95 Books, 2014

Starting again at 1.
Jonathan Ball has how to begin and proceed doing your 95 books per year. He’s up for it again. You may notice he goes by the UN definition of book of 48 pages. It’s good to have a standard to define by. I’m going broader, as I did last year with some chapbooks included.
I have to track down what I read already. The order of the first couple batches are randomized because the order has fog-patches.

1. Chinatown Zodiac by Steve Artelle is a poem for each animal of the zodiac. How to pick a favourite or favourite part? I like how each poem is distinctly its own. You couldn’t roll them all into one indistinguishable-parted long poem.
   

   tiger hypothetical
   if we sit here any longer, someone will fill the windshield with tea sets
         (or fading layers of convenience store advertising)
   the mural on the corner is moving faster than we are
         (right away there are things I like about you)
   oir conversations about the natural predators of everything we build
         (ice eats road, rust eats car, fire eats everything)
   your carnivorous laugh and death-defying lines of reasoning
         (time has the biggest teeth, traffic eats time)
   consolation in the grip of rush hour on Booth Street
         (everyone but you despises a commute)
   creeping along until the instinctive leap through the lights at Eccles
         (because: red means stop, green means go, yellow means tiger)

   Can I articulate why that’s perfect, phrase by phrase? There are leaps but they complete the scene rather than competing and clashing. There’s a ebullient energy and fondness and rightness of the rush of life. There’s the accuracy by exaggeration of those crammed like a hoarders attic shelves of Chinatown everything shops and the pouring of life into the streets like not that many streets of Ottawa has. There’s a touch of profound and grounded in the everyday like that penultimate line. It carries the spirit of ferocious vivaciousness and company enjoyed. Such an antidote to poetry being where one comes to find commiserations.

2. Ignite by Rona Shaffron (Signature Editions, 2013)
   I feel I may be the last in Ottawa to read it since I missed her two book launches. She has some nice turns of phrase “in caramel heat” (p. 56), the person feeling “porous as pumice stone” (p. 55). p. 22 has a poem called “Manna: A Prayer” which is worthwhile as a whole but I’ll relate only a part.

   she cranes her neck, puzzled
   by what appear to be black knobs
   high on the branches
   of a bare ash,
   when, as if on cue,
   all the knobs explode
   into an aerial parabola alive
   with black-capped chickadees

   I once tried to convey something similar but couldn’t get the angle. That got it. Did I mark the pages I’m looking for? The poem that struck me strongest was about a woman awaiting a man coming home feeling hornier than a thornbush and was looked past. It hit the marks on being raring, and pivots to being crushed by a cool reception. As a poem in itself it rocked but then turning the page, surprise. The next is the perspective flipped and the same scene replays from his point of view, just as strongly. Wonderful act of seeing and compassion and stepping aside without the sense of editorial or writer’s hand.
   Overall it conveys complexities of relationship without cleaving out anything positive as if that were banned from poetry.

3. Leaving Howe Island by Sadiqa de Meijer (Oolichan Books, 2013)
   I was lucky enough to hear live in one of rob mclennan’s poetry series. The room mmmmed to her poems. They seem to flip fragments of things lived or observed. “corridor” (p. 54) is a train poem, watching the landscape with its “clapboards houses,/yard with inflatable nativity, the plunge/of a river, scalloped with whitcaps” all sweep past.
   In general, what do things signify? Is it personal deep meaning or naming and archiving? p. 53, from “January”

   red fox,
   at the bottom of Cataraqui Street, where the mill was
   and the tired in the shrubbery are —
   agile, shifty listener to its own brass solo,
   taking such a generously unlinear while,
   over the lake ice, to disappear

   Is there a deliberate troubling of the next with punctation. Line break choices confuse me at times. They aren’t semantic nor breaking against for effect I can see. Read aloud it’s clear. There’s some singing in here “in small migrations we traversed the hours –// clockwork walzes over knotted floors.” (p. 62)
   She has some lovely dense phrasings. In a swirling poem of hospital birth “I, the two reduced to one.” (p. 60) In “Labour Day Weekend, Lake Huron” (p. 48) “There’s a video: I’m freaking out, wearing the huge shirt I used to hide puberty. More keeps washing up.” And set nearby the bird vomiting sunglasses and the plastics that clutter the beach for a suggestion of adulthood pollution.
   I feel like I skim to the next good lucid sharply true bit rather than read thru plain bits. In “Community Pool at Noon” (p. 57) “He’s a sad animal, flailing. Now I have to/love him, even”. Compassionate, fond, and bitter, resenting imposition both. “Pools are the same/ in starkly different cities.”

