Review, THE BLOOD OF A TOURIST by William Taylor, Jr.,

Review, THE BLOOD OF A TOURIST by William Taylor, Jr., Sunnyoutside, PO Box 911, Buffalo, New York 14207, 92 pages, $13, 2014

Review by Barbara Bialick

In the title poem, “The Blood of a Tourist,” poet William Taylor, Jr. says he, Taylor, is like the tourist with blood so cold, he “could only look away” at the wino, “a wounded beast/drunk on the wine/of our fear…”

This is a collection that speaks of the “terror” in life—and “the people you try not to look at”:

“I awoke with the terror today/…this morning it lingered/in the unmade bed/the dirty dishes…/I saw it in the man on the bus/and the woman in the grocery store/and wondered if they saw it/in me/…most everyone knows the terror/more than they will say/.”

Taylor says he was born “with a weak heart and frightened eyes”—“I met the big nothing early on,” he says, having “to let others walk the world/as if they had some place in it.”

This reviewer had a similar feeling when I was young and felt like the author writes, “myself content with dreams/of little rooms with little windows/looking out upon the rain…”

Other sad people (or the secretly sad) could relate to these spare but arresting poems:  “It suddenly strikes me/that so many lives could be made/from all we’ve simply/thrown away…”

William Taylor, Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, California. His other book titles are BROKEN WHEN WE GOT HERE (Epic Rites, 2013), AN AGE OF MONSTERS (Epic Rites, 2012), and THE HUNGER SEASON (Sunnyoutside, 2009).  Many of his poems have previously appeared in a wide variety of literary publications.

Reviewer Barbara Bialick is the author of TIME LEAVES and NEVER RETURNS (Ibbetson Street Press).

REVIEW OF SEA-LEVEL NERVE (BOOK ONE), PROSE POEMS BY JAMES GRABILL,

REVIEW OF SEA-LEVEL NERVE (BOOK ONE), PROSE POEMS BY JAMES GRABILL, Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC, publisher, La Grande, OR 97850, 2014

Review by Barbara Bialick

This an environmentally emotional book of 94 pages of prose poems.  At first, the poems rolled along like a wheel of time that spoke of the wearing down of Nature in our industrial disaster.  However, I soon could not stand to read one lumbering poem after another…until I had my own a-ha moment… The poems are listed in alphabetical order according to title!

Therein lies the San Andreas Fault line of the whole book. You don’t just list your poems in alphabetical order…  You have to place the poems in juxtaposition to each other in terms of sound, picture, topic, theme and so on.

Fortunately for me, the reviewer and you, the reader, the author made one other very helpful alphabetical list—the impressive array of literary magazines that each published one or two of his better titles.  I went right for some of the magazines that I felt usually had good taste and picked out some lines for you in an un-alphabetical manner:

From Wilderness House Literary Review, “In the Santuary of our Midwest Wisdom Religion”:  “Dark-red ancestral robes in the stained-glass sanctuary…close to the professor with his Bach hair the wind blew as he walked in rehearsing/He’s half sitting, half standing, playing four parts of the hymn on the organ at once, opening pipe-tornado tremolo…”

From Pemmican Online, “Exposure”:  “A few moments and his temperature had become 400 mm of mercury still cooling after his birth, his voice floating with studs as when the windy Great Lakes Bay had become eutrophic, when all the perch died on the sand.”

From Salamander, “The Idea of Throwing Tires”:  “Oil grease slips around the axle that turns within industry, as Junior hauls ass on the tow motor, wild/from breathing in downtown Toledo where little exists in 1967 but trouble at worked…”

From “The Bitter Oleander”, “Night Fog”:  “Walking through the body of fog we’re being lifted to an ancient place where angels disappear and only night would wait longer than fog for final lightening fires at the end of forests to turn back into rock, or the voiceless hands holding back this stretch of time.”

James Grabell, the author, has been publishing poetry in the U.S. and internationally since the early 1970s. He earned an MFA from Colorado State University, where he also taught writing.  He also taught at the Oregon Writers’ Workshop, at Clackamas and Portland Community College, among other places. He also has long experience writing on environmental topics.  He has published seven books of poems, two books of essays, and two poetry chapbooks. He is a long-time resident of Portland, Oregon.



******The reviewer, Barbara Bialick has published two poetry chapbooks from Ibbetson Street Press, TIME LEAVES and NEVER RETURNS

The Aurorean, Fall/Winter 2012-2013

 

REVIEW OF THE AUROREAN LITERARY MAGAZINE

By Barbara Bialick

The Aurorean, Fall/Winter 2012-2013, Volume XVII, Issue 2, ISSN 1521-2013, $11, Publisher/Editor: Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, Encircle Publications, LLC, P.O. Box 187,

Farmington, ME 04938, USA.

Statement of Purpose: the Aurorean “seeks to publish inspirational, meditational, and/or poetry reflective of the Northeast. Do not submit by e-mail. Address is above. Website:

http://www.encirclepub.com. Note: The Aurorean is also made available to Bookshare, an on-line library of digital books for people with disabilities.

The new Aurorean is dedicated to snow on a country road, as the cover photo implies. The two feature poets are Shelley Girdner and Steve Ausherman—who won $30 for Best-Poem-of-Last-Issue, called “Breaking Upon the Anvil.”

