Search Results for: stroke

August 24, 2010

“Grandma Zolie Gives Unheeded Advice” by Lauren Marie SchmidtPosted by

Lauren Marie Schmidt

GRANDMA ZOLIE GIVES UNHEEDED ADVICE

If ever your husband comes home drunk, don’t
beat him while he sleeps; you’ll just end up confessing to it.

If ever you drive your car up on the curb, don’t
keep it a secret; your son will find out when he sees
the tires wobbling and will be sore when he learns
it’s actually the second time.

If ever you want to teach your grandchildren not to smoke, don’t
flash them your pneumonectomy scars or wag the rubber-insert
breast in their face. It will scare the bejeezus out of them.

(If ever you want to make them laugh, though,
spit your dentures in the meatloaf.)

If ever you can’t finish your dinner, don’t save the leftovers.
They’ll just lodge in your freezer for six months until

you can stand to throw them away. But don’t throw things away.
Fix them, mend, reuse them, clean them, and that goes for you too.
You don’t want to be the smelly grandmother, for Heaven’s sake.

If ever your grandson tells a joke with the word queef in it,
don’t repeat, for clarification, Pussy fart? when he answers you.

Which brings me to swearing. If ever you need to swear, don’t
take the Lord’s name, say shugamaloot instead, or,
if you have to swear, say shit-fuck-goddammit like a lady,

because when a nurse instructs your stroke-stricken husband
to shit in his bed, you’ll want to have something to say.

If ever you’re mad at the family who is mad at you
for christening the neighbor’s baby in the bathroom, don’t
threaten to stop taking your meds: it only works the first time.

If ever you’re about to die, don’t ask the Lord for more time,
because the Lord is good and He just might give it to you.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

_______

Lauren Marie Schmidt: “Every summer of my youth was spent in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, or, if you are from the Garden or Empire State, ‘the Jersey Shore.’ After spending the day at the beach, my parents would take my brothers and me to the boardwalk which was filled with games, arcades, and rides. When we grew to be too old for these things, my father taught us ‘the dollar trick’ where one of us would go under the boardwalk with a buck, slip it through the cracks and yank it away as someone reached for it. Some people would laugh at themselves and even become part of the crowd that gathered to watch others fall for the gag. Some people would stomp off all embarrassed or yell through the cracks demanding to know who was behind the treachery. And had it not been for my father who stopped him, one guy would have chased my brother down the beach. I come from a long line of observers, people-watchers, and I believe my summers at the Jersey Shore were the earliest lessons I had in what has become the basis for my poetry.” (web)

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August 5, 2010

SEEING BIRDS IN CHURCH IS A KIND OF ADIEU by Arlene AngPosted by

Review by Lynn LevinSeeing Birds in Church... by Arlene Ang

SEEING BIRDS IN CHURCH IS A KIND OF ADIEU
by Arlene Ang

Cinnamon Press
Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau,
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Gwynedd, LL41 3SU
Wales
UK
ISBN 978-1-907090-06-6
2010, 80 pp., L7.99 UK, L8.99 outside UK
www.cinnamonpress.com

The poems in Arlene Ang’s new collection Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu bid farewell to mothers, fathers, spouses, children, comrades in arms, and others. My own parents are elderly, and I know that I will endure some of the losses that Ang describes in this new collection. I will return to her lyrics at that sad time because of the tenderness they offer, but I savor the poems now for their beauty. These poems of death and remembrance speak intimately of family ties. While a few poems might hint of regret, most reflect on relationships that are solid, tender, and loyal. Though unsentimental, the poems are steeped in love.

In her 2008 collection Bundles of Letters Including A, V, and Epsilon, a collaborative work with poet Valerie Fox, Ang was playful, experimental, and avant-garde. Her 2005 collection The Desecration of Doves delighted with stylish, and sometimes sexy, lyrics. In Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu, her fifth collection, Ang returns to the lyrical and richly descriptive style of The Desecration of Doves.

