Review by Nick DePascal

SPACE, IN CHAINS
by Laura Kasischke

Copper Canyon Press
PO Box 271
Port Townsend WA 98368
IBSN 978-1-55659-333-8
2011, 110 pp., $16.00
www.coppercanyonpress.org

Space, in Chains, Laura Kasischke’s eighth book of poetry, is a powerful and stripped collection that presents a picture of grief, less through proclamations and statements than through striking, disturbing and original imagery. While the individual poems mostly come off feeling gloriously bare-boned and raw, at 110 pages the collection itself at times can feel a bit overstuffed and redundant.

Space, in Chains mostly works in the mode of multiplicity, and like a house of mirrors it displays its subjects from a variety of different angles and possibilities, often within a single poem. Through the multitude of possibilities offered, the reader is invited to engage with the various meanings and images used, to expand their own understanding of the subjects discussed, and in a way allowed to “choose their own adventure,” as we in the real world are never allowed. This theme of multiplicity is set from the opening poem “O elegant giant,” where we get a description of the speaker’s father, presumably suffering from Alzheimer’s:

And Jehovah. And Alzheimer. And a diamond of extraordinary size on the
hand of a starving child. The quiet mob in a vacant lot. My father asleep in a
chair in a warm corridor. While his boat, the Unsinkable, sits at the bottom
of the ocean. While his boat, the Unsinkable, waits marooned on the shore.
While his boat, the Unsinkable, sails on, sails on.

Here, the speaker imagines the father as every child growing up does: “Unsinkable,” or invincible, made even more poignant by the obvious devastation patients of Alzheimer’s and their families face. And the speaker, through the metaphor of the father’s ship, tries to picture the outcome of the disease, first simply as death, then as absence, and finally as absence with possibility, the ship sailing on without the speaker, but at least still sailing on.

As in “O elegant giant,” the worlds in Kasischke’s poems are often presented as mysteries and riddles, and what’s pleasing about the poems is that the speakers seem content to catalogue—both the objects of the world and their memory of it—rather than explain or answer those mysteries. Thus, the multiplicity presented in the poems seems to say, “who are we to demand answers?” And this unconcern for finding answers paired with the use of varied images actually allows Kasischke to approach her subjects from a place closer to truth and devoid of clichés. Take, for example, “The drinking couple, similes,” a poem that announces in its title its intent to use an incredible number of similes to try and get at that mysterious combination of freedom and looseness and passion that alcohol instills people. Rather than try and use an extended metaphor throughout the poem to capture this feeling, the speaker’s description attacks from all sides:

until the next drink

like a princess waking up
beside a chimpanzee—

or that chimpanzee
in a tuxedo, strapped

to a rocket, launched
in a living room, like

not the strong man’s arm, just
the sleeve, as if

not only the birds but the cages
had been set free, the way we

were enjoying one another
enjoying one another’s

company

The poem here, like that rocket, blasts the reader through at breakneck speed with short lines and little punctuation, but with an interesting if divergent image in each line so that the images seem to transform before the reader’s eyes. The images themselves are striking, yet tangible, and this allows the reader to grasp each before moving on to the next. That morphing quality of the images seems to accurately represent the situation of the poem without precisely defining or explaining it, a feature of many of Kasischke’s poems, that again, gives the reader agency as they read.

If there is an issue with the collection, it’s that there are simply too many poems. While many of the poems in Kasischke’s collection are incredibly powerful and original, it’s the strength of these that call attention to some of the weaker poems. For example, in the poem “Forgiveness,” we get the lines “Hello, floating multitude of my sins in a / basket called Forgiveness on an ocean the name of which my son once mis- / pronounced the Specific.” Whereas in the majority of poems the reader is given vivid and surprising images, the flatness and generalizations of this poem feel dull by comparison, and there are others with similar problems. It’s certainly not that these poems are bad by any means, only that they feel ineffective in the context of the other poems in the collection.

But this particular criticism or gripe doesn’t detract from the fact that the collection is an eminently enjoyable read, one that offers clarity through Kasischke’s tightly controlled language and imagery, while at the same time offering readers fresh perspectives in her willingness to embrace multiplicity and abundance.

____________

Nick DePascal currently lives in Albuquerque, NM with his wife and son, where he’s working towards his MFA in Poetry at the University of New Mexico. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Sugar House Review, Adobe Walls, The Houston Literary Review, Breadcrumb Scabs and more.

Review by J. Scott Brownlee

BLUE RUST
by Joseph Millar

Carnegie Mellon University Press
5032 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15289-1021
ISBN: 0887485499
2012, 88pp., $15.95
www.cmu.edu/universitypress

What have I lost
in the sea’s wide pastures
watching for whales headed south?

