Over Misty Plains By Alessio Zanelli

 

Over Misty Plains

By Alessio Zanelli

Indigo Dreams Publishing

www.indigodreams.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-907401-60-2

8.99 British Pounds

Review by Dennis Daly

These poems of Alessio Zanelli scream out for the twilight tonality and muted landscape of essential beauty. They soften life’s stark edges.  At the same time they chronicle the internal seasons of the human condition. The poet’s art connects these two visions on a planet filled with ghosts and shadows. The title poem Over Misty Plains serves as the touchstone. Mankind appears as a species of “tiny“ figures intent on their little deeds,  striving against all elemental odds. The poem introduces the situation with this question,

Whoever was this tiny man

who used to run against the wind,

through the fog,

In the rain,

on snow-covered paths,

towards the sun—

away from his own shadow?

Notice the seasonal themes of weather and shadow. Zanelli uses them throughout the book to both frame his visions and define them. The mist, through which man must struggle, lends beauty to his otherwise alien context.   AT Lucia’s, a poem set in Lombardy,

…The sky opens,

discloses the plain beauty of the Lombard campagna.

Boscageand lea are slowly unmisted in the distance,

toward the laggard sunset.

The air is just bracing,

not bleak or ungentle.

The distance here becomes clearer through the mist, though it is still misty. At the same time the sun is setting, hiding the clear outlines, softening. This in-between time births beauty. In a poem entitled Chasing Specters Out in the Sticks, the hunters race through the woods tracking down the wraiths of desire and perhaps life-force. The excitement of the hunt is everything. The conclusion hangs in the balance, but a truly insignificant balance. 

In the poem Getaway Zanelli comments on the aesthetics of our present environment. He describes an unlovely world, where

Mist and dew

no longer inhabit the dale

Plumes of smoke are the reeds

in the miry oxbows.

The poet then goes on to describe a “snow-hearted” boy, who

now has sand in the lungs

and mineral pitch in the ears.

The acrid smell

of irreparable loss

in the nostrils.

Lord of Winter ices the reader up in its metaphor. The poet’s creative spirit leaves its burrow to face “sharp- cheeked” reality. The frozen season preserves the future’s viability and potential. The awakened poet avers,

As long as your glow resides in my eyes

however dark it is, to be lord again

I just need skin as hard as bark,

a few fluttering snowflakes…

The poem, Snow Runner, is nothing less than a declaration of seasonal preference. The poem starts this way:

You know I like snow

The chilly breath of winter,

Icy roads and rimy trees,

The frosty countryside.

But this winter covering also covers danger. The poet cautions,

Only, if I’m not back by ten o’clock,

Please light a candle,

kneel and pray,

forgive me…

In Summer Fog, Zanelli again softens the piercing sunlight with a fog. Here the fog proves not only an aesthetic decoration, but a potent natural force inseminating the earth with a new generation of life. He exults,

Such phenomenal exhalation from the earth

Betrays the parental nature of the summer

To the dismal seasons to succeed.

Dreamskimmer is a poem about internal coldness and a realization which comes with age. It details the shell of a human being after his dreams slip away and his frantic attempt to recall those dreams. This is perhaps Zanelli’s saddest poem.

Love brings with it a dependency of sorts. In his poem Lost the poet shows how destructive that becomes. There is a nice play on the word “starlet” as the poet’s guiding star. But the end doesn’t bode well for the lover,

It’s gone

No device

no cognizance,

nobody can help.

I’ve been going awry ever since.

More ghosts in the poem The Rolling Soul and Mountain Ghost. Only now the ghosts are the chasers instead of the chase-ees. Those solitary untamed souls that dared the mountain heights are rolling toward the earth whence they came. The more vital fire carried by the soul, the more the ghost gets to eat. I think we are talking about the ravages of time here and the poem’s  image strikes me as honest, if unpleasant.

Knocker of Giants celebrates one of those carriers of fire, Sir Edmund Hillary. Apparently the poet believes a few grand souls can beat gravity at least for a time. Zanelli says,

We salute you

knocker of giants,

mindful of how small we are,

how greater than we thought your feat,

how grand your soul.

Near the end of this book there is a gem of rhyme and formality entitled A Universe’s Song. The poem takes you to a place of creation in deep space, where vibrating spheres communicate nothing and everything. Here’s a bit,

And yet all things there shift

Vibrating spheres of light

Explode and flash adrift

Till fading out of sight.

Don’t read Zanelli’s last poem titled Witnessing’s End last. It will haunt you into silence with its meditation on the end of cosmic awareness. It’s that good. Instead try Absolute Beauty in which the poet wonderfully negates physics and knowledge and praises the efficaciousness of imagination. The poet puts it this way,

In fact,

one of the three must be true:

there is no beauty in you;

or else—unreality is the most real of things;

or yet—all those geniuses of matter, space and time

are nothing but madcap visionaries.

I can live with that.

Performance of Berryman’s Dream Songs To Be Part of Grolier Benefit

Performance of Berryman’s Dream Songs
To Be Part of Grolier Benefit


An upcoming benefit for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square will include a performance of Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. The one-act, one-person play, adapted by Jim Vrabel, will be performed on Wednesday, May 16th, at 7 p.m. at the Oberon Theatre, 2 Arrow Street in Cambridge. The performance will be followed by a Poetry Open Mic, hosted by Harris Gardner of Tapestry of Voices.


