Review of Odysseus' Daughter by Cammy Thomas

 

Cammy Thomas, Odysseus’ Daughter. Parkman Press. 2023. 20pp. $18.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman

Amid summer heat and ghastly newspaper headlines, Cammy Thomas’s Odysseus’ Daughter blows in like a brisk, briny sea breeze. Nineteen poems beautifully printed, with a gatefold blue-gray cover bearing an elegant line drawing of Athena by the poet’s brother: the book is a pleasure to hold in your hands. And the poems make those familiar Odyssean characters come alive yet again: Penelope, Nausicaa, Cyclops, the sea nymph Leucothea, Argos, and others are transformed by Thomas’s precise, musical language into new guises. Anyone who has taught the Odyssey repeatedly—as Thomas has—knows how beautifully it opens up conversations about love, family, heroism, mortality, gender politics, and community. Thomas’s poems touch on many of these themes but what struck me most was their repeated return to the uncanny: the sense that on some level we are unfamiliar to ourselves, shot through with contradictory yearnings as we negotiate what she calls in one poem the “shifting voids of the waves.”

A Boston-area poet, Thomas taught literature and creative writing for many years (including fourteen years of teaching the Odyssey) and now lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. Odysseus’ Daughter is her fourth book.

Homer’s Odysseus, of course, had no daughter; men in his family bore single sons. I take the title poem’s imagined daughter to be the poet, heir to Odysseus’s prowess not in war, but with words: “my boat has nothing of mast or crew,” Thomas writes. “I stand under the bow of heaven/words locked in my throat.” Meanwhile, the world does what it will: the boat floats on an unfathomable sea, and “gods hang above decks.” Greek gods are notoriously imperfect, much like the humans in whose lives they interfere. The speakers in these poems live in an eerie, unmanageable world that mirrors their own unwieldy desires.

So Penelope is neither the standard sad sack, weeping and sleeping her life away, nor is she the clever, idealized wife. She’s just human—“weary now,” getting fed up. Yes, she cleverly manipulate the suitors with her ruse of weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s shroud, teasing them “into limbo/as they feast on dwindled flocks.” But she also feels something herself:

Now I dream of the handsome one,

imagine his soft lips on mine,

shame myself in morning light.

Penelope’s desires make sense in human terms—twenty years of celibacy! But they also make sense in Homeric terms, as an example of homophrosyne—the “like-mindedness” of Odysseus and his wife.

“Sea Nymph Leucothea” is another poem about complicated desires. As a former human, Leucothea is pained by Odysseus’s fear when she intervenes to save him from drowning. “In his face/I see—I’m no longer human”:

Still, he takes the scarf, and it scares

the water calm. I sink back into the cold

foreign gloom that’s now my home,

turn, swim down.

The modulations in vowel sounds are beautiful and evocative. How sad, we think, that poor Leucothea is condemned to such gloom. And then remember that she has solace of being immortal.

On the facing page Odysseus is human and near drowning: “His arms can’t pull through the chop,/mouth choked with salt, a ring of jagged/rocks clanging as he goes down.” Between sound and rhythm, I can just about feel the whitecaps splashing into my mouth, cutting off breath. And then Leucothea-as-bird offers a scarf as she transforms into nymph. No wonder Odysseus is scared as he “pumps his legs/against whatever glides beneath.”

“Whatever glides beneath”: the sea in these poems—as in Homer—is the ultimate undoing of human identity: unknowable, threatening us with oblivion, undoing our efforts at control. Its apotheosis comes in the final poem of Part 1, “Facing Scylla,” a virtuosic rendition of seawater sloshing and whirling, drowning syntax along with Odysseus’ remaining crew members. Words repeat, return with varying meanings, rhyme, almost rhyme; body parts, boat parts, sky and sea churn chaotically:

We row the foam we sense the mouth

It opens in a moment smoked

Sea foam smokes the glass we row

The mast the past come floating on the foam

While Part 1 adheres closely to Homer, the eight poems in Part 2 move into the modern world. We’re still in the hands of forces we can’t control (whether we call them gods or not) but without Odysseus’s resources to help us through. In “Not Your Wit I Want,” the speaker mourns, “She’s got cancer/and I can’t do a thing.” Brawn and wit won’t help, only “toxic drugs and scalpels.” But still the speaker yearns for the “nose-thumbing backtalk” with which

Odysseus faced death. “Save us Odysseus,” the speaker concludes: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

Feminist poets in recasting Homer have often elevated Penelope, Circe and Kalypso at Odysseus’ expense. Thomas’s take is surprisingly sympathetic, emphasizing Odysseus’ vulnerability. Even as he rapes a nameless woman taken in a raid, he seems a little lost, “her tears/rough ropes/twisting my heart.” But in Part 2, through the imagined figures of Odysseus’ daughter, granddaughter, and sister (who, unlike her brother, wouldn’t “pillage a town for fun,”) Thomas begins to offer an alternative to Odyssean values. The book’s final poem is its least Homeric, positing a benevolent Zeus horrified by what we’ve made of the world. Reimagining Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” Thomas has Zeus contrast the world he’d planned—“a simple favored place,/with greenery that shaded all from pain” and “no faceless governments that cannot feel”—with contemporary actualities; much as Auden contrasts the peaceful world that Thetis expected to see on her son’s shield, with the totalitarian nightmare Hephaestos has actually wrought there. But here I’ve come full circle, back to heat waves and ghastly headlines. “Save us Odysseus,” I’m tempted to say: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Poem Series. Keith Tornheim Poetica Publishing. 2022. 40 pp. $15.00

 

REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN

When I think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, I think of a Rubik’s cube—with its colored squares you’re supposed to shift until each side of the cube is a single color. But shift one panel to make it right, and another shifts out of place. In the same way, that story about God and Abraham fails to make sense to me no matter how many times I turn it this way and that. I can admire Abraham’s faith as long as I don’t look at what God’s asking him to do. I can admire God’s provision of the ram, as long as I don’t look at what he put Abraham and Isaac through first.