Arlene Ang’s metaphors startle and amaze. A house in August wears “heat like hosiery” (“The Day She Was Called to Identify the Body”). Parents contemplating their adult son’s death, stand outside his bedroom door “like phantom limbs” (“As we think”). In a house of mourning, time passes to no effect: “Like a mother, the clock wipes its face over and over/with its hands” (“A Sun That Isn’t a Source of Heat…”). Ang, who lives near Venice, sometimes brings glimpses of Italy into her poems. In “Col San Martino,” a wife drives to visit the remains of the car wreck that claimed her husband, and the landscape speaks: “From this hillside, the vineyards/sprawl like cemeteries, grape stalks crucified on white pales.”

In the title poem, “Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu,” the poet unfolds a painterly tableau in which a sparrow, a pigeon, and a blackbird alight upon a pew, a statue of Christ, and a bronze of a station of the Cross. The poem opens with these lines:

The silence never lasts long.
Wings in the air stroke and turn it upside-down.
Ears were made to capture chaos,
you said. A tree sparrow raps
its beak on the pew as if to remind the wood
that it was once a tree.

The birds seem to symbolize the spirit of a person – a father perhaps? – who had wanted a room overlooking the church.

Ang often memorializes the dead by describing the spaces in which they lived or the rooms in which they are dying. She shows us a sickroom with its crumpled sheets and pills, a studio, a kitchen. In “Leopold’s Room,” a mother seeks to hold on to the memory of her son who died of cancer by having his bedroom videotaped.

The curtains – craggy with nicotine – billow,
smudging a view of the lake.
The tape jams. You don’t slap
the video camera awake, but watch
the wind shut the door on Leopold’s secrets:
the x-rays, the synthetic wigs,
the unworn sweaters
with moth holes mouthing sarcomata.

Amid the tender moments, Ang faithfully observes the things that are not so neat and beautiful. Various poems speak of incontinence or food spoiling in the dying person’s fridge. And yet, one of the things that impress me about these poems is how kind the people in them are to each other, the sensitivity they show, and the dignity they accord those who are suffering the humiliations of illness. In “Surviving Grandfather,” a poem written from a child’s point-of-view, Ang writes:

In the end, his fingers cast spidery
shadows on the wallpaper, white sheets
became stained: this was coffee,
everyone said, and we shouldn’t stare.

The children are then sent outdoors to play, and there they encounter still other clues of the grandfather’s illness.

Ang includes a number of sonnenizios on lines from the poets Ros Barber, Merryn Williams, and Jean Cassou. Invented by the Kim Addonizio, the sonnenizio is a fourteen-line poem that springboards off a line from someone else’s sonnet and which incorporates a word from that first borrowed line in each of the successive thirteen lines. The poem ends with a couplet. I was delighted to discover the sonnenizio, and I see that it is catching on with other poets.

The poems in Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu throw their net over a world that is receding, fading, and therefore all the more dear. The poet says to us: “You are facing a loved one’s death, you are visiting his possessions and keepsakes. I’ve been there, too, and this is how it was for me.” These are poems that console. They are clear-minded, unsentimental, stoic even, and yet they radiate love.

____________

Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection is Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009).

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May 30, 2010

WINTER TENOR by Kevin GoodanPosted by

Review by Alan SchneiderWinter Tenor by Kevin Goodan

WINTER TENOR
by Kevin Goodan

Alice James Books
238 Main Street
Farmington, Me 04938
ISBN-13 978-1-882295-75-3
2009, 43 pp., $15.95
http://alicejamesbooks.org

Kevin Goodan’s second collection of poetry and prose poems, Winter Tenor, is a rare pleasure for poetry reviewers of any stripe. The unity of theme throughout the work makes the work readily accessible and indeed obviates the necessity of titles for its constituent pieces–they are all subsumed under Winter Tenor. Within its pages Goodan’s speaker explores a wholly organic relation to the land of the mid-western farmer and the natural cycles of which he is a part. These poems are refreshingly free of moral judgment and shallow didacticism, invoking the spirit of the pastoral sans the idealized vision that has traditionally accompanied that genre.