John Berryman was one of America’s greatest poets and The Dream Songs is one of the masterpieces of American poetry. But its “wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, [and] extraordinary leaps of language and tone” can confound readers. Homage to Henry transforms the poems into a more accessible play and brings to the stage the unforgettable character of Henry, as he encounters wine and women; faculty meetings, fame, and family; old age and God. The play also presents Henry’s portraits of his fellow poets - “expression’s kings” like Frost, Stevens, Williams, Schwartz, and Plath. Poet Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer, calls Homage to Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel Beckett.”



Admission to the event is $15. All proceeds go to the Grolier, the oldest continuously operated poetry book shop in the United States. For tickets online: www.cluboberon.com. In advance: Grolier, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge. On the night of the show: Oberon Box Office beginning at 6 p.m. For more information, call the Grolier at 617-547-4648.

Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam: Selected and Translated by Christian Wiman

Stolen Air

Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam

Selected and Translated by Christian Wiman

Copyright 2012 by Christian Wiman

Ecco

Softbound, 81 pages,  $15.99

ISBN 978-0-06-209942-6

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Translations of poets, particularly Eastern European and even more particularly Russian poets are often difficult for any number of reasons: circumstances under which the poems were written, the difference in language and idioms and most often as we read in English translations of poets like Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam we are reading the translator’s version of what he or she thinks brings an accurate representation to us. I have read such complaints in the past about Rilke’s poetry and Neruda’s. Often I dismiss these complaints because I would have no access to the poet and the poems were they not translated by enterprising translators willing to take on such daunting tasks.

A number of years ago I purchased The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. (New York Review of Books, 1973). These renderings I often found sparse, harsh the way I imagined Mandelstam may have meant them. However, Brown in his introduction makes clear that Merwin has translated Mandelstam into Merwin in the same way Lowell and Nabokov translated Russian poets into Lowell and Nabokov.

So here I am with Wiman’s translation, Stolen Air, Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam accompanied by Ilya Kaminisky’s introduction, which by way of personal preference I find more interestingthorough.  For example, Kaminsky calls Mandelstam a lyric poet which Brown and Merwin clearly did not. Plus Kaminisky spends far more meaningful time on Mandelstam’s Jewish background. 

But all that has In the Merwin version, for example, the poem Black Earth begins thusly:

            Manured, blackened, worked to a fine tilth, combed

            like a stallion’s mane, stroked under wide air,

            all the loosened ridges cast up in a single choir,

            the damp crumbs of my earth and my freedom!

Wiman, however, first changes the poem from four line stanzas thus his opening lines read as follows:

            Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a rich tilth.     

            Everything air, star; everything earth.

            Like a choir acquiring one clean sound—brief ringing

                        kingdom—

            These wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.              

Clearly there is a difference, not only in style but in language, Wiman making, I believe, Mandelstam not only lyric, but more accessible to those who have either not read Mandelstam previously or have struggled with previous translations.

In another poem Wiman brings American sensibility of beauty to stark Russian language which, we must remember, was in its original written in the worst of times for many Russians.  Czarist Russia was not a happy play land, especially for Jewish poets, and Stalinist Russia was certainly not an improvement, and in fact for Mandelstam, his poetry proved to be his undoing, sent off to Siberia he died at the age of 47.

Here is one of my favorite versions by Wiman:

Bring me to the brink of mountains, mystic

Dread, rapture of fear I feel and …fail.

Still: the swallow slicing blue is beautiful.

Stil: the cloud-tugged bell tower’s frozen music.

There is in me a man alive, a man alone,

Who, heart-stopped above a deep abyss,

Can hear a snowball grow one snowflake less,

The clock-tick accretions of dust becoming stone.

No. I am not that man, not that sadness

With its precise ice, its exquisite rue.

The pain that sings in me does not sing, and is true.

O whirlwind, O real wind

In which the avalanche is happening,

All my soul is bells, which will not ring.

With Stolen Air Wiman brings a modern sensibility, a beauty of language previous editions of Mandelstam may not have attempted or succeeded in fulfilling. Yes,Wiman’s is a new Mandelstam, a revision of what has come before and a pace setting for what may come after.  Highly recommended.

_________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Author, King of the Jungle and  Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Attention Somerville Poets and Poetry Lovers: The Mass. Poetry Festival!

By Doug Holder


 Well it is poetry month, and although T.S. Eliot characterized it as the cruelest month, it is not for poets. I mean our landscape is littered with poetry events. For the past few years I have been on the Advisory Board for the Mass. Poetry Festival, that started in Lowell, Mass. and since has moved to Salem, Mass. Mike Ansara , who founded the festival, January O'Neil and Jennifer Jean as well as countless others have nurtured the festival in impressive ways. From April 20 to 22 there are a plethora of events in Salem that you can enjoy: readings, music events, slams, a  small press fair, and the beat goes on.  The website for the said Festival is:  http://masspoetry.org. Below is an article from the website of the Mass. Poetry Festival that gives you valuable information. Hope to see you there!