Shelley Girdner’s poem “A Snowstorm Every Week for a Month”, has original snow imagery such as “It’s sky that’s fallen at my feet…the blankness around me/like all the chalk ever erased from boards…”  In “The Dinner Party”, the poet luxuriates in fine images as “to be at the end/of the night, luxuriating in goodbye./Each detail gathers a little sadness to it:/the lemon rind at the bottom of a glass,/a cherry stem tied and left…”

Featured poet Steve Ausherman also writes beautiful imagery, line upon line in “The Weight of Returning Winter”:

Abiquiu Lake lies low upon the land/

With skin reflecting the dull sheen of an iron skillet./

Sleet mixing with snow/

Breaks the skin of the land like mosquitoes on pink skin./

Surrounding mountains hide from sight/

As storm clouds drape a veil over their granite faces./

The windshield wipers play a washtub bass/

Over the tenor chords of sideways-blowing wind/…

Robert K. Johnson, a local Boston-area poet is also included in this issue with the poem “Man’s Best Friend.”

Widely published poet Lyn Lifshin has a poem called “Before the First Red Comes Into the Maples”:

“the young girl’s dreams/are of him. On the line,/wet bathing suits hang/like wild birds, their/cotton wings camoaflage/her leap from sheets/she hasn’t touched…”

If you love finely crafted nature poetry, you might enjoy reading and submitting to the Aurorean. It has “published over a thousand poets world-wide since 1995. Several times it has been named a “Pick” by Small Press Review.

THE WREN’S CRY by Dorian Brooks

THE WREN’S CRY by Dorian Brooks (Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143) $15.


Review by Barbara Bialick


Dorian Brooks’ THE WREN’S CRY, is a great volume of poetry, which deserves to be better known, for it’s in the league of famous poets, far and wide.

She both enriches and breaks our hearts with well-edited, polished lyrics carved out of love, nature and memory. But don’t stop till you read the last poems, which will almost kill you with their powerful anti-war messages, one after another, landing as a dead monarch butterfly on Sitting Bull’s hat…

The book calmly but pointedly begins with memories of her family, first with her grandfather leaving his little girl (Brooks’ mother) his”collection of speckled eggs”
She says, “It’s from him I inherit/my sense of the natural order…” But she’s not so rational that she doesn’t see nature’s transformative power, hinting at reincarnation of the soul, even as creatures or plant life. She says her own mother may have had the “soul of a butterfly” or could be heard in “The Wren’s Cry”. She envisioned herself coming back as tumbleweed…”how often I whizzed past/the little things/…a wavering comb of moments behind me.”

Her memories and creativity help her create such vivid images, as when she imagines her father talking to Bach “On a Cold April Day.” In “The Wish” she wants to be talking with him over a beer instead of waiting as he “finished revising despair’s long manuscript.”

She moves from her parents to her sometimes traveling husband. They share the love of nature. In “The Willows”, she notes. “How beautiful (the willows) are” she writes of the trees, “in their sadness”…/Timeless, they touch the depths of loss…lithe as dancers/mourning whole kingdoms…I harbor sorrow on my own shore, /among my own kind”. Then she brings us to “Ground Zero”, where she just discovered the death of their baby boy happened at the same time as the largest ever underground nuke test in November, 1971 in the Aleutian Islands: “and I can’t help thinking, /No wonder you left.”

People are also expressed as that part of nature in which they get ill…from her breast cancer to her husband’s heart attack. She muses about a neighbor she never knew who apparently died of suicide, but having a view of the same Blue Spruce that she loved. She touches on her academic side with a tribute to a professor who died: “the dark earth yields its shimmering tassels.” She calls on the Celtic goddess of poetry but also reminds us of the death of young girls who used to paint radium on watch faces.

Naturalism deftly falls into politics. In a powerful scene she asks us to imagine a place being named not for a famous man, but for a woman giving birth some time in history on that spot. In “Historical Marker” she writes: ‘On this site, no man/was ever bayoneted/or shot, not battle /fought for God or country./But once , long ago a woman lay here/gasping and straining/…for hours, then lifted/her baby to her breast…”





Keep reading. You will love these poems, such as “Whales”: “the heart/is an open book where/nothing is written except/whom we shall love, whom not/snow on water.”
And you must read the book through to the end where she presents a potent batch of anti-war poems good enough to finish off the book as well as the reader!

She speaks against current wars in “Friendly fire” or” How the Dead Come Back To Us”…to “Tumbleweeds” where she describes herself as an innocent cow girl with her toy guns shooting the imaginary Indians, not realizing then the tragedy of her game. Which leads to “Mariposa”, a Spanish butterfly…being the name of the “U.S. battalion/sent to fight the Indians/who lived in what became/Yosemite National Park…Mariposa. I can’t get/the sound out of my head/as I stare at the famed/black and white photo/of the park’s great Half Dome,/pale moon rising over/sheer rock, no living thing/in sight. Maybe the souls/ of the dead really do/come back as butterflies--/or else maybe as words/that,when spoken, flutter/across time, on wings/brighter than blood.”

Her words are certainly bright. As assistant editor of the literary review “Ibbetson Street”
she is a big part of the “small press” scene in Somerville, Massachusetts. But she deserves to also be a part of the “big press” which oozes out of academia, rarely noticing all the talent the small press finds. She is definitely part of that talent!


--Barbara Bialick is the Author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)