Review by Nausheen Eusuf

TWO FOR A JOURNEY
by Carol Frith

David Robert Books
P. O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254
ISBN 978-1934999837
2010, 96 pp., $18.00
www.davidrobertbooks.com

Carol Frith’s two for a journey revolves around two central characters, the “two” of the title: the “I” of the poems, and the “you” who is addressed throughout. The poems are a delicate rendering of the tensions and silences that are palpable in the air between the two. They probe with unflinching honesty and plangency the emotional terrain between two that are inseparably linked in this journey together. These are not the quarrels of young lovers, but the involutions of a deep and intense intimacy—the heart of mystery, a “sense / of something silent” that transcends them both.

Most of the poems involve the two characters in dialogue with each other, but when they speak—or even when they argue—their speech is beautifully oblique and allusive. Often they speak using the language of form, color, light, and texture. At other times, they speak through the landscape that surrounds them—through the grass, the sunlight, the flowers, the air, the rain, and the domestic spaces of the porch, the patio, the lawn. The landscape inhabits them as much as they inhabit the landscape. The “neurasthenic glare” of the light, the air that is “our own recycled breath,” the “blank sea of flowers” and the “sun-scorched grass” are imbued with their moods and become the language of their communion.

One poem defines love as “a question of movement and / color,” which also comments aptly on the collection itself. This is a story told in color, the dominant color being yellow—the yellow of the roses on the cover to the yellow that suffuses the collection, from yellow grass and air and light to yellow songs and sighs and heat. The color yellow is associated with the narrator, while the “you” is associated with blue: his “blue hands,” the “dark blue silence” between them, the tension between them “bluer / than the sea.” Occasionally, there are dramatic intrusions of other colors, such as the pink that characterizes the seductress of “Salt”:

The woman shifts. Her breasts crackle like flames
and turn pink as flamingos.

…and the orange that is the bitter citrus of reconciliation in “Corona: After-image” #6:

I taste you; citrus burns my palate, a case
of pungency. Your juice is bittersweet.
. . . I say orange, orange, a surfeit
of citric acid in the fragrant heat—
the scent of you entirely adequate.

I also enjoyed how the two characters experience the world synaesthetically; the senses merge or run together as do their lives: vowels are “thin arcs of light,” phonemes are “weightless in my palm,” a song is “like blue smoke,” and sunlight “crumbles in my palm.”

As the use of color and synaesthesia suggests, Frith’s poems have a painterly quality in their attention to not only color, but also light, shade, form, pattern, and texture. In addition to painting, the poet’s vision is also informed by photography: many of the poems concern surfaces, mirrors, exposures, reflections, and after-images. In “Wash of Water”:

You tell me I am counter-pressure, the second image
to your second image: I doubled into we.
Duplication, you repeat.

Mirrors in particular form a recurring motif—they are dangerous, they invite solipsism. And yet, the characters are drawn to mirrors and reflections as they try to understand themselves and each other, even mirroring one another in their movements and speech: “We are each other’s mime.”

I left for last what I admired most: Frith’s effortless and often inventive use of form. About half of the poems in the collection are sonnets, which includes two sonnet sequences (“Corona: After-image” and “Le Temps Perdu”) and a sonnet redoublé (“The Neighbor’s Rose”). There are also several villanelles and a sestina, with the rest being free verse, Frith being equally at ease in both free verse and form. I particularly admired the sonnet redoublé “The Neighbor’s Rose” which I think of as the center piece of the collection, and the two terza rima sonnets, “Mourners in Half Light” and “Birch,” where the use of tercets rather than quatrains creates a constant feeling of being off-balance and impelled towards to the next stanza by the rhyme. In “Sestina: After Muses,” if the form’s strict pattern of six interlaced end-words wasn’t constraint enough, Frith constrains herself further by making the six end-words share the same two rhymes. The effect of the constantly rhyming end-words is suffocating, hypnotic, almost deranging—which is exactly what the poem is about, so that sound and sense are perfectly in accord. Likewise, the repeating lines of the villanelle “Airless” reinforce and reenact the circularity of the argument in which the two characters are trapped: the narrator admits that “we circle” and “we’ve lost our plot” and yet they keep on going in circles, both in the argument and in the villanelle.

The poems of two for a journey find words for subtle and elusive registers of feeling even as they grapple with the difficulty of communication itself. Like the love they celebrate, the poems in this volume will linger with the reader, “ringing like an un-struck bell.”

