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Posted on by Dave Bonta

After Rain by Nan Becker

After Rain After RainNan Becker; Elephant Tree House 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” wrote Emily Dickinson in one of her most celebrated poems. Many of the poems in After Rain seem to be situated just a little past that “hour of lead,” apparently in the wake of a painful separation or divorce. I say “seem to be” because they are poems of great delicacy and, like the lake pictured on the cover and frequently evoked in the course of the book, often suggest a hidden drama or turmoil beneath their calm surfaces. I was reminded strongly of ancient Japanese court poetry (which I read quite a lot of at university) in the way Nan Becker writes about the natural world, simultaneously celebrating it as a source of beauty and solace and using it as a mirror or metaphor for human emotions. I was so impressed that three hours after my first reading, I picked it up and read it cover-to-cover a second time.

One advantage we moderns have over those ancient Japanese poets is a greatly expanded body of knowledge about the natural world. So in “Dragonfly,” for example, Becker can observe that the eponymous insect “swishes / and skims a still river,” then add that it is

Being, and going on,
under doubled wings
come late in life.

“Migration,” too, is a subject about which we know so much more than even writers a generation ago, enlarging the scope of an age-old wonder:

A pipit flies across the water
into a cover of leaves losing green.
Jays scatter about and shout.

High up, geese score lines south,
speaking of elsewhere—pulled
as water to the moon.

Of course, this attention to the natural order has its pitfalls, too. If you’re writing surrealist poetry, no one will complain if you get some detail “wrong” — poetic license covers it. But the one off-note in this otherwise terrific collection, for me, was the implication in “Pileated Woodpecker” that Dryocopus pileatus is migratory (“Year after year / spring after spring / the Pileated returns”). In fact, the mated pairs stick to their home territories year-round.

That’s a minor quibble, though — just one poem out of 50. Of all the books I’ve read so far this month, I think After Rain has the smallest percentage of poems that just didn’t work for me. Becker is especially good at evoking psychological landscapes, often suggested by little more than the title — “How Farewell Feels,” “Over,” or “Of What Must Have Been”:

What it was,
was some large carp
bouyed upon the water,
—it was a sodden log,
a shade of errant current.

Each true in the weight
of its moment,
real as any thing
on this page.

Elsewhere, the treatment of inner states is more direct and philosophical. Becker compares “The Way Grief Breaks,” for example, to the way “a bird breaks before flight,” which she calls a “sudden loosening.” Another favorite, “Nostalgia,” is worth quoting in full:

While I was not watching at all, I saw
a bear, black as a hole in shadow,
rocking in place, shifting within without,
as if in conversation with the ground,
with words I haven’t yet learned,
a way to ask and answer.

There’s an implicit narrative arc to this book; the poems speak to each other, and the beginning and the end of the collection are carefully constructed to set the scene and offer resolution, respectively. Working my way through the second time, I was moved perhaps more than I should admit, remembering half-submerged things I hadn’t thought about in years. “And what does it mean now,” the narrator of “Redemption” asks, “how / seldom I think of you?” In “Absence,” she wonders, “Is there a plain truth? A clean knowing?” and concludes in the following poem, “Diminuendo”:

This unastonished, unremarkable landscape weighs
almost nothing, which is what is meant by enough.

Quoting blurbs is probably frowned upon by serious book reviewers, but I think Gillian Cummings got it right: Becker’s poems “encompass the world: the world as it exists outside, simply, of itself, and the world as experienced so deeply within the self.” The way After Rain manages to explore both simultaneously is a rare accomplishment for a modern Western poet.

Visit the book’s page on the publisher’s website to read the rest of Cummings’ review, as well as to read three complete poems from the book.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rat ghazal

Stoney Moss:

Could I tame the creature that steals birds’ corn, could I
cage her, set a wee wheel in motion for the rat?

Who can harm such industry, close her bright brown eyes?
I set bait, hope the lure doesn’t take my brown rat.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Intermission

This entry is part 17 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

It’s late. It isn’t yesterday anymore. The hour has moved beyond that part of the sundial. Up in the woods, soon the witch hazel will leaf a low green flame. Yesterday we picked our way through hellebore, through foxglove, through belladonna. Above, the heads of snowball viburnum drooped low like lanterns. I turned a question I cannot voice, over and over in my head. No one will hear its soft bumping in the corners, no one but me see the flare of orange tracks in the velvet dark. If I said it aloud, all this softness would fade in an instant. The lambs’ ears would shrink and recoil, the creeping flox and the tiny fingers of salt cedar form crystals like ice. See the roses massed on the trellis, the rows of spiked thorns on guard at their feet.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Night Fish by Kristine Ong Muslim

Night Fish Night FishKristine Ong Muslim; Shoe Music Press/Elevated Books 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
It was only after I finished this chapbook that I realized how peculiarly appropriate it had been to read a book of 13 poems on Friday the 13th. I had thought of Stevens’ blackbirds, but not luck or the lack thereof.

