Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers
at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim
in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours
and days and decades, head to foot, and slim
is just a faded photograph. It’s strange
how people look away who once would look.
I didn’t know I’d undergo this change
and be the unseen cover of a book
whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.
One reaches for the pleasures of the mind
and heart to counteract the loss of quicker
knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,
although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,
in case I might attract another geezer.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet

Read by Author

Review by Mary Meriam

EASY MARKS
by Gail White

David Robert Books
PO Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106
ISBN 978-1934999066
2008, 80 pp., $17.00
www.davidrobertbooks.com

Encountering a poet and her book of poems for the first time, I find myself fascinated by the slow emergence of the book’s persona. In a book of formalist poems, the persona can be seen in stanzas, like the rooms of a house. Though she may be working with received forms, these are rooms of the poet’s own creation, and she is free to move in and through the rooms as she wishes. Who is this persona? What is she moved by? How does she move through her rooms? For women have always had less space in which to move. Does the enclosure of the form open outward or spiral inward?

The poems in Gail White’s Easy Marks are marked by a central persona known as “woman,” in this case a highly intelligent woman aware of the restrictions around her and the prejudices against her. She’s an outsider, she may have disappeared, she may be a ghost, but she has plenty to do in her rooms, as we can see in this powerful poem:

The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene

At Pentecost, she’s gone. Her tongue of fire
had come already, scorching Peter’s brain
with a subtle whisper, “I have seen the Lord.”
Then, not another sound. As if she knew,
with her next breath, Peter was taking charge:
this movement was for men. There’d be no chair
for her in their tight circle.

Underground, her faith ran like a waterfall. She lived
a hermit’s life. If women sought her out,
their stories thumped like washing on the rocks,
buckets in wells. Theirs was a gospel word
that shunned the daylight—tales Paul never heard.

Like Magdalene, White’s poems work their magic outside the “tight circle” of biblical gospel. They contain their own “gospel word”—the words of women—just as important and valuable as “this movement for men.” For wasn’t Mary Magdalene the very first person to see the risen Christ? A rather pivotal detail conveniently swept away through Christianity’s centuries.

Queen Gertrude, Rosetti’s wife, Beauty, Snow White, Simone de Beauvoir, Red Riding Hood’s sister, Virginia Woolf, and of course, Eve, all make appearances in Easy Marks. Although I appreciate the light-verse tartness of the voices in many of the poems, I find the poignant, longing voice that occasionally appears, deeper and more appealing, perhaps because these poems express pain more directly, without first passing through anger. “Sea-Child” is a girl who isn’t sufficiently attractive, for her mother or the world:

So I mastered keyboards and computers.
Day after day my legs are curled
in the curve of a desk, and I not dreaming
there are silver tails in the world.

But when the wind thrashes the willow branches
on the river’s edge, I hear with pain
those feminine voices, wailing, luring,
singing far off in the rain.

Certainly, a lovely poem. Another poignant moment can be found in “Red Riding Hood’s Sister,” where the younger sister’s chance to explore the world is curtailed by her older sister’s adventures. She is kept at home.

Late at night I get up
and look through the window.
Somewhere deep in the woods
the silvery wolves crouch low
and whine like ghosts,
and I look and look
for the lights in my grandmother’s house.

A discussion of rooms would not be complete without mention of the original room, Eden. Or, in “Eve in the Cave,” lost Eden. Our original couple converse in a cave, with Eve asking several fascinating, philosophical questions, only to be put (ironically) in her place:

Might we be living yet
in our old home, with no
names given to the beasts
and plants? Could we not know
the world in other ways,
through loving sense and touch?
The trouble is, he says,
you women think too much.

But it isn’t only the men silencing women. In “Queen Gertrude’s Soliloquy,” Hamlet’s mother smothers:

I wish he wouldn’t sulk. It’s unbecoming,
and first impressions ought to be our best.
Then I do wish he’d stop that beastly humming
and talking to himself.

And in yet another twist, “Rosetti’s Wife” kvetches:

He wants his poems now, the ones he buried
with me, to be a sacrifice of love
forever.

The upshot is, from the castle to the grave, from Eden to the cave, “we’re all too easily taken in” (especially women). Happily, White’s light verse

“tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice. Light verse precisely lightens; it lessens the gravity of its subject.” (John Updike)

Easy Marks hits the bulls-eye.