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The fourth Massachusetts Poetry Festival will be held Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 20–22, in historic Salem. The three-day event, which will bring 1,500 poets and poetry lovers to the city, will showcase a variety of extraordinary local and regional poets, and engage the public through poetry readings, interactive workshops, panel discussions, music, film and visual arts, and performances geared toward a diverse statewide audience.

• Readings by emerging and nationally recognized poets including:
• Friday Night: Robert Pinsky, Major Jackson, & Maggie Dietz
• Saturday Night: Sherwin Bitsui, Nikky Finney, Wesley McNair, & Joy Harjo
• Sunday afternoon: Frank Bidart, Martha Collins, & Stephen Dunn
• An exciting lineup of programming created by the Peabody Essex Museum
• An expansive Small Press Fair
• A Literary Magazine Fair
• Poetry slams
• Poetry-inspired music performances and visual arts
• A poetry train from Boston to Salem to provide both transportation and another venue for poetry

“The Massachusetts Poetry Festival will bring a blizzard of verbal beauty to Salem, a city with a rich literary history and vibrant writing community. It will connect generations, and it will give the city and the university a leadership role in building culture in the Commonwealth,” said J.D. Scrimgeour, poet and professor of English at Salem State University. “The Poetry Festival is evidence of the vitality of the fundamental, central art of poetry,” said Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States and the honorary chair of the poetry festival.


This year’s festival follows a variety of small events across the state organized by schools, libraries, and bookstores in April as part of National Poetry Month.

For National Poetry Month, Mass Poetry will:

• Produce Common Threads, a set of poems by Massachusetts poets to be read throughout March and April by schools, colleges, public libraries, book clubs, community poetry reading series, etc.
• Produce a kit that includes the poems in text form, in audio form, a guide to reading and discussing each poem and several essays about each poem

Court Green Columbia College Chicago

Court Green

Columbia College Chicago

http://www.colum.edu/courtgreen/

$10

Review by Rene Schwiesow

At home she lives happily

on yoghurt, Diet-Pepsi and

the occasional celery stalk.

But take her out to diner

and, Boy can she eat!

“Miss Blank,” appears mid-way through “Court Green 9” and caused me to grin, then to chuckle with recognition.  “Court Green” is a poetry journal, founded in 2004, that is published in association with the English Department of Columbia College in Chicago.  “Court Green” is named for the property in Devon, England that was home to Sylvia Plath.  Plath wrote many of her most well-known poems at Court Green, including the Ariel poems.  The journal was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.  This is easy to understand given the work that Court Green publishes.

In a section entitled, “Poems and Fragments,” Elise Cowan says:  “I don’t want to make your poem out of dead jonquils & stored crocus bulbs that may never bloom again but the shocks of memories that will live again.”

Court Green is filled with shocks of memories, of words that breathe through lines such as:

Dear God of the bent trees of Fifth Avenue

Only pour my willful dust up your veins

and in

At the acting class

The perfect paper daffodil

Upstages us all.

Throughout the book the work references iconic poets like Anne Sexton and speaks to mythological concepts as in “Take it With You,” where Charon receives a nod:

In ancient times, the dead carried

two coins into the Underworld. . .

. . .no one asked what the ferryman did with all

that cash, emptying his wallet before bed. . .

I had to admit that I had never considered what Charon did with all those coins.  And indeed, as the poet concludes, the trip is “a one way ticket across the river to where/there is nothing the dead could buy.” 

“Court Green 9” contains works of varying lengths from extremely short poetic snippets a few words long to lengthier, narrative poems.  Each issue of “Court Green” includes a dossier on a specific topic.  The theme of “Court Green 10” will be sex.  The submission period is March 1, 2012 until June 30, 2012.  Submission is snail mail only.  For complete guidelines visit the website at:  http://www.colum.edu/courtgreen/

*****Rene Schwiesow is a co-host of the popular South Shore poetry venue The Art of Words.  She writes a monthly arts column in The Old Colony Memorial and enjoys reading her work as feature poet and at open mics.

MAY 20, 2012: Have a laugh at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s Expense!

MAY 20, 2012: Have a laugh at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s Expense!


By Doug Holder

Who said poetry has to be staid and stuffy? Not The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, which is sponsoring a one-time event filled with poetry, levity and laughter. Laughter at the Grolier cranks up the merriment May 20, 2012, 3:30PM at the brand new Grolier Poetry Room--upstairs at the Bloc 11 Cafe--11 Bow St.--Union Square-Somerville.

You’ll experience a wild concoction of poetry, mixed media, and mirthful merriment featuring hilarious poetic luminaries. You’ll also be helping the famed Grolier Bookshop--a literary landmark--in the heart of Harvard Square to thrive and stay alive!

This will be the second event at Grolier’s Poetry Room above Bloc 11 in Union Square. The first event Madness at the Grolier was a resounding success, and the sponsors promise to please with this one too!

Featured readers will be hilarious local poets X. J. Kennedy, Tomas O'Leary and Dan Sklar. In addition, the event’s curiously titled “Readers of the Lost Arc” will be Lo Galluccio, Doug Holder Paul Steven Stone, Alice Weiss, and the owner of the Grolier himself: Ifeanyi Menkiti.

