Special Operation By Mark Pawlak

 

Special Operation

By Mark Pawlak

Beltway Editions

Rockville, Maryland

ISBN: 978-1-957372-22-8

41 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Generally, I try to avoid political poems as well as anti-war poems. Not because they don’t have an important place in those overlapping genres—they do. Or because they can’t effectuate changes in belief systems with their emotional and sometimes rational appeal—they can. But even so, overcome with their own self-importance or consumed with the certainty of true believers, the poets, who write them, usually fail. Brilliant exceptions like Sigfried Sassoon (First World War), Wilfred Owen (First World War), and Michael Casey (Vietnam War) prove the rule. Therefore, when confronted with reviewable collections of this verse type, I walk, nay, I run in the other direction. But not today.

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military strategist, once claimed that “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” Well, he got part of that right. But war does more. In its classic form, the clashing of grounded armies, it transforms patriotism and high-minded glory, and common hospitality into human rage and bloody slaughter. It highlights an awful history of horror, bloodletting and the much darker and deeper and bestial nature of mankind. Great conquerors, like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, T’ien Wang (leader of the Taiping Rebellion), Napoleon, et al, celebrated by many in modern nation-states, brought untold suffering and death to their fellow man.

Special Operation, Mark Pawlak’s new collection of war poems, set in the god-awful Ukrainian-Russian quagmire, focuses not on who is winning and who is losing but what, euphemistically, the military class calls collateral damage. And in wartime collateral damage unerringly refers to the very old and the very young. In fact, Pawlak addresses Babusya (meaning grandmother) in a number of his more poignant pieces.

In Pawlak’s opening poem (doubling as his title piece), Prologue: Don’t Worry, his narrative details two sisters, one in Moscow and the other in Kharkiv discussing the war. The Moscow woman assures her sibling that Vladamir Putin’s war machine in his “special operation” targets only military installations. The second sister responds this way,

“Good,” she says. “So please ask him

why his Operation’s missile struck

your niece’s kindergarten.”

Erasure, Pawlak’s poem lamenting the historic looping of war and regret since time immemorial, uses a well-worn slogan to great effect. The phrase Never Again seems to have been popularized during the First World War and later associated with Elie Wiesal, a Holocaust survivor and Pope Paul VI in his 1965 address to the UN. Pawlak relates how survivors of the last war painted this slogan on bricks of newly constructed buildings only to later have those same two-word slogans altered to a single word by modern munitions. The poet concludes his dirge with not a little irony,

… “Never Again.”

But when artillery shells and missiles

demolish buildings,

they create by erasure—

as this new war demonstrates—a new slogan

on brick facades and survivors’ lips:

“Again.”

When everyday life mixes with murderous technology on warfare’s tableau, it causes the observer (or reader) to question the very fabric of ethical reality. Pawlak’s The Gift conjures up this juxtaposition for all to see. The poet/narrator councils his grandmother on the degraded condition of her home and garden. He tells her to consider the advantages of the recent bombardment of her property (Is this a Monty Python skit?) and to consider the bright side of things. Indeed, low comedy has a way of merging with tragedy in these dire situations. Here the poet, in a kind of despair, winks at the devastation,

Come summer, the shattered door, burst windows,

shell shocked walls

will provide ventilation.

And your garden plot, Babusya,

won’t need digging: already cratered, trenched,

it’s well prepared for spring planting.

Elderly refugees from the Ukrainian meatgrinder understand all too well humankind at its worst. All illusions long since vanished, they plod ahead because they must. This is also man’s nature. In Pawlak’s poem Survivor the reader follows the dreadful trek of a 98- year- old woman, having already experienced Stalin’s man-made famine (ten million dead), and now seeking existential comfort in her piety and prayers. Her footwear, contrasted with the bombastic and grisly landscape surrounding her, tells the tale in, alas, horrendous detail. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Rifle fire, explosions, occupation.

One Russian soldier shoots the family’s barking dog.

“What have you done? That was our protector!”

“I’m your protector now,” he says.

Rifle fire, explosions.

Separated from family, fleeing west alone,

no food, no water, on foot,

in house slippers.

Exploding artillery shells, cratered roads…

she steps over dead bodies,

walks past cars, trucks:

blasted, smoldering.

My favorite poem in Pawlak’s collection, The Gardener, sneaks up on you with its candor and calm in the midst of devastation. Yet another elderly woman continues on with her ordinary life in spite of everything. She keeps to her routine and ignores what she cannot change. She endures in spite of the madness that surrounds her. Pawlak explains,

Her son is at the front.

Now the only resident of her block,

she tends her garden,

the one she’s kept for 30 years:

her hands weeding,

spade and pitchfork turning earth—

in the bomb craters

she plants new flowers.

All around: destruction;

in her apartment, order:

Czech crystal displayed

on top of her dresser.

Rules of war are laughable. William Tecumseh Sherman, a commanding general during the Civil War, once argued that “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” That very recognition causes shame. And shame can be efficacious. We need to be reminded in painful detail of war’s essence and humanity’s capacity for barbarity. Poets like Mark Pawlak serve as essential mitigating forces. He deserves our thanks.

A Day In The Republic By Tim Suermondt

 A Day In The Republic

By Tim Suermondt

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

ISBN: 978-1-962847-42-1

82 Pages

$20.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Retying a shoelace in poetic terms can make all the difference. Tim Suermondt in his new book entitled A Day In The Republic celebrates the ordinary progression of life’s footsteps through geography and time. Suermondt, a veritable Everyman, conveys the wonder of inexhaustible routine in poem after poem. His commonplace images surprise with their hidden possibilities and seem to magically flower with each touch or sympathetic attention by the reader.

Clean lines, decency, and simplicity, masking a more complicated reality, dominate Suermondt’s pieces. This straightforward technique propels an imagination of hopefulness and idiosyncratic comfort.

Suermondt’s poetry paean to bar culture, Kennedy’s, salutes the collective way many drinkers sort out or think they sort out their private lives. A close friend of the poet is in love and he has come to Kennedy’s to affirm his new status among friends and familiar furnishings. The tone is upbeat and admiring. The poet says,

… The clamor at the bar

matches the clamor of the city—

this is where we go to take stock,

to repair. To celebrate even better.

All the voices that insist they can change

the world and themselves, words

and beer on lips beautiful and on lips

chapped hard by having to come

from behind just to hang on for dear life—

the photos of the martyred president

watch us from the walls, lamps shining

like little moons, my good friend

luminous in his rumpled suit…

When a poet manages to exude optimism in theses tumultuous times, his readership and beyond should take note. In his poem We All Move On, Somehow, Suermondt deals with the closing of his stalwart hardware store that he has patronized for twenty-five years. Aha a routine broke, you might remark. But this poet, this champion of the ordinary, takes the disappointing news in stride and gives his poem a positive twist. Here is the heart of the piece,

“Can I still buy a big wrench set today,” I say

trying a little positivity. “Buy three,” he says

“and I’ll kiss you on the cheek.”

I buy two and he still insists on giving

me a discount. I thank him and he thanks me,

sunlight on the cash register. I carry my wrench sets,

one under each arm, thinking I’m set for life…

A Day in the Republic, Suermondt’s title poem, details a state of mind. Sometimes believing all’s right with the world can lead to exactly that. Yes, belief can be efficacious. The poet and his wife traverse a friendly city and return to their abode. They seem comfortably in love. At the end of their route, before supper, they espy a nearby park with its embedded problems. But not today. The poet concludes his poem with the highest hopes,

…We make

it back to our front door, in time

to join the dusk as it turns to darkness—

the tiny park almost emptied out,

a police siren, but everyone has been good

and not afraid of asking about justice.

A bit of liquor, cooking on the stove—

my wife and I waiting on the bushel

of stars the weatherman says will come.

