Review of HIGH COUNTRY, chapbook by Arthur Winfield Knight

Review of HIGH COUNTRY, chapbook by Arthur Winfield Knight, Presa:S:Press, Box 792, Rockford, Michigan 49341, www.presapress.com, 32 pages, cover art by Ronnie M. Lane, $6.00.

By Barbara Bialick

I’m so glad I have a copy of Mr. Knight’s HIGH COUNTRY. I can stash it away with my favorite poetry “refer to” books. You should grab one, too, and try to figure out how he could present such perfect, narrow poems, only 20 lines or more, story teller vignettes that keep his clear voice of the historian, artist and observer of Nevada and California always fitting that guy in the picture wearing a cowboy hat and a big, snide smile.

This chapbook is the author’s first collection of poetry in ten years. But just to pick it up and check the compliments on the back of the book and to stare at that mystical green cactus on the cover, it starts you out with positive feelings before even reading it.
He’s apparently an expert who’s published more than 3,000 poems, short stories, and film reviews that “chronicle life in the old and contemporary west” that have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and more. His bio claims “Knight’s poetry remains one of the most distinctive voices of his generation” in the small press. (He was born in 1937).

The book opens as he and his wife Kit have just moved from California to Nevada. How could you not want to read a poem called “THE WHOREHOUSES AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.” He writes, “We’ve driven past them/for thirty years, but it’s different now./We moved from California to Nevada/two weeks ago. Everything’s different./Slot machines are everywhere: in grocery stores, gas stations, whorehouses, chocolate factories,/Laundromats and strip joints…/and the owner of Casino West/runs ten thousand head of cattle…”

One of my favorite poems is THE TUMBLEWEEDS. He took some of that rural Nevada plant and mailed it to an American West buff in England. The post office charged eleven fifty and stamped it “Fragile”. Two weeks later the English man said it was tumbling well in his back garden. The poem concludes: “it’s stamped all over FRAGILE,/but it’s Tough as Old Boots,/and has been bouncing across the desert/for Donkey’s Years./What’s wrong with those people/at the post office?”

Some the other poem titles include, MORGAN FREEMAN COMES TO SACRAMENTO, BIBLE THUMPERS, WYATT EARP, CROP DUSTERS, DUELING PIZZAS, and WEED HEIGHTS, NEVADA. The only problem is it’s just a little chapbook. On the other hand, that’s part of its magic. Read it fast and realize that now as even an easterner you sort of get something of the flavor of the American West from a western point of view

The Somerville News Writers Festival--The Poster

( Click on picture to enlarge)

Moments Around the Campfire With a Vietnam Vet

Moments Around The Campfire

With a Vietnam Vet

Thom Brucie

Cervena Barva Press

2010 $7.00

　

Brucie introduces the reader to what appears to be a ghost,

poems hidden in script, wrapped in a worn out leather satchel,

a gift which many still try to brush aside as a 'then thing.' The

reader is brought into the presence of verse, given an opportunity

to receive what is given, or to reject what was:

…"Harold liked to watch

the war across the bay,

tracers arching under the moon like

the 4th of July,

reflecting orange along the tongues

of the waves

in rhythm to the sounds of gunburst.

It calmed him down.

Sometimes he'd doze a little

and wake up before sunrise

and pick up

right where he left off."

The poems stark realities carry the veteran's voice deep into what

'surpasses,' why we expect a soldier to fight without an understanding

of the actuality of meanings and all the many ways to lose:

"There was a kid from Spokane named Quincy.

He went to church and didn't cuss.

He loved his girlfriend named Alice

since high school.

He stayed away from the whorehouses,

but he would drink a beer

sometimes on a real hot night.

When his "Dear John" letter arrived,

he cried.

He asked for emergency leave,

but nobody gets leave for love,

so he took an R&R to Hawaii

and got on a commercial plane in Honolulu

headed for Seattle.

He figured if he could talk to Alice

he could fix everything,

but the Mps arrested him before

he got out of the airport.

They put him in the stockade for six months

and later sent him back to Da Nang

for another tour.

By the time he got home,

Alice had two daughters and a station wagon."

Each lasting story works as part of a unit, bringing the same conclusions;

coming back from disastrous 'situations' is daunting, is life altering:

　

…"The explosion flung his body in a somersault,

and a piece of angle from the frame stuck in his forehead

like a piece of glass might penetrate a piece of soft wood.