In addition to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Laughter at the Grolier is sponsored by Ibbetson Street Press and Blind Elephant Press. The suggested donation is a paltry $10. So come and support this unique poetry bookstore, and have a laugh, guffaw, or yes, even a yuck—at their expense!

Program: Visual Inverse : Board of the Plymouth Guild

Program: Visual Inverse




Pairing of poetry and Art



Board of the Plymouth Guild



15 Poets interpret



15 pieces of visual art



38 Pages



Program Design: Terry Kole



And Jack Scully



Plymouth Center for the Arts www.plymouthguild.org





Review by Dennis Daly





Homer, the poet, conjured up with his verbal art an impossible description of Achilles’ Shield, as created by Vulcan, the visual artist, in Book 18 of The Iliad. Here is a description of characters on a panel of the shield from the translation of Alexander Pope,





Along the Street the new-made Brides are led,



With Torches flaming, to the nuptial Bed;



The Youthful Dancers in a Circle bound



To the soft Flute, and Cittern’s silver Sound:



Thro the fair Streets, the Matrons in a Row,



Stand in their Porches, and enjoy the Show.





This unbroken tradition of ekphrasis continues to this day yielding astonishing insights of one art form by the creation of another. Recently a show entitled Visual Inverse, a Pairing of Poetry and Art was held at the Plymouth Center for the Arts in Plymouth Massachusetts. A large number of lucky attendees



viewed the live performances. I and others (not so lucky, or in my case, not so smart) had to wait for this magnificent program to circulate.



Mike Amado, who died in 2008 and is the inspiration for the successful poetry venue, Poetry: The Art of Words, begins the collection with his poem, Spring Beyond the Door, which matches up with the colored photograph, “The Other Side of Winter” by Barbara Barker. His poem is traditionally descriptive, subtle and true to the photograph. Here are my favorite lines,





…viscous ice



inches its way down the house,



roof tiles to the shingles.





icicles cage in the porch





It brings to my mind Boris Pasternak’s ice house, the lovers’ hideout, in Doctor Zhivago by way of David Lean’s movie interpretation.



Louisa Clerici’s poetic study of Jill Voelker’s drawing, “Pow Wow—One Who Sees Vision,” is a model of aesthetic empathy. Clerici’s piece almost mirrors the dense texture of Voelker’s work. The poem moves from finger painting gods to druid magic, elves, and wizards. Clerici navigates through this wondrous world with unusual adeptness, leaving us with the delightful image of the poet’s words pouring onto her page.



Violent confrontation is the technique of choice used by an unblinking Reggie Gibson in his aggressive take on the oil painting, “Southeast Ridge” by Gretchen Moran. Gibson sees teeth and vermin and razor wire and a heat swollen sky in this expressionistic painting. But Gibson also sees healing here and a hum as soft and spiritual as a prayer, and I do too.



Poet Elizabeth Hanson discovers the essence of a perfect leaf in Bill Brissette’s color photograph, “Fallen Leaf.” Hansen’s touching poem inhabits her dream-life and the leaf fallen is a gift like no other, coming directly from the gods.



Charles Harper also taps into his dream life in order to make verbal sense of Ben Pohl’s acrylic painting, “You Live Inside Their Ideas.” Like the patriarch Jacob, Harper wrestles with the incomprehensible and reaches out toward the texture of a cave wall.



In an interesting approach Lawrence Kessenich’s poem, Brief Vacation, translates Greg Kullberg’s” Block Island Wave” by way of other senses: odor and touch. Kessenich smells the memory inducing brine as



his hands submerge in dishwater. In his mind’s eye children breast the cold surf, whales spout, and sandpipers motor up the sand. All this from a inland distance, and a gifted poet.



“Arianna,” a striking oil painting by Edwina Caci, offers a formidable challenge because of its singular level of excellence. Irene Koronas, with her poem Girl, Wearing A Hat, is up to it. Koronas intersperses her spot on descriptive passages with an impressionistic study, giving the child movement and filling her out with the poet’s own hopes and desires,





…she bends to pick pebbles growing under her…





and,





…on golden horizon her simple reply, mute, oval face



without the lace beside a tea cup…





Lovely!



Thomas Libby’s poem Ovaphobia takes inspiration from Kathleen Mullins Mogayzel’s drawing, “Robin Quartet” and runs with it. He writes a poem on the need for human gentleness using the provided egg metaphor. He deems gentleness essential not just for our persons, but for our posterity.



The black and white photograph, Vuitton, by Richard Mulcahy portrays a large fashion poster on a narrow brick street. Gloria Mindock, in her poem Entrapment, imagines the photograph coming alive and details some profound humor-filled aspects. Mindock speculates that the woman has no teeth and that the young woman’s comely legs might be weaponized and used to trip passersbys. A question then arises. Is the beautiful woman portrayed on the poster from a Fellini movie or a Woody Allen one?



Like an alchemist Tomas O’Leary’s poem Red Rose Tea transmutes the precious reflections in Kathy Ferrara’s watercolor of the same name into verbal gold. O’Leary’s poem becomes the internal conversation of a very astute art critic. His lines in turn crackle with wit and sparkle like crystal. I like these especially,





The ghostly ewer they’d coveted and bought



When Lady Grey’s estate went on the block.