Life lived at the ordinary level, when stalling into sluggishness, revolts and spices-up or romanticizes reality. Imagination enables this non-violent phenomenon of sublimation. In Suermondt’s piece entitled Hotel Odessa, the poet daydreams a world of intrigue, which constructs excitement out of nothing and (although often disturbing) physically disturbs no one. Of course, this is what poetry often does. The poem opens with verve,

On my first morning in Paris

I paused at my apartment window,

holding a croissant and a mug of coffee

and watching people go in and out

of the hotel’s entrance, convinced each one

of them was a spy, good and bad—

how the imagination of youth

still clings at the age we should know better.

Minutes later I got fully clothed\

and made my way to the hotel’s small

lobby, hoping a man with a pronounced

scar or a woman whose beauty is timeless

would show me a folder and say:

“You must get this to the American embassy

in Prague by midnight…

The poet, in his piece The Runners Go by the Apartment, logically mulls over his Everyman role as a spectator, albeit in comparatively great comfort, but also without conceding the hope of artistic immortality. Alas, there are many struggling (or not so struggling) poets in the same boat. Even as academic elitism has been brought to heel, other political hierarchies have popped up with their associated tyrannies. Suermondt puts it this way,

But I’m waiting to see the runners

who will pass by differently, runners of every shape

who will have many go from running

to jogging to walking, some who will

bend over, their hands grabbing their knees

as if begging the earth to filter up a stream of air,

those laters and last of the pack who ask

how they keep thinking they might win one day—

impossible, impossible, until next year for them…

Tim Suermondt’s gentle poems wash over his readers with their lightness and ease. When you think you’ve finished reading, you realize you haven’t and go back to his metaphoric, yet satisfying, surface and stay for a while. It can be illuminating—like life.

Hard Up By M.P. Carver

 

Hard Up

By M.P. Carver

Lily Poetry Review Books

223 Winter Street

Whitman, MA

ISBN: 978-1-957755-50-2

25 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Calliope rules the world of heroic poetry. Even collections of short heroic poetry motivated by injustice. Whatever the intent of the poet, this muse waits for her opportunity to intervene, to alter, to charm. When reading M.P. Carver’s latest chapbook, Hard Up, one delights in the counterpoint between musical expression and poetical grievance. Carver’s (and her muse’s) ability to transcend down-and-out situations with humor and the necessary concomitant irony inspires. It inspires so much that the political point of her art becomes secondary to her admirable persona and descriptive magic.

Carver’s opening poem, At the Public Housing Complex, or, It Wasn’t All Bad Until We Ran Out of Sky, picks out moments of joy and possible goodness in a smelly, derelict environment infested with mosquitoes and bats. Her detailed attention to reality and blunted expectations impress. Even Carver’s tone evinces complexity by mitigating its sarcasm with conflicting facts. Consider these telling lines,

I remember the landlord

would come rolling in

for a visit in a shiny car

each Sunday and park it

in our rusting sea

of jalopies. He didn’t kick

anyone out for paying

late and got broken

appliances fixed right

away by his son-in-law

who came quick to hit

on all our single moms.

In her poem Why Do Teenage Girls Travel In Groups of 3, 5, or 7?, Carver conjures up the magic phenomenon of mall rat. The poet’s mnemonic shopping mall appears as it originally was, exuding wonder, brightness, and promise. Its starling-like denizens, the teens, commanded respect as they assembled, disassembled, and assembled again in concert, all the time avoiding their nemesis, the mall cop. In time, of course, the underside of this brave new capitalist world would wreak havoc on these innocents, a fate the poet duly notes,

…We were little gods of our

well-appointed domain. We didn’t have money,

but we could bum around and be swept up

in our tidy, colorful, shopping world just the same

as everyone else. Better, we knew every corner.

Knew, too, the old men, 20s and 30s, even 40s,

who hung around too long, trying to find the girl

whose home was worst, trying to look cool to an unwise

young rebel. This was before we got minimum

wage jobs like our parents, learned what it meant

to be broke and care…

The eye-catching centerpiece of this jewel-encrusted collection, My Friend’s Mom is CFO of Some Private Equity Holding Company; My Mom sells Rings at the Mall, says a lot about a daughter’s admiration for her mother. Carver describes the retail process, as her mother practices it, more like a dance or dalliance. She, in effect, translates capitalism into humanity, a novel alchemy without question. The poem concludes this way,

My mom makes the sale seem

like some half-remembered dream.

Not the dream about falling through the ice,

but the dream pulled out and fussed over,

‘til it’s so warm it shines.

Oddly, but wonderfully, Carver teleports Mencius, an ancient Confusion philosopher, into her poem entitled Welfare. Mencius, it seems, believed that people were essentially good. Now there’s a thought. His proof for this insight entailed his belief that even a common criminal would go out of his way to save a baby perched on the rim of a well. Carver points out that today’s criminal, schooled in our twenty-first century culture, might consider conditional implications. The poet, tongue in cheek compares the two eras,

… You could save a baby then, without

everyone asking What the hell? Who are you

to save that baby? There’s paperwork associated

with that baby. Do you know how much that baby

is worth? Mencius’s criminal lived in the Warring

States period, a good well-defined time for folks.

Criminals were criminals, peasants were peasants,

the rich were rich, yes, even then, and anyone

could just walk around thoughtlessly saving babies.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Carver ruminates on the ability of these very wealthy types to book future rocket ship flights to Mars aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX in her piece Safe Travels. Her gentle and full-smile sarcasm strikes home again and again. I find this poem strangely comforting. The poet notes how even her actions mimic the behavior of upper class when among them. She says,

I won’t make it to Mars,

but after a poetry reading

at the BPL the other day

I found myself in the IN crowd

at the afterparty at the Copley,

where a waiter brought me pillows

of pretzel skewered on plastic sticks

and I didn’t even look at him,

though he could have been

my best friend, my student,

or my mom who used to cater

weddings at Spinelli’s, at the head

table with the biggest tips.

Carver’s poetic grievances, despite their earnest and valid points, have no hard edges. Whatever you consider your station or caste in life, everything about this accessible, mini-book charms. Invest your time in reading Hard Up. Believe me, it’s (pardon the expression) worth its weight in gold.

Speaking for Everyone: An Anthology of “We” Poems

 

Speaking For Everyone

An Anthology of “We” Poems

Edited by Eric Greinke

Amazon

ISBN: 9798332054433

181 Pages

Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly

Use of the third person plural in poetry not only draws the writer away from the overly fashionable confessional style of versifying but adds a sense of universality and transcendence to the wordcraft. The ability to connect the emotions and thoughts of a multitude suggests either deep arrogance (in bad poetry) or collective insight and consciousness (in good poetry). There are obvious pitfalls. For instance, “we” could simply be used as a metaphor for “I.” Or the writer may project his revelations onto others without any real sapience. Eric Greinke’s masterfully edited anthology entitled Speaking For Everyone avoids the pitfalls of this genre and, in his inspired choices of good poetry, bonds together the fears and hopes and commonalities inherent in the nature of mankind.

Greinke’s informative introduction gives his anthology context and gravitas. All the poems included were written in the past 60 years except three by Walt Whitman. According to Greinke, Whitman’s theme of universality foreshadows the other pieces in this book. He’s right. Looking back on the book’s setup, Whitman’s delightful poems do add ballast to the timelessness of Greinke’s poetic ship.

W. D. Ehrhart’s poem The Cradle of Civilization directs us back to our archaeological beginnings. The “we” persona examines the commonalities of birthright that presumably made us what we are. This begs a question: What happened? Ehrhart provides the answer with not a little irony. His “we” has a destructive side, an incomplete evolution of “our” souls. Presumably he cites the recent wars in Iraq. This pessimistic view is part and parcel of the human condition. The poet’s lament ends this way,

How very far we’ve come

that we should come to such a place

not in gratitude and wonder

but with bombs and guns,

that we should not find this odd

that we should so believe our otherness

that we would rather kill and die

than search for common ground.