Keith Tornheim’s recent collection of poems, The Sacrifice of Isaac, works the story as if it were Rubik’s cube: turning it every which way, each poem giving voice to a different participant (not only God, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, the servants, and the angel, but also the ram, the thicket, the rock). I found the juxtaposition of these viewpoints surprisingly moving, and surprisingly surprising: such an old story can still appear strange.

The thirty-one poems open with an account of a Persian plate the speaker’s mother admired in a Boston antique shop, a plate depicting “Father Abraham with the knife/raised above Isaac his son,/whom he clasps against his chest.” Tornheim bought the plate as a gift for her, then inherited it when she died, but found himself “uneasy as the heir/of this testament of her certainty and faith.”

He’s not the only uneasy one. How can a righteous God ask such a thing? How could a loving father do it? Kierkegaard, Leonard Cohen, and countless rabbis have asked the same question. Tornheim works very much within the Midrashic tradition of rabbinic commentary; in

fact, many of his poems have been read as part of High Holy Day services, when the “binding of Isaac” is the Torah portion for the day. “Who knows what really happened atop Mt. Moriah?” the speaker asks in the title poem. “All are dead, except God./Perhaps Abraham acted differently from what is written.”

Or perhaps the rocks did. In “Memorial Stones,” those rocks which “by God’s grace never tasted Isaac’s blood” become the site of future suffering:

And afterward that angel of the Lord

carried the stones away one by one

and dropped them at designated points

in places in a distant land.

There they waited for four thousand years

in Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen…

until at last their thirst was quenched

in Buchenwald, Treblinka and the rest…

with blood of Isaac’s seed.

Tornheim’s poems have the stark, paratactic style Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis associates with Biblical narrative—we see only spotlit actions, with minimal context. But each poem shifts the spotlight, aligning us with contrasting, contradictory viewpoints. In the process the emphasis shifts from the story’s message to what it might have felt like to the individuals involved.

One poem, “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” points out that the story is more properly known as the “binding,” not the “sacrifice” of Isaac, since Isaac is not sacrificed. For many rabbis, this is the point: the story teaches us that human sacrifice is not acceptable. But surely the same point could have been made without causing so much pain. Because “Abraham sacrificed his son/in the depths of his heart” the poem suggests, “it was his heart/that Abraham gave to God”:

And Isaac knew it.

And Sarah knew it,

and it broke hers.

So it was that Abraham sacrificed

their hearts, too.

The poem ends blessing God (somewhat bitterly, it seems to me) as “King of the universe,/Receiver of hearts.”

Because the human price seems so disproportionate to the lesson learned, Tornheim can’t rest with any single explanation. In “I Should Not Have Asked,” God decides it was all a mistake. Both “The Testing” and “Adonai-yireh”suggest that rather than God testing Abraham, perhaps Abraham was testing God:

And when I raised the knife,

God had to answer, to reveal Himself

as a God of life,

not one of the old gods of death.

Other poems suggest it was God’s test, but he failed to understand its consequences. Sarah’s heart, Abraham’s heart, Isaac’s heart: all are shattered by what they learn. “How long must I rock him in the night,” an angry Sarah asks Abraham on his return. “And then who will comfort me?”

But my favorite poem is “Borrowed,” in which no one’s heart gets broken. Even the sheep turns up unharmed, returned to its shepherd although “not so frisky as before,” and smelling of smoke. When the shepherd later journeys near an encampment “whose headman we were told worshipped/a strange and solitary god”:

. . . Abraham himself came out

to see that we were well provided for.

And when he saw our ram—

it was the strangest thing!—

he bowed his head in silent thanks,

and our ram nodded back at him.

In its simplicity, its refusal to explain, and in the stark beauty of its language (the assonance of “thing” and “him”; of “thanks” and “ram”; the defamiliarizing effect of Abraham as “headman”), “Borrowed” is typical of Tornheim’s best poems: their strange, evocative mix of understated mysticism and humanity.

Ultimately, The Sacrifice of Abraham suggests, we are the stories we tell. The book’s final poem, “Looking Back,” invokes history and collectivity—the “we” formed by shared stories:

Scars become legends,

legends become scripture;

a family becomes a people.

And the ram becomes “ancient smoke/that still swirls around us.” What all this says, finally, about God, violence, sacrifice, and humanity, I’m not sure. Maybe just that we need to think, when we read those old stories or even the newspaper, less of what the lesson is and more of whose heart is getting broken.

In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers

 



Rebecca Burke, ed. In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers. Stillhouse Press. 258pp.

Reviewed by Ruth Hoberman




Curb cuts, kneeling buses, closed captions, and audible walk lights were a start. But disability rights activists are now asking for more: representation. This means representation in positions of power as well as representations in the media that they have themselves created. “Growing up, I never read a book with a main character like me written by a disabled author,” Rebecca Burke writes at the start of In Between Spaces, an anthology of work by thirty-three writers who identify as disabled. In solidarity with other underrepresented populations, Burke insists that publishing—long dominated by its “cisgender, heteronormative, ableist, and white supremacist history”—must make room for more diverse voices. In Between Spaces addresses ableism in particular: the assumption that bodies and minds differing from social norms or notions of health are defined solely by that difference, and that they therefore need “fixing.” Look elsewhere, these writers collectively suggest—at infrastructure, attitudes, and institutions—for what needs fixing.

Burke and her fellow editorial board members at Stillhouse Press—a student- and alumni-run press affiliated with George Mason University—have sought out work arising from the spaces “in-between traditional diagnostic criteria and textbook definitions, where lived experience fills the gaps in our understanding.” Individual pieces are true to this aim: fiction blurs with nonfiction, poetry with prose; poems push the boundaries of form and genre. There are no straightforward narratives of diagnosis, treatment, and cure. Instead we get immersion in the minds of interesting, carefully individualized people.