____________

Nausheen Eusuf is a doctoral student in English at Boston University. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and her work has appeared in Acumen, Mezzo Cammin, Raintown Review, Spillway, and other journals. A chapbook titled What Remains was recently published by Longleaf Press.

Review by Claire Keyes

THE GREEN COTTAGE
by Michelle Gillett

The Ledge Press
40 Maple Ave
Bellport, NY 11713
2010, 29 pp., $8.00
http://www.theledgemagazine.com

The Green Cottage of Michelle Gillett’s chapbook appears to be an actual place that has gotten passed down to the poet’s generation. It stands for continuity but also as a place for closer connection to the natural world (“Vespids,” “Not there,” “Dead Man’s Float”). “Love Poem 137” depicts the green cottage as a place where the loved one waits. Michelle Gillett casts a wider net with her central metaphor; the green cottage is a place where memory coheres—not just personal or familial but memories that haunt the 20th century including the depredations of World War II. With her ability to marry the lyrical with the political, Gillett challenges her readers to open themselves to themes of death and dying, to a sense of time passing and the inevitable loss of loved ones, but also to sustaining love for other humans and the natural world.

For all the seriousness of her themes, Gillett has a delicate, lyric sensibility. Experiment with reading the opening poem of this collection out loud to yourself. Let its music play over your senses. Don’t hurry after meaning. It’s there in the hands of a poet for whom the lyric still matters. “Vespids” opens with the line: “It’s down/ The hornets’ nest.” Clearly, this is a destruction not to be mourned:

Now first sting of frost on the ground
And we see no threat
only the hollow where harm lived.
Everything the season has housed has flown.

How interesting that she employs “sting” in connection with the frost, at the same time calling up the hornets. “Ground” chimes nicely with “down” just as “first” and “Frost” create a different tone. Similarly the alliterative “hollow,” “harm” and “has housed” give us language chosen for maximum immediacy and music.

The center of the poem makes a leap back in time “when we were children” and recalls childhood exuberance “rising over the roofs not like souls/ detached from bodies, but as bodies/ resisting the world.” The final lines of the poem temper that exuberance by returning to the hornets’ nest and its removal:

                                          Light in my hands
when I lifted it from the eave, forever gone,
no longer wadded in industry, this testament
to vanishing is too fragile to hold.

The nest as a “testament to vanishing” brings the poem back to a more mature understanding of the world. Everything passes; nobody can “resist the world.” But how tender the poem is, how aware of the fragility of life.

In “Documentary,” Gillett strikes a tough pose that only belies the tenderness underneath. The scene is a nightmare from the Holocaust, the voice a disinterested observer:

Why waste bullets on children
when they will suffocate under the weight
of bodies heavy as doors?

The rest of the poem concerns itself with the children who live in the nearby village. They have to “drum on saucepans/ to drown out the sounds” of the mass murders. One of the child-victims survives this horror and “is in her seventies now, smiling for the camera/ against a back-drop of oaks.” The poem concludes with two sentences from this woman:

I remember the sun was shining.
I remember holding onto the roots.

How does one survive the horrors of war? The answer lies in the act of “holding on to the roots.” Literally, the child grabbed onto what was available and solid. As metaphor, her action is more resonant and stands for not giving up, for being active and resistant. The sun, shining down on the scene, is indifferent. “The green cottage” might be an escape from the world, a place of restoration and revival—boating on the lake, swimming with one’s sisters. But the world’s ugliness and cruelty intrude—at least to a poet as conscious and aware as Michelle Gillett.

She does not, however, despair. “Barred Owl,” the penultimate poem in the chapbook is typical of the nature poems in this collection, presenting the bird as in communication with the humans “asleep in the cottage.” Aware of the humans, the barred owl leaves “packets of mouse and finch” for them. He is a bird of prey, after all, and he “stalks the smallest shadows”:

                        He swallows
them whole the way you tried
to swallow grief, father, mother
dying in turn and after them, the sister who
asked for songs. All night rubbing her back,
half-remembering words to Night and Day, Blue Moon.

Forging a link between herself and the bird, the poet calls up grief she “tried to swallow” in mourning the deaths of family members, with the implication that she didn’t succeed. More grief must come, and with it the necessary music to soothe her soul. The music takes shape in the repetition of the “s” sounds in “whole” and “swallow,” the “sister who asked for songs.” The connection between the poet and the barred owl can only go so far: “His repeated notes trouble your soul–/ you who are nothing but gristle and gut, / cannot thrive on darkness.” In fact, Michelle Gillett has made it clear in the poems of this volume that she prefers “the light that stirs me awake,” and that she has developed her own “vocabulary for vision: angle, focus, light.”