4. The Innocence of Father Brown by GK Chesterton (1911) is a curious book. It is full of wit, quip, and a detective’s observation of how human’s perceive. For example, did anyone pass this way he asked the police, the chestnut seller and one other. All said no but there were footprints in the snow. The mailman. Or someone dressed like one passed taking the missing corpse with him. The train of logic can be odd as where someone trying to be found looks for ways to mark his passing by doing odd things, like overpaying a restaurant bill with an apology then breaking the front window on his way out so that a stir will follow him as he’s tracked. Chesterton describes a rich old charitable fellow,
   

   “he had been, when only a boy, drawn away from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, […] had risen out of both and become (as he modestly put it) what he was. Yet his wide white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberless dinners and congresses where they appeared made it hard to believe, somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a dram-drinker, or a Calvinist.

   He was murdered it seems. Father Brown says,

   “You say that nobody could kill such a happy old man, but I’m not sure; ne nos inductas in tenationem. If I ever murdered someone,” he added quite simply “I dare say it might be an Optimist” […] “People like frequent laughter,” answerered Father Brown, “but I don’t think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is very trying thing.”

   He concludes that although the man seems cheerful, it must be a public face because all his family and servants are dour, thus he concludes, the man is a secret binge drinker.
   He tends to skewer the upper class as geese only good for becoming foie gras. The characters are blond or red-headed, generally bearded. He spends a lot of words proportionally characterizing people’s noses. Perhaps its a code fo stereotypes then? It isn’t obvious at first but characters accumulate as good U.K. stock, as he may put it, or else suspicious, even if not the murderer. You probably don’t want to read what he says about Muslims, Jews or Hindus. Father Brown gets completely into a paranoid rant at times. It was another era, but apparently even in his own era he was called on his views. At the same time how heinous of dismissal and marginalization is common still, more in omissions and kind oversimplifications more than namecalling.
   His life was odd and he converted to Catholicism later in life after soundly rejecting it earlier. He was a religious apologist but his short stories seem far more lucid than his meandering arguments in “What’s Wrong with the World”. (Spoiler: Apparently “women” it would seem. The working type, you know, those apostates.)

5. fur(l) parachute by Shannon Maguire (BookThug, 2013) can’t be read the way you would pulp fiction, depending on how you read that I suppose. Try the way you would look at a painting that isn’t a representative reproduction of a landscape or portrait.
   A delightful book to deliberately confound conventional automatic thought. I’d seen a sub-set in chapbook form but it takes the longer length of accumulation to better effect. More of an abstract painting in places than representational language the poems change density and transparency. sudden pop on anchor to real world wakes and shakes up text “we all looked as cute as/ sheep, bags full of blindspot” (p. 37) opacity of Old English were oddly in glossary so visible translations were there but ones without cognates weren’t. pure sound pieces (p. 45) are tongue fun (which I am not going to try to reprodice in html because life is short) yet it also takes the poetic opportunity to show an awareness of world politics of oil-spill (p. 63) which a poetry book about the sea didn’t mention. Lucidness comes and goes p. 85 “A glass can never be half shattered”. Usually I don’t know what’s going on. It’s a sound rush and a rush of sound, say
   To my guess p. 71 is Old English was homophonically translated and then machine remixed as a modified sestina.