What exactly is “wrong” with the narrator of “Mornings,” a nonfiction piece by Rhea Dhanbhoora, which opens the book? What struck me as I read was how much I wanted to be told and how thoroughly my desire was rebuffed. The narrator has problems with her legs. “But you’re not disabled,” people tell her. “Disabled is—like really disabled.” But her legs “just hang there limp, loose, on fire.” My impulse was to impose a narrative on her experience, one where the tension comes from sickness and the happy ending means cure. Her friends tell her, “you’re not disabled—everyone has back problems.” But that urge to deny or fix someone else’s reality is one of the problems this anthology seeks to expose and counteract.

Many pieces point out the limitations of medical terms. Poems like “Health History,”“Galvanic Skin Test Response,” “Turner syndrome,” and “Bipolar II” undercut and complicate diagnostic labels. Kaleigh O’Keefe’s “Diagnostic Laparoscopy” echoes a medical textbook with its headings and bullet points:




I. What will the surgeon find inside me?

 . blood and muscle

  . inflammation

   .scar tissue (to be expected)

  .scar tissue (that wasn’t expected)

  .a box of Kleenex




The list mingles likely things (“scar tissue”) with unlikely (“maybe that tampon I still don’t know if I lost on the dance floor or if it got sucked into the black hole behind my cervix seven years ago when I got too drunk at that lesbian music festival”). There’s a hint of rage in some of the imagined findings: “an old stone wall creeping through my guts” or “a bomb”. We learn so much about this person through her fantasies that what the surgeon does finally find— endometriosis—feels laughably inadequate.

Lili Sarayrah’s “pain(t)—by—number,” a wry nonfictional account of back pain, complicates the infamous 1-10 pain scale with a paint-by-number set. Immobilized by pain and the pandemic, Sarayrah seeks distraction in her paint set but finds instead just another facet of her bodily condition: “If my pain were a color, it would be like paint No. 19, a shade of orange like those traffic cones marking caution ahead.” The pain scale, of course, frustrates with its narrow range of options; so, too, does the world’s desire to label who she is: “I feel in-between a lot of the time. Specifically in-between cultures, jobs, and diagnoses.” Sarayrah’s essay ends tentatively, inconclusively: there is no definitive triumph, only “acceptance of the imperfection.” And most important is her own incalculability as a human self: “I put away my pain(t) and when we film my first wobbly steps, no one’s counting.”

No one’s counting because experience isn’t reducible to numerical formulae. That lovely ending made me think of Whitman’s “When Last I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” in which the speaker, “unaccountable,” gets impatient with the lecture and wanders out alone to look “in perfect silence at the stars.” The people in these poems, essays, and stories are all insistently unaccountable: individuals conveying what it feels like to live inside a particular body or mind at a particular time and place.

Resistance to categories means also resistance to conventional endings. Wendy Elizabeth Wallace offers the reader alternative plot options as she narrates “Your Very Own Low-Vision Dating Adventure,” and Teresa Milbrodt, in “Cyclops Notes,” a fragmented account of visual impairment, writes, “Life means continually revising what is normal, embracing your tenuousness, wondering if the twinge in your elbow is temporary or permanent. Nobody is ever out of the woods. Life is all about the woods.”

There are many more writers worth mentioning than I can include here. But I’ll conclude with Latif Askia Ba, whose four extraordinary poems depict life inside a body with “crooked glowing limbs.” “On Gospel (a Meander)” is particularly innovative and powerful. Aligned on the page’s left margin is an account of “this body like an exile,/like a wound dumb luck carved into my neurons,/a wound only words can pass through.” Interspersed is an account of listening to “Aretha’s gospel/over and over”—an account aligned along the right margin. “Only the gospel can remedy/this confusion,” we learn: the confusion of a mind where words from “Plato’s Republic/and the Pali Canon collide with verses/of Patwah.” The remedy: “She knows/one must bend to testify.”

Ba’s “Houses,” the book’s penultimate piece, epitomizes the anthology’s ability to familiarize us with unfamiliar voices even as it defamiliarizes the familiar:

Even houses are strange.

They live in you.

They’re shaped of corners and doorways,

parts of apartments and crammed lodgings—

private as a pair of testicles.

I thought of Philip Larkin’s “Home is So Sad,” but his houses are tame, “Shaped to the comfort of the last to go.” For Ba,

Houses cut you open:

a jagged wood,

a very bad word,

a question.

And when houses die, they leave behind an “inheritance” that captures the incongruities and beauties of this anthology: “a dying washing machine, a garden devoured by winter,/an old CPU, a bird unnamed by man.”

John Okrent, This Costly Season

 

 

            John Okrent, This Costly Season.  Arrowsmith.  2021. 62 pp. $20.00

             Review by Ruth Hoberman

 

            In March 2020, the Northwest and the Northeast shared a peculiar horror: that first onslaught of deathly ill people, the sirens and scrambling for masks and ventilators, the fear of contagion—all weirdly juxtaposed with daffodils and nesting birds.  John Okrent’s recent collection of sonnets, This Costly Season, recreates the anxiety, despair, and rare glimmers of hope so many of us felt during that time.

            A physician as well as a poet, Okrent practices family medicine at a community health center in Tacoma, Washington—the state where the first coronavirus case in the United States was confirmed on January 21, followed in late February by the first death. By March 17, the date of Okrent’s first poem (each poem is titled only by its date), the U.S. death toll had surpassed one hundred:  “Driving to clinic,” the poem opens, “—on the radio a pulmonologist/in Italy tells of choosing among the dying/which ones not to save.”  Fear is becoming the norm.  The gun shop is packed, the poem notes, and “Everyone’s eyes seemed wider/above their face masks.”