These pieces arise from the observance of, for lack of a better phrase, the necessities of farm life. Observed through the eyes of a mostly-passive speaker, events are rendered with an elegant simplicity which brings with it an implicit understanding that what occurs—what the reader sees, the beauty, the harshness, and the brutality of the land—is is neither more nor less than the facts of that life. This is evident even in the opening poem which ends:

The mare rubs her neck against your shoulder
And you smack her away–
The pneumatic sigh hoaring
The long, unshaved hairs of her snot,
Her great-roomed eyes–
You punch her nape but she does not shy.
It is then you hear blood puddling the snow.

This is not to say, however, that Goodan’s speaker is indifferent. There is passion here as well, restrained (sometimes only barely) but all the more palpable for that restraint:

Came blizzard came lambs stillborn
Came ravens cawing from pine
Snow hazarding every breath shadows
Lost their balance fled a lantern
Lighted but light is lost
In whiteness the stamping ewes
Coo around dark stains
Every direction overwhelmed bodies
Iced-up cawing

Here one might see Goodan’s linguistic prowess at work as well. Though the words are simple, there is enough newness in the way they are used to grip us firmly and propel us forward through short, muscular lines and impart the feeling of near-panic which lies under their surface.

Yet one of the greatest joys a book can offer is the disclosure of new secrets each time it is read and thus even with that propulsion—the desire the language of the poem instills in the reader to press forward—Goodan ensures that meaning appears on multiple valences (in the above case by means of syntactic ambiguity created by his heavy enjambment) He ensures rewards to the reader who will take their time, go back, and read again.

Goodan’s simple, non-judgmental word-choice combined with the fresh manner in which he brings those words together is perhaps the genius of the work. It renders such images as a rabbit caught by a hawk in a new light with the simple choice of a different verb—one without the connotations often ascribed to “caught”:

Dark shapes darting in the stagnant
Weedy water of a ditch, drying tufts
Of a rabbit chosen by a hawk.

The violence of the image is mitigated by that word, “chosen,” and thus the impulse to judge is not fueled. One thing, however, which might be worrisome to the reader of Goodan would be, in all his linguistic inventiveness, his occasional lapse into the conceptual world, drawing the reader from the concrete imagery his deft strokes paint so vividly in the mind. For some reader such lines as “The tolerances between which we almost prevail,” spoken in relation to “..a comma sizzling on bright tin/That is the body of a nestling dropped by a hawk–” might seem abstruse and perhaps overly intellectual. The good news, however, is that such lines are few and far between and that Goodan, in fine form as a poetic artist, lets the images tell the story.

_____________

Alan Schneider is a graduate student with the creative writing program at Sacramento State University in Sacramento California.

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May 15, 2010

MORE by Barbara CrookerPosted by

Review by Dori AppelMore by Barbara Crooker

MORE
by Barbara Crooker

C&R Press
812 Westwood Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37405,
ISBN978-1-936196-00-5
2010, 68 pp., $14.95
www.amazon.com

As a fan of Barbara Crooker’s two previous collections, Radiance and Line Dance, I approached her newest, More, with an enthusiast’s high expectations. In this latest volume I found everything I’d hoped for: keen observation, generosity of spirit, supple wit— and more!

The title is a perfect choice, and while Crooker speaks often about desire, longing, and the wish to make things last, her bracing appetite bears no relation to greed. A celebrant of food (olive oil, salt, all five flavors of chocolate), she also pays enthusiastic tribute to the miracle of a new day: “dawn turned up its dimmer/ set the net of dew on the lawn to shining” (“Narrative”), and her fellow celebrants : “every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running/ for the sheer, dopey joy of it” (“Strewn”). “Excuses, Excuses” includes this tender and memorable tribute to her husband of thirty years: “I would choose you again if I met/you at a party, even if I could see/the future, the damaged child/ the bodies that creak and sag.”

Walking on the beach, Crooker’s “Surfer Girl” leads us with easy humor from a description of herself “on the far side of sixty, athletic as a sofa” to her youthful alter-ego “lithe and long-limbed, tanned California bronze,/ short tousled hair full of sunshine.” Longing and whimsy merge as she feels the wind at her back and imagines the bliss of catching the perfect wave, “choosing my line like I choose these words, writing my name/ on water, writing my name on air.”

