they say, singing.
is not too far away from “My Bonanza,” in which the poet professes her preference for
…. the ugly brother,
middle-son saddled with upright Adam
and pretty Little Joe forever
out-looking, out-talking, out-flanking you.
As different as the subject matter in these poems appear, they do share one reality: death. The Blues Man dies in a tragic car accident; Hopkins and the virgin martyrs are no longer with us obviously; and the occasion for “My Bonanza” was Hoss’ recent death. Throughout these poems, the separation of the living and the dead is sometimes as flimsy as “Grandmother’s Living Room” with
The frayed floral carpet
all that held us from a head-
long tumble down the mine-
shaft dug beneath the house long before.
What is under the earth, the thin porosity separating where we walk blithely on with where we might fall, is never far from the poet’s mind. She takes us to the mines where her father worked in “Touring the Mine,”
to a place untouched by sun,
unknown to night or noon
or cloud-scudded sky
and she takes us to grave sites, her father’s, grandmother’s, Hopkins’ as mentioned, but also Melville’s (St. Melville) and the great unknowns, All Souls and All Saints.
There are other less traditional graves. In the title poem, “Moving House,” the poet replaces a photo of the former residents of the home they are vacating (one of whom, might I add, succumbed earlier to cancer and his widow likely has followed):
… As I pack
the last of our belongings,
label boxes with a newly
strange address,I replace the smiling pair
in their slot behind the molding,
our own smiling selves
before the enduring hearth
slid in the crevice beside them.
This ritualistic burial requires some resurrection. It is there, but subtle. In one of the final poems set in a snowstorm, O’Donnell considers “The Meaning of Birds,”
What will fill their hunger,
stoke the flame of beating wings
when what lives lies buried
beneath the soft weight of white?What mercy for the birds,
seed of sky and worm of earth?
The grace in my full hands
comes a cold, slow sleep.
There has been other evidence of spiritual angst—for example, “Waiting for Ecstasy,” which counterpoints the poet’s afternoon doing laundry with Saint Therese’ labors and of the burden of being, or “St. Henry,” in which the poet wishes to change lives with Thoreau for just one day. Despite this, the lost homes, the unreliability of accustomed pleasures, the ubiquitous grave where unfinished business must be confronted directly, Moving House is a serene, even joyful book. There is so little posturing in these poems that the simple honesty and balanced joy of ”Coming and Going” rings truest:
I’ve come into my beauty late
and won’t be staying long
and know that I must make of little
much—Time’s winged chariot rides again.
Finally, to return to my original questions. O’Donnell willingly embraces for herself the rubric “Catholic poet.” Many of these poems do draw on Catholic imagery and what could even be called Catholic superstition, but I would describe the poems as much catholic as they are Catholic. After all, orthodoxy has not yet caught up with St. Melville. However, and this is more to the point, the quality of her imagination and the willingness to live in a porous world is Catholic, as she defines it. Her refusal to dichotomize between heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane, as I understand the arrangement of the poems, is the most compelling argument for an incarnate faith.
I am left with only one question, perhaps of my own making. “Lies,” the first poem of the book, ends “We lived and died by stories in that house.” I know they are stories, but in what sense, I read the book wondering, are they lies? Other than its placement as the first poem of the collection, there is nothing else in the text to justify reading this as a post-modern undercutting of all that follows. Still to have the first poem of a collection signal “Lies” does pique my interest.
My own definition of Catholic poetry, not limited to Catholic poetry either, assumes an individual wrestling, albeit at the intersection of heaven and earth, with the question of what is a lie and what is not, what is the truth. Perhaps O’Donnell’s answer would be that nothing is a lie that points you in the right direction. Or perhaps this is a question I, not the text, am asking.
____________
Maryanne Hannan has poetry recent or forthcoming in Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, Light Quarterly, Naugautuck River Review, River Oak Review, Stand (UK), and Windhover. She can be contacted at: mahan@nycap.rr.com.
Review by Rob Wright
FAIR CREATURE OF AN HOUR
by Lynn Levin
Loonfeather Press
P.O. Box 1212
Bemidji, MN 56619
ISBN 978-0-926147-28-7
2009, 74 pp., $12.95
www.loonfeatherpress.com
What is a “fair creature of an hour?” The title of Lynn Levin’s new poetry collection suggests ephemerality. In the case of the sonnet from which the title is taken, it’s the end of Keats’ experience of the world, of fair creatures. By the end of Lynn Levin’s collection I was convinced that there were other sorts of “fair creatures”: a race horse whose fame ended when he won two, but failed to take the third race of the Triple Crown, and a soul that just looked death in face.