See how the great-eared ewer’s belly holds



Spectral reduction of the teascape,



Doily to vase to solitary tea cup.





Miriam O’Neal’s relates the rules of dream-life in her poem, In case you are wondering, which interprets Terry Kole’s acrylic, pen and ink piece entitled “A Whole New World.” The drawing captures you in a fable and the poem delivers surprising insight. Consider this,





Dreams talk to one another all day





and,





A good dream will never interrupt a nightmare.





Rene Schwiesow’s poem, Shades, fleshes out Ivy Francis’ color photograph “Missing You” with gut wrenching sadness. Schwiesow writes a love poem/ meditation on death set in winter on the ocean shore as affecting as any I’ve read in years. The starkness and the cold permeate through you as you breathe in this piece. She infuses her poem with classical images of shades and coins and, of course, the ferryman. This is really well done.



The fact that Linda Vopat’s oil painting of intersecting colored fields offers no clue as to its source and is titled “untitled” doesn’t stop poet Bert Stern for a second. His poem, Plymouth Art Show, begins wonderfully,





To each her own harbor, his meadow or hill,



this ancient oak, these fish, butterflies, sun-



rise or sunset- each scene born out of



nothing…





Stern seems to be riding these colors, testing borders, and playing in the texture. His internalized aesthetics hint at the deeply spiritual while continuing to frolic. This poet loves what he does.



Susan Cook Thanas meditates on Amelia Earharts biography in her poem Amelia. She seems to use Edwina Caci’s oil painting called “Amelia Earhart” to charge up. Awe and admiration then carry her through this delightful mini-portrait.



The poem, Boat in Sea Grass After Fishing, by Sheila Twyman attaches a way of life to the color photograph “Skiff on Seagrass” offered by D. Peter Collins. The fisherman in the poem admires the cagyness of the bluefish he is unable to catch. His line is drifting with the tide, but that is not important. He is listening to a symphony of color. And, more importantly, his home awaits his return with his wife, Elsie, whom he loves.



In alated ’12 the poet Miriam Walsh transforms herself into her subject. The watercolor, “Dragon Fly Lady,” by Pat Bianco weaves this magic,





I swim, I sleep, I dream.



nourishing myself upon the black



until upon a lotus root I alight,



rising from it own dark seed.





Walsh then dreams of procreation and a “womb surfaces into the sky” and offers the art of a new creation. A fragile piece, but astounding.



I’m told that the Plymouth Center for the Arts intends to host a redo of this event sometime in the future. If you have any creative spark in your soul, go. You’ll not regret it.

Review of The Collected Poems of Jared Smith

Review of The Collected Poems of Jared Smith

• ISBN-13: 9781935520702
• Publisher: The New York Quarterly Foundation

Review by   Ralph Pennel

The Collected Poems of Jared Smith settles deep in the heart of the reader and settles the reader deep in the heart of the heartland. The work in this collection is both intensely personal and of a common language that, at times, expands as wide as any sweeping plain or open field in tenor and voice, and, at other times is equally as singular in breadth. The Collected Poems spans nine books and forty years of Smith’s career as a writer and encapsulates the vastness of his ethic and vision. The works housed in this collection capture not only the visage of Smith’s view of the world around him through careful and thoughtful observations of the land and the people of the land, but they capture the visage of Smith himself, as well.

From the first book (Song of the Blood: An Epic) to the last (Grassroots), and including the “uncovered poems,” Jared Smith’s voice is resonant. Timeless. Unwavering. Each poem is a clear pronouncement, an ideation, and resolute. From word one to the very last intimation, Smith’s poetry is definitive. Each of his books, though singular in content, collectively gives rise to a singular voice.  That is because Smith’s primary concerns are of our humanity and of how we might live better, more meaningful lives, and, in doing so, how we might leave meaningful legacies of our lives as well, and he does so with uncommon restraint and patience.

These concerns rise up throughout Smith’s life’s work. The poem “Evening in the Heartland,” from, Keeping the Outlaw Alive, his first full-length book of poems and a paradoxical look at that which makes us honest and better for honoring that honesty, blemished or not, captures the aforementioned concern as well as any poem in the entire collection and with the same restraint and patience of his later works:

Our chances seem so remarkably small by now of finding anything. Yet, we

carry on. What a remarkable genius man is in his survival, in his ability to

look with amazement at even the darker rocks that will crush him when he

falls, and to find mystery and hope in them. (p. 209)

We are each of us always surviving regardless of our positions in life, of where we reside, or of the luxuries we may or may not have at our disposal. It is in the survival that we are forged by circumstance, rendered accessible, common, humane. And, it is exactly this, this constant demarcation, this remodeling of ourselves toward accessibility, that “makes us [simultaneously]/ An opening into the stars / And as distant as a stranger’s hands” (p. 205).

This exploration, this call to truthfully examine our lives despite the consequences, is further evidenced in the book, Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory. But in this book there is also a sense of resignation, the poems here as rooted to place and identity as the soil itself. In works such as “He Who Says The Name of God Will Perish,” Smith, with the same patience toward recovering ourselves as “Evening in the Heartland,” asks, “What is life / when we cannot reach out and feel our skin against the cold stone of night / and find the warmth we do not find within ourselves” (p. 260)?