            Okrent’s experiences as a doctor give him credibility, but he turns his attention mainly to what he sees going to and from the clinic, and to the pandemic’s impact on his family.  “Home from clinic,” he writes in “March 19, 2020,”  “I throw my clothes/straight in the wash and get in the shower/before I touch my wife and daughter.”  He’d like to think he can protect his family:  “From our cabin we keep the world,” the poem opens.  But its ending acknowledges that home can’t be partitioned off:  “In our cabin we keep the world.” The poem that follows, “March 20, 2020,” elaborates on our interconnectedness, “We keep the world, the world keeps us.” And “March 27, 2020”:  “If you die, I die too.”    

            Okrent’s book is subtitled A Crown of Sonnets, evoking the sonnet’s long history of exploring love and time. While his poems deviate from the traditional rhyme scheme and meter, they retain the form’s fourteen lines, meditative pace, and narrow focus.  Some include internal rhymes, and many end with a turn or summation that has some of the feel of Shakespeare’s concluding couplets.  Most powerful, though, is the repetitive impact of the crown:  as one poem’s last line becomes the first line of the next poem, the scene darkens and intensifies.  That first poem, for example, which opens with the Italian pulmonologist, shifts to an image of Walt Whitman tending to Union soldiers amid “the smell of dead/or dying flesh. And in all the dooryards, the smell of lilacs.” The image evokes the book’s project as a whole—to salvage what there is of beauty during fearful times.  But it also sets us up for the poem’s ending, which imagines the man working at the busy gun shop in his “latex gloves the color of lilacs, only darker.”  And then “March 18, 2020” opens “The color of lilacs, only darker—the clouds/that cover the top of Mt. Rainier this evening/like a shroud.”  Those echoing lines create a sense of claustrophobia, of consequences unfolding, of contagion.  

            Okrent’s title comes from W. D. Snodgrass’s “April Inventory,” a poem quoted in the book’s epigraph and again in “April 20, 2020”:

            That time of year when every crow you see

            carries clump of hair or twig or tuft of down

            into the trees. They brood and hover

            over our duress while spring repays last summer’s

            debts. “We shall afford our costly seasons,” said Snodgrass.

            But this one?  Like a stain, desperation seeps into things:

            the grocery bag, the steering wheel, little hand

            in my hand, midnight bowl of cereal.

Spring’s bank account is full; our own, emptied by loss. The allusion to Shakespeare’s “That Time of Year” is equally bleak:  Shakespeare links winter, fall, and twilight to the approach of death. For Okrent, however, death is already there at daybreak: “The mist hangs low around the whole horizon/like the lid of an eye that’s closing. But it’s only morning.”

            Unless morning means there’s time still to hope?  Okrent’s forty-eight sonnets mention disasters besides the pandemic—the murder of George Floyd, hurricanes, wildfire, a divisive President—and also hints of change, like the Black Lives Matter movement. In “June 1, 2020,” he calls for “more gentle/more genital, more wrestling with angels, more asphyxia’s opposite.”  “June 5, 2020” notes, of a protestor knocked down by police, “blood leaked like a secret from his ear.”  And the next begins, “From the ear, to please the muses, music/reaches for more music”; the speaker and his family, newly tested for Covid, visit family “for the first time in months.” Ultimately, Okrent suggests, in the book’s final poem, “Nothing is wasted,/love least of all.”  That poem concludes, as so many others have begun, with the words “Driving to clinic.”  But this time, there is no mist like the “lid of an eye that’s closing.”  Instead, “day breaks its glass of light on the harbor/and I take it—like a chance—like a cure.”

            With their repetitive box-like form and those reverberating final lines, Okrent’s poems are at times despairing, but always graceful and controlled. There’s a muffled quality to them that I found added to their impact, as if the speaker were too stunned to probe too deeply or to let loose emotionally.  If, in ten years, we’ve forgotten what these last few years have felt like, This Costly Season will be there to remind us:  “I bow my head to the gun/of the infrared thermometer, then enter the clinic” (“April 23, 2020”).

Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can.

 

Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can. Loom Press, 2021. 119pp. $20.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman


Sarah Alcott Anderson’s debut collection, We Hold On To What We Can, returns again and again to the message of its title. Children grow up, family and old friends die, the places we love change. What can we retain from the passage of time? Anderson is the daughter of a photographer, and the poems are charged with some of the emotional aura of a family album: moments caught—vivid, but trailing clouds of loss.

Anderson, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, chairs the English department at Berwick Academy, in Maine. She and her husband live in New Hampshire with their two children, where they run the Word Barn, which hosts readings and workshops. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including North American Review and Raleigh Review.

The challenge of writing about the passage of time, of course, is figuring out how to avoid sentimentality. Anderson does this by using precise language and (mainly) short lines; the poems feel restrained, understated, even reticent. Transitions and context are minimal; moments and images are juxtaposed without elaboration. “Let parts of your world/speak to each other,” the speaker says in “Come Here,” quoting advice an artist once gave her. Or, as she says in “Sweet Gum Seed Pods,” “We hold on to what we can./My son’s hair is thick, golden,/a wilderness.”

The poems are grouped into four sections. The first focuses on childhood; the second losses (great uncle, friend, grandfather, older brother); the third more recent relationships; and finally “Kaleidoscope” addresses the mind-bending complexity of time. But themes and images recur throughout: in particular, as a poem from the first section, “Beginnings & Tornadoes,” has it, “It’s about Time”:

It’s always about time. Strings of little lights

and paper lanterns, the shimmering city over there,




the sirens over there. All those lives

in all those windows.

The poem mourns the long absence of a childhood friend: “Why/did it take us this long? My children have filled me./They have filled me. I should have called you.” The repetition suggests the way children both satisfy and consume. Now, at last, they talk and remember: “girls racing headlong toward the magic/and the hurt. No one could have stopped us./We had salt in our hair and we were fast.”