Alienation takes center stage in Eric Greinke’s piece, Flood Tide. Adrift in a strange and terrible ocean, we swim through the waves of life, experiencing both pleasures and pains, but utterly confounded and beyond comprehension. Are we on course or deluding ourselves? Love comforts, but even that emotion is illusionary. In the end we die alone. Greinke’s poem begins in measured time, in human time,

Another day surges over

the horizon, flotsam

sloshing through the dark

sluice. Loose pages

drift in pools, like

travelers, asleep beneath

the hills. There is no

bowl to contain our

tears, just flooded floors in

a hastily abandoned factory.

In his poem The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel, Doug Holder expands on the themes of isolation and estrangement. Set in the New York tunnel which runs under the East River between Manhattan and Queens, the poem’s objectified man devolves into a blur of fumes and pressure. Despite the continuous traffic the man loses his identity as he gains familiarity. The “we” persona, consoled by its multiplicity, can only observe a fading individual in isolation. Understanding has absented itself. Here is the heart of the poem,

And he

Has lost

His face

Long ago

In a blue

Uniform

And the sun

And the fresh air

Merely throw

Him hints

In our car

We pass him.

Faceless

And a blur

Phantoms behind

Thick plates

Of light-bleached

Glass.

In Here, We Are Gathered, a poem by JudyKronenfeld, death descends onto our reclining faces like a soft pillow. The “we” persona notices each detail right up until the end. Details comfort. So do connections. We love to share images of illness and decrepitude until, well…just until. Then the bottom falls out into the mystery of individuality. The poet perceives the end is near,

But no, not quite there,

not quite then,

for there is esprit de corps

in Shearly Beloved—where everyone’s

hair starts out frizzled, or orange, or white,

and highlights, lowlights,

ombre, sombre drown out the fear;

and even in the infusion center,

there is quiet communication, comparing

of wigs and scarves, hope-woven threads…

Universally experienced alienation perplexes mankind in Paul B. Roth’s piece entitled Strangers. Here the faces of “we” experience the same anxieties, but separately. They individually share their photographs with others, hoping for a reaction or perhaps a tidbit of information. The results, always the same, are melded together in the third person plural. This “we” transcends time and territory. But in the end the self is still a stranger. A good night’s sleep in Roth’s reality never ends. He puts it this way in his prose poem,

We realized we were not waking up, nor were

we hitting ground, as if nothing were below us.

We slept on, unable to awake, unable to

unscramble the millions of neurological micro-

seconds that prevented our eyelids from

opening…

In Hayden Saunier’s Shape Shifting we are all the same under our various coverings, Even this poem moves from second to third person. Thus, our multiplicity is real. Nothing we experience is unique. We are every other person struggling through this life and dealing with the paradoxes embedded in our human condition. The poet says,

Maybe you’ve heard this song,

how the screech owl sounds

like a horse’s whinny

slight wind shifting through a sycamore

precisely like another

sleep-scented body shifting in its sleep

how those glugs and whirrs

from the amphibious

crowd at marsh and creek

match the murmurs and leaps

of your own underwater heart.

Every single thing’s

like every other single thing…

Like Greinke’s magnificent book we are all anthologized through history, each of us edited as a reminder to our fellow homo-sapiens to keep it going, to find life’s final destiny. And, yes, we are all in this together.

Homage By Kathleen Spivack

Homage

By Kathleen Spivack

Wilderness House Press

Littleton, MA

ISBN: 978-1-7331185-3-8

43 Pages

$12.00



Review by Dennis Daly



Spanning oceans and multiple generations, Homage, Kathleen Spivack’s newest collection of poems, delivers a movable feast of poets and other influencers of her estimable artistry. Spivack’s narratives celebrate famous poets, musicians, painters, and booksellers, many of whom she personally knew and some before her time, as well as teachers, a lighthouse keeper, and other oddly interesting individuals.



Each of these poems seem perfectly weighted, upbeat, and toned with appreciation and even affection. Not an easy task given the ever-present and dark backstories of some of these fraught individuals.



Set in Elizabeth Bishop’s apartment in Cambridge Massachusetts, Spivack, in her poem Ping Pong Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop, recounts a ping pong match between Bishop and herself. The match is much more than a game of course. The metaphors of career and life and youth and age and talent mesh together in this slightly irregular (read personalized), but masterful, form. Bishop, who is known for writing a terrific sestina herself, would approve.



Spivack’s admiration for Bishop’s determination, despite her arthritic hands, powers up through this poem as she plots to throw the game to her adversary. This passion pushes the piece forward past Bishop’s many unsaid torments. Consider these affecting lines,



… You so easily won

friends, admirers, yet always at play

was your encircled suffering, lack of love hinted, gamely

ignored; the poems and stories in which pain was handled

so far back behind the eyes that the poetry

stood for itself, was really poetry, not pain. You faced



it only obliquely. Once, showing me a photo, the face

of yourself as a baby, small, stubborn, not at all “poetic”

protesting abandonment in crumpled white lace, hands

tightly folded as if your dear life, even then, was not

a game, as if you sensed you had something dark to play

out, a despairing intelligence behind that winning



For Anne, Spivack’s amazing short poem lamenting the death of her poet-friend, Anne Sexton, seems to sear through its printed page. Yes, it has the necessary pathos. Yes, it is resentful of death. Yes, it provides a modicum of solace. But above all that, the piece affirms the friendship of the two poets and salutes Sexton’s life. The poem concludes this way,



Friend, from the phonograph you are still wise and true:

you go on talking, wry, amused.

No one could keep you from writing the poem-of-your-death

so I write a poem to your death, as you wanted me to.



Next stop Tours, France, in the lush Loire Valley. Spivack memorializes her former French teacher in her poem Madame Joelle Blot, my French Teacher. The piece is gorgeous and my favorite poem in the collection. One can almost smell the French language in the metaphoric lilac perfume flooding these well-wrought lines. Mentors with moral and/or emotional authority can often open interior doors in addition to the proper subjects they impart. This clearly is the case between Madame Blot and Spivack. Here is the heart of the poem,



Madame Joelle Blot, my French teacher, determined that



I should not spend another night without lilacs in my room.

Then you mouse-stepped down the ladder, little feet in little

strappy high-heeled shoes, set the lilacs firmly in a crate and



carried them inside, a bushel of lilacs. For me. No one

had ever… Selecting just the exact tool, you laid into the lilacs

with an enormous antique hammer, mashed down the woody



stem-ends splintery and flat. This is how it’s done, you showed me.

In France. Where they break eggs to make omelettes.

In Tours, where they speak the best French, unaccented



and pure, so they say. I wanted to learn that language from you.

I was foreign, foreign even to myself

And so applied myself diligently to your lessons.



Even the lilacs knew you were boss…



Many writers fantasize at one time or another about being a lighthouse keeper (I have.). The extreme seclusion coupled with grave and undeniable responsibility has its attraction. The Lighthouse Keeper, Spivack’s paean to that singular calling, does nothing to limit this allurement. She uses the Cape Antibes’ lighthouse on the French Riviera as her example. Listen to Spivack’s protagonist, enthroned in his glowing dome,



“I am in Paradise.

I live among the birds.

Sometimes I see angels:

I think I am becoming

an angel, drawn in a beam of

light, upward, spreading

hands over water, guiding ships.

If you listen, you can hear birds

also encouraging the sailors,

more benevolent than Ulysses’

sirens.”



If poetic romance and charm delights you, as well as mentoring power, muse upon Spivak’s poem, For George Whitman , Shakespeare & Co. Paris. Whitman was the proprietor of the second iteration of Shakespeare & Co., a gathering place for American expats, located in Paris, France. Described by Spivack as eccentric and generous, Whitman inspired and promoted his visitors and encouraged them in their writings. The poem exudes joy, possibility, and thankfulness, a far cry from the usual depressing caricatures inherent in literary life. The piece ends thusly,



… all roads led

to Shakespeare & Company. Always had. She looked

across the Seine. The vista took

one’s breath away: the bookshop; Paris spread



before her; conversation, Notre Dame….