-from “Leaving Coos County”

You may have never heard about Joseph Millar’s poetry, but after reading Blue Rust, you will probably end up reading all of it, at least if you are a young poet like me looking to learn a thing or two from a master of the form. A gentle, unassuming, soft-spoken teacher and mentor to wunderkinds like Coos Bay native Mike McGriff and Portland twins Matthew and Michael Dickman, much of the attention deservedly due Millar tends to shine more directly on his students—many of whom have published wonderful books and chapbooks of their own. While it is easy to forget about the existence of behind-the-scenes teachers like Millar, they are often some of the best (if not most well-known) poets of their generation. Blue Rust, Millar’s third and most recent book, provides compelling evidence of this. It is an expansive, thought-provoking, beautifully rendered collection containing some of the poet’s finest work to date.

The book’s ability to strike a successful balance between narration and image is perhaps its greatest strength. Considering Millar’s previous collections, it is not difficult to see why. Overtime and Fortune both contain poems that are successful at creating aesthetic resonance by interweaving narration and an Eastern-influenced emphasis on image Millar shares with his stylistic forebears Williams and Pound. Millar’s voice is ultimately, however, his own—and very convincingly so. As poet Yusef Komunyakaa once said, Millar, who takes his subject matter from an intrigue-riddled, rust-crusted working-class background, is “a poet we can believe,” particularly when he writes about the land- and seascapes of the American Northwest in poems like “Year of the Ox”:

I can hear the sea calling out
from beyond the jetty, smell the pines
near the flooded-out bridge where today
someone tried to winch an old Volkswagen
up from the swirling waters.
Far down the coast the same west wind
blows through the marshes and river mouth
where my brother’s boat rocks on its mooring.
He’s the only one awake, modest and reliable,
replacing a frayed hose, tightening the clamps.
He doesn’t trust the government
shining his trouble-light into the darkness,
his radio tuned to a satellite
broadcasting through the blue dust of space.

Millar has a wonderful eye for detail, in part, because he is much more interested in seeing than being seen. His gaze is that of the speaker in search of a transient, extrinsic beauty. Whether he is describing “a sunset turning dim like a weld over the Bering Sea,” “torches and welding tanks rinsed in blue light,” or the “plutonium shutters and platinum fins” of spacecraft hovering over North Carolina back-country, Millar’s gaze is always turned outward rather than inward. In keeping with the tenets of the Eastern poetics that informs much of his work, this strategy allows Millar to broaden the scope of his own gaze—lending his observations a sense of greater cosmic importance than they would otherwise have, even as he describes something as seemingly mundane as the light thrown on a shadowy wall by a welding torch.

During several stints as a commercial fisherman, Millar gained a profound affinity for and appreciation of the ocean that plays heavily into the themes and conceits of many poems in Blue Rust—so much so that the ocean itself often eclipses Millar the speaker in interesting thematic ways. One of my favorite things about the poems in this book is the tendency their speakers have to slip into the thematic background, giving way to a situation, natural phenomenon, or metaphysical context that can stand on its own without a bulky poetic ego holding it up. Another way of saying this is that Millar’s poems really start to sing when he is a spectator, rather than a participant, in them. “Romance,” a piece in which the speaker’s voice and intentions fade so that the feelings and memories of his friend can be more closely explored, provides a great example of this:

One more month coming up
watching the moon in its changes
hoping the salmon will finally arrive,
one more month listening
to seabirds and wind,
listening to you dreaming out loud
about the waitress in Naknek
who called you Honey
when she brought the eggs
thinking because of your red moustache
you might be one of the Russians
with their slick fiberglass Wegley boats
we never understood how they could afford.

You could have made a life with her, you said
as we watched the cork line
straighten and drift.
You could settle down by her woodstove
turning your back to the road outside,
hidden away in her kitchen,
smelling the spaghetti sauce
like a child or an old man. You could
live easy and die happy, a candle burning
in every window, the blue compass needle
and hands of the clock pointing north
through the field’s wavy grass.
You could make your grave in her.

When Millar is not tweaking the emotional sensibility of his reader, he attempts to draw the reader in with imagery that exists for its own sake—without any need for logic, or even a skewed, New-York-School inspired anti-logic, for that matter. Crickets, in a poem like “Divorce,” for example, provide all the introductory friction Millar’s poem needs in order to move successfully down the page. Without any complex, confounding language games or other postmodern whistles and bells, the image of crickets singing is enough:

Now the crickets are throbbing
the ancient psalm of tall grass.
You clasp both hands over your heart
with its pawnshop guitar and fake fur jacket,
its cloth roses sewn end to end,
the turquoise necklace you traded for money
so far from home and too late for autumn,
frozen star lilies bent to the ground.