           

Even the poems about other things are really about our humanity, about identity, about affirmation through acceptance. This is most evident in Lake Michigan and Other Poems, a seminal book in the collection, and a book firmly rooted to the heartland, the Midwest, where Smith lived for much of his adult life. It is a book, however, that marks a more mature (but no more reticent) voice, where Smith’s sense of his own humanity seeps in and mixes in with his other concerns, reflectively.  “When It’s Time to Go,” is a perfect example of this latter development:

            It was quarried deep beneath the earth

                          where it is dark

                                        and light comes only

                                                       with a chisel

                                                                       or dynamite

                                                                                     and is everlasting

            except that some part of the stone retains darkness

            and holds it deep within its heart

                          while the boot soles of other hearts bounce off.

            You wander there

                          after the thanks

                                         and you go home. (p. 354)

We sense this relatedness again, and with no less eloquence and with no less concern for the greater humanity, in “Beyond the Season” from the book Grassroots:

            Winter is a type of entropy

            where the wind socks down mountain valleys

            heaving boulders from frost cracked perches,

            spreading alluvial plains across the heart

            white and then gone as wind boils tarmac.

            If there were time I would say we wait it out . . . (p. 577)

The Collected Poems of Jared Smith is testament to a life of poetry well lived, and we by virtue of Smith’s generous voice, are members of this well-lived life, too. To read the poetry of Jared Smith is to stand beside him, to live with him “in the plate glass window factory, [where] the workers never go home / not even when they fish dark rivers beneath the stars” (p. 261). The Collected Poems is a work that carries with it the weight of consciousness.  It is not the consciousness of glowing embers, but rather, of the igniting breath. 

The Unselfish Memoirist: Ploughshares Founder

The Unselfish Memoirist: Ploughshares Founder

DeWitt Henry reads at Endicott College

by Michael T. Steffen

This Thursday evening (28 March 2012) the Endicott College reading series, organized and hosted by the founder of Ibbetson Street Press Doug Holder, welcomed memoirist and founding editor of Ploughshares DeWitt Henry as its guest speaker. While Mr. Henry’s seminal associations with Ploughshares, one of the most respected literary magazines in America, would be enough to draw interest on any campus – and Endicott faculty and student turnout witnessed to the occasion – the readings and discussion given by the speaker highlighted Henry’s memoirs, in particular passages from Sweet Dreams a family history (Hidden River Press, Philadelphia  2011). It is a book of great patience and personal research, which Thomas Larson best sums up:

Ranging from early childhood to the death of his parents, DeWitt Henry’s Sweet Dreams is among the more unselfish memoirs you’ll encounter. What’s so engaging about this book is Henry’s kaleidoscope of family mishaps and cultural adventures that involve him in someone else’s becoming, which, in turn, come to be his own. The memoir portrays with warmth and grace how we mature in the crowded many more so than we do in the isolated self.

Reading from a few of the more dramatic passages of the book, Henry spoke of the implicit “contract” between the memoirist and the reader, binding the writer to stay faithful to things and accounts as they were and happened – opposed to any inclination he may have to embellish. He suggested the responsibility of the memoirist, in particular, to confront the damage behind the scenes of the fantasies much of literature’s euphemistic tendencies produce – even betraying the allurement of his book’s title, Sweet Dreams, evoking the candy factory his father owned and operated.

     For those who have read Sweet Dreams, it would be hard to think that much – if anything – had been added or omitted. That said, Henry revealed that his brother Chuck didn’t altogether agree with him on all of the accounts of their childhood.

     I hesitate to give much detail of the book, not only for the reader, but with an instinct that the heavier matter of Sweet Dreams is DeWitt Henry’s to tell. Before the reading, I had a chance to chat with him about some of the book’s memorable marginalia, the hushed nearly sacred aura that banks used to have, the milkman dropping pints of milk and cream off at the door in the morning, bailing hay on a ranch in Colorado… These few instances don’t begin to account for the wealth of detail in the book, yet remind me of the source of pleasure and meaning I received reading it. Henry’s memoir served as a pathway to the things and events of my own young life, from childhood on through to my struggles, fears and modest accomplishments as a college student and then as a teacher and writer.

     Importantly, in our somewhat egocentric society, DeWitt Henry, in his writing as well as in person, conveys the notion that a self, the “I,” is, “unselfish,” composed so much of the things and people surrounding the observer’s consciousness – all we take in dearly, with challenge or discomfort, as encouragement or threat to ourselves.

Listening to Henry, I thought of the poem “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

To keep things whole.

The Instrument of Others Leonard J. Cirino

The Instrument of Others

Leonard J. Cirino

Lummox Press 2012

ISBN 978-1-929878-33-8

$15.00

“If they had their way” is the first poem in this book

and it lets the reader freely wonder throughout the their

thoughts without fear, because without free thought or

free form, a lot of the contemporary writers and readers

would be boxed in by stricter forms, such as, keeping in

a straight line and if your not into freedom, I suggest,

dear reader, you might want to read another book of poetry,

more suitable to your inclinations, because this book

is about freedom:

“the Bishops would kill me

as would the heathens and heretics,

the Commies, and surely the fascists.