To read to write, this was a writer’s dream.

All this, and more: the writer’s rooms, the cat,

the company, including lively Sylvia, she praised.

Few of us get to say thank you to friends, teachers, and mentors who have encouraged us along the way, either directly or indirectly. Kathleen Spivak, capping her storied career as poet, writer, and teacher, found an opportunity to express her homage to those who came before and, using her breath-taking artistry, took it. How refreshing!

The Biographer Poems by David M. Katz

 

The Biographer

Poems by David M. Katz

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-962847-07-0

71 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Spectral power belongs to ages and cultures long past. But here and there evidence emerges of its elusive endurance in the form of poetic techniques such as projection and personalization. Here imagination (Cotton Mather aficionados take notice) provides the proper venue with insight, empathy, and understanding as value added attachments. In his new book of poetry, The Biographer, David M. Katz haunts his set of chosen characters with his mnemonic underpaintings. He merges his rich emotional values with the objective facts of his characters, real or fictional.

Katz’s first poem, His Last Book, hooked me with its third person objectification of the artist getting old. Sentimentality and emotional pain are met head on. But they are contained and given purpose. Rather than bathos and mawkishness, the poet elicits an identifiable hard-bitten reality that one can recognize immediately. The poet introduces his protagonist empathically and with reflective preciseness,

… he realized

He was no longer young. He recognized

A periodic feebleness of mind,

A lack of balance, tendency to slip

And wobble in his steps, rise in the night

Repeatedly to pee: of scant concern

In themselves, these irksome little symptoms,

Annoying as mosquito bites,

Together made it seem to him as if

There were just two things in the universe

That mattered: his life and the end of it…

In his poem, The Altitude, Katz fills in the unknowable (read spectral) blanks between father and son. The speaker, no older than five, looks up the length of his father and nurtures the beginnings of an evolutionary understanding of the man. A moment of

drama creates a mnemonic guidepost on which the son attaches facts—both real and quasi-imaginary. Here is the heart of the poem,

… Suddenly I pitched

Forward like a ship, the mica chips

In concrete hurtling up at me before

My arm grew taut. My father’s hand had held

Me back from falling, though he didn’t seem

To notice, and we took a slow next step.

My eyes rose up and saw, beneath his hat,

A jaw, a nose, and something like a smile.

Generally, I am not fond of poems dealing with substance abuse, alcoholism or otherwise. Are You Still Drinking, Dad?, Katz’s piece on this very subject jolted me beyond any personal biases. Dealing with the disease’s phenomenon of quitting and relapse, Katz ghosts his persona with both unspoken and spoken connections that re-live intense, emotional hurts. But it is more than that. Missed opportunities caused by human failings are the bedrock of mortality. This Shakespearean sonnet is, pardon the expression, top shelf and my favorite poem in the collection. The last lines nail the irreversible pain and are not to be missed in any review. So here they are,

… He might have had one shot,

A rye to ease the future shock a bit;

Sweet Gypsy Rose; cheap peach or apricot

Liqueur. I said I’d be a father soon,

And he was miles away across the phone

On some highway with a cowboy tune

Fading behind. He always drank alone.

It’s now or never, Dad, I might have said.

Before my son was born my dad was dead.

Tread-worn spooks flitter past, still in grand context, but not as certain, not as noble in Katz’s mysterious poem The Code, written in memory of John le Carre. The real world is fading into the spectral by half and the activities of the spectral seem confused and leaderless. The poet has withdrawn his added details and leaves his audience in the dark or to their own Kafkaesque devices. The poem opens this way,

They were muttering in half-understood languages,

Half-wanting to be known, half wanting to know,

Half not and half-not. They were in the lobby,

Exchanging the code, partly overheard, the bellhops

Inured to it by now as they hustled

To the ever-ringing bell in their tight red coats…

Notice, everything appears compromised in this piece except the bell, which seems to signal the need for intervention.

Katz’s title poem and masterwork, The Biographer, A Verse Novella, spans twenty-six pages of compelling and imaginative narrative. The poet outdoes himself. He first creates a persona worthy of his truly American story. Then he essentially possesses the persona, not in a hostile way, but in a way that merges both biographer and subject in a dual adventure of creation and kaleidoscopic life.

Telling the story of an abandoned foundling, adopted on board ship on the way to Ellis Island, Katz’s persona intimates her techniques of biography referring to her subject’s newly found (and soon lost) parents,

… While Shmuel gazed, Ida

longed desperately to be off her feet. Their

Internal lives

are of course, my own creation, as is

the bulk

of any biography, a story

based

on a handful of facts. I have seen,

in fact, a creased,

anonymous photo of a pushcart

from that time

with a grimfaced father, mother, and

little girl posed

in front of it…

Katz’s narrative continues in a rapid, almost dream-like fashion, elucidating the life of vagabondage, independence, fame and activism. The reader, along for the ride, can do nothing but marvel at both the external and internal goings-on.

From beginning to end this superb book of poems illuminates the magical sum and substance of human nature, as well as the importance of soulful imagination at the heart of even the most objective life histories, or their fictional and spectral counterparts.

New And Selected Works By Charles Coe

 

New And Selected Works

By Charles Coe

Leapfrog Press

New York and London

ISBN: 978-1-948585-69-972

140 Pages

$14.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Few confessional poets can tug hearts with their first-person observational words without sliding into sentimentality and mediocrity. Charles Coe proves the exception with this delightful new collection of narrative, bluesy poems entitled New And Selected Works. This compelling volume contains twenty new poems as well as an assortment of extraordinary poems from four earlier books.

Opening the collection, Coe’s poem Prelude sets the standard, and a very high standard indeed. Fusing the illusory nature of man with a horrifying image of victimized children from a war zone, Coe makes an obvious point. But, unfortunately, not so obvious to our hardened and sterilized comprehension of war. The juxtaposition of scientific emptiness with affecting image adds the needed intensity,

Would it bother you to look through

my suddenly spectral form and see

the backrest of this chair?

It wouldn’t be intentional, a parlor trick.

It’s just that when I think about broken children

lying in the rubble of bombed-out buildings

I sometimes find it difficult to remain tied to this world.

For Ruby Bridges is a prose poem based on Norman Rockwell’s famous painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicted the brave six-year-old black girl, who, accompanied by federal marshals, singlehandedly desegregated the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Like the painting, Coe focuses the little girl in the center of a racist and poisonous whirlwind. The poem itself gathers force by addressing Bridges in the second person. The closing Astronaut metaphor both illuminates the subject and strikes home with poetic precision,

Ruby, what can we possibly say about you? What words can describe

this six-year-old child, armed with only a notebook and ruler, walking

resolutely past that pack of jabbering hyenas, past the woman who every

day threatened to poison you, past the woman who every day waved

before your face a black doll in a coffin?

The lead marshal said you never cried once during that nightmare year.

What can we possibly say about you, brave as an astronaut climbing

into a tin can to be launched into the airless world?

Coe’s piece In the House of Echoes details the homey pathos and blood-ties of a large family dealing with demise of one of their siblings. The poet’s mother provides perspective, and food and conversation dominate. The death-watch takes a new turn as Christmas carols, spontaneously begun by the participants, fill the house with echoes of sentiment. That is, until mathematical reality (read: dark humor) takes center stage. The poem concludes thusly,

In the silence that followed the last carol,

a silence neither pained nor awkward,

merely thoughtful,

as each sat with his or her own memories,

my mother whispered softly,

to no one in particular,

“Three down, six to go.”