Other poems make similar efforts to recreate past moments or bridge distances between people. “Let me put you there,” “MacMahan Island” opens, inviting the reader into the speaker’s past, in this case a church service in Maine when the speaker and her twin sister are five. But we never quite get there. The moment hasn’t just slipped away; it was illusory to begin with, infused with a future that will undo it. “In two years, our parents/will separate. All that is, seen and unseen.” This snippet from the Nicene Creed appears as part of the church service, but also as a reminder that, much as her minister father might insist on the reality of the “world to come,” any single moment is inseparable from the ones preceding and coming after them. The speaker and her sister pretend they are lost:

I had heard about lost explorers—shipwrecks.

Where were our parents

those afternoons? Just behind or ahead of us,

I am sure. We are always turning,

responding to someone calling a name.

The sisters feel secure enough to want to pretend they’re lost; someone will always call a name. But in a sense they really are lost—caught up, as we all are, in fantasies and a future we can’t foresee.

To compensate for these uncertainties and losses, the poems celebrate love—not romantic love so much as a relatedness manifest through gesture. In “Turning to Go,” for example, the speaker stands behind her naked three-year-old son as he climbs a rock:

I stand behind him,

my arms ready. I imagine

holding my arms this way

for the rest of my life,

as if the space

I create with my limbs

will endure

his turning to go . . .

This idea that the mother’s gesture might create something enduring—combining memory and love in a single, embodied manifestation—strikes me as strangely powerful.

Such a gesture turns up in other poems as well. In “Turn, It’s Been Three Decades,” the speaker remembers drawing on her children’s backs: “If I could have traced my finger gently in circles/along your skin forever, girls, if I could have,” she says longingly. In “Moonstone,” the speaker opens, “If I could, I’d press my thumb along you/like I do across this smooth moon necklace…” And “Come Here” ends:

This drive has become




everything I can’t say

to you. In slow, half-moon

strokes, I will




wipe your face

with a warm cloth.

This is all I can promise.

The gesture compensates for what can’t be expressed or reconstituted.

What “drive” is the speaker referring to? The book is framed as a journey by the poems that open and close it. The first poem, “Caution,” warns “Do not run/on this trail.” And the last, a prose poem, “Free Advice,” is set on a highway: don’t mistake the taillights you see for the windows of a hostel, the poem warns us. We may be invited into the poems as co-constructors of past moments, but we’ll never quite arrive anywhere. “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark,” “Free Advice” concludes, evoking Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass ends, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” But Anderson isn’t as sure as Whitman about the meetup: “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark, but you have to keep walking for now. Think of the gestures we all misread, slough them off, step over them. Keep going.” We will never get the whole picture—of the past or of each other—but perhaps the gestures of affection offered by these poems suffice.

Myrna Stone, The Resurrectionist’s Diary. (Dos Madres Press)

Myrna Stone, The Resurrectionist’s Diary. Dos Madres Press. 2021. 86pp. $17.00

REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN

A coffin quilt decks the cover of Myrna Stone’s most recent book, The Resurrectionist’s Diary. Such quilts, often handed down from generation to generation, depict coffins, some filled and labeled, others awaiting the still-living and not-yet-born. It’s an apt image for a book that digs up the dead in various ways, most obviously by giving voice to forgotten women from previous centuries.

Stone, the author of five previous books, writes formal poems with a weirdly archaic yet vivid immediacy. The first section in particular struck me as uncanny in its power. Six poems, titled by their dates, are spoken by the wife of a “resurrectionist”: someone who digs up corpses and sells them, generally to medical professionals. Amid occasionally grotesque details, the speaker maintains her practical, thoughtful, observant tone:

Yesterday, half past the darkling hour, we took

from pauper’s corner in the South End Burying Ground

a woman’s freshly interred body, her face a book



writ large in pain, and her two infant daughters

laid upon her breast, their torsos joined at the sternum,

each malformed and monstrous.

I haven’t seen the word “darkling” since I last read Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold, but how right it sounds here, in a poem headed “Wednesday, 17 March, 1830.” The speaker has two boys and a baby on the way. Her life is defined by their shared labor and love, the meagre food, the weather. “Our work/is not without risk,” she notes, “though we take only the dead, never/their goods, never their souls.”

She and her husband do what they must to get by in nineteenth-century Boston. The climax is the death of their horse Belle: “What sour/Fate dictates such privation?” Unlike the humans, who seem troubled by the questionable morality of their work, “Belle was good—/a sweetness, a clearness—and come what may/we cannot replace her.” The reader is left wondering how they will live, though in the short term their needs are met: “John tells me the ice/is fast and the weather holds, so her flesh will keep./Therefore, even in death she will nourish us.” That final line says everything about the speaker’s cold, dark, hungry world.

The wife’s monologs are written in rhyming tercets that evoke Dante’s terza rima, and indeed this first section resembles a journey through the land of the dead. Enjambment and off-rhymes keep the formal constraints unobtrusive, the speaker’s voice spontaneous, genuine.

Stone herself, of course, is also a resurrectionist. The brief section that follows, “Each of the Dead,” unearths (among others) the wives of Raphael and Edgar Alan Poe, whose stories are told in quatrains; the third section, “Excerpts from Catharina Vermeer’s Daybook,” gives voice to the artist’s wife through a series of twenty-one sonnets. The book as a whole asks to think about the relevance of past to present: what’s worth digging up? Stone’s use of traditional forms—versions of terza rima, ballad, and Shakespearean sonnet—as well as her occasionally archaic diction lend dignity and distance to her subjects. There’s no sign here of the “American sonnet”—exemplified by Wanda Coleman and Terence Hayes—with its irreverent talking back to the form’s history and constraints. I think of Coleman’s “American Sonnet: 91,” for example, in which the sonnet is an angel, her foot lamed by the slamming of heaven’s gate, a “mystic gone ballistic” with “no choice but/to learn to boogaloo.”