   Right
   from marsh all-night moose send night
   lava image all forms passing a hider
   night forms the “send moose” button from a marsh
   marsh peal from a hidden sail
   send marsh from a sail letter
   forms passing raw button pearl under the lava
   moose trail from image letter
   left all buttons…send pearl future-passing letter

   According to blurbing, “fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman’s lament, or even a broken elegy.”
   p. 98, one paragraph of a 14 prose paragraph series that challenges other systems and “Their performed meaning Is making trash That other fields would call The notion of character” (p. 99)

   burnt stubble Lest the deforestation become too able Paring for their roles Bursts from “the stomach of memory” Meaning that lies Longing after Texts, people Not a continual process of being under leaspelle Stood in the rain in order to win an argument Great river without a hyrd Cells, whatever subseas they have gathered And contamination most other fields Would cull

   A refreshing change from the 40 line or less plot arc with a cream dollop of pathos.

6. micro haiku: three to nine syllables by George Swede (Inspress, 2014)

is a best of selection update. His collected was in 2002. These are 101 shorter haiku written between 1977 and 2013. Some he said have been published up to 10 times. Haiku can take a few kicks at the can, locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, broadsheets, chapbooks, magazines, anthologies and single author collections. p. 39

the gull with one leg      soaring

Short pieces can take as long or longer than long pieces. At first glance I thought one haiku per page should call for smaller format of book but if an idea is sound, it should hold a page of ground on equal basis with more words for the same idea. For only a few words there’s a lot of compassion poured in, acceptance and hope.
p. 41

watch repair shop      broken icicle

It gives a simple vignette yet is suggestive of something larger than the scene. As intricate as a watch is, it draws attention to all that can’t we fix or control. As helpless as we may be with a broken watch, someone has the skills to make it right but with ice, no hammer can set it right. It speaks to transience, to unbreak the cup. The two images are related in time and place yet different scales and with linkages. The tick of drip and the sound of watch. It is a certain kind of street that has a watch repair shop. A certain time and temperature with icicles. It is surprisingly rich as an observation.

7. glottal stop: 101 poems by Paul Celan, translated by Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh (Wesleyan Poetry, 2000)
   I haven’t ventured, that I recall into Paul Celan although people keep praising him so I’ll dip. This might not have been the best starting point. It’s a book acoustically by Heather McHugh. She would translate him because he resonates so there must be a similarity. I like her books, am very struck with them, but I don’t know if I’m closer to getting to Celan. Flipping back I see the answer to the regular question, how’d that word get in my head? p. 55 palaver.

   here the glassed-in
   spider altars in the facility’s
   overarching sprawl
   here the half-sounds
   (still there?),
   shades’ palaver
   here the ice-adjusted fears
   cleared for flight
   here the semantically X-rayed
   sound-proof shower-room
   with its baroque appointments […]
   [p. 58] In Böcklemünd cemetery, the
   hammershine from
   infinity
   races over the
   shallow inscription on the front,
   also over you,
   deep Brother Letter. […]
   [p. 62] Eyeshot’s island, broken
   into heartscript
   in the faint of the night, faintly lit
   by an ignition key.

   Hyphenated phrases are better than of-clauses because they take less time, but, man, I don’t know when I’ve seen a book with such a density of hyphens. It makes one attend to the part and the whole and slows reading and attention but. I realize that’s almost as trivial as commenting on distracting title font. But at random audit (p. 67-71) there are 18 hyphens and 5 em dashes in 7 half-full pages. It feels like there’s morse code secreted in. But within that, p 71 a sweet roll…

   Upholster the word-hollows
   with panther pelt,
   enlarge them, furback and furforth,
   senseback and senseforth,
   give them vestibules,ventricles, valves,
   furnish them with wilds, parietal,
   and listen for the second,
   every time their second, second
   sound

   What strikes me is probably not what you’d pull out. Perhaps. But there’s an intellectual awareness (p. 97) “consonant concussions, the /evidence largely screened out,// shield against stimuli: consciousness” and a different filter for the world that tickles with juxtaposition, (p. 98) “a menorah of mullein” or (p. 99) the insight and play in the frame of sound and pause, “what is lost gains/ rarity, clarity”.