Sadly, poems themselves are often ephemeral. How long does a poem stay with us on a casual reading? An hour? True, most of us can bring to mind phrases and images from poems we know and love, but for the most part, poems are only briefly held in our minds and are transient, like the thistledown which is the title of one of my favorite of Levin’s poems from this collection. Friends are arguing about the nature of the soul when a car—a Vauxhall, setting the scene in England—races toward them “on the wrong side of the road,” almost bringing on their deaths. The poet wonders if the soul is not “perishable? Organically based?” By the poem’s end, the friends who have “gulped back our ghosts” after fast action by the driver are now “spinning, laughing, waving their arms” in a field of thistledown that sticks to their clothes. It is moments like these, testifying to the joy of observation and survival that appear again and again in this collection and stay with me.
Lynn Levin has divided her book into four parts with notes at the end. The poems are almost without exception free verse, except for a sonnet titled “Freefall” and a triolet “For the Red Planet.” The formal device of alternating iambic with trochaic lines gives “In the Alte Pinkothek” a pleasant rambling rhythm suitable for wandering around a museum. Although the first sections poems seem to me grouped by observation, by a rather original eye, the second section’s images and narratives are grounded firmly in religion. Ideas are taken from the books of the Bible, like the witty “Numbers,“ and from tradition, like the search for the hidden matzoh in “What You’re Looking For.” By tradition, the collection’s notes tell us, a piece of ceremonial bread is hidden during the Seder, the meal honoring deliverance. The poet wonders if the bread is hidden “between old LPs / after a certain decimal of pi,” then wonders what to do with it once it has been found: “be able to read its Braille / play its sheet music, / want to eat it.” It’s typical of this poet to think of the most obvious thing last. But to be able to read the Braille of a matzoh is an astonishing idea. What would the poet, or her readers find in the bread baked for a ceremony of deliverance: history, tragedy, survival? I love the idea later suggested that there are those who “hope never to find it / fearing that once in hand / the thing might crack / or loose the charm.” How much like the creation of a poem, or any work of art that is. The artist asks herself, “Will this hang together? Where is it going?”
In Lynn Levin’s poems the reader gets to witness the exploration of seeing a poem travel to strange and unexpected places, as in the earlier mentioned poem “Numbers,” which she begins by speculating on the mistranslation of a passage from the book of Numbers as red heifer rather than, as it should be, a red herring. The poet moves on to what would happen if we had two toes like sloths. Would the year two-thousand be meaningless? She then imagines humans condemned to “hang / upside-down by our nails in a rain forest” and how we would lose all sense of humor and irony, but would “think the sky had wings.” Here “Numbers” is not only the fourth book of the Bible, but counted years and the digits on our hands. The imagination of the poet (and the reader) ranges, but returns again to the touchstone of the red herring, the quirk, the trick of translation. The poet does not only see the world around her in a surprising and original way, but watches the way her own mind works to produce those quirks and red herrings, which testifies to a great originality. In “Sybarite,” the poet confesses that it “was for lack of shelter/but for love of hedgerows/ that I stood in the rain.” And later, ”I rarely thought/of the way all things/stream headlong to disorder,” evoking a confidence in her own love of experience and a willful disregard for the threat of chaos around her—two charms, or faults that I cheerfully admit sharing with her.
I find the title of this collection ironic. But the irony comes from the poet’s testimony of survival rather than that of ephemerality of poetry and life. Survival of the poet’s words and ideas, and indeed the poet herself comes through memory, observance of tradition and the very human need to imagine, to turn potential tragedy into joy. For me, survival is the theme that runs through these poems and lifts them beyond the experience of the transient, of an hour.
Review by Adam Houle
THE WOMAN YOU WRITE POEMS ABOUT
by Danielle (Dani) Montgomery
Civil Defense Poetry
PO Box 11812
Berkeley, CA 94712
ISBN 978-0-9786913-3-2
2009, 75 pp., $12.00
http://civildefensepoetry.com
Dani Montgomery’s first collection is a strange homage to the broken, the decrepit, the still-somehow-managing amongst us. The opening poem, “December 7, 1977,” offers us a snapshot of genesis, of an inauspicious beginning conspicuously (and wisely) absent of woe:
Seven months pregnant
My mother smoked a pack of cigarettes
Drank a pot of coffee
And scrubbed the floor on hands and knees
This immediate conflation of an inner impurity with a concern for external cleanliness would lend itself toward cries at the pregnant mother’s hypocrisy, but it is the poem’s restraint on this front that keeps the movement taut and evocative, avoiding the prescriptive posturing of a “don’t do this” sort of poem. Though the beginnings detail a roughness, a neglect, the poem doesn’t linger here long, and by the final line we’re reminded that “dirty and live” will have to do for now.