____________

Mary Meriam’s chapbook of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have been published in Literary Imagination, Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, A Prairie Home Companion, and Light Quarterly, among others.

RHYTHM AND BOOZE
by Julie Kane

University of Illinois Press
1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
ISBN 978-0-252-07140-9
2003, 88 pp., $14.95
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/

Once upon a time, there was a powerful ruler called King Booze. Almost all the people were in thrall to King Booze, who was vicious and bloodthirsty and sucked the life out of his people. Only the most brave subjects of King Booze managed to escape his clutches. These brave souls formed little groups, but still, it wasn’t the same as being part of King Booze’s mighty nation. They were lonely.

The loneliness we get at night
by water, with a rising moon,
can’t be drowned in alcohol.

(“Halloween on the Nile”)

In Booze, there were Bartenders, who carved tattoos on the boozers. Then bloody Booze concealed pain with false beauty, and the boozers belonged by blood to the Bartenders.

I see men’s arms and want a flower
carved into them, your rose tattoo.

(“The Bartender’s Tattoo”)

Young boozers played chess with their mothers and remembered early invisible tattoos, given by their mothers, who were all Queens of King Booze.

Drifting in and out of my skin,
I heard her rattle the kitchen pots,
or thought I heard her gliding like
a queen across the checkered floor,
up the dark diagonals
of linoleum tile, and out the door

(“Chess with My Mother”)

In King Booze’s churches, the beat of the blues concealed pain with false rhythm. The boozers were seduced by Booker’s playing into thinking they were “just asleep,” and the boozers belonged by darkness to the churches of the dead, the Bars.

Who cares about the way things used to be,
except us creatures of the slime, who love
the darkness and the dead?—the Maple Leaf
with Booker playing, Maddox “just asleep.”

(“Mapleworld; or Six Flags over the Maple Leaf”)

A brave soul, Julie Kane, told the story of Booze and escape from Booze. There was a river, the Big Muddy, cutting a path through Booze, where the ashes of boozers were scattered. It was by this cold, muddy river that Kane decided to cut loose from Booze and shake herself awake.

Or the morning we gave back Everette’s ashes:
homeless alcoholic poet-prince.
A cold March wind was ruffling the water.
Wouldn’t you know, the ashes wouldn’t sink;
so someone jumped in to wrestle them under.
It hit me then: I didn’t want to die.
And so I made a choice, against my nature,
to throw my lot in with that moving line:
abstract, rational, conscious, sober—
cutting a path through human time.

(“Ode to the Big Muddy”)

Her tattoos longed for the false rhythms of Booze, and the Bartenders and the Bars. “The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation —the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation— by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety.” (Yeats)

I mark each sober day with a cross.
I come to joy in a season of loss.

(“The Bartender Quits Drinking”)

She’s alone and lonely. No one else is there. She tries to keep busy. No one can see her. No one notices her, outside the reach of King Booze. “What we call ‘the power of the word’ is really a pattern of words in a rhythm originating in heartbeat and footfall.” (Anne Stevenson)

I busied myself for a while collecting
a volume of my letters,
and published them six months ago,
but no one has taken notice.

(“Letter from Laura Cereta (Brescia, 1488)”)

She finds true rhythms in words. The words become poems. “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.” (Adrienne Rich) The moon rises over Louisiana.

We do not raise a cup of wine to the quarter moon
Because this hard-won clarity has its own enchantment.

(“After Reading Po Chu-i”)

Rhythm and Booze won the 2002 National Poetry Series, selected by Maxine Kumin.

____________

Mary Meriam’s chapbook of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have been published in Literary Imagination, Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, A Prairie Home Companion, and Light Quarterly, among others.

Review by Mary Meriam

BUNDLE O’ TINDER
by Rose Kelleher

The Waywiser Press
P.O. Box 6025
Baltimore, MD 21206
ISBN: 978-1904130-33-8
2008, 88 pp., £7.99
www.waywiser-press.com

Why do we read poems? Poems can be songs, prayers, chronicles, confessions, memories, meditations, complaints, portraits. Poems give us contact with the world and help us feel less alone. Reading a poem can be a moment of pleasure in an otherwise painful world. Sometimes poems speak for us when we can’t find the words, when it all seems too terrible. Here’s where we can be thankful for Rose Kelleher’s brave, strong book of poems, Bundle o’ Tinder. This book wrestles demons to the ground and pins them there, crushed.