Halfway through the collection Coe’s poem Sleep Cycles thunders off the page. This well-wrought formalist villanelle, devoid of any sentiment or emotional controls, is the classic and mythological anomaly that highlights the singular artistry of the other included works. A scene from his mother’s recurring nightmare, this narrative resounds over universal chords. Despite our efforts, the piece seems to caution, humans do not control life, life controls humans. Here is the heart of the poem,

as once again they set upon

this changeless and eternal race

beneath an unforgiving sun

spurred by a dread of what’s to come

that Morpheus cannot erase

foam-flecked and wild, the horses run.

the spectral carriage thunders on

although in passing leaves no trace

beneath an unforgiving sun.

My favorite poem in this collection is Coe’s The Dance Hall at Porter Square. In this affecting piece the poet idealizes a specific tableau of a street couple about to dance to a popular tune on a boombox. The troubadour-poet assesses the makeshift scene as a courtly love ritual and imagines a shy damsel, accompanied by a sensitive gentleman/ knight. The poet fears his passive intervention or even a close observation might break the spell and so he continues his walkabout. The piece opens with the narrator setting up an appropriate stage for the young lovers,

Near the entrance to the Porter Square subway stop

is a small tree-shaded concrete plaza, off to the side

where street people congregate

and where yesterday I heard an old boombox

call out that it was “Time to get together, and love

one another right now,” and saw a shirtless young man

in a grimy Red Sox cap hold out his hand

Blasphemy as a strategy into religiosity often succeeds. Thomas Merton seemed to know that. Dorothy Day certainly did. Coe’s poem Butt Dialing Jesus offers a mildly impious premise to its readers and beyond and then proceeds to an old-fashioned demonstration of the golden rule (that is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” Matt. 7:12). The piece works because of its irreverence and humor erases sentimentality and cliche. Consider this very funny set up,

“You have reached the Son of God.

I am currently speaking with another supplicant.

But please hold; your salvation is important to me.”

This was followed by music.

I expected celestial choirs, or maybe an elevator-friendly

version of “My Sweet Lord,” but was instead treated

to acoustic Delta blues guitar, interrupted after

a few minutes by the voice of Himself, greeting me

by name and asking how he could serve.

Armed with these sturdy, compassionate, and accessible poems, Charles Coe delivers his forthright lessons in empathy and warmth with ethical fidelity. His mnemonic inner-city parables are not to be missed. See him in person (he’s a powerful reader) if you can. In any case, buy this book, you won’t regret it.

Knock-knock By Owen Lewis

 Knock-knock

By Owen Lewis

Dos Madres Press www.dosmadres.com

Loveland, Ohio

ISBN: 978-1-962847-01-8

35 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Does surpassing life’s expectancy bestow any extraordinary blessings of goodness or happiness or vitality? Probably not. What about wisdom, surely….? Sorry, jury’s out. The legendary Methuselar, at 969 biblical years old and righteous to a fault, died a natural death (with all its attendant horrors), apparently not long-lived enough for passage on his grandson’s just recently built ark, specifically that same ark’s gene-saving journey into mankind’s brave new world.

In his new poetry collection, Knock-knock, Owen Lewis notices the tragedy, the irony, and the humor in the impaired denouement of humankind. His protagonist, a card-carrying member of the AMA wanders through a fading landscape of imagination and perceptiveness bundled in symptomatic non sequiturs.

When attention to details devoid of context becomes one’s dominant focus, the many dimensions of the cosmos recede into the primordial but pointed littleness. Lewis begins this recession with his remarkable opening poem entitled “Prelude: How I Started to Use a Cane.” The piece lures the reader in with its curious hypnotic power. An umbrella serves the narrator as his transitional cane. Here’s the heart of the poem,

I was talking on the phone,

walking steadier, noticed the tap,

and after, the tap-step, a light

knock, a knock like someone’s

at the door come to visit,

like company’s always arriving

and I feel this step in my hand

and hear it keeping a nice beat.

If my feet are sock-swaddled

they get muffled and vague

and make a kind of shuffle-step,

shuffle-glide, instead of the steady

tap, the tap-step’s sure contact

with concrete. Some days I set out,

I’m half-way to downtown, and

I forget. All the names and numbers

are in the phone, I know, but when

the name goes blank, the phone

directory is no use, no use at all.

The tap-step’s the only sure thing.

Sandwiched in between fear and humor (two closely aligned subjects, if ever there were two closely aligned subjects), Lewis embeds key metaphysical elements in his poem “When I’m not losing things.” The poet’s persona perceives objects and actions in a deeper, more thoughtful way—somewhat satisfying, but not very practical. Consider these lines,

things often fall with a clatter and break,

but sometimes without a clash or clamor

they pass into another realm, quiet winter-

light draining the day.

Then I understand

they’re not lost.

They’ve moved ahead

without so much as a knock. A prep-team

is stocking up the next time zone.

Living life in the moment can be daunting at any age, but in one’s declining years, with enforced partitions separating crucial caches of knowledge, the notions of present, past, and future can be disconcerting in the extreme. Lewis’s piece, “I ask my doctor how one can remember” centers on the struggle for what the elderly need to know. Often humor and wordplay can bridge awkward gaps in the inquiry. Here’s an example,

… He’s one of the good ones,

holds my x-rays up to the window. Hmmm.

I can see through that. There’s a tree bough

growing right across my lungs. In my knees,

a bird nest, my shoulder of garden perennials.

From the MRI, I see a cloud inside my skull.

He’s asking about my aches—

I live with them. What does he do with his?

(My daughter glares. She comes with that nervous

Cough of hers that always makes me forget what,

What I want to ask. I should have made a list.)

What about the cumulus? What about sleep?

he insists. I insist. What about that cloud?

Am I a cloud? An i-cloud?

Lewis explores life with dementia in his piece entitled “Before my daughter leaves.” Within a nursing home a name tag takes on aggrandized significance as if branded into the elderly patient. Here, if one loses his identifying tag, he loses himself. The poet somehow keeps these scenes comic/tragic without caricature. The result begets intensification and human empathy. And, much like viewing a car crash, the reader cannot look away. The poem opens with well-meant directions opined by the patient’s health-care proxy,

she always promises she’ll be back

in a few days or a few months

and she pocket-pins my name tag

on my shirt and says always wear it

don’t take it off and she says Don’t

Worry and tells me she feels bad

since there’s no piano here but

my fingers don’t play it anymore

she says just hum the fugue song

but I’m only one voice we need

at least three others she says just

say Hi each time the attendant

comes by and start with him but

I know she’s even more worried

I’ll forget my name lose the tag

so I don’t take it off and I’m good

and even when I send the shirt

to the washers they don’t take it off

Nearing death most members of our species have concerns beyond the actual process of dying. These concerns vary from practical monetary issues before to the imagined meritocracy presumably set-up after. Lewis contemplates a split difference between these two needs. After paying the ferryman his due in preparation for a crossing of the River Styx, the soul of the dying patient returns to the body and imbues it with its forever name-tag. The arrangements continue,

… Was I redeemed? I am

still here, still counting—Doctor!

Doctor, your patient is calling.

If he’s dead he’ll want his eyes

closed. Or maybe, he’ll want one

left open, the secret, roving one,

the sacrilegious one. Only Moses

could look into G-d’s face. (Holy

Moly!) Afterward he glowed

in divine sunburn. If and when…

a coin on just one eye.

(Knock-knock…

Poet Owen Lewis has given those of us still here, and still counting, stage directions for our long anticipated penultimate and final scenes. His collection towers as a tour de force for which we should be immensely grateful! Bravo! Exeunt Omnes.

Blues, Prayers, & Pagan Chants Poems by Diane Sahms

 Blues, Prayers, & Pagan Chants

Poems by Diane Sahms

Alien Buddha Press abuddhapress@yahoo.com

ISBN: 9798873734580

86 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Are there parallel universes that complete us, that deliver meaning where there seems to be only chaos-- a place, perhaps, for prayers to be delivered, petitions to be filed, unholy chants to be rhythmically sounded out, and sadnesses to be unfolded into wonder and song? Diane Sahms, at least in a literary sense, seems to think so. In her marvelous new book, Blues, Prayers, and Pagan Chants Sahms connects with this other shadow (sometimes sacred) reality, often using memory as her catalyst and nature as her medium.