No one boogaloos in these poems. But there is a lavish delight in words—their sounds, connotations, the way they emerge from the past with all their redolence intact. Stone’s poems about painters’ wives celebrate the “perpetual now of the painting’s moment” in which Raphael’s Margherita “breathes still, her spirit abrim/with familial affection, soulful and potent.”

Stone’s words are equally “abrim,” as when Catharina Vermeer’s heart is stirred “within the cincture/of my linen stays.” In telling of her son’s death, Catharina says, in the sonnet’s final couplet, “Nightly I pray that his soul may forever abide/with our lost others, and in their grace, happify.”

Dated 1674 to 1675, Catharina’s entries capture moments within a narrative: Vermeer paints; her brother behaves badly; a child dies; they struggle to pay debts; and then, disastrously, Vermeer dies. The sequence depicts the family’s daily life convincingly. At its conclusion, Catharina mourns her dead husband, “our lives as drear/without him as the graven light that suffuses/the leaded panes of glass inside my chamber/window.” She, too, is a resurrectionist as she remembers, in this section’s final lines:

his fingers tinctured in tints of weld and azurite,

his scent ripe and unsweetened, his head




lolling against my shoulder as he erupts

in laughter only the rush of love can disrupt.

The book’s final section, “Across the Void,” also consists of sonnets: five poems thinking back on the speaker’s past. That “void” we’re asked to bridge resonates in many ways: the gap between past and present, between dead and living, between self and other. Steeped in the antiquarian feel of previous sections, I found myself reading these final poems as if they were spoken by some long-dead woman shaped by another place and time. Only to find myself in the present, listening to a speaker reminisce about her mother, her brother, her childhood molester. Perhaps that is the point: our contemporaries are, in their way, as distant from us as these historical figures—equally bound by constraints we know little about, and equally deserving of our attention and generosity. “Mercy,” the speaker tells her ne’er-do-well brother, “has no expiration.”

lesser case by Mark Decarteret

 

Mark Decarteret, lesser case. Nixes Mate Books.  2021. 86pp. $18.00

REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN

            The bio in lesser case tells us little about Mark Decarteret:  only that he “has appeared next to Charles Bukowski in a lo-fi fold out, Pope John Paul II in a high-test collection of Catholic poetry, Billy Collins in an Italian fashion coffee table book, and Mary Oliver in a 3785 page pirated lit-trap.”  More traditional accounts on-line note that Decarteret   has been the poet laureate of Portsmouth New Hampshire (2009-2011), has worked at Water Street Books in Exeter, and is widely published—in anthologies; in journals such as AGNI, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Poetry East, and Third Coast; and in six previous collections. 

            But Decarteret’s elusive “About the Author” is revealing in its way, evoking him through juxtaposition rather than as a biographical self.  The poems in lesser case push against any easy distillation of meaning or authorial presence.  In Decarteret’s previous  book, For Lack of a Calling, punctuation, capital letters, and syntax operated more or less conventionally.  Here, in contrast, the upper case is reserved for “I” and Jesus, there are no periods, and the syntax is sometimes difficult to parse—as in the book’s title:  lesser than what?  should it be “lower case”? if not, what kind of case?

            The book’s first poem, “front,” while providing no answers to these questions, invites the reader in, to a place

                        where my shaking finds company

                        more light has gone bad

                        & yet the weary recognitions

                        always happily remain

If I take the title as continuous with the first line, the poem situates me at the front of this book, keeping the speaker company as he shakes—whether from age, illness, or uncertainty—a shaking that has replaced an earlier more “resolute” self: 

                        first we had bed creaks

                        & all sorts of hunger

                        then reality sat in even

                        more radiant aberrations.

I love those oxymoronic “radiant aberrations,” with their celebration of weirdnesses and mistakes which, given the poem’s positioning, we then expect to encounter in the poems that follow.  Indeed, the phrase “reality sat in” (not “set in” as we might expect) hints at strangenesses to come.

            One strangeness is the poems’ relation to the natural world.  In a 2018 interview, Decarteret described the nature-poems in For Lack of a Calling as “eco-laments” about “living in a time and place where [nature has] almost run its course in some way.”  In lesser case he rejects the poetic praise of nature as self-serving. Take, for example, “I have a minor in visual arts,” which ridicules his own past use of imagery:

                        now those starlings I once rated

                        an 8 are not even worth

                        throwing one’s latest voice—

                        that shock of hearing one

                        making a lesser case for oneself

Perhaps the “lesser case” is their and our inevitable stance in a fallen world, where manufacturing tropes (“what’s not to liken to anything else?” he asks) brings us no closer to anything and leaves the poet “wobbly as a calf/licked well past relevance.”  As the speaker notes in “inhabitants,” the poem that follows, “we won’t ever be/worthy of this house.”

            When Decarteret allows himself to indulge in descriptive language, it’s wonderful:  in “some say (seed),” for example, a cardinal comes “crashing the scrub/singing & stammering/cross-tongued” amid “branches signing/their iciest of scripts—/a blanket of wet/& then chatter, exaltation.” But the exaltation is dashed in the next stanza: “this response to be cashed in—/an image in shambles again/like a berry’s taxed memory.”  Decarteret undercuts easy pleasures, opting always for the “lesser case.” 

            A related strangeness is Decarteret’s harsh stance toward his own role as poet.  In “the last ever ode to one’s pencil” the speaker lambastes himself:

                        even w/the sky full of sun, unflawed

                        I’ll waffle or low-ball, tell you lies

 

                        go what you’ve come to call

                        post-modernist on you

 

                        try to sell you on the same sparrow

                        I saw yesterday atop the potted flowers

Like the “berry’s taxed memory” in “some say (seed),” the sparrow has been compromised by human greed, and the poet’s words are complicit.  Indeed, with his “lab coat & paper hat,” balling up “more poems into asterisks*,” the poet sounds downright ludicrous.