In creating a page for the book at Open Library, I discovered that it had already been ably reviewed five times (should we shoot for thirteen?) which, I thought, rather relieved me of the responsibility of saying anything significant. (I’ve linked them all on the main book page.) But it’s an extraordinary record for a slim book without an ISBN, or any publication info at all aside from the URL on the back cover.

Design-wise, this chapbook has a split personality: the cover design and artwork (by Gordon Purkis) are pleasing, but the interior is a horror: a thin monospace font that’s tiring to read, especially since the commas are hard to distinguish from the periods.  I sat in the strong sun with it, tilting the pages a little to keep the glare manageable.

I liked the majority of the poems. They tend to have unusual premises, which most of the time takes them in interesting directions. “From now on, there will never be any flat land,” the title poem begins, and continues for thirteen lines (though it may be a prose poem; the left-justified, narrow text column makes it impossible to tell), concluding: “The sound of oars cutting the water / clean will be the most familiar sound in the / universe.” This is followed by “Night Swimmer,” which is “after Max Ernst’s ‘Aquis submersis’,” and concludes: “Sometimes, one plunge is enough / to cut the water clean, the splash / merely an afterthought.” So there’s a lot of call-and-response between the poems. Another aquatic one, “Hypergraphia,” is followed by “Heat Stroke,” for example, which begins with hell viewed from above, and ends with yet another reference to the watery theme: “Heat presents itself in the form of waves / melting the world away. Squandering nothing.”

My favorite poems, the ones where I penciled little check-marks in the corners of the pages, were all in the second half. In “House Guest,”

I enter the door marked
for strangers only.

Behind me,
autumn shrinks…

And in the poem that follows it, “December,” the protagonist has become even more of a stranger to herself, concluding from the dense fog of breath coming out of her mouth that she is not alone in her body, but “a sieve for / the soul fermenting inside.” This takes us straight to “Falling,” a kind of how-to for people who find themselves falling from tall buildings. It is, as the kids say, full of win. I’ll just quote a bit of it:

You will notice that the side of the building
has been streamlined to keep its insides
from spilling on the sidewalks.
[…]
A distraction of happiness, a memory perhaps
makes you look away from the ground.
You imagine strolling
on the street below. …

And the poem ends not in the expected manner but with “you” walking away — in imagination, while still falling.

It occurs to me that almost all the protagonists in these poems are in the process of acclimatizing to extreme conditions. The book therefore assumes an almost prophetic tone for the environmentally minded reader, whether or not that had been the author’s intention. Immediately after “Falling,” we have “Extremities,” which recounts
a nightmare vision of limbs reaching out to other limbs ad infinitum, with bodies reduced to noting more than pairs of limbs. A nightmare of inter-connectedness — hmm. Seems familiar, somehow!

Can art save us, or “Dream Villages” with cotton-candy clouds? Muslim seems skeptical. “Art is repulsion floating in a bowl of soup. / Sometimes, it is the soup.” May I have some more, then? Night Fish definitely whetted my appetite. This is one up-and-coming poet who isn’t just dabbling in surrealism because it’s fashionable.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Some stories

are best written out by hand, in fine
black ink with an old-fashioned

fountain pen with a modest, polished
carriage and a solid but flexible nib—

for instance, this story about how
my mother was a farmer’s daughter

who married a lawyer twenty years
her senior. They met the summer she

tended the cash register at The Midway
Restaurant and Bar in a sleepy northern

town on the coast, trying to put herself
through college. When I was a girl,

she recounted how he used to come in
with the same group of his friends in law

school, not so young men newly hopeful
in a world after war, all wearing suits

despite the infernal heat: cravats, hats, one
good pen with its small gold arrow clipped

like a talisman in the breast pocket. Oh
but after food and a few rounds of drink,

those ties were loosened, and even the shyest
could make bold to stagger over to the counter

to invite the girl with the perfectly shaped brows
to sit at their table. In another version of this

story, my mother says he threatened to break
every single wineglass on the counter to get

her attention if need be, if she refused.
The rest, as they say, is history. A few

months later, in the cathedral, as family
and friends looked on (my mother’s poorer

relations on one side of the church),
they signed their vows: his signature

looped and sprawling, hers neat and upright,
every letter in its place, elegant as a pin.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Paraskevidekatriaphobia

In the first documented reference
to Friday the 13th, it is already
described as an ancient superstition,
but the ancients had much more
complex methods for detecting
an inauspicious day. They might’ve noticed
for example how those three crows
skimmed low & landed in the field
to reunite with their shadows.
They might’ve seen the wild
columbine next to the sidewalk
thrusting its red lanterns where
they don’t belong. Our ancestors preferred
hot jets of revelation to the patient
& dispassionate sifting of evidence
and you & I are the eventual result,
with our missing 13th floors
& our boardrooms full of Judases.
Ten million Americans won’t get
out of bed today because
nothing bad can happen as long
as your eyes stay closed.
In an otherwise empty morning sky,
what can possibly begin with
our dead moon’s fish-belly of a C?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Signals by Ed Madden

Signals SignalsEd Madden; University of South Carolina Press 2008WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
I was very lucky that I got to read about three-quarters of this book to Rachel over Skype this afternoon, because the high craftsmanship of these poems really emerges when you read them out loud. Try reading, for example, this passage from “Coastal” about fiddler crabs:

They skitter
sideways, claws raised. The ground is riddled

with burrows, claws extruding. The claw comes out
first—an attitude. Lights come on in the house

behind me. I lift a crab shell, cracked open,
sun-bleached chitin, its ridges crisp and unbroken,

dry husk of history, the inside still pearlescent.
My step raises a hundred claws of threat.