A poem entitled “Songs of Praise” opens Sahms’ collection. Birds of many feathers are her subjects of choice: a grosbeak, goldfinches, a woodpecker, orioles, a catbird, and a mourning dove. Somehow the poet merges her consciousness with their colorful cadences and flourishes. Consider the contemplative tone of these lines referring to the grosbeak,

Black-hooded head

brilliant semicircle of red,

with a leaky valve extending down

the middle of a white breast.

Satin black wings with patches

of white highlights

& this sacred space—his rambling

song and sharp rhythmic tweets—

then silence—emptiness—

to enter, to become silence,

ever changed.

Another early piece in the collection, Sahms’ “Dulcimer’s Broken Strings—Restrung,” a well-wrought pantoum, details the grimness and privation of Philadelphia’s mean streets in the eyes of a child, and a sensitive, artistic one to boot. Dreams of ghostly abodes with bungled plumbing and cracked plaster metamorphosize into musical refrains and brilliant word imagery. In the end the artist escapes, but the nightmare

seems to persist as an alternative field, separate from reality but still a haunting presence. This presence must be acknowledged before any healing or high art takes place. Thus, the pantoum. Consider these lines as a mnemonic paean,

gone, those childhood ghosts will show their faces no more

nor haunting mice jumping out of toaster’s coils.

No more snake charmer baskets of interwoven thoughts

Scurrying about the inside memory’s walls

nor haunting mice jumping out of toaster’s coils.

No more heartbreak of country tunes—crooning,

Scurrying about inside memory’s walls

& numbing voices—playing over hollow airwaves.

No more heartbreak of country tunes—crooning.

No more superstitious stories, wives’ tales

& numbing voices—playing over hollow airwaves

or crucifixes hanging from rusty nails in cracked plaster.

In her poem “Wedding Portrait, 1934” Sahms peers into time’s portal, seeking knowledge, preparing for an uncertain future. She sees the concern in her grandmother’s eyes. In this telling scene, infused with intensity, the portrait’s aged glass doubles first as a crystal ball and then as a weapon capable of turning sunlight into flame. The poet observes,

Petals as snow owl feathers fall from a hand-

held boutique much the way down feathers

escape from pillow fights and there’s a real tug

here between memory and this present moment.

I whisper, Beside you in a field of frozen sleep

two of your four children now lie.

Long trailing albino peacock veil fans out its tail

on studio’s floor like a foam tipped wave’s arrival

on an unexplored shore. Lace camouflages grief,

& beneath her hidden shoes—a trap door.

My favorite piece in this collection, Sahms’ “Well-McLain Heater,” strays a little from the poet’s dominant nature imagery—but not really. The furnace becomes a ghostly backdrop to wintry life in a stone-walled space. Always there to adjust the temperature of life’s troubles with new warmth and comforting, if metaphysical, rhythms, this mostly unnoticed machine periodically kicks on to penetrate the entire house. It projects its influence into humanity’s dimension through strategically placed radiators that faithfully extend its essence. Here is the heart of the poem,

… Stationary

for countless years, little

need for repair, unnoticed

as a forgotten bike. Concealed

companion clicks abruptly on

& off, then all’s silent, again

& again, 24/7 works

winter hard as a behind the scene

maintenance man or out of the spotlight

stage crew hand. Housed

in basement, shares room with containers

of Christmas decorations and boxes

of retired books.

Love in the city materializes as a miniature Eden in Sahms’ “Urban Garden, a love poem.” Emotional intensity rises with the contrast of nature and cityscape. The poet’s beloved gently gardens his plants and their resulting flowers manifest gratitude. Seasons burst into wonder, blossoming multitudes sing their tonal arias of climaxing life until autumn collects them into disappearance. An unseen world grows into fruition, filling vacant patches of our landscape. The poet sets her scene this way,

In marbleized moonlight, hidden

garden, as if part of Eden

had secretly fallen. Discreet

in the city’s concreteness, just

at the bend of a shared neighborly

driveway, where waist high

red & pink roses tell

of passionate love.

Not all universes are invisible and ghostly. Some are tangible and exist with the same backdrop (albeit secretly) that mankind uses. Sahms’ poem “The wall behind me

breathing” elucidates many such worlds made up of trees, currents, breezes, and hills. These natural phenomena practice with little effort their languages and dialects that in some ways parallel discourses exhibited within human society. Consider these lines,

reminder of wind, the way it rolled song

over sloped cliffs, among

many languages of trees—

even fallen, overturned ones,

whose root matrixes plucked

vibrations dead accents, decaying trunks

fanning out fungus dialects.

Everything has a voice.

Indeed, everything does have a voice in this multilayered book. Diane Sahms loops in again and again, birdlike, to dazzle her presumably pensive audience with these deep blue poems of parallel possibilities. Lovely images. Tonally near perfect.

Uyghur Poems, ed.Aziz Isa Elkun, trans.Aziz Isa Elkun & Others

 Uyghur Poems, ed.Aziz Isa Elkun, trans.Aziz Isa Elkun & Others, Everyman Library

Pocket Poets, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, London, Toronto, 2023

Reviewed by Karen Klein

This publication is significant as it is not only the first English language anthology of

Uyghur poetry, but also an overview of the history, culture, and poetics of the Uyghur people, which is admirably provided in the introduction by poet, editor, and translator Aziz Isa Elkun. Most English speaking persons in the West are only aware of the Uyghurs due to media reports of Chinese oppression and persecution of them. Confined to their native Xinjiang region, put in reeducation camps, their children taken from them to boarding schools, not allowed to practice Islam, their language and customs discour- aged, they are subjected to forced assimilation. To open our minds to this Turkic group, once an empire in Central Asia through which the ancient Silk Road passed, carrying material goods and knowledge cross continents and cultures, and to expand our knowledge of their rich poetic tradition is this anthology’s gift.

The editor has divided Uyghur poems into three time periods: Classic Poems(BCE to 1900),Modern Poems(1900 to 1960), Contemporary Poems(1960 to 2022) with the most

famous in the period of Classic poems. Uyghur poetry, like that of most ancient cultures, begins in the epic poems of the oral tradition. Tales of rulers, wars, heroes and saints were recited publicly by bards and sung by musicians. Carried down through generations, these poems carried Uyghur history. Script came in the Sixth Century BCE; by the Tenth Century CE, the epic Oghuzname, the exploits of Oghuz Khan, was preserved in Uyghur script. The Bard writes of a woman ”as beautiful as a fairy” whom the hero marries and the ferocity of his warriors: “The grey wolf will be our battle spirit.” Similar themes of love and war dominate the Homeric epics. This anthology includes fragments of Oghuz story and that of Alp Er Tunga, meaning Warrior Man Tiger, a mythical hero possibly historic, and several examples of wisdom poetry, similar to instruction for young noblemen, e.g. the Mirror for Princes, in Western Europe.

Uyghur acceptance of Islam in the Tenth Century CE brought new poetic subjects of spirituality and religion; script gradually became more widespread in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, including the formerly oral folk poetry, now written in quatrains, a poetic form Uyghur poets of the Modern and Contemporary Periods continue to use.

Persian and Arabic traditions, including Arabic script, influenced Uyghur poets as did their adaptation in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries of the Sufi poetic tradition into Turkic language. Poems of the Central Asian poet of Uyghur descent, Ali-Shir Nava’i are still recited and he is venerated as among the best of their poets. Writing in the formal poetic style of the ghazal, the most common verse form in the Sufi tradition, a style contemporary American poets, for example Adrienne Rich, have used, limits the poet up to fifteen couplets with a rhyme scheme of AA, BA, CA, DA, EA, FA, GA, etc. The same end word in the two lines of the first couplet is repeated as the end word in each second line of the successive couplets. Formal limitations do not, however, limit the emotional impact of these poems of love, beauty, and loss or separation from the beloved. This loss can operate metaphorically--the beloved as a beautiful woman or the beloved as Divine love.