8. Jail Fire by Julie C Robinson (Buschek, 2013)
   It looks like it should push all the right buttons. It is about a Quaker woman, about prison reform to more humane conditions. It’s looking from a Canadian context. I wanted to know more about Elizabeth Fry. The preface shows it was well-researched and it is vivid in details, the poems seem to be paler and vaguer that break cloud cover here and there, such as the poem in the voice of Joseph Fry. p 44, “Anniversary”

   “Who doesn’t enjoy chasing geese off the lawn?
   A sprint down the slop to the pond
         opens the body to the rhythm and breath.
         Each cell announces life.
   And you know how much I love to sing —
         my nearest approach to flight.
   In the beginning I realized I embarrassed you.
   My laugh too loud and ill-timed,
        when your speech has never yet been side-ways.
   You do all with amounts of considerations[…]
   I have kept my promise, Elizabeth.
   I have not been a fence between you
               and your god.
   I have not sung so loud as to overwhelm
   the whisperings of your spirit.
   but followed as far as I was able

   It has promise but comes across as foggy, remote, and pat too often. It also doesn’t focus on the prison. There’s a little. There are good lines, but not overall the book has not been worked with a fine tooth comb for long enough to make a tighter, denser more insightful work. A good edit could have taken it further. And yet valuable bits, such as this bit from p. 36 relating the voice of her uncle’s speech to Elizabeth, of his understanding of how sensibilities vary

   Your father celebrates the arts because he finds in them
   a living water
   whereas I am brought down,
   my spirit distracted, fragmented.
   The heath, its heather and gorse
   enough to bind me to a living truth.
   Religare God, my root, my life, my foundation.

9. Surge Narrows by Emilia Nielson (Leaf Press, 2013)
   This is a sweet book, especially the Pass Creek section where there’s the inward and the outward set on their own row of the page as two complementary narratives or soundtracks. Firm and quiet, sifting to find significance there’s a dexterity with language and metaphor.
   In “Sensorial” there’s a self-awareness and sound-awareness. p. 59

   II
   Agog in this landscape, loose,
   whole being eager — tongue.
   Every highway we’ve travelled
   flanked by broom, azure lupines.
   This diction is amorous. I don’t
   recongize my life on the page.
   Spread and winged, my hand
   searching the small of your back.

   I like the sharpness of rebuking the poem and yet, letting it stand. The lupines aren’t ejected from the poem’s possibility for us never to see, but moved past. The tone is corrected. And then it goes on even more amorous and yet more tactile. And in this road trip, it is not driver thru the night alone. There’s another person, not a foreign object-person who is inert.
   Thru the poems there’s a sense of place, and in the reading a sense of journey, and a sense of future, not just the past and present lock-stepped to each other.

   Kiss my collarbone, my someday tattoo:
   blue water lily. Offer me one breast.
   iii
   pray for a life without plot,
   a day without narrative.
   This kick of gas flame, weeping
   willow, for taprooted melancholia.
   Monotony, straight country gravel,
   traffic jeering past fallow fields.
   A millstone, a horse on the road:
   Slow Down and Circle Wide.

   A book I happily dipped into to read for a second time.

10. Desire Lines by Glen Downie (Wolsak & Wynn, 2002)

is the story of backpacking thru Europe 16 years after the gap year when cancer causes a call for a time out. Many are meditation to merge with the perspective of someone from history, like Gaudi or Freud. I always have had a weak spot for the term “desire lines”, those paths that people make that architects and city planners didn’t. I haven’t read one of his books before and he’s had at least 2 collections since. I don’t know if this is representative.
p. 36-37, Pigeons, St Mark’s Square

They are only
grey Skinnerian pawns
witlessly pecking wherever
crumbs may be found
Their take-off sound is a round
of gloved applause