At best, the do-gooders and quasi-liberals

would silence me because

if I were to call myself anything

it would be mystical anarchist;

my thoughts like birds,

always flying free.”

Modern Greeks name holiness as 'bright sadness.'  Cirino refers

to light as, “but a pale sorrow” and my sorrow ebbs in knowing this;

this is the first time I've read Cirino's poetry.  This grieves me, knowing

there is no other way to speak with him, to let him know how inspired

I am by his work, his words, his poems shine on the page. I will

content myself with communing with his poems on the page. “all I can

put in the bag of this poem.” Each and every one of his verses,

leaps over the moon:

“A Sacred Madness

I didn't want to listen but the wind, the sea,

howled the world's blood-stained torments.

I turned my thoughts inside my ears

and there a scarlet madness screamed.

Behind the sky, the moon succumbed

to dawn, the twilight gleamed in pain.

My head bowed to darkness,

life was wretched, struggle dreary.

Years later I lay down in woods

and bloomed among the ferns.”

The cruelty, for me is, he writes the universal truths, the song

we all want to sing but we get caught-up into the worldly net

and then we are left without those few poets who can bring us

into the cathedrals, temples, or the landscape ecstasy, brought

to us through the music, words can and must bare. The poems

are, at times, as religious as they are anarchist:

“In a Church

        for Akhmatova

In a church or another place with music

some men die with a tortured beauty,

but women, women's poems are fire

written into the ash of history.”...

Who else in these contemporary times, can pave the way,

who can purify our thoughts, who can just let the want to write

with night beauty. who writes with true ocean verbs. Do you know

how hard it is for me to write a review for this eminent book?

It feels unbearable, like cutting down a tulip magnolia tree

in full bloom. The book must be read and not reviewed:

“Unaware I'd Fallen

Not knowing where I'm going, I walk

in the dark, unaware I've fallen

and landed on some moss. Soft

and comfortable, it's my bed for the night.

I curl up and pull my dog close. She sighs

and moans in her sleep. Arm for a pillow,

I watch the moon fall off the western edge.”

The reader would be foolish not to have this book on their

shelf or on the floor next to their beds.

“Less is More-Two Geese 

for Ava

Not much nest making left, we've had our share.

Now we're like homing geese, tipped wing to wing.”

Irene Koronas

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review     

Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible Tomas Kubinek

Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible 
 Tomas Kubinek
March 29- April Fool’s Day (April 1)
Presented by ArtsEmerson
Playing at the Paramount Center
559 Washington Street, Boston, MA

For information and tickets: www.artsemerson.org
617-824-8400



Review
By Amy R. Tighe




(The notes I scribbled in the dark during the performance say “laughter was held tenderly in the room.”)
Sell that old silver tea pot and that vintage Hawaiian shirt (yes I know you look great in it) and take the grandkids and also every other kid you know and your auntie too and go see this show. Right now. It’s only here this weekend and you need it now. I’m sorry. Ditch the brunch party. Better yet, take the entire brunch gang. Just go alone or do what some unrenowned Emerson student did—he or she gave 10 tickets to the local Boys and Girls Club and helped kids get hungry for real art and then- amazingly—let them be completely served by Tomas Kubinek, Certified Lunatic, Master of the Impossible and most definitely, an artist to experience. In his opening remarks, Rob Orchard, Executive Director of ArtsEmerson, movingly reminds us that budgets for the arts are being cut everywhere. Tonight, we see what we could lose and also, what could be ours to reclaim.

There is a song called “The Road I Took to You” by Barbara Keith that says “the way back home to me is the road I took to you.” An evening with Tomas Kubinek could be called “the Clown I Took to You” because he brings us back home to what it means to be human, together in a human crowd, completely present to the enormous human possibility we each have. This is NOT a return to the nostalgia of vaudeville although there are charming and compelling moments of that. It is NOT quaint. It is NOT cute. It is a forecast to what happens when an artist brings a disparate community together where wonder and laughter are our founding members.

On the subway, on my way home, I suddenly realized there were no t-shirts, no plastic cups, no overpriced brochures. No dolls. There was nothing for my 9 year old niece to drool over. There was just my heart opening. This is NOT Disney on ice. This is gazing into the edges of humanity and creativity and having a guide who loves you and loves humanity at the same time, and on your time, wants to play. With you. Okay, that may sound grandiose, especially when you consider there are only a few props, one man and bad chicken jokes. But I come home empty handed and mind fed. How did that happen?

Tomas Kubinek was about 4 when he saw his first circus. At age 9, he performed in front of a council of magicians and at 13, acquired an agent. He has been performing ever since. He is both ethereal and pedestrian, truly a magical combination. Born in Prague, escaped to and raised in Canada, Kubinek studied every magician, clown and circus act his parents allowed. He has spent his lifetime learning from international masters and performing on the world’s stage.

My knees are pretty much the same age as his and yet, his knees speak Wikipedias about the power and delight a career focused on being simply human brings. He does a dance with his knees and six shoes which seem impossible, and yet as he does it, he acts as if it’s the easiest and most enjoyable dance anyone could ever do. I want lessons. Don’t worry, I already have the shoes.