Fourteen ghazals by Ali-Shir Nava’i are included in this anthology, thirteen of them are translated from Uzbek by Dennis Daly and taken from his Twenty-one Ghazals by Alishir Navoiy(Cervena Barva Press, 2016). Daly, a well-known writer and poet, is admired by many friends and fellow poets in the Greater Boston area. His translations follow the ghazal form to the letter; the A words reflect the themes of these love poems: eyes, heart, face, fire, fate, night, beauty, heaven, one, beloved, pearl, joy, and pain. It is curious that only one of the thirteen ghazals has pain as its end word on all the lines when so many ofthese poems speak to the misery of the poet, often addressing himself:

Speak up, Navoiy, has love injured your very soul?

Do you bleed your love? Is there no help from heaven?

I don’t read Uyghur, so can’t comment on the accuracy of Daly’s translations. But he has remained faithful to the form Ali-Shir Nava’i chose, and the translations work on their own as poems with wonderful, sometimes startling, images: Your eyelashes found a fatalspot in my heart, or the love song with the end word eyes where the image extends into a bizarre action, explicable only, perhaps, as the eye of heaven, the dark, infinite eyes, an exchange of spiritual love, a mystical exchange of tears, the beloved the image of Divine Love:

Your eyes

Burn into mine until brimmed with salt-spiked tears

Which flow, unburdened, into the channels of your eyes.

Navoiy’s poems of yearning love, of joining Those who suffer, lovers all, are not always laments. In a couplet that poignantly universalizes an emotional state which ends one of the Love Songs, he again addresses himself: Navoiy, why do you complain of meetings and partings? Give thanks for those long moments that still fill your heart.

There are noticeable changes when moving from the poets in the large section of Classic Poems(BCE to 1900)to fewer poems in the Modern section(1900-1960). The strict ghazal form isn’t used, but there are couplets and quatrains in the poems, many are political and speak of the resistance struggle of Uyghurs against the Chinese. Lutpulla Mutellip, poet and journalist, before Chinese police executed him at 22, wrote on a wall with his blood:

This bloodthirsty devil has turned the bloom of my youth into

a withered leaf…

Women appear not only as symbols of the earthly or Divine beloved, but also as fightersA poem from 1943 is addressed To My Daughter, the War Nurse. She was Rizwange who died at 19 on the front lines rescuing wounded by the Chinese Nationalist Army. And the first woman poet included, Melike Ziyawudun, with a love poem from 1957in which she confesses I always read your poems, I learned your secrets from your poems, and teases that she might not only love his poems, but him as well.

-3-

Most of the anthologized poets are included in the largest section Contemporary Poems(1960 to 2022). These young poets, born in the Twentieth Century, are the continuance of an old culture, now under suppression. Many have fled or left for different countries. Mahmut Abduramanov speaks for so many, writes of their diaspora My Uyghurs, you are scattered all over the world, but the longing for their formerly immense Motherland for the river Tarim, the is intense: We are moths drawn to the fire of our homeland. In his famous poem, The World in the  City of Kashgar, Abdul Tunyaz writes Every night in the Berlin sky/You see Uyghur eyes in every star and concludes his poem:

The homeless birds

Cry for the seasons, calling for their homeland

While the wandering wind carries

Leaves of its own.

The editor notes that in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, Uyghur poems show the influence of Russian poetry with modernism, post-modernism, free verse. Many women poets are included; their stories of fighting the Chinese, of persecution, of being taken away to re-education camps, of their deaths are heartbreaking. Some are like the Blue Shirt, whom Armet Igamberdi commemorated in his poem for the unknown heroine of the protest on July 5, 2009 when women came out to demand where family members were. Like the Russian women poets they might have read, Akmatova, Tsveteva, they show resistance and love. Zeynure Isa writes: I wish to become the flagpole/Of a flag we wave for freedom; as the editor of a publishing house, Chemingul Awut was sent to a Chines re-education camp in July 2018 and poet/activist Muyesser Abdul’ehed’s debut novel depicts the detention camps. Rahile Kamal writes Because I miss you, I fall like rain. Teacher Risalet Merdan claims Today is a day to write poems, while Gunisa Imin Gulkhan, sentenced to seventeen years in prison for her ‘separatist’ poetry writes of women prisoners: They don’t want to shed their tears…. They want to talk about it with someone on the outside. Gunaz Saydullayeva’s poem begins Mother cut her own umbilical cord because the strict Chinese policy of birth-control makes couples hide one too many. Since 2017, that policy has relaxed, but forced sterilization of Uyghur women has been reported.

The forms of these contemporary poems are stanzaic, mostly quatrains, but I must mention a single, perfect ghazal by Ekhmetian Osman that shows the persistence for love poetry of a traditional form and includes an image from the old battle poems: The wolf of life begins to howl each time I take you in my arms.

Editor Aziz Isa Elkun has done a commendable job in compiling this book, translating many of the poems, writing a splendid introduction, providing biographies for most of the poets and important facts from contemporary Uyghur history of resistance to Chinese attempts to deny them a state and to obliterate their cultural identity. He concludes the anthology with several of his own poems, so he should have the last word. The final poem, about the roses he planted, concludes:

My roses are blossoming with hope

Singing a song of freedom

Swift River Ballad Poems by Thomas DeFreitas

 

Swift River Ballad

Poems by Thomas DeFreitas

Kelsay Books

Kelsaybooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-63980-416-0

41 Pages

$17.00

Review by Dennis Daly

When tonality rides along the surface in poetry the results often appear strangely profound. In Thomas DeFreitas’ new book, Swift River Ballad, the poet pilots his paper boat of sorts down a torrent of uplifting canticles and unsettling hymns, seeking the truth, but missing the dangerous rocks and eddies along the way.

DeFreitas stops his readers in their too comfortable tracks with curiously numinous images and sacerdotal references. His technique strikes one as unusual (in the sense of modern verse) and new. Depth is never a problem here. The poet’s perfect pitch phraseology allows submergence into subconscious levels when necessary and proper in an emotive sense.

In his opening poem Autumnography DeFreitas follows “the undermutter of stiffening leaves” and with it the unveiling of the season. The sun, of course, plays off these well-said, if standard, natural phenomena using spy craft, then letting things deepen into mortality and garishness,

Furtive now, clandestine,

whisper-witted gestures,

but soon enough: blatant,

reckless flamboyance,

spending fire-colors

in a glorious death-gamble.

Elegy, DeFreitas’ poem of sorrow and hope, resounds with empathy for a little girl afflicted with the illnesses of humankind, who ages into a wintery dependency. She lived and lives in a world of lost children, a world that begs for attention and, perhaps, safeguards a metaphysical secret. Even Dolores’ name reverberates with sadness. The last two imploring stanzas read like a formal prayer,

Every living voice

sings with Dolores,

Queen of Limerick,

Lady of Sorrows,

fierce as Freya

when she’s at the guitar,

brave as St. Brigid,

this whiskey soprano,

this pint-sized fighter.

Every parched spirit

drinks with Dolores,

from a well of solace,

from a lake of grace

pure as the first star

kindled in Genesis,

wide as the mantle

of the sheltering Virgin.

DeFreitas becomes a double for Shakespeare’s Falstaff in his piece entitled My Belly. The poem, written in prosaic form, flies across the page, propelled by humor, interesting word choices and touches of vulgarity. The poet personifies his gut and imbues it with majesty and power. He opens the piece this way,

is ample and accepting, catholic and capacious; it takes up space, it

gives you room: my big old liberal belly, filled with poached eggs

and coffee, subversive stories and baritone dollops of whimsy.