Funny pattern to use sentence case, hyphens, question marks, exclamation marks, colons, apostrophes, but no periods or commas. It seems to shortchange the pigeons as individuals and a species but nice observation of sound. The text has a universal pall with loaded words like “self-loathing”, “curse”, “despised”, “fools”, “deceptions” and other general telling words. “The names of the months/sound to me like threats” (p. 75). Every country is full of the newsline headlines of historical traumas and devoid of meeting any individuals. There’s lists of objects but few moments and no variance in tone. p. 68-69 in “Exhausted”

with every step
we shouldered another burden:
           the Inquisition
Columbus & his consequence     By Dachau
we bent double with
the weight of the dead      We wore relic
finger-bone leg irons      slept in airless rooms
like ovens       Each night we rented
fresh-laundered sheets
on which to act out
our own falsely innocent history
& woke every morning grey
with weightless ash

11. Strangely Happy by Joan Margarit, translated by Anna Crowe, (Bloodaxe Books, 2008)
    Perhaps unsurprisingly is not happy. But considering how low one could feel in comparison, not too bad. Funny how often my favorite poems in a book are midway, not the opening handshake or high five, not the fierce closing wave. They tend to come in mid-conversation of the book, 40 pages in or so. p. 45

    Encounters
    Sometimes in very lonely places,
    like an airport bar or the berth
    of a night train,
    a wave of sadness wraps itself around me.
    It means she is passing close by me,
    and that she is walking determinedly away,
    supporting herself on her crutches, to the end of time.

    Many of his poems have a symbolic sort of allusion. He has a way with metaphor such as this bit out of p. 74’s “Evening falls on the Dead Sea”

    You, poisonous lake, are my childhood,
    salt sea of Bible stories,
    stagnant water which, when I tasted it,
    burned my gums and my tongue,
    like the prayers that they made me learn.
    They wanted to turn me into that sea,
    that has no opening, into an abstract
    mind, confined by desert.

    Too bad it turned out with so much bitterness and resistance. Any starting point can yield any direction. His didn’t work so well. Or it makes a good story.
    Many take place in motels or trains, all the interstitial spaces where one can stop to ponder not quite being anywhere or with anyone. There’s a grief mist hanging as he processes his daughter’s death. Modern poems, there’s chemotherapy, which seems to be the new alcoholism in poetry. In his poem about a hunter

    the animals’ warm blod searing
    the fur, the feathers, and his hands.
    There is nothing poetic in poetry.
    The gold of those dead eyes tells him autumn
    is nothing more than mud weighing down his shoes,
    the game’s stench in the days that follow
    and those who will be round the table to eat it all up
    with no thought of him, or how this old
    and futile ritual is killing him.

    That nails the blood sport aspect of confessional poetry and other hyperbolic equivalent of Upworthy link bait poetry. What does it do to the poet to play the game of creating a good story, untrue or making it true. Whole lives and poor choices excused in the name of being good creative fodder instead of living well then writing well, or as well as one can.

12. Black Suede Cave vby David Reibetanz (Guernica, 2013)
    This is more school of quietude and breath. It’s medium is its message and its message is quietude, breath, stillness and the poems have rubber edges to them. There are more poems about being than about any particular subject. There’s an angling for cosmic profound meditation. The mandala of the poem-built universe is orderly and intended such as “Findings” (p.44-45) where a purse is stolen in 2002 and when recovered a decade or so later, the time capsule indicates time has moved on. The explicit conclusion is that whatever happens is for the best from the good.
    “Ivy on Yew” (p. 50) has an emblematic weight for all the parasitic bad energies in the world but even it is neutered by being non-malicious, just a nature of being. In p. 57 “At the Glassworks” the glassblower blows into the mould the horse head,

    Now the beast solidifies,
    hardening to glass,
    cooling to hollow stillbirth.
    […] let me
    stay a liquid globe, a ball
    of becoming.
    Only by falling
    can I fly full tilt.
    Make me over
    and over again.