In Kelleher’s poem, “Lourdes,” compassion is in full force. Lourdes is a grotto in France, with spring water that many pilgrims believe can heal. With great gusto, Kelleher writes:

Burst the spigots. Overflow.
Send mercy surging down the mountainside,
washing over every borderline.
Don’t just stand there. Go

These commanding lines are just one stanza in a four-stanza poem, which ends with the line “Cure my doubt.” We do not find wishy-washy tones in Bundle o’ Tinder, but unabashed exhortations for justice and mercy.

It so happens that I read Kelleher’s manuscript as she was preparing to enter it in a contest. I told her it was so good she would surely win. And folks, she won! The contest was judged by the renowned poet Richard Wilbur, who wrote in the foreword, after listing some of his favorite poems, “I suspend my list of good poems, lest it go on and on.” Now I have something of the same happy dilemma: how to choose one poem for you, out of so many good ones.

While “Lourdes” is a poem of tremendous sincerity, “Laissez-faire” is a satirical response to a heartless remark made by the British Treasury Secretary in 1846, about the Great Irish Famine, when 25 percent of the population of Ireland died of starvation:

Laissez-faire

“[The overpopulation of Ireland] being altogether
beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied
by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence…”
Charles Trevelyan, British Treasury Secretary, 1846

The extra folk. The fat. The gristle.
Ragweed, nettle, buckthorn, thistle.
Girls in shirtwaist factories.
Brushwood burned to free the trees.
Dusty little Mom-and-Pops.
Apple peelings, turnip tops.
The latchkey kid, the lemon rind,
the poor New Orleans left behind.
The trampled ant, the straying sheep,
the badly schooled, the compost heap
that must decay to feed the crop.
John Henry’s carcass, should he drop;
his life, his living, should he live.
The damn we frankly do not give.
The sack in which we drown the whelp
(as Nature sometimes needs our help).

The brisk, efficient meter, short phrases, short lines, and tight, true rhymes are like the short, sharp strokes of a broom sweeping away detritus. All the “f” sounds in the first four lines produce a percussive spitting effect. The poem is a felicitous pile of images of society’s unfortunate outsiders. Except that here, the outsiders are swept together into the poet’s warm heart, recognized and comforted.

It’s not a question of an issue, but a question of the people I know who are close to me, who are health-care workers or living with illnesses, or the neighbors, housed and homeless, I pass on the street, or the grocery store that goes out of business where I’ve bought my salad and broccoli every day for the past five years. All of those may be reflected or transformed in my work… (Marilyn Hacker)

“Laissez-faire” is French for “allow to do,” and it means a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering. By paying attention to people, the poem “Laissez-faire” reverses the meaning of its title. In the great line, “The damn we frankly do not give,” satire works to reverse the course of a distant, uncaring attitude, and bring home the message of the damn we frankly do give.

“The First Uprising” has such a beautiful first line it’s like an entire poem in itself: “The blackest plums are closest to the sun.” There’s a symmetry to the line with blackest/closest and plums/sun, and a striking opposition between black and sun. We usually hear of planets, not plums, being close to the sun. The poem that follows this intriguing first line is about human evolution, a subject that arises in several other poems in the book, including the gorgeous, tender-hearted sonnet “Neanderthal Bone Flute.”

These lines from the poem, “Not Our Dog,” place us in the common human dilemma of homelessness or imminent homelessness:

But trouble spies on us behind the blinds,
a giant dog that’s caught our scent. At night,
its eyewhite glows between the slats, its breath
fogs the windowpane; and while we hide
at home, the mangy world of war, disease
and famine hunkers down to wait for us.

Those of us already caught by the “giant dog” can be thankful we’ve found a respite in Rose Kelleher’s poems.

____________

Mary Meriam’s chapbook of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have been published in Literary Imagination, Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, A Prairie Home Companion, and Light Quarterly, among others.