            That asterisk*, though, is a key pivot, as it sends us to an actual footnote: “please know if I’m lost on you, stolen & sold-off-in-lots, that my line about love was about a lot more than just votes.”  Asterisk:  a quasi-star that sends us toward additional annotations and qualifications—away from, rather than toward the source of light. Or love.

            There is a presence here that counterbalances the poet’s “lesser case”: the subtle, complicated invocation of Christianity as a source of transcendence.  Various poem titles—missal, host, lord god bird—invite us to think in these terms.  And various poems not only suggest that humanity on its own is a sorry thing but hint at an alternative. In “rather,” for example, the speaker has come to hate  “the velvety kings/we’d become/thinking ourselves/all but invisible/as our hair was combed/back in the mirror/by yet another.” Another what?  Some presence we’ve preferred to ignore?

            I’ll conclude with a final strangeness, Decarteret’s poem “the kingfisher,” with its homage to Charles Olson’s 1949 poem “Kingfishers.”  Critics argue over what Olson was getting at in his poem.  Olson himself, in his 1950 essay on “projective verse”  argued for a poetry that was kinetic, more speech act than discourse, and thus resistant to paraphrase:  “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.” Decarteret’s poems have a similar resistance to being pinned down, a similar pressure on the reader to follow their short lines and uncertain syntax into self-questioning and suspense.  “What does not change/is the will to change,” Olson’s poem opens, a line equally relevant to lesser case.  But even as Decarteret quotes Olson several times in “the kingfisher,” he does so with a difference—shifting from several to a single kingfisher in his title, and extending his poem beyond Olson’s final, inconclusive line, “I hunt among stones.” Decarteret concludes:

                        I hunt among stones

                        where the shadows have long been

                        trying to enter their side of our story

Or, as the speaker says in “lord god bird,” “if one holds their/place long enough/one will begin/to see the ghosts/burning their way/back into things.”

Gary Metras, Vanishing Points

Gary Metras, Vanishing Point Dos Madres Press. 2021. 73pp. $18.00

   Review by Ruth Hoberman


Gary Metras has been an essential part of the Massachusetts poetry scene for decades. A widely published poet, for forty years he also ran the Adastra Press and in 2018 was appointed Easthampton’s first poet laureate. Vanishing Points, his eighth collection, is steeped in this local landscape: throughout much of the book the poet thinks through his own mortality by means of his relation to natural phenomena—mountains, clouds, wind, fish, snow.

Take the opening poem, for example, “The Flame”: “Wind and snow./ A white persistence/as unforgiving as night.” A sleeper wakes from oblivion and lights a candle (whose long, narrow shape is mimicked by the poem): “A heart moves on the wall/like a shadow.” The poem feels brief and breathless, a half-waking vision that suggests the brevity and immateriality of human life.

The book is divided into four parts, the first two of which strike me as particularly death-haunted. Part I culminates in an ominous and ultimately comic encounter with a hearse, and Part II opens with “Approaching Harvest,” a 14-line poem with a hint of Shakespeare’s “That Time of Year” to it: The squash “huddle with fears of impermanence,” and “I sit atop the worn/wood table . . . one more thing/that will not survive the season.” In “Narrating the Pond’s Night,” the speaker catches and throws back a trout after sniffing “the death sprouting under his fins.” This wonderfully precise poem narrates the process of fly fishing at night under conventional headings—“exposition,” “complication,” “climax” “denouement”—while evoking a mystery unstructured by human devices. Images startle with their strangeness: the speaker stands on a “weed throttled shore,” as “water licks my sneakers and the bony flesh inside.” The fisherman and the fish are equally liable to be consumed: “Night is a simple mouth admitting all.” As the fisherman heads home, “Darkness has swallowed/the human way out.”

If “Narrating the Pond’s Night” provides a key to the collection’s structure, parts one and two being “exposition” and “complication,” then the final two sections are “climax” and “denouement.” The poems in these sections deal less with nature than with cultural and domestic experiences: the poet’s response to the “complication” of aging is to celebrate the consolations of human-made things, including a long marriage and a future made real by the presence of grandchildren. Perhaps my favorite poem in the book is “Lint,” which concludes the third section, making it the climax to the climax:

It doesn’t bother me to have

lint in the bottoms of pant pockets;

it gives the hands something to do,

especially since I no longer hold

shovel, hod, or hammer

in the daylight hours of labor

and haven’t, in fact, done so

in fifty-five years.

In an interview several years ago, Metras cited Robert Frost as an influence, and his previous book, White Storm (2018), includes a poem entitled “Frost’s Chair.” Certainly there are echoes of Frost in Metras’s snowy, rural landscape, and an “After Apple Picking” sense of mortality hovering over it all. What struck me reading Metras, though, is how many of Frost’s poems describe labor—a working in/with the land. When Frost’s speaker sees birches, he thinks of boys swinging on them. Metras’s speaker mainly looks. He does fish and in one poem mixes stucco, but after mixing in the scenery with his stucco, he tells us, he “quits the job.” This aging out (or professionalizing out?) of physical labor widens the gap, I think, between the speaker and his physical environment and contributes to the book’s poignancy. Instead of “shovel, hod or hammer,” there’s “lint”—that unnoticed detritus of wear and tear produced by the unnatural collision of clothes and washing machine. The poem’s speaker imagines giving his wife a sweater made from it, or wearing a tweed coat of woven lint to class. “Who would believe it?/ Yet there are stranger things,” he concludes: “the son of a bricklayer with hands/so smooth they’re only fit/for picking lint.”

I thought of Seamus Heaney’s pen, “snug” in his hand in “Digging,” but no match for his father’s spade. Digging, of course, is the poet’s task; Metras offers “picking lint,” an apt if modest analogy for the poet’s skill at noticing, the magical way minuscule observations coalesce into substance (am I the only one who has wondered how those invisible particles that fabric sheds somehow transform into fuzz?).

