Wrapping up the year of reading, finishing up books from the almost done shelf. I briefly thought of scanning in each cover but then, how about this instead?
There’s not much linking this set thematically. Some books overlap in style or obsessions but as a group it’s more time and place than subjects. 163 total. With the gender stats at the end and a link to all the book lists from 2013.
- How to Love a Lonely Man by Rhonda Douglas (Apt 9 Press, 2013)
I look forward to the longer collection of this which is entitled “For”. I’ve heard some of these at open mics and I think it’s her strongest work to date. If you don’t have one the print run is only 50 at Apt 9 so get it if you still can. Lovely ideas turning against ideas. It mixes intellect, emotion and concrete observation in a good fuel ratio. Here’s a sample out of “One Year Later”,When rejected the brain in an MRI
lights up as in love.
Look, I’m a Christmas tree for you,
the fridge light that won’t go out,
ache that tastes like nothing,
evaporation of ice.
On the stairs in my front hall
a gift for you, bought in a moment
of weakness at Heathrow, T5, Also, a card,
Smithson’s, T3.“Song for July 1st” is superb for its playfulness, intensity and melding of geography, geology, and bodies. Can I take a core sample from it? It is best in entirety but to take it from the middle,
Everything between us is Pre-Cambrian now –
let’s say this means we haven’t quite peaked
yet my love, let’s say tis iambic echo of breath signifies [ ],
slide of skin over skin some manifestation of what happens
in the middle, round about Manitoba. Touch me here and
invoke the three seas. Oh, I never thought I could love
Moose Jaw like this. - Six Weeks by Richard Scarsbrook (Turnstone Press, 2013)
I guessed the title comes from either 6 week fling or 6 weeks after a fling. It is obsessive thinking about a past lover. The title poem is about being separated for potentially 6 months like Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in the movie, then deciding on 6 weeks. It makes a lot of reference to Gene Kelly era musicals. Most of which I haven’t seen so I’m the wrong audience.
Some have a chatty tone for internal monologue. There’s a 6 page list poem of why I love you such as “maybe I love you because of the way/your small perfect breast/fits neatly in/to the cleft in my chest/when we dance”.
I liked “Rule of Three” where 2 dozen common words to block together are set up in contrastliberty equality fraternity
faith hope and charity
paper scissors rock“This Poem Has No Cash Value” was a chuckle, set up as a coupon to surrender.
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This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For by Al Rempel (Caitlin Press, 2013)
The title is catchy. Apparently everyone loves a good Apocalypse. Flipping though p. 13 “sleep-soaked” is a pretty awesome phrase but it is more pleasingly dense than most of the book.
The poems broker in general anxiety of sedentary domestic life. There’s a fuzzy calm and fuzzy anxiety. There’s a lot of sitting and waiting poems, on a ridge, in bed, on lawn chairs, on a dock, on a porch, in traffic. The narrator is watching sky, rain, swimsuits, malls, accident memorials, imagining then unimagining, children in the bath are in danger. There are poems that play in hypothetical surreals like p. 43, “Urban Dreams” that ask, what if when you dream or being a bear or crow, if you can’t stop dreaming?but what if one night, before dawn
you couldn’t quite get back into your body?
ribcage too tight, lips pressed
and not wide open in its usual clatter,
toes – I don’t know where
you normally get in
or go out – curled under
like hotel sheets tucked in at the end
what then?I rather liked, p. 46 “This Day, All Day, The Trees are Drapes” where “flowers put on lipstick for the bees, pucker/ I can almost hear the p./ except the birds are hanging around, singing/when she sits down at the café, she pulls out a parachute/attends to it with needle and nylon thread/the way lips attend to the edge of a porcelain cup”. Later in the poem the seamstress “looks around at the sky the way birds do”
- Radiant Life Forms by Diana Brebner (Netherlandic Press, 1990)
I felt remiss for not reading this. Yet it is a hard book for me to get into because it’s a checklist of against my grain. Full of general nouns, like vaguebooking: light, earth, glowing, blood, ghosts, spirits, angels, children, (always stripped of their individuality) birds (always stripped even of their species), cry, terrible. No critical mind. The first set of poems was about kids being beaten and immolation. Somehow the kids being beaten seemed abstract and pretty. Odd. Still, it’s not your materials but what you do with it. One can make great art with duct tape if you have the eye. The poem I came closest to liking (despite the vocabulary, punctuation, stanza and line breaks) was p. 53Bioluminescence
I come to you with this luminous heart. It
wasn’t always transparent, or glowing. Now,
I shine in the dark like a primitive fish.