And notice how Madden slipped in that phrase “dry husk of history” without making it sound at all sententious? This is a good example of the kind of mischief he’s up to in this book, his first full-length collection but already the work of a mature poet who knows exactly what he’s doing. The book won the South Carolina Poetry Prize, and appropriately so: many of the poems are set in his adopted state of South Carolina, and he tackles issues of race and sexual orientation in the deftest possible manner. “Coastal” appears in the most explicitly political section of the book, and is the second of a pair of poems in the middle of that section that both hearken back to the calmer waters at the beginning of the book, while also suggesting the degree to which political awareness and activism can color our perceptions of even the most innocent of scenes: a white wedding, a walk along the beach of a barrier island. Here’s how that poem concludes:

A stomp sends them scuttling thru the grass.
I imagine crushing one—the crunch of carapace,

small gush of guts in my fist. And if
I dropped it in the dark, others would find it,

their claws tugging at bits of brother meat.

I got to know Ed Madden originally through an email correspondence about The Morning Porch, and his own attention to the natural world is in evidence throughout the book. I like poets who know the names of things, and I like books that begin outdoors and get the reader situated in the landscape before anything else. Like the Sherry O’Keefe chapbook I blogged about yesterday, this is (mostly) autobiographical, place-based poetry at its finest. Not all the poems are set in South Carolina; in the middle section, Ed and his partner Bert travel to exotic places such as Paris and Pennsylvania (the Mütter Museum!) and in the final section, a couple poems take us back to the author’s childhood in Arkansas.

At the AWP conference in Chicago last month, I attended a panel discussion moderated by the editor of Orion about how poets might write about politics without getting terminally didactic. It was called, I think, “Not With a Bang But a Whisper,” and included Dorianne Laux and Lia Purpura, as well as some great back-and-forth with the audience. I think Madden should’ve been on that panel; certainly his poems follow two of the panel’s strongest recommendations (if I remember correctly): keep it personal and write from where you live (Laux), and cultivate a quality of attention that lets you notice suffering and respond in a human manner (Purpura). And Signals suggests a third strategy: arrange your poems carefully for maximum impact. Madden’s understated attention to natural and human details throughout the book builds up a reservoir of trust in the reader, preparing one to listen more receptively to the awkward truths about race relations in the last part of the book: poems such “Roots: an Essay on Race,” and “Here, or the White Boy on the Bus.”

The latter poem recounts an incident where the African American civil rights and gay rights activist Bayard Rustin gets arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in 1942 — a decade before Rosa Parks. Madden personalizes the poem by addressing Rustin in the second person, then imagines himself as the white kid he singled out as he was being led away (“If I move, this child / will not know that injustice is taking place / here”).

I watch

the police lift you from your seat—
Bayard, black angel, troublemaker—

force you to the street. The bus pulls away,
folks turn back to their business,

a white man takes the seat, looks at
that boy, wondering what he knows.

And wondering, it seems to me, is precisely where the understated political poem derives its power, a power so often squandered by those who deal mainly in outrage and don’t let time’s alembic work its magic. You have to preserve some core of wonder or you risk the calcifying of your politics along with your poetry, I think. In the final part, “Transom,” of the somewhat ironically titled “Three Poems on Politics,” Madden focuses at first on “A vase of tulips … pink / anomalies on a table filled with tracts.” Then:

The question that we’re sniffing toward,
said the old black man, is this:

Can capitalism reform itself?
The window above the door is dark—

a thin transparent film to screen
the light. The sun is bright outside.

The clouds boil in slow swirls.

Over the transom they sneak their hard questions in, these poems. I expect they’ll stay with me for a long time.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Fire Report

This entry is part 16 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

The drone of planes against a bright blue
morning, winds that fan the charred smell
of houses going up in flames. One of the men
that has lost his home tells the TV reporter
how he picked up his daughter from her crib
and walked out with her into the day. And now
they have nothing. Nothing, that is, except
what they haven’t lost: thumb in her mouth,
sleepy head against his shoulder; curls
brushing his cheek, breath sweet with milk
kind neighbors put into a cup. He shakes
his head and repeats: What could hold
against such a conflagration? And yet,
night will not touch this cargo.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Attila József

George Szirtes:

I have translated only a little. That tone is hard to strike as well as keeping form. It is colloquial, romantic yet firmly rooted in realism. […]

Fat drops of rain on the roof,
          metallic pit-a-pat.
Cluck on old hen, brood me time,
          hatch me some of that.