Here, as in many other poems, touring the natural world in her company is an invigorating experience. In the collection’s opening selection: “A thin comma moon rises orange. a skinny slice of melon,/ so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole/ thing, down to the rind” (“How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River”). A variety of small birds flit among the pages, autumn’s late bare branches are saluted after “the burning bush has given up, slipped out/ of its scarlet dress” (“The Mother Suite”), and a stone “that lies there, inert, nothing but itself” ultimately gives voice to its “one long song. Something about eternity. Something about the sea” (“Geology”).

The ekphrastic poems of the book’s third section take a number of striking turns. I particularly liked the dismissal of critics who “fail to see the forest/ for the brushstrokes, the celestial city in the centrifugal clouds” (“Late Turners”). Crooker is clearly an ardent appreciator of clouds: rolling, expanding, changing their colors and shapes, being pulled apart like taffy, and in one poem’s moving conclusion, bleaching themselves pure white—with a poignantly darker lining: “White,/ the memory of itself, what you see before/you fall into bed at night, into the arms of sleep./ or the long tunnel you swim through/on that last journey home (“White”).

In the beautifully harrowing journey of “Demeter,” the poem’s movement is in an opposite direction, from darkness to light: “It was November when my middle daughter/ descended to the underworld. She fell/off her horse straight into Coma’s arms./ He dragged her down, wrapped her in a sleep/so deep I thought I would never see her again.” Eventually, the daughter rises from her coma, heals, and resumes her life. For her parents, however, seen in a snapshot, “drinking coffee and smiling,” there will always be the hovering awareness of possible, irreplaceable loss.

More is the work of a poet who understands the paradox of fulfillment within impermanence—reading these poems feels like a wake-up call to notice. The penultimate selection, “Strewn,” closes with lines that capture the collection’s essence and Crooker’s readiness to meet life’s exhilarating, sometimes painful, embrace: “All of us broken, some way/ or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant, slanting light.”

____________

Dori Appel’s collection of poems, Another Rude Awakening is published by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems have also appeared in many journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Calyx, as well as in a number of anthologies, including When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple (Papier Mache Press) and From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press). A playwright as well as a poet, her plays have been widely produced in the United States and internationally. Three of her full-length plays are published by Samuel French and a number of her monologues are included in anthologies. She was the winner of the Oregon Book Award in Drama in 1998, 1999, and 2001.

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March 15, 2010

SIX LIPS by Penelope Scambly SchottPosted by

Review by Claire Keyes Six Lips by Penelope Scambly Schott

SIX LIPS
by Penelope Scambly Schott

Mayapple Press, 2009
408 N. Lincoln Street
Bay City, MI 48708
ISBN 978-0-932412-84-3
2010, 80 pp., $15.95
www.mayapplepress.com

Six Lips is dazzling. Were it for its language alone, I would savor these poems again and again if only to get some relief from the pedestrian gumbo of contemporary speech. Schott takes her readers for a ride as thrilling for us poetry readers as “Avatar.” Her imagination knows no bounds and she accomplishes her feats with the time-honored tool of language alone. Six lips? At least.

Even so, she doesn’t fly off into the stratosphere. Like Frost’s climber of birches, she knows that “Earth’s the right place for love.” She says as much in “Why I Did Not Wish to Float in Space,” one of my favorite poems in the book. She opens with a series of questions reminiscent of God lecturing Job on his powers. For example: “Who spread the western horizon to snip/ the orange sun in half.” She then proceeds to ask an even more impossible question:

Can you feel how our planet spins in a void,
how the shallow mantle, hauling its fur coat
of forest, its slippery skin of ocean, seems
inconsequential over the molten core?

Note the rightness of the line-break after “fur coat” and the aptness of the ocean’s “slippery skin.” Note also that as the poem builds, it becomes more intimate:

I’ve lost my footing in the belly of curled roots,
and I’m scared of falling, of lurching clear out
into space—nothing on earth to touch. Pull me
back by a finger, will you?

What captures me in this poem is the surprising turn it takes to the intimate gesture of “Pull me/ back by a finger, will you?” Her meditation on the vastness of the universe turns into a love poem, concluding with “Please?/ Here, in the motionless house, my face/ brushed by your glance.” What makes Six Lips so compelling is how unpredictable Schott is.