Review by Mary Meriam

AMERICA IS HIDING UNDER MY BED
by Julia Vinograd

Zeitgeist Press
1630 University Avenue #34
Berkeley, CA 94703
ISBN 0-929730-84-x
2008, 70 pp., $8.95
www.zeitgeist-press.com

The cover of Julia Vinograd’s new book of poems, America Is Hiding Under My Bed, is graced by a lively, loving portrait of Julia, painted by her sister, Debbie Vinograd. Both Vinograds are portrait artists: Julia paints with words; Debbie is a poet with paint.

Adrienne Rich could have been describing the Vinograd sisters when she wrote, “The revolutionary poet loves people, rivers, other creatures, stones, trees inseparably from art, is not ashamed of any of these loves, and for them conjures a language that is public, intimate, inviting, terrifying, and beloved.”

The book’s eponymous poem is a public, intimate, inviting, terrifying, and beloved portrait of America as a felon, fugitive, and addict. In contrast to a poem about hiding is this poem about being invisible in plain sight:

ON THE STREET

I’m not here, don’t look at me.
Don’t scream when your children look at me,
do you think bad dreams are contagious?
Do you think I’ll breathe bad luck on your children?
Suppose you’d spent the afternoon
shining in your lover’s bed
and then brought him home to meet your parents
and they screamed
“Don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been!”
You can’t see me,
I’m just a crack in your contact lens;
I’m just a crack in your mirror.
My hands are dirty.
I’ve got your shadow under my fingernails,
I can’t wash it out.
I’ve got the shakes,
my own skin isn’t speaking to me
and I’m not speaking to you.
I’m not here, I have no past,
no memories, no name, not allowed.
So I eat your memories like garbage,
all your buried broken promises
and the bad dreams you forget
till you see me. Till you don’t see me.
I’m not here.

What is it about the street that makes people “not here”? Bad dreams, bad luck, dirty, shadow, shakes, garbage, buried, broken, “no memories, no name, not allowed.” We need to be seen. Likewise, we need to be heard. Julia’s poems remind us, with gentle force and sensitive passion, that an important human need is to be seen, heard, and remembered. We all need a name that we call our own, and we need other people to remember and say our name. This gives us a feeling of expansion, like breathing, and a feeling of belonging.

“Young Student” is one of Julia’s many Berkeley street portraits, so alive that it seems to be written on the spot. In this poem, the young student is tenderly and forgivingly portrayed. The contrast between the student’s innocence and the hard facts of war are deliciously rendered:

War. Nations. Government. It’s too silly.
She stepped in history like a cat
stepping in wet paint
and getting little red paw prints over everything.

Julia’s poems frequently transform abstract concepts into animistic life. In “Happy Endings,” her witty voice is especially vibrant in these lines:

Happy endings were a door slammed against my nose
and I could hear it locking on the other side.
How rude.

Julia’s poems show again and again that no matter how many times the door is slammed in our face, we must stand up again and keep trying. And one of the best ways to try again is to speak, no matter how ugly we feel our words might be. There is great strength in “Witch”:

I want to be a witch like Mother
and have words leap out of my throat
like warty toads.

Tragedy silences us. We feel crushed, numbed, and dumbed by the terrible things done to us in life. But Julia’s poems inspire us to “spit out the pits,” the hard, indigestible troubles, swallow the cherries, and let the cherry blossoms of compassion bloom in our throats, as they do in “A Bag of Cherries”:

I spit out the pits and feel cherry blossoms
opening in my throat as I swallow.
Cherry blossoms pink over soldiers’ graves.

Here’s a poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), dedicated to Julia and her new book:

Cherry Ripe

Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry,
Full and fair ones; come, and buy:
If so be you ask me where
They do grow? I answer, there
Where my Julia’s lips do smile;–
There’s the land, or cherry-isle;
Whose plantations fully show
All the year where cherries grow.

You can find Julia Vinograd on Telegraph or at Fourth Street, hawking her book for $5. You’ll know it’s her by the portrait on the cover.

____________

Mary Meriam’s chapbook of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have been published in Literary Imagination, Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, A Prairie Home Companion, and Light Quarterly, among others.