Like any good street performer, Kubinek gets members of the audience to play. One man, over 50, comes up on stage and in front of a full theatre, transforms into a master acrobat under Kubinek’s safe guidance. At the end of the trick, he is asked “Did you ever think you could do that?” And the man says quietly, “No. Never.” We are stunned. We saw him do it. He was amazing.

By now, we have all been transformed into Kubinek’s playmates and the Paramount has become our beloved playground. After the performance, Kubinek comes out to the front of the stage and welcomes visitors, talks to all of us, and engages respectfully with the children who come to ask him their wide-eyed “How did you do thats?”

This is also why the performance is remarkable. The audience was composed of a healthy number of children, the adults that love them, regular theatre goers, students and other clowns. And somehow, through Kubinek’s generous mastery, we were all included in this evening of intelligent, fortifying and inspiring play. The children in the audience got to see adults happily play. The adults got to see children learning from another human. (I asked the 11 year olds next to me what they thought. They had told me before the show that they loved their computer games, but afterwards, they thought he was totally awesome and made them want to learn magic.)

We all got to be a part of the play.
Go see it. Bring whomever you can. And welcome home.

Swimming In A Southern Reservoir by Laverne Firth

Swimming In A Southern Reservoir

            by Laverne Firth
 www.finishinglinepress.com  $12

Review by Alice Weiss

            As a reader who spent half her adult life in Louisiana, Laverne Firth’s poems were a call to homesickness and desire.  The poet cast me back to tender awful moments, for example, suffering through  the “Southern Summer,” 

                        our stickiness

                        carried over into humid nights. . .

                        we crossed our fingers

                        wished . . .that quickly

                        time would claim the season.

or in “The Fill of Summer,” “rustlings in the grass, and the havey breathing/ we always take for granted.”

The poems evoke the simple  tropes of Southern rural experience, porches, circling chicken hawks, singing through rows of cotton, but they also  rise past the conventions of Southern writing because

they are populated with family, growing boys, Deacons, and singers.  Of aunts on the porch (I count five in the poem),” Distances,” Aunts seem to crowd on a porch. The poem is structured  according to their birth order.  The youngest, who speaks of men, the two oldest who do not, and “Two aunts sandwiched in between/start an argument.  A frog is heard,/ loud, near.”  A speaker,a little boy is listening and doesn’t quite get what’s going on . . .”Things become complex.”  It is a poem where the title seems to pinch all our perceptions with irony of the distances living close creates. 

            Further, I find the In addition, Firth manages to portray the  struggles  Black families endure in the context of institutional racism with amazing grace.  In the voice of mourners at the funeral of  a woman in “Everybody Was Impressed,”

            She must have been happy  how could she

            have not been so after nine birthings, sixty years

            of heavy domestic service, most of it in the best

            of homes,

and in “From the Time I was Born” singing through the wounds, and miseries,

             for my chance to breathe. . .

            My grandmother sang and sang and sang

            through the rows of cotton, through the

            two hundred pounds she would pick in one day.

We are conviced that “From the time that [he} was born, [he] knew singing.”

Review of POETICA MAGAZINE, CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING, SPRING 2012

Review of POETICA MAGAZINE, CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING, SPRING 2012, www.PoeticaMagazine.com, PO Box 11014, Norfolk, Virginia 23517, one-year subscription $19.50, Editor-in-Chief, Michal Mahgerefteh



Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES



I just gave POETICA a great report on their Holocaust edition. But this issue is a little more elusive as it is a “general” issue filled with Jewish voices rising just above

stereotyped or “typical” to fresher modern wordplay, as in “A Supermarket Sonnet” by Ehud Sela:



“Today by the produce section/an old man sneezed a few times/...Disturbing infused sounds/From overhead speakers/And squeaking carts, rusting/at metal wheels, pushed/By elder Jewish women, crooked/By time-lost calcium,/And their sight/Glazed by a cataract’s veil…”



Also clothed in newer imagery is “Zachrenu L’Chaim (Remember Us Unto Life)” by Beth SK Morris:



“I still see him walking/in that pigeon-toed gait/the old sprinter with a high hurdler’s grace/ ‘Keep going’/…feel his strong hands/lifting me out of the dirt and glass/in an open field where I’d gone down/trying to ride my bike too fast/’Don’t Worry’/…but I can’t recall his voice--/his pitch his rate the pattern of his speech/Why are the other memories so clear when/the sound of his voice is just out of reach?/’Soon Enough’”



There are 41 poets represented in this issue as well as beautiful cover art depicting scenes from Israel in hues of turquoise, green and pink, “Dreams of Israel” by Melanie Lewis, that would make the curious reader want to grab a copy.



Meanwhile, bordering near “typical” yet with the twist of visiting New Jersey from out in Oregon, is “Challah in New Jersey” by Lois Rosen, which rises above the familiar east coast Jewish family dinner. “Yearly pilgrimage east from Oregon/to the old ways: Marian, the linear napkin/on her hair darker brown than the crust/…We slow down to savor the egginess, the hint/of honey that continues dissolving in your mouth…”



For anyone interested in reading a good literary journal with Jewish themes,

POETICA would make a good gift subscription.