The really interesting thing about Millar’s poetic skill is how adept he is at placing the seemingly mundane imagery of everyday life within a larger framework of resonant, ear-pleasing syntax. References to the Steelers and charred onion rings appear alongside vivid descriptions of nature in poems like “Kiski Flats,” combining sound and image in complex matrices of meaning that hum and whir like well-oiled machines:

Soon we’ll be driving the black road
I left by, shining with mica
blistered with tar, the back porch
collapsed where we ate the charred onion rings
watching the Steelers on channel four,
the hatchet sunk deep in the workbench he left
to die in his bed behind the closed door.

It’s no crime to be tired of the sun,
to be secretive, hiding your pain.
We peer now into the choppy rooms,
the windows wavy with age and rain.
Let the phone ring forever, let the mail
pile up. Let the dry nest fall apart,
stuck together with last year’s mud
jammed in the eaves and shaped like a heart.

Millar’s favorite images, the ones he tends to repeat throughout the book, relate most often to mechanization, tooling, and the hard-luck lexicon of the sweat-stained, working-class man. Grease, gears, and other “implements for joining and rending” are used as rhetorical tools by Millar time and again—serving as stand-ins for more plainly-stated emotions. This naming of mechanical parts, the intentional act of listing of them, is one of the most important poetic tools Millar uses to give help poems like “Marriage” momentum, emotional variation, and music.

We could be standing inside an airship
laughing and jostling each other
or inside a dead star
surrounded by metal, the whetstone’s
fine oil, chisels and knives,
torches and welding tanks
rinsed in blue light, threaded light,
bridal light helplessly shining
over the spools of new copper,
over the pocked green lunar cement.

Other points of prosodic interest aside, perhaps the most significant evolution of Millar’s work in Blue Rust is a tendency for him to paint in broad, sweeping strokes what it means to be an American. Millar’s experience and age lend him a rare historical perch from which to critique, explore, and reckon with our nation’s past—particularly with respect to its gradual, decades-long transition from an industrial to a post-industrial power. His, I would argue, is the voice of a working-class prophet who does not intend to prophesy, but nevertheless does. Reading a poem like “Fire,” for example, it is hard for Millar’s reader to not quite literally feel the nation “slouching towards Bethlehem,” as Yeats so eloquently put it, “to be born.”

America raises its iron voice
over the coal fields of Pennsylvania:
backyard engine blocks, chain hoists,
bell housings, toothed gears
resting in pans of oil—stammering out
the poem of combustion,
bright tongues and wings, white-hot ingots
glimpsed in the huge mills by the river,
coke ovens, strip mines, brick stacks burning
over the spine of the Appalachians.

Elegiac snap-shots of 1960’s-1970’s industrial America like this one can be found throughout Blue Rust and make the collection’s title, given the ongoing economic downturn of the United States, seem particularly apt. I found them all very arresting and emotionally compelling—what with their distinctly grim, albeit beautiful ability to encapsulate the past 40-50 years of American economic decline in only a few short, hard-to-forget lines. Even so, this is definitely not a book that pushes its reader in any one emotional, social, historical, or ideological direction. Millar has written for far too long and with far too much care to succumb to any prophetic temptation other than the soul-searching desire to fashion the language hammered steel-solid in him and present it to us on its on rust-clad, blue-collar terms—for its own sacred sake.

__________

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet and poetry critic from Llano, Texas. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Tar River Poetry, Front Porch, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Writers’ Bloc, Windhover, and elsewhere. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. His current writing project, County Lines: The Llano Poems, explores small-town life in the Texas Hill Country.

Review by Kathleen Kirk

ONCE
by Meghan O’Rourke

W. W. Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10100
ISBN 978-0-393-08062-9
2011, 96 pp., $24.95
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/

Once is a lovely book of poems revealing the ephemeral nature of life in all its transparency, as suggested by the tissue thin green scarf on its cover: even the hem stitching shows. I’ve not read The Long Goodbye, O’Rourke’s memoir about the loss of her mother to cancer, but this book makes me want to read that one. The poems about the mother are moving, tender, and real. There’s nothing sentimental about early death, cancer, or chemo, so the poems achieve their poignancy by way of honesty, nothing less.

I happen to be reading and re-reading the poems here at Christmastime, when the poet’s mother died, so these poems cut me as ice or tinsel can. “Elegy: Hill Without Scar” takes place on Christmas Day and begins:

That winter day was the last you remembered.
The shutters of the house were open.
The snow lay on the ground like cold and cracking embers.
Inside a fire, an evergreen, a slender iris by the bed.