WILD WEST
by Judith Rechter

RAW ArT PRESS
ISBN 978-0-9729185-4-1
2007, 64 pp., $12.00
www.rawartpress.com

Life is a perilous balancing act. In a flash, the comforts we cling to can be stripped away. Judith Rechter’s book of poems, Wild West, is a wild ride through the perilous world. Animals and people are lost, fallen, chomped, bleeding, beaten, dead, skeletal. Several poems depict hair-raising rides in “the small world of the car” (Robert Bly), whether it be an actual car, or a bus, as in “Planetarium,” which I give you in full, and quickly, so that you can relish and be reassured by Rechter’s virtuosity as “the master-mistress of the absurd”:

Planetarium

Wow, I thought what guts. Was she serious?
We all sat on the bumpy bus grinding gears
as it lumbered like a wild beast pricked
with a metal hook just behind the ears.
The driver was in charge of her vehicle.
She was master-mistress of the absurd.
Sure Missus, we might drive over the railing.
Ok, I relaxed and watched a video
of what we might see up at the pinnacle,
the world spread out, flagged like a windy
banner consuming constellations and nebulae.
Our Milky Way reminded me of the enormous
space of things, earth tiny and to the left at the edge.
My grandson was mouthing the worry that the sun
might explode as we neared the top. His mom confessed
she had him on a new drug that made him
pee in his bed at night but maybe would help
him focus. I shook in disbelief.
I knew, she said, you wouldn’t approve.
Out the window, the sun setting, lights going on,
Capitol Tower decorated with a red Christmas tree,
I flashed on a cobra devouring a bunny.
Wow, we all had guts and I thought
that my comfort was in disrepair and we might
be going way over the edge like our bus
without brakes, and me, ballistic.

In this planetarium, the gutsy bus-driver is a goddess, holding the fates of her passengers with the steering wheel in her hands. While the bus-driver might be reckless, Rechter exercises masterful control of her poems. She is the “driver in charge of her vehicle,” and the source of her control and strength is her perspective of wit, wisdom, and delight, despite the perils in the world. It’s a pleasure to follow Rechter’s imagistic, emotional, and verbal leaps, because we’re safe in the world of Rechter’s poems.

In ancient times, in the “time of inspiration”, the poet
flew from one world to another, “riding on dragons”…
They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke…
This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken
place in the poem. (Robert Bly)

Rechter’s cinematic eye is always in play, as in these lines from “On Re-seeing a Monet Exhibit”:

You the fearless swimmer anxious to pull out the refracting
colors to see what no artist had grasped before. You
drag me from my insufficient skin from the crazy
patchwork yellows that fill my days.

Notice the conceptual convergence of “fearless swimmer anxious.” Again, a survivor of the perilous world keeps swimming, inspired by beauty, or goaded by the beast, to do even more than just survive, to “see what no artist had grasped before.” Then we are moved from visions of high art to the mundane world “On the Tarmac,” with these hilarious lines about the pompous side of po-biz, the business of poetry:

The national poetry workshops were still going on, poets
writing massive oeuvres as well as memoirs with ardour.
I was married to my laptop, working on an education poem
that was coming out bitterly.

Perhaps to signal her rebellion or queerness, Rechter occasionally opts for unusual grammar or spelling; in this case, she uses the British spelling of “ardour.” Rechter’s “education” poems are some of her best; she is a retired teacher of English and creative writing. In particular, “Class Picture on the Ramp” is a satirical portrait of class levels, visually explicit on a ramp, from the “cliff-like heights” to the lowest, latest immigrants. These lines show Rechter’s deft, encompassing, compassionate grasp of the profound dispossession caused by immigration:

It must have been a matter of rank.
I was stunned by the cliff-like heights
of the faculty and administrators
so self-assured, so uncompromising
big city coastal persons of oceangoing craft
whose forebears assume privilege and upheaval
having waded earliest through muck to shore.
Quite a late shoe I was from the middle ground
west and east of them, without profile, the flat rivers,
creeks and barnyard product of postmasters,
tailors, porters, cleaners, sewers, sowers,
who needed no place to stand.

The poet of Wild West, while acutely aware of the suffering in the world, gives us her courageous perspective, which is reassuring, despite her feelings to the contrary in these lines from “March”:

embedded information on the savageness of war
trudging up the hill I avoid a woman     sitting on the curb
she’ll ask me for assurance I don’t possess

It’s one thing to crow about one’s compassion for the homeless, but it is perhaps more honest, and more heartbreaking, to admit your own helplessness and vulnerability on life’s wild ride.

____________

Mary Meriam’s chapbook of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have been published in Literary Imagination, Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, A Prairie Home Companion, and Light Quarterly, among others.