Today I am thanking my belly for being so well-rounded: truly, a

civil and impeccable gentlebelly, eager with factoids, brave with

bombast, adroit at a quadrillion gaucheries. No joke! There’s

nothing prim or diminutive about my belly.

Parts of conversation from one person, who has something original to say, can sometimes morph into a peculiar type of poetry. But it does take a skilled poet to set that natter into a frame. DeFreitas accomplishes this task in his poem She, Barkeep, to Him, Barfly. Both bartender and regular drinker are plausibly retired from their former professions. Here the bartender takes stock,

Fifty-cent vocab and a slacker’s gut,

you’d guzzle Newcastle `til you browned out

on the barstool you wore your cheek-prints into.

Ridiculous tipper! No, you’d never stiff me,

but Jesus, forty percent? Dude, you must’ve

wanted me more than the dark English stout

you’d gulp down to dial back your lovestruck fluster.

I gave you grief. You took it straight, no chaser,

never flinching from my ashtray trash-talk,

my moods as changeable as late October.

I miss you sometimes, bro. You weren’t a jerk.

Swift River Ballad serves as both the title poem and my favorite poem in this DeFreitas collection. Set in a honky-tonk type of bar, and written in pantoum form, it reads gritty as hell, and it’s lovely. A seemingly thrown in line: “Larry, that’s Butch’s kid, his wife just left him,” brings great power and enormous depth into an emotive setup. Consider this context,

A grit-voiced redhead staggers from cheap gin.

There’s a faint smell of sawdust and spent dreams:

Five or six local boys get high out back.

A grit-voiced redhead staggers from cheap gin:

Who’s gonna buy the lady another drink?

Five or six local boys get high out back:

Money is scarce and jobs are hard to come by.

Some guy buys Julianne another drink—

Larry, that’s Butch’s kid, his wife just left him…

Money is scarce and jobs are hard to come by:

“I Fall to Pieces” plays on the old jukebox.

Like a comfortless man whose wife’s just left him,

A winter sky darkens above Swift River.

In DeFreitas’ poem, The Widow at Ninety, he deals with love, low expectations, and loss, not to mention a certain grim wisdom that comes with age. The elderly protagonist rattles off an old, sad story experienced by many women. But here the matter-of-factness detonates in the piece’s final line. The ambiguity says a lot, especially following a prideful breaking-out line. The actual venting of the story takes on high significance by giving meaning to desperate action. Note the multiple exclamation marks. These are the key lines,

… I had to

learn how to pay the bills. I did it!

Would you like another cup of tea?

No trouble! Oh, I miss him—still!

He always did the shopping, not me.

He was a better cook than I was,

And believe you me, I’m no slouch!

Not once did he ever hit me or the kids.

Thomas DeFreitas speaks clearly in this collection of righteous poetry. It rings of lyrical truths. Honesty in poetry should not deter readership in these days of gathering darkness. And DeFreitas is nothing if not reverently honest.

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani By Marc Vincenz

 

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani

By Marc Vincenz

White Pine Press

www.whitepine.org

ISBN: 978-1-945680-60-1

141 Pages

$17.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Slicing through the surface of airless consciousness toward unfathomable truths can excite the artistic imagination into a rather unique understanding of being and self. Marc Vincenz in his new book, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, concocts distinctive and curious metaphors from these rarely explored oceanic depths with their hitherto undetected, and sometimes priceless, gems.

Many of Vincenz’s poems are disguised narrative pieces seemingly connected with a dreamlike, almost metaphysical logic. His sparse, but poignant, imagery belies the substantial emotions and mnemonic thought subsumed within.

A Crest of Memories, Vincenz’s opening poem, details “some other knowledge,” where mortality’s threat and the confrontations of life are held in check. The poet commences this poem of love with a complaint and a question,

When the wind becomes

my heart and I undo

your eyes on night’s

other edge, a bitter

taste floods my tongue

like a nub of tamarind.

The absence drinks

you dry and you re-

call the reasons

for forgetting and why, why

you’ve learned to sleep

in that shadow memory.

What is the sound of love

In this dark hour of death?

Life’s breath takes center stage in Vincenz’s poem Nephesh. Sometimes translated from the Hebrew as “soul,” nephesh inhabits both humans and animals in a hierarchical way. Night terrors and memories fill the mass of humanity with history and godliness. And godliness is nothing if not alert to particulars at varying levels. Consider the transformation that comes with understanding in these lines,

Surely everything is interior.

An ancient fear, primordial

almost. Therefore all this

flesh and bone armoring the heart?

The forest, the ocean,

the mountain—also

all daunting, no?

And who has the most ferocious eyes?

a reclining figure sighs;

and suddenly as if by magic,

at that unsure moment,

everything transforms

and we burst into song.

Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), famously said Rene Descartes in his Discourse on Method. An active consciousness (or thought) proves existence, and beyond that, well…. In his poem, To Discover Descartes, Vincenz exalts being and the small truths derived from it, but acknowledges a concomitant loneliness, both pushing back and profound. The poet confirms his alienation, albeit opening illumination, in the interior of the piece,

And those thousand eyes

of mammalian

longing. O, to sleep

among the scavengers and predators

but alive in the dark,

obliterated in the pavilions

of the insects, in the wake

of pollen and fragrance,

everything filled in and used,

but barely used up. The sparkles

that catch the light of the passing

cars or trucks carting

consciousness, or perhaps,

more aptly, a self-

consciousness edging toward

the warmth of morning.

Dreamtime pervades each of the luminous shores that slither under the watery universe of human memory. Drawing on Past Lives, Vincenz’s poem, which explores the nature of death and mindful life, pictures a dazzling morning in the preternatural beginnings of innocence. Childlike with wonder these lines strike home,

It’s too early still,

what’s visible, not awake,

what’s awake, not yet visible.

What’s audible is running

away with itself—

upwards, the stars still present,

winking into silence.

beginning their dream

of bone and flesh,

of dazzling storms,

an endless text

leaping from planet

to planet, flowers-

and trees- and fossils-

to-be, a power of such

beauty above and below in the pitch

beyond death, where worlds

are repainted again and over

in shadows, where a curious

child is hypnotized

by a future unknown—

and then, the dream

subsides and walks

into itself

Consciousness flirts and flutters. It has no truck with stability. Vincenz’s delicate poem Enchantment on the Islands moves lightly with a looking-glass narrative delineating a beginning, a climax, and a denouement in logical succession. Love’s logic, that is. Or, perhaps, humanity’s interior search for truth. A metamorphosis at the heart of the poem enchants,

… someone suddenly

took my hand

and drew me through

the wave of weeds.

As far as the tarnished

tinsel she led me,

through a thin tangle of myself

she led me, no maps

no sense or hint

of technology,

and we tumbled

in the grasses and the leaves

mirroring the quilts

of clouds, to a space

where joy and awe communed,

and soon, we sprouted

wings, clamoring

for distance…

Alone with oneself silence governs in a dive to find the right word, the right phrase, the pearl that unpuzzles the surrounding chaos. Here the poet conjures up the sums of deceit until the right combination delivers the sought after, defining truth. In his piece, Every Subterfuge, Vincenz enters this watery frontier of tightening depth. Aquatic voices stream past him as he reinvents himself as the subject of being. A personal history nudges at him,

How much has sunk in,

bled into your pores

over the years: the salt,

the hard calcified shells,

the ink of invertebrates—

it fills you with clear, warm

blue, and all the waters

in a tight embrace,

the voices borderless,

the tones tied in knots

then freed again, pieces

of a puzzle spread through

another heaven where almost

everything flies, fragments,

plumes and scars

After reading Vincenz’s exquisite collection of poems, the reader rises to the surface of self with an often startlingly new appreciation of life and its sometimes stifled, but then omnipresent, insistent, and musical voices. Here drawn-in breath turns sweet and poetic comprehension begins anew.