Somehow outside and inside, fire and ice, are the same, sharing even their cracking sounds. The poem accumulates and repeats its images so they become iconic, almost “tokens” of what they were, once. The poem ends:

The dead are the first to be embers.
They do not remember the thawing ice, or wine and spice.
You sleep like an ember, a token, a door.

Here, and in many of these poems, I hear a subtle, steady use of internal rhyme, as if the speaker of the poems has taken her mother, her memories, and her former impressions of the world to a place inside herself, where they rest or wait to be examined…or left alone, if need be. Sometimes that place is, or is like, the mythological underworld, where the mother now lives, deep underground. I’ll leave you to find those references and the crucial image of a red-veined leaf that I found very moving.

Reinforcing the use of internal rhyme to take in and protect memory and feeling is the use of point of view. Sometimes I forget whether the “you” in a poem is the mother being directly addressed or the poet talking to herself. This happens with the pronoun “she” in the poem “Still,” also set at Christmas, in which a hovering voice enters the perspective of both, so readers can be or see “her mother” or “her daughter” interchangeably, and lose track, collapsing their separate identities.

The intimate tone of so many of these poems is balanced by an outward-looking retelling of a kind of fantasy history, especially in section two, which contains the longer poems “My Life as a Subject” and “My Life as a Ruler.” “Because I was born in a kingdom,” begins the former, “there was a king.” Maybe she was born in a kingdom, but I take this as a metaphorical kingdom, created by words, a timeless dreamlike kingdom; in it is the invention of “moving pictures, / the emperor’s new delight,” so history and fairy tale somehow mix to create a fantasized growing up in a land of abundance. Also mixed in is regret, as if for American excess, and acceptance:

Do I have anthing
to add? Only that
I obeyed my king, my
kind, I was not faithless.
Should I be punished
for that? It is true
the pictures creaking
through the spindle
cause me pain. I know
the powdered drugs
we coated our fingers
with made us thirsty
and sometimes cruel.

But I was born
with a spirit, like you.
I have woken, you see,
and I wish to be
made new.

By the time she is a ruler, the world is broken:

The world, when I met it,
lay about in broken pieces—
a neglected toy.

…

All I did was pick up the pieces.
I caused them to be put together
like the parts of a chair.

The twin towers come to mind, but this can’t just be the United States. This is a world history. It mentions Ninevah and the Nile. There is a Cleopatra-like passion in it. “Of course I hate my power,” says this very powerful ruler, though powerless against “the night, / which keeps coming, though / I command it not to.” This ruler, at the limits of power, is both compassionate—

I thought the world’s trouble
lay in its shards. So I resolved to hold
the shards to my heart.

—and “nearly frozen up with cruelty” (a pretty amazing paradox).

I read in an interview that O’Rourke read Hamlet over and over during her initial grief, as Hamlet, too, was grieving a parent, and, as I am now engaged in reading Hamlet aloud to my own daughter, I was particularly enchanted by the poem “Ophelia to the Court,” sort of what Ophelia would say, if not such a “good girl,” obedient to father and king, if not driven to madness and suicide in her grief. “All / I wanted (if I may speak for myself),” says Ophelia, thanks to O’Rourke (a wonderful irony), “was: more.”

If only one of you had said, I hold
your craven breaking soul, I see the pieces,
I feel them in my hands, idle silver, idle gold.

Oh, this is marvelous!—to let Ophelia say she wanted to be seen, to be valued! Even if broken. And then this persona poem breaks free of plot!

You see I cannot speak without telling what I am.
I disobey the death you gave me, love.
If you must be, then be not with me.

I plan to pull my own daughter aside this Christmas, when Hamlet in Honors English is done, the final exam taken, and read her this O’Rourke poem. “What do you think of that?” I’ll ask her. And let her think it over, and talk to her, if she’ll have it. Next year I’ll be 55, the age O’Rourke’s mother was when she died. I want all the time I can have with my daughter.

Poetry does matter. It helps us live our lives.

____________

Kathleen Kirk reviews poetry for Prick of the Spindle and chapbooks for Fiddler Crab Review. As a former editor of RHINO, one of her favorite duties was reviewing contributors’ books in the RHINO Reads section of the journal. She also reviews informally in her own blog, Wait! I Have a Blog?! which she created accidentally. Her own poems appear in a number of print and online journals, including Confrontation, Sweet, Leveler, and Greensboro Review, and she serves as poetry editor for Escape Into Life.