Radiant life form. Bioluminescence is such
a big word for what has happened. Perhaps
it comes from drinking the water. Nothing
is safe anymore, when I know you can look
right through me. It is nice though, to
shine like a nuclear clock at night. You find
your way to my green delight, bask in the
radiance of my affection.One grows more by reading what one dislikes that what goes with the bias, I’m told. Let’s assume she intended the effect so end of lines don’t act like semantic anchors and break against the flow of syntax to disrupt or trouble the reading. It sets that up against flowery language. Was the poem before or after her chemo? “I shine in the dark like a primitive fish.” and “You shine/your way to my green delight” are the lines that sing for me. Is it about love with a person or comic relationship to cancer treatment? Or both?
p. 30 has the sweetest poem, “Awake to the Silent Morning” (which incidentally uses the same line techniques despite a very different tone) starts,This is a new definition of silence: amid
the unnatural quiet of children, awake in
their rooms, but not yet awake in ours,
and the sounds which count as quiet in
our world: snow falling, birds drifting
down to the feeder to quarrel over seed,
the snow-plows out on the highway moving
between the three fir trees and our red
maple, bones creaking through a long winter.And eventually the kids detect the parents are awake. It’s nothing I’ll ever experience but the report rings true from here, lifelike and even touching. And that’s what writing is good for, to experience what you wouldn’t otherwise.
- Surge Narrows by Emilia Nielson (Leaf Press, 2013)
When did Leaf Press make the leap into spine-books? An articulate book grounded in internal and external observations, I like Pass Creek chapter with the upper 2/3 of page devoted to walking a landscape and the bottom with an italic line of self talk. p. 44 exemplifies the poet at home with contradiction. In the last half of the poemA late night phone call makes me long for a pickup
grinding down the dirt road and, after fucking,
to be held. The blue desire.
Song breaks through radio static;
robins whistle as wind tears through trees.
Fill the outdoor bathtub with rainwater,
kindle pine branches and spruce sap, light a match,
smoke and steam rising while I soak,
buoyant, unable to move
Become lost, undone. Return to what was never lost.The “light a match,/smoke” is a playful turn, referring back and forward, hinging it well while the idea of being buoyant therefore lifted, and yet fixed, paralyzed almost, by relaxation contrast sweetly.
Later, In Sensorial, p 55ii
Agog in this landscape, loose,
whole being eager – tongue.
Every highway we’ve travelled
flanked by broom, azure lupines.
This diction, amorous. I don’t
recognize my life on the page.
Spread and winged, my hand
searching the small of your back.A hand as wing searching is unexpected and lovely. I have a soft spot for poems that question themselves and double-back against themselves. What is deemed “poem-worthy” is good to question. I like the sharpness of rebuking the poem and yet, letting it stand. The lupines aren’t ejected but the tone is corrected. And then it goes on even more amorous and yet more tactile. I admire a poem where there is not the poet isolated from the rest of humanity with a gap. We travel the highway. In other hands, the poet is a passenger and incidentally there is some other human with an infinite distance or bitterness or otherwise back of palm to forehead.
- The Grey Tote by Deena Kara Shaffer (Signal, 2013)
Another book about parental death and cancer. Who says there is no quintessentially contemporary subject. It’s cancer. She conveyed the pluck and contradictions inherant in disease and death, p. 35Comeabout
She needed the endline,
the terminal verdict.
Hopelessness renwed her
hope, made her funny.
In knowing it wouldn’t be
long, she sought harder to thrive.
Held both the soon of ending
and faith in remiss.
Scans injected
momentum. Paralysis made her
hungry. Her cancer wasn’t catchable,
but boy, her belief in wellness was.Later in “Grief Management” she acts as a witness to other ways we cope assuring self or reader, we do what we do. Life persists even happily, even when it seems absurd or inappropriate.
- Engagement Calendar by Mary Aird Rutherford (Inanna Publications, 2013)
Also another memoir in poetry of cancer and death, but in this case, also, the husband is ill and has gone deaf, the mom dies, the dog dies, the narrator goes through cancer, the sister has an aneurism and a break-in. Annus horribilis. Poetry acts as a witness, testimony and I suppose support because people feel isolated in such circumstances and to have a log on the fire saying, come, someone else has been there too stores up some heat.
It’s not about what happens for plot in poetry so much as how it is expressed, conveyed. My favorite piece from the book is “Primum Vivere”, p 37-40. from a section of p. 38Two millimeters separate healthy tissue from diseased.
To think a millimeter is a measure smaller than this dash –,
Each unexplained ache, each twinge seems a sign of cancer
spreading, rogue cells infiltratin liver, brain and bones.
You find sanity in simple acts: cream on chaffed hands,
lighting dinner candles, squeezing breakfast oranges.
Morning are spent walking in a nearby park. A child
threads a red kite under clouds. Such power.
Such possibility. A woman on a bench, glasses askew,
reads headlines in the news. Even with glasses
firmly on our face, cancer tricks your vision:
a “tiny dancer” becomes a “tiny cancer,” a book cover,
Carry My Bones, turns into Cancer in my Bones.
Obituaries are your daily reading. Your hoard the age
at which the victim died, how long she battled for her life.
There no one whimpers into death, all seem so brave.