    It has a undercurrent of grief, longing and pang. Meanwhile in another ballpark,

13. The Loneliness Machine by Aaron Giovannone (Insomniac, 2013)
    It start out as self-aware, 4th wall-breaking stand-up. [egad, I’ve caught the hyphens] p. 14 “Just be Cool”

    I’m sitting at a picnic table
    at the beach.
    No use pretending I’m not.
    You?
    You’re reading this poem
    in my prize-winning collection,
    The Loneliness Machine.
    Me?

    and it goes a few more times back and forth. By the 3rd section of the book, it was less entertaining patter but more foothold. Fav might be “A Poem isn’t a Memory” which still fidgets against it’s risk of being unanimated on the page. Taken from midway,

    A poem is a way of being alone.
    But I’d rather
    have my hand on your thigh.
    My hand’s on my thigh.
    I sink into this leather chair
    and sink into a drink
    with comfortable friends.
    Stella sewed “Cuddlebots”
    from old sweatshirts
    that belonged to the baby’s grandfather.
    Thus the old man lives
    in every squeeze of her baby’s fingers.

    The poem isn’t content to rest there, even end its page there on a potentially papercut ending but goes up and down about the toy, and feelings deflected into humour and resilience, “Of my two thousand daily recommended calories, more than two thousand/ will come from Nutella” and then another softer note. He has confident craft and control of the language and feels aware of the audience and perhaps, people’s attention spans which are shorter than previously so another bit of pop of treat is sewn along the crumb trail at random intervals. I like how he doesn’t do the rule of simplication of one poem = one idea = one plot and its payoff.

14. The Blue Tower by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Michael Biggins (Houton Mifflin, 2011) is more random than your average spam message. ADD? What am I looking at. Why?, I might ask if he was a university kid trying out oulipo but he’s in 40-books deep and translated to 20 languages. “Fra Angelico’s/ tongue is tin. The ants on it are the hills of/ Tuscany.” How do you create that? He likes surreal and is soundy. A whole line is “Phallus — radish.”
    By cover blurb promise, he does quotidian and surreal and is witty. The poem of p. 9, is more cohesive as a run of lines than most, starting with a title to miscue then a romp in what is the part of speech relationship in phrase. You have to be in the right mood, but then, the same would be true for someone’s plodding sopping memoir rendered with a lot of white space too.

    We Build a Barn and Read Reader’s Digest
    Quick ostrich. Quick ostrich. Quick sand. Quick sand.
    Quick line. Quick grass. The white juice from celeste Aïda.
    and forgot-to-take-it dries up. The one
    trampled by sheep (down below), Grischa and Beatrice
    (up above) converse. They’d recognize each other in
    a cover, a box, a jacket, a picture, in moss and trampled
    dirt. At this angle of the sky
    no pictures are allowed. Corpses are rapped up like
    shelves. Dismiss the footprint. Wipe your eyes.
    Stop pilfering. Grapeshot gets tangled up.
    I go paying visits with my lives.
    Here I just romped and touched the rug
    with a yellow shoulder. I don’t know what a word is.
    To dry out moth! when on your white towel you see
    a scorpion? El Alamein! Where is the difference?
    Rommel was kissing heaven’s dainty hands, and yet
    from his airplane above the Sahara, my uncle
    Rafko Perhauc, still blew him to bits.

    “This ant has a wrinkle on its wing” to “Mangle your hands./ Die them in a stork, so that/ the golden gray gushes.” (p. 36) A lot of the poems have violent images but it shifts from neutral to death to comic and may mix in Italian at any time.
    p. 18 may give some rationale inside the initially disorienting irrational

    hey, there are no metaphors here, Jure would be pleased,
    no he wouldn’t, this would be too frivolous for him, we’re left
    where we are, we remain, we’ve had a nice life,
    we have one. I saw a spider while I shaved,
    le matin, le chagrin, I’ve got to get something out

    “If you like your poems rational, if you like them unified, if you like or require a coherant voice, elegant arguments, recognizable poetic conventions, traditional tropes, a story or backstory, then you may find yourself frustrated.” says a (silly-handled) reviewer at Amazon.

Enough for one read, I’d imagine. I’ll sort out more books for the next one.
btw, I’m on twitter, also as pesbo, and at 9-10 tweets a day I’ll crest 6000 within 2 weeks.