Part four, our denouement, is dominated by love, the word appearing in multiple poems and underlying the title poem, “Vanishing Point”: “Staring, you look for clues,” the poem opens, the “you” being anyone who has wondered what makes a marriage work. But “Love, when it stays, is traceless,” disappearing into whatever it touches, dissolving boundaries between those who share it: “When two people journey far enough into the distance/they merge.”

In the process they pass beyond the horizon, leaving children and grandchildren to take their place. This is where the book ends: “It is the child who speaks to my future,” the speaker says in “The Birth.” And in the final poem, “Engineering Sweet Dreams,” the speaker confesses to having eaten his son-in-law’s last mint to spare his granddaughter the smell of “stale tobacco” on his breath: “we/want her dreams to be sweet.” That “we” makes his son-in-law (and us) complicit in the theft of his own mint—a funny, complicated commentary on the relation of old to young, of poetry to the world. 

Code by Charlotte Pence

 

Charlotte Pence, Code. Black Lawrence Press. 2020. 100pp. $17.95

Review by Ruth Hoberman




There’s nothing like a pandemic to make you think about how much in life is determined by entities we can’t see, much less control. In her 2020 poetry collection Code, Charlotte Pence explores the tension between the givenness of DNA and the inchoate longings that make us human—a painfully relevant topic at a moment when a virus’s replications can alter the course of our lives. If DNA could write poetry, what would it look like? these poems ask. And how do we write back?

Pence’s first collection, Many Small Fires (2015), explored family through the lens of Darwinism, asking what and whom we sacrifice in the name of survival; in Code, too, science sharpens Pence’s vision as she describes human beings dealing with what she calls in one poem “the limits of the possible.” Science offers Pence a way of asking big questions inventively and expansively: far from being reduced by understanding ourselves biochemically, we are connected more deeply to each other and to the world. “I like being/reminded that we all began in dark and stars,” Pence writes in “The Weight of the Sun”: “that the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen/in our bodies was created 4.5 billion/years ago.” As for DNA, it may contain our death, but it also gives new life to the dead. “My child./Our eyes,” a dying mother says of her young daughter.

This dying mother is at the heart of the book’s Part III, entitled “Code: A Sequence in Twenty-Three Parts.” Its twenty-three poems dramatize a young mother’s death of a degenerative disease encoded in her DNA. This section is the book’s most inventive from a formal standpoint: along with a few sonnets, it includes poems constructed from a multiple choice quiz, from a series of palindromes, and from actual genetic codes. The woman is named A, her husband T, letters which, the endnotes inform us, stand for adenine and thymine, two constituents of DNA. Since a cell contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, the twenty-three poems dramatize the extent to which we are our DNA. What does it mean that DNA, that “track laid for/a corporeal train,” determines so much of who we are? That we can inherit a propensity for cancer or Huntington’s disease along with our parents’ love? “Don’t be fooled into thinking you/understand this world,” DNA cautions in one poem. DNA’s perspective is nothing like our own. “Up here/in this bank of blue, this blink of clouds,/everyone is reduced to the hard roof/of their car.”

CRISPR, Pence reminds us in an endnote, stands for Clustered Interspaced Palindromic Repeats. And indeed the book is structured somewhat like a palindrome: parts I and V contain poems drawing on Pence’s life as wife, mother, poet; each of parts II and IV contains an essay by Pence and two poems by Shira Shaiman, a poet-friend of Pence’s; and at the center, Part III: the story of A, T, and their daughter. Clever? Yes. Too clever? Not at all.

The language and structures borrowed from genetics only intensify the impact when humans talk back to what has been encoded—and they get plenty of space to talk back. “Grief, like art, continues to teach/the limits of the possible,” T says, but he stretches those limits as he envisions holding his daughter up in the Paleolithic cave he has read about, so she can poke “the ceiling’s moon milk,/that wet, soft carbonate sparkling like stars/under the forked flame,” stone age and contemporary child melding, joined by the clay, “this moonmilk, mountain, mother.”

Pence enacts T’s thoughts a few pages later, in Part IV’s “Stubby Horses and Why We Paint Them: An Essay,” where she describes visiting the Monte Castillo caves in Spain with her family. She, too, is looking for continuity in the face of death. Indeed the four parts that frame A’s story echo its themes, addressing losses in Pence’s own life—of her poet-friend Shaiman, of her father-in-law, and of a friend’s daughter—losses she chronicles in Part II’s “Codicil: An Essay.” There she describes rereading Shaiman’s masters thesis as she was completing Code. Her inclusion in the book of four poems by Shaiman works an act of love and preservation, and also as an echo-chamber of loss and replication. “Don’t become like me,” Shaiman’s speaker imagines her mother—dying of cancer—telling her.

Loss and the fear of loss pervade Code, but so too does delight in the everyday and in connection. In her essay about visiting the caves, Pence sees, in a child’s handprint on the wall, “that desire to reach out . . . red hands without arms reaching out in the dark.” Reaching hands appear also in “Among the Yellows,” in which a beehive’s “hundred split hexagons,/shining, licked gold” morph into an apartment building where, as the speaker passes by, “A slumped stranger suddenly/leapt from his chair, mouth/open, arms outstretched/to catch something/he loved.” These generous poems extend their own arms toward us—celebrating the many ways we save what we love from oblivion.

  Ruth Hoberman is a professor emerita of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she taught modern British literature for thirty years. She has published on Virginia Woolf, biography, and women’s historical fiction. Her most recent book, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism, was published in 2011 (University of Virginia Press).

Since her 2014 retirement, she has published poetry and creative nonfiction in (among other places) The Examined Life, Adirondack Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Ploughshares, Calyx, and Rattle: Poets Respond.