Penelope Scambly Schott is unabashedly female and yet, in a way, post-feminist. She simply is who she is and more power to her. “Counting the Body,” the long poem which occupies the center of this collection, makes her attitude towards herself abundantly clear. Each section plays with a number. She requires

Six lips to sip the sublime,
    two for the mouth and four for the vulva
      plump as succulents and shining with dew—
         ah, youth; ah, time.

The naturalness of the rhyme (lips/sip) and the abundant alliteration characterize her versifying and also lead to the nostalgic note at the end. These are not the poems of a young woman, but youthful exuberance pervades the volume.

In the last section of the poem, she imagines what it would be like “If I Had Ten Thumbs”:

I would wear pink leather shoes with velcro straps
I would strike matches on the sole of my shoe
I would suck firmly on my ten wet thumbs
I would practice exactly how to suck
with rapt attention and rhythm
so as to gratify any man
and I would do it
yes I would
do that
yes

The voice of these poems is often playful and funny. At the same time the overall tenor of this book is conditioned by the impending death of her mother. The poems get darker as the poet meditates on time and aging. As she says in “Eclipse”: “This is the world that ends over and over and then/ goes on without us, our tiny smudge of time.”

Schott is blessed, however, with a flexible consciousness. At home with animals or the stars, she gives a sense of her life as a succession of lives. Aware of the natural world, she suggests the transmigration of her soul into a screech owl or a horse. Such poems tend to be upbeat and thrilling, but the excruciating demise of her mother haunts the speaker of these poems. She finally gives way to addressing her mother’s death and dying.

Typically, she refuses sentimentality. In “Heart Failure,” she writes: “This is the year I would like to find pity. I would like/ to hurt for my mother the way I ache for my children.” As much as she would like to develop this feeling, it eludes her: a failure of her heart: “I want to be sad that she’s eighty-seven and fading.” Through her use of anaphora and an accretion of brilliant details, Schott builds up the image of her mother:

She lives in her elegant house like a black pearl
from a broken oyster drifting under reefs in a bay.
she lives in her house like a startled rabbit unable
to finish crossing the road.

The poem startles when the speaker imagines killing her mother, as an act of pity:

                                     If I had enough pity,
I would dare squeeze her fragile neck and kiss
her forehead as I press down on her windpipe and keep
on pressing with my strong and generous thumbs.

The poem, however, does not end there. Schott’s spirit is too magnanimous, and her mother changes, showing a gentle “appreciation” of nature that Schott finds surprising. Her mother “watches the squirrels scamper up black bark/ like acrobats of joy.” In fact, Schott doesn’t recognize the person her mother has become:

This drowning old lady is not my mother. Not
abrupt. As I stroke her knuckles, grace glints
in our salt hands.

Drowning because she is dying, the mother undergoes a kind of transformation, as does the daughter. For both of them, there is a communion, a touch of being to being.

While I admired A is for Anne, Schott’s previous book, for her deft handling of the life of Anne Hutchinson, Six Lips takes its readers to a new place through her language and style, but also through her openness, her dexterity, her seemingly boundless range of being in the world. She’s a stunning poet.

____________

Claire Keyes reviewed A is for Anne for Rattle and would be happy to review future books by Penelope Schott. Disclaimer: they share the same publisher. Mayapple Press published The Question of Rapture, a book of poems, in 2008. To be honest, Six Lips is far better than Rapture. Claire Keyes lives modestly in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

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November 6, 2009

“To the Former Self in Art Class” by Hannah Faith NotessPosted by

Hannah Faith Notess

TO THE FORMER SELF IN ART CLASS

You didn’t know the boy sitting next to you
in Watercolor 101 was going to shutter himself
in the car, stop breathing, break the heart
of his father and the whole college.

Let’s be honest. His cones and cylinders
were as lopsided, as badly shaded
as everyone else’s cones and cylinders.

When you hear the news two years later,
you search your own tatty portfolio
for clues, sigh If only I had known—
but I want to shake you and say, You didn’t,

and anyway that phrase is a stupider knife
even than Ockham’s razor. If you went,
with your grey lens of knowledge, back to that
minute, you’d still be painting the same

burnt-out cathedral under burnt-orange blood
dripping from the sky, collaged with quotations
from The Waste Land. You thought it meant

you were losing your faith; but look, there you are
sitting in church, five years in the future,
wondering (like a good Protestant) why
you want so much to pray for the souls of the dead.