You pull yourself tall, not wanting to seem wanting,
wonder when the blue jays’ brassy call, the soughing
in the trees, the scent of lupins will once again astonish.Ah, lupines again. Another odd cross-tie. Over the last 3 days, 3 books separately mentioned Camus, hummingbirds and cancer.
- Blindsight by Rosmarie Waldrop (A New Directions Book, 2003)
This was a much underlined book. It spurred off all kinds of poem fragments. I got torn about reading faster or stopping because I didn’t want the book to end. Checking how many pages left was more not wanting the number to be small.
Although there’s a rotation of vocabulary like Brebner’s, it’s more of a return to theme from a new context than revolving in the words. Each line may not follow from the previous so the reading is different than lyrical storytelling. for example, a section from p. 32 with its questioning perception and interrogating one’s own thoughts and notions that float out there,A riddle is anything pure. In pure memory (what is pure memory? and where?) I might know my image. But not find a caption. Though a name of my own I have no matter what time of year.
p. 44
And how to talk to. I don’t know. The dead. We’ve drained the symbols so our stories be cool. But it would take. The depth of years we stand on. The sea. Frequencies out of range. And air. Insurmountable in its lack of resistance.
Love those last two sentences in particular. I can’t say why but my hair stood up.
I hear reference to We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks in there.
The poems construct and decontruct. You never know where it will turn next. Each stanza is a room. p. 61,When he leaves the room, he recaptures a memory called meaning. A matrix where a word is carried by a foreign language. Say “th.” Say the whole word: “death.”
A backwards forwards sort of surprise. If the element symbolizes the whole, why should only the first letter stand for it? Why not the last sound for the last thing? Each line feels intelligence driven, long thought out and impulsively fresh, both.
In “Musil as Potential, Aloof” p. 68-69,His strange attachments. No logical objections can be advanced in small areas. So that philosophers could see what kind of unborn forest for the trees. He takes refuge in the next thing to be done. He’d go mad inside the blindspot, the place of no proof.
Ah salivatory and salutatory. It is that arguing something with pedantic logician who dismisses everything as insufficient proof, too much unmeasurable subjectivity, so one’s lived experiences are invalid as evidence of harm.
- Cascadia by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Poetry, 2001)
This is apparently a part of a multi book series, each exploring water, air, earth and fire. I shall have to get others in it. A delight to read. I wonder if Vivian Demuth in Fire Watcher had read the same text, p. 4 is right justified. I’m not sure I can do that without right justifying everything. El Niño Orgonon has “punctuation like beach-flies”, hotels, stars and this,
When you think it ends, the medium is played with. The next page has centred mid-page(enter: The “we”–)
A lovely playfulness.
And later, in Fresno Lunette/Predella environmental protest, a history of religion, agriculture, cash, life choices all mix together freely and hip-bump hard enough to bruise.
- Revelator by Ron Silliman (BookThug, 2013)
p. 42
The 5 word lines that comprise the whole book create more structure than I expected. The lines that end-stop give a whomp. The others create juxtapositions. “On the window glass, because” for example stands alone as our nature is to be a moth beating on a window glass, but then it elaborates a different direction, “we are heliocentric”. What animates thoughts? The bloody boned machine itself? Does the thought send word to bone and bone word to thought?
Later p. 68, at Yosemite falls, the sidetone because sidenotes also comprise the whole,“Yohemite,
h, not an s, means
in West Miwok, speaking of
the Aliwahnee, “some of them
might be killers”then travel along to p. 71
by the corner of where
the garage used to be
bougainvillea that ate childhood home
any ghost there would be
my mother’s mother, unquenchable anger
echoes forward even now, some
of them might be killers
San Quentin’s sad yellow expanse
no longer remoteThe same subjects of the terraformed world loop back, including San Quentin which is another part of the book-length poem was remarked on for being all green inside. The image seemed to make it, like the sea, like a shell that catches grit.
Overall so far as CWILA count goes, I was surprised at how even the numbers turned out. A run of male authors in a row and I think it’s going to be skewed.
Out of 163 books, 19 books by mixed gender, 71 by males, 73 by females. Some of those by males were about females, or published by females, and those by females about males, published by males. Here’s a link back to all the list. You may remember a year ago, I just listed titles and deciding that not very useful started adding excepts as well.
Part 16, Part 15, Part 14, Part 13, Part 12, Part 11, Part 10, Part 9, Part 8, Part 7, Part 6, Part 5, Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, Part 1.
Books I thought I’d finish by year’s end but didn’t quite make it. Brenda, note you pushed me over the edge; I got The Civic-Mindedness of Trees for myself for xmas.
Absent from the photo: A Writer’s Life: The Margaret Laurence Lectures and Deconstructing Product Design edited by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa (Rockport Publishers, 2009) . Also reading on digital, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostovesky, The Ambassadors by Henry James, The Innocence of Father Brown by CK Chesterton and Utopia by Sir Thomas More.
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