<div class="line">Ancient rhinos roamed the Yukon,</div>
<div class="line">Narrow-eyed and heavy-footed,</div>
<div class="line">Looking for a rock to puke on,</div>
<div class="line">After eating leaves gone putrid.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">They grazed near pike fish and turtle,</div>
<div class="line">And some kind of ancient deer.</div>
<div class="line">Long ago the herds did hurtle</div>
<div class="line">O’er a land bridge: there to here.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Rhinos throve in stormy weather</div>
<div class="line">Warmer, wetter than today.</div>
<div class="line">Rhinos would need hairy sweaters</div>
<div class="line">Once the Ice Age came to stay.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Rhinos then were small and hornless:</div>
<div class="line">Fossil records thus bequeath.</div>
<div class="line">Turned to stone, extinct and gormless,</div>
<div class="line">They have left to us their teeth.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/BergmannRhinos.mp3"></audio></figure>

Erectile Dysfunction as a Variant of Skototropism

Poets Respond

What My Children Remember

Ancient Rhinos Roamed the Yukon

<p><em>Review by John Philip Johnson</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/bergmannforest.jpg" alt="Out of the Black Forest by F.J. Bergmann" align="right" /></p>
<p><small>Centennial Press<br />
P.O. Box 170322<br />
Milwaukee,WI 53217-8026<br />
2012, 44 pp., $8.00<br />
<a href="http://centennialpress.com">www.centennialpress.com</a></small></p>
<p>Beautiful and at times haunting, F. J. Bergmann’s new chapbook, <i>Out of the Black Forest,</i> conflates the crowded world of fairy tales into contemporary relevance. Concerned with true love and changelings and eerie silences, among other things, these poems echo with post-modern sensibilities. Accompanying illustration from Kelli Hoppmann help further evoke the mood, and the mood is rich and gothic with a tendency towards uncertainty.</p>
<p>Bergmann, a past Rhysling winner for best spec poetry, and editor of the Science Fiction Poetry Association&#8217;s publication <i>Star*Line</i>, is a practiced hand at this genre. Her poems are well-polished, expansive, with terse one word titles tacked onto them. In “Feather,” a foundling girl, raised by birds, asks them “when her feathers/ would come in, when she would be old enough/ to fly.” Fantastical poetry is often concerned with the creation of mood (to transport you elsewhere), and lush diction goes a long way towards that end. The girl raised by birds had been found in the nest of a “lammergeier”:</p>
<blockquote><p>The birds swaddled her in shed plumage:<br />
She slept nestled in eiderdown, was fanned by<br />
swan primaries, wore pheasant or ibis retrices<br />
in her hair. Looking beyond the endless forest,<br />
she could not tell mountains from clouds.</p></blockquote>
<p>This poem is about Leda and the Swan, although she never says that, and it’s a lot different than the story you know. Like most spec genre work, it has a rich narrative environment, but the tales here are subtle and obscure, often made of gestures.</p>
<p>For example, in “Teeth,” a girl with a red hood goes out into the woods with a basket of food for her grandmother. But no wolf appears. Instead, the poem ends simply with the forest growing dark, and her lifting the napkin (which she had “spent all winter/ embroidering with snowflakes”) off the basket to find “There was no bread./  In the moonlight, white pebbles/ glistened like teeth.” That which menaces is sublimated.</p>
<p>There is no visible threat anywhere in “Hair,” but the air of menace abounds, sumptuously. The poem is about a girl in a tower with long yellow hair “as heavy as gold threads.” She pulls out the “glittering strands” one by one, letting them “float away on the wind, until/ her head is bald as a spotted egg/ and every tree in the forest/ was crowned with a golden nest.” The tower resonates in my mind like a girl in her bathroom; pulling out her hair feels like she’s cutting herself. The romantic mien, at least to me, hints of the comfort of that pathology for its practitioners.</p>
<p>These poems are full of touchstones like that to give us a bearing in their fantastical worlds. The poems connect, and transport. That’s the reason I love this genre. These poems quicken my breath, and let me touch something carefully delirious. There is a glut of fairy tales out there but these are more personal. For my taste, I can only take so much tapestry, but at sixteen poems, this is just the right-sized serving. You might try it with a cup of mulled cider. Good spec poems like these help me, just momentarily, break away from this software we call western civilization. And enrich my perspective when I return.</p>
<p align="center">__________</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><small><strong>John Philip Johnson</strong> has work recently published or accepted <em>Southern Poetry Review, Euphony, Ruminate, Dreams &amp; Nightmares</em>, and in the <i>Rattle</i>’s Speculative Poetry issue. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and five children.  <a href="http://www.johnphilipjohnson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.johnphilipjohnson.com</a></small></p>
</blockquote>


How to Become a Professional Folk Singer

Watching Deer in a Snowstorm a Few Days After Oral Surgery…

OUT OF THE BLACK FOREST

<p>He thought of each marriage as a strophe<br />in the poem of his adult life–those arguments<br />that ended with a slammed door, or one<br />or the other of them hanging up the phone, mid-<br />sentence, as the line breaks; a divorce<br />as the double carriage return. He was still undecided<br />about how to handle the trial separations.</p>
<p>The first stanza was the longest of them all (he had<br />omitted the prior pregnant-high-school-senior<br />shotgun wedding ending in miscarriage; he did not<br />consider himself to be an adult at that point;<br />he did consider himself ill-used). There were several<br />lines about his first child, too, even though<br />she was only a daughter, not the son<br />he finally had, late in the fifth strophe.</p>
<p>The second and fourth stanzas were similar<br />in structure; they both began with rhyming couplets,<br />resplendent with delightful adjectives, but shortly<br />something ominous would appear in the subtext<br />and emerge as images of futility: a crone laboriously<br />hauling a wooden bucket from a dry well, snowflakes<br />silently drowning themselves in a black sea.</p>
<p>Each subsequent strophe grew shorter.<br />Even his son was not given more than<br />a single line to celebrate his birth. He told himself<br />he was becoming more discerning, honing each phrase<br />to a tight elegance.</p>
<p>The sixth stanza is approaching<br />its close, he feels, although he may let it continue on<br />for another line or two;<br />short ones, abruptly<br />enjambed. The structural repetition is starting<br />to seem like a bad idea; perhaps<br />he should have considered the sonnet form,<br />something more pastoral, less awkward.</p>
<p>He is less and less confident about the ending<br />of the poem. He is not looking forward<br />to it. He had hoped that the last stanza<br />would close with lengthy, sonorous, dignified lines,<br />a vindicating summation of his existence.<br />He is beginning to think it<br />increasingly unlikely.</p><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/BergmannMetaphor.mp3"></audio></figure>

Shopping Cart
items

November 12, 2019Ancient Rhinos Roamed the YukonF.J. Bergmann

Sign up for our Newsletter

November 12, 2019Ancient Rhinos Roamed the YukonF.J. Bergmann

Related

OUT OF THE BLACK FOREST by F.J. Bergmann

Uses of Metaphor by F.J. Bergmann