In fact, you could go back and forth enough
times to wear a rut in the floor of time,
but your awkward brushstrokes would still paint
the same cathedral that lists to the left. You’d still

stay up all night in agony over the alchemical
substance of the soul. Your grand attempts
at phthalo yellow sunrises would still turn murky,

while the same boy sat silent beside you,
washing the globe of an apple with quinacridone
gold, shading it with Payne’s grey,
the same dark worm asleep on his heart.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

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October 15, 2009

VOICE CARRIED MY FAMILY by Robert SullivanPosted by

Review by Craig Santos Perez

VOICE CARRIED MY FAMILY
by Robert Sullivan

Auckland University Press
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand
ISBN 1 86940 337 1
2005, 64 pp., $14.95
http://web.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/aup

Voice Carried My Family, Robert Sullivan’s 5th book of poetry, navigates the difficult currents of narrativity, while exploring the personal and mythological history of Maori culture. The title poem, “Voice carried my family, their names and stories,” establishes the central theme early in the collection:

Their names and fates were spoken.
The lands and seas of the voyage were spoken.
Calls of the stroke at times were spoken.
Celestial guidance, sightings, were spoken.
Prescriptions – medical and spiritual – were spoken.
Transactions – physical and emotional – were spoken.
Family (of), leaders (to), arguments, were well spoken.
Elders (of), were well spoken.
Burials were spoken.
Welcomes at times were spoken.
Futures lined up by pasts, were spoken.
Repeating the spoken were spoken.
Inheritance, inheritors, were spoken.
Tears at times were spoken.
Representatives at first were spoken.
The narrator wrote the spoken.
The readers saw the spoken!
Spoken became unspoken.
[Written froze spoken.]

Prior to the 19th century, the oral Maori language was the predominant language of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Around 1814, missionaries made the first attempts to develop a writing system for Maori using the Roman alphabet (“The narrator wrote the spoken”). By the 1860s, Maori became a minority to the English brought by British colonialists. When the English school system was introduced, the Native Schools Act of 1867 forbade the use of Maori in school. The exclamatory response of the readers in Sullivan’s poem highlights the violent transition of the spoken becoming unspoken, of Maori becoming English. We feel this tumultuous history between the lines of the poem, and the fact that Sullivan writes this poem entirely in English testifies to this history. Even though the “written froze spoken,” the poem does not remain frozen in the colonial past. Instead, the orality of the poem (its chanting repetition pushing against the end stop) ignites the written into a lyric fire.

This parallels the Maori language initiatives that ignited Aotearoa in the 1970s, including Te Ataarangi (a language learning system), Kahanga Reo (Maori language pre-schools), Kura Kaupapa Maori (Maori language schools) and Maori broadcasting. In 1987, the Maori Language Act declared Maori to be an official language of New Zealand and established the Maori Language Commission, Te Taura Whiri i te Reo. Sullivan’s poetry ascends from this revitalization to prove that poetry (the written) does not, of necessity, freeze the spoken, but can revitalize the spoken into new, vital fires. A powerful example of this is “Te ao hurihuri”:

The everchanging presence of the earth
is a term, te ao hurihuri, it shifts
like a dancer turns and turns.

The everchanging term is the presence
of the earth, te ao, like it shifts a dancer,
hurihuri, turns and turns.

Like turns the everchanging turn
of the term is te ao hurihuri,
the earth—a dancer shifts.

It shifts the earth, te ao hurihuri,
a term like a dancer.

If shifts te ao hurihuri, a term.

A term, hurihuri, in te ao.

Te ao hurihuri.

As a dancer turns, Sullivan shifts through the ever-changing terms of an oral tradition into the scripted presence of the word. The bilingual interplay enhances this dance and negotiates the fragile, political undertones of language policy in Aotearoa. Sullivan suggests that the poem is a site for the intersections of Maori identity to enter into critical and lyric dialogue.