The Green Cottage offers us a refuge and the opportunity to reconnect with the natural world. At the same time, Michelle Gillett’s poems resist the idea that there is any escape from reality.

___________

When not writing reviews, literary essays, and poems, Claire Keyes can be found teaching poetry courses for the life-long learning program at Salem State University in Massachusetts or singing in her hospice choir. She actually prefers to publish her poems on-line in places like the Umbrella Journal, Tattoohighway.org and Verse Wisconsin. For a fuller experience of her poems, check out The Question of Rapture, published by Mayapple Press.

Review by Ellen Miller-Mack

BLINKING EPHEMERAL VALENTINE
by Joni Wallace

Four Way Books
POB 535, Village Station
New York, NY 10014
ISBN 978-1-935536-09-3
2009, 68 pp., $15.95
www.fourwaybooks.com

This volume of poems does not require a glossary, but a few definitions could only deepen the enjoyment of Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, starting with its fantastic title. The word “ephemeral” confirms my belief that poets are obsessed with time. From the “e” sound to the final “al,” something is gone forever. Ephemeral is short-lived and transitory, suggesting weightlessness. Wallace is working in a gravity-free zone–seeing, holding, and letting go, deciphering the negatives and following scented paths where something is, then isn’t. In this zone of here-it-is-there-it-went, fireworks hang in the air for the reader to experience.

Wallace has created zoetropes with words. By the time one literally appears in the third section of the book (“Zoetrope, small horses and animals”), the reader has already envisioned it, sensed its behind-the-scene presence. Often made from paper, zoetropes are similar to little books of pictures animating as you flip the pages. Here’s part one of the poem “National Monument”:

Wish yourself inside
the ornamental deer,
veneer of and spots
floating in the reservoir,
water breaking the edges.
In the time lapse of drift forever
a lasso across your shoulder
and in your pocket
a fly’s wing
on which to sketch
your S.O.S.,
a ribbed dog.

The images are meant to be inhaled deeply, like a mind-bending drug. Reading this volume, sometimes I felt like I was in a theater, watching a beautifully conceived and executed animation.

The poems have a narrative element in a hybrid-cinematic sense, an original blend of imagism, narrative and language poetry. Wallace’s mothers could be H.D. and Gertrude Stein; her poet-sister Harryette Mullen.

A valentine expresses love anywhere on its quirky arc, using pictures and words. It’s also the targeted lover: “be mine.” Are valentines in the hands of a poet love poems? This is the enigma of Wallace’s valentine poems. Visually, they are the pop-up kind, finely detailed and with moving parts, pushing paper past its potential. Perhaps that’s the project behind the poems, and it’s actually quite stunning. From “Star-Spangled Valentine Shagged in Drab”:

I fell hard for the Wide Open,
your scrap yards and tree-lined rivers,
parking lots etched into prairies.
All this inside myself, a broken
bottle gleaming. Tell me a story,
begin with a flag unfurled
and a sun-warmed body of cows,
black/white and black.

Wallace conjures up a defunct television game show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” where participants traded what they had for the possibility of something more valuable, hidden behind a door. They were often disappointed. Wallace’s game of love is quite solemn. What valentines wait behind doors numbered one, two and three? From “Valentine Behind Door Number Two”:

Here lies the starlit heart
housed in scarlet shingles.
Blood-bright, the socket.
White piano of ribs.

There is beautiful music and opulent language in these poems. From the shape poem “Snow Globe with Frank O’Hara and Arboretum”: “Geraniums like lit lanterns / that row toward Christmas, everything lit and back lit, / so real, better than blinkers outside splintering the / cake glass.”

Paradoxically, the speaker or persona seems restrained. She is an observer:

Sometimes I think I understand
love like an image I don’t cast
but when I run toward it my shadow
contorts: crippled king, queen of knees.

(“Easter in Snow Angels”)

And from “Accidental for J”:

I count words between louvers, my hush-hush
Eye exam, bedclothes my template.

The persona in Blinking Ephemeral Valentine may be a bit distant, but Joni Wallace clearly is in love with language and language is in love with her—a wild, passionate love affair for this talented and skillful poet.

____________

Ellen Miller-Mackhas an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her poems and reviews have appeared in 5A.M., Affilia, Bookslut and the Valparaiso Poetry Review. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons Comix ( PM Press) and is a nurse practitioner at a community health center in Springfield , Massachusetts. She can be contacted at: ellenmiller-mack@comcast.net.