When he hit the tree, the impact broke his hip

and the recoil broke his jaw.

He felt pretty bad when he passed out."

…"They flew him back to the states in a commercial airplane

which landed in Oakland

on a day some protesters were demonstrating.

One of them threw a rubber filled with urine

at Mark,

and when it hit him, it broke

covering his face and jacket.

One of the other protesters called to him,

"welcome him, baby killer."

Tightly wrapped in clean narratives, Brucie records: "the hissing, acid

steam of monsoons…"

This is the best chapbook of the year 2010. It cuts close to the bone

with healing portraits of a real war and peace; stark, sharp, shadows…

and within the shadows of each poem is forgiveness. Bravo…Thank You

Welcome Home.

　

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Review of A Prayer for Everyone by Tomas O’Leary

Review of A Prayer for Everyone by Tomas O’Leary

Review by Lawrence Kessenich

Broadly speaking, most of the poems in Tomas O’Leary’s new collection fall into two categories: idea poems and story/character poems. Most of the idea poems occur in the two earlier sections of the book, “What One Has Said” and “Confession on a Tight Budget.” Most of the story/character poems occur in the final section, “A Sorceress of Rate Note.”

I find the idea poem daunting, but O’Leary takes on the form with unbridled gusto—and often with humor. In the section’s title poem, “What One Has Said,” he examines “truth” and “candor:”

I speak now only that I not be lying.
If I should die before I wake, well, hell,
at least the light is on. The darkness drops again
each time I hesitate. I train my tongue
into orbit around silences.

Even a poem about a cat named Ashes ends up a Buddhist meditation:

The cage of consciousness is not hers to pace
As she flattens down to refuge in the Buddha.
Lordly, they take the sun together,
Fur and stone – the ravager
And the holy one, fast friends…

O’Leary has a clever way of personifying ideas, so that they’re not just dry thoughts, but things that move around in front of the reader, as in “Hands Without Pockets,” where the contrast between what men and women do with their hands says much about the differing natures of the two sexes:

So often have women turned
their hands into grace, through gesture
or occupation, without

misgivings all will come out
right, they clearly manage
naked. Men, though, are lost, their hands

determined to hide deep in their pockets…

I was so enamored of O’Leary’s ability to manipulate ideas in his poems that I wanted more, so my less enthusiastic response to the story/character poems probably reflects that wish. It’s not that the cast of characters isn’t interesting and colorful: “The Perfectionist’s Midlife Crisis,” “Dick Cheney on Iambic Truth Serum,” “A Monk Gone Larking,” “The Alehouse Lion Rises and Orates.” The book’s first and title poem, “A Prayer for Everyone,” which might have served better as the introduction to this last section, captures O’Leary’s appreciation for the wonderful variety of human nature:

Blessed are the saved and the damned, for both
are born to blessing;
Blessed are the best and the worst, the wisest,
the most foolish;
Blessed are the fallen, the risen, the reverent,
and the ghoulish.

And he delineates these characters, tells their stories, with great enthusiasm. The “Monk Gone Larking” is not actually a monk, but the thumb of coast-to-coast hitchhiker who meets a lovely lass along the way:

…as I pass her the blackberry brandy.
She takes a belt that’s neither

greed nor daintiness and passes
back the bottle. Does she mind
if I smoke? Hell no,

go right ahead, do I have
any hemp, ha ha? I do ha ha.
Now the Chevy’s on air jets five feet

above the highway, in perfect gear…

“The Book of Shite” pillories a mythical landlord, Lord Owen Shite – I’m assuming he’s meant to be an English landlord in Ireland – and the ass-kissing Irish priest who convinces the Irish, represented by Doug MacDeep, that serving Shite is an honor:

In jags contumely strove
the florid pigwit Doug MacDeep
to caution tenants by the drove
they’d Christwise best contain their peep,
scale down the larder and eke out
the doubled rent since sunset last
they must be paying Owen Shite,
who suffers them to till his dust.
…

The priest was circumspect and pure,
a man of God who loved a story:
Spreading his subject like manure,
he harvested a Shite of glory!

Though certainly bold and enthusiastic, these story/character poems don’t quite have the impact for me that O’Leary’s idea poems have. He’s clearly a man of profound thought, even when he’s making ideas do cartwheels for us. In fact, it’s those cartwheels that help us reconsider ideas in a new light – and how many writers of poetry or prose are capable of making us do that?