“Dirty and alive” might just be the best we can hope for, suggest the poems that follow in the collection. And Montgomery is working best when the work stays local, stays close to a speaker who lives and breathes, a speaker who is part chronicler, part live participant, part mourner and reveler in the speaker’s private sphere. Glimpses here offer us a cross-section of America we might otherwise romanticize or trivialize or all together ignore. In “namesake,” we witness the lingering effects of a mythic father-figure who, like the carnival barker he brings to mind, is brilliant and broken and playful in ways we’re at a loss to explain. The poem reckons with something akin to the numinous when the speaker “still wonder[s] / if he won’t show up on the doorstep one day / lazarus in a powder blue coat / smoking a cheap cigar.” Though the “cheap cigar” feels mailed in, the absence here is palatable, and the blending of two biblical references (Mary wore blue after all) stretch for a transcendent significance that contrasts nicely the snake oil on which the departed made his living.
Other poems that achieve a biblical resonance in the everyday should also be noted here. “Sunday Evening” ends with a surprising and sturdy vision of the outer cold as it “builds up / like a pile of old splintery wood, full of nails.” Internal evidence from throughout the collection suggests the simile here hums with crucifixion, with the weight of redemptive powers both from a theological as well as interpersonal level. Interestingly, it’s also one of the few places where Montgomery uses punctuation in the collection, and it’s also one of the most successful turns in any of the poems. Elsewhere, we see a god who “has problems / who loses sleep / over family dramatics and work” which hints at a Jeffrey McDaniel-esque sensibility that, although mildly interesting for a quick bit, does not hold and ends up feeling gritty and “real” for its own sake. And I have a difficult time understanding why such a god would be desirable. The poem, sadly, offers up no answers.
And it is those moments when the wheels of the collection start clattering, shaking loose from their axles. The poems at times are political seethings, a register of social ills, cast in broad and glancing blows that feel more didactic than poetic, with stand-in characters we sense are meant to represent the unrepresented but end up feeling like pawns or silhouetted lawn-art. In “a love song for walt whitman,” the listing technique doesn’t illuminate and only catalogs generic concerns without offering up any insight: “our america / gets up each morning / even though today she may be arrested / and he may be deported / even though she can’t afford rent / and he can’t pay to see the doctor.” Yes, all that is true, but should the shifting pronouns all find their worst fears realized—she’s arrested, he’s deported, she’s evicted, he stays sick—America will still wake up the day after all that happens. The poem moves toward resilience, but the stock images turn the tone tinny and shrill; it feels more like a poem to yell out at a rally then to read. If that’s part of the goal, and at times I sense it is, then poems of this sort might get a bit of a nod from an audience who already believes what they’re being told. In “what the living do,” a similarly underdeveloped poem, the speaker rejoices to “the sound of a man pissing / out back behind the dumpster,” pleased, we learn, that “we lived through another night”. The unstated conjecture, of course, is that things certainly could have been otherwise, that one or the both of them might not have made the morning, but it is not clear why this is of imminent importance in this specific instance. In that way, Montgomery seems to take her readers’ stances as a given, and the poems preach to a choir who’s preaching the same thing right back.
The middle section, “cerulean bruise,” is hit or miss like the rest of the collection with this one exception: a few of the poems here, like the best of the other two sections, simmer with the fallible love of a speaker who we immediately recognize as a part of ourselves. Two poems from this section have haiku intensity:
trying to save you from a fall
cerulean bruise
bursting beneath your forehead
my hand not quite quick—
and
social worker
i smile
she smiles
nobody screams
As haiku go, I don’t see why a poem approximating haiku doesn’t just go for the whole haiku construct with its season terms and precise images, but these two poems endear themselves to us with their honest humility. The movement in the third line of “social worker” taints the previous smiles above, but that’s all it does. That restraint here is admirable, especially in light of the other excesses throughout the collection.
The difference between poetry as art and poetry as catharsis is a shifting shoreline, and there’s that middle space where the poems can be both. In the woman you write poems about there’s more catharsis than craft, though, and the poems drift closer to that cathartic shore where the poet has purged or grappled or railed. And we are left wanting craft to help us anchor it all together, to steer us back to the poems for their structure and technique as much as their content.
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