This dialogue continues in the poem “Ahi Ka—The House of Nga Puhi”, which carries the metaphor of fire across the frozen page. As we learn in an endnote, “Ahi ka” refers to a “person’s right to land, so long as they maintain their presence, or ‘home fire.’” The poem moves in a tidal tercet, creating a powerful rhythm:

We light the poem and breathe out
the growing flames. Ahi ka. This
is our home—our fire. Hot tongues out

—pukana—turn words to steam. This
fish heart is a great lake on a
skillet. Ahi ka! Ahi ka! […]

carried by the tribe’s forever-story
firing every lullaby.
Shadows shrink in our hands’ quiver

as we speak—ahi ka sing fire
scoop embers in the childhood sun
stare into molten shapes and see

people—building, sailing, farming—
see them in the flames of our land
see them in this forever light

no tears only fire for ahi
ka no weeping only hangi pits
no regrets just forgiveness and

a place for the fire—it’s our song
to sing—ahi ka—got to keep
singing the shadows away—ha!

Sullivan’s poems become a place to maintain the fires—the forever-stories—of culture and identity. We can’t change the colonial past; we can only attempt to heal the trauma of colonialism by “singing the shadows away.” Poetry creates a “forever light” from which to navigate a decolonized future.

The central poems of this collection, in a series titled “For the Ocean of Kiwa,” tell the story of 4 Polynesians on Captain Cook’s several crews: Tupaia, Mai, Koa, and Te Weherua. The first poem begins in the Great Hall, a part of the old University of Canterbury complex in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the narrator looks at the stained-glass figures. Interestingly, Sullivan begins by questioning storytelling itself:

Who am I to extol Tupaia? Star navigator. Great chief.
Cartographer of a chunk of the Pacific Cook claimed his own?
Loving Tupaia of the Arioi? Who am I to say these things?

When he tells the story of Mai, a similar questioning ensues: “You’re in the public domain — perhaps I could claim / your story through your eyes? […] Why not? Why can’t I tell your tale, slip under you skin? […] But I can’t I just can’t take the middle of your throat. / Who would I pay for the privilege?” Sullivan’s self-consciousness disrupts a narrative of objective representation to question the very idea of “voice” and re-imagine the historical figures:

I’m trying to make sense of this shadow
that follows me across my shoulder.
Why this discomfort? I’ve heard it said
that i should not listen to ‘enemies of the imagination’.

Whose image? Who is imagining?

The emphasis on narrativity becomes a site for the reader to imagine new ways in which the spoken can become written without becoming unspoken. Sullivan reaches into “the throat of history” to keep his and our “eyes wide open with ancestors,” suggesting that the true “enemies of the imagination” are found in the refusal to question representation. The violence of such discomfort comes to fruition in the section titled “Captain Cook”:

Didn’t we get rid of him? There are far too many statues, operas
and histories. If only I could be a brown Orwell—a Moari Big Bro,
find every little caption card in every European museum and scrub it out:
change the working to, ‘This was given to Captain Cook as a token of friendship
and should be buried with him’, OR ‘This was temporarily given to Caption Cook
and would have been expected to be returned on his death’, OR ‘ Well, actually, Captian
Cook stole this’, OR ‘The Captain exchanged this for something vastly inferior in value—
ha ha for him!’ But even as an extra large bro I suspect the lies are superglued.
The empire that sent him to his death three times has its hero.

Sullivan allows us to see that history-making is a story imagined by the privileged. The discomfort arises when this imagining becomes accepted as “forever-story,” and those outside this privileged imagining become forced from their right of narrative. Poetry embodies an opportunity for Sullivan to “scrub out” the European valorization of Cook in order to reinscribe or re-imagine alternative histories.

Voice Carried My Family carries us through a poetry of fire, a poetry of the spoken being written and the written being spoken. Every current of this book carries the “ahi ka” into our imagining of Maori culture, history, and identity, establishing a presence that can’t be stolen by any empire. As Sullivan writes in “Ocean Birth”:

Every wave carries us here—
every song to remind us—
we are skin of the ocean.

____________

Craig Santos Perez is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His reviews have appeared in The Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Latino Poetry Review, MiPoesias, First Intensity, Rain Taxi, and Jacket, among others.

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