Two Star General By Grey Held

Two Star General

By Grey Held

Brick Road Poetry Press

www.brickroadpoetrypress.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9841005-8-3

ISBN-10: 0-9841005-8-X

57 Pages

$15.95

Review by Dennis Daly

In the best of circumstances the relationship between father and son tends towards complexity. Even a game of catch, the American emblem of that relationship, often devolves into rebellion when the boy tests his new found adolescent freedom against fatherly restraints and concerns. Now add to this paradigm a father who doubles as a military man, a leader who gives orders and expects immediate obedience. And finally add to this mix the rank of general; the father and leader now becomes a strategist who often must, and certainly should, sacrifice individual compassion for long term outcomes. Now we have an interesting and combustible consociation of dependency and paternal kinship.

In Two Star General Grey Held’s persona confronts his father and commanding general at odd angles and with the sensitivity and transcendence of a new-found understanding of human decency. The poem Under his Command gets right to the point,

We go to the Commissary

Drug Store so he can buy me

aviator sunglasses, though

what I want is the Elvis Presley kind,

but he says, not

for a two star general’s son!

He takes me to Uncle Sam’s Barbecue,

which I’ve never liked,

so he can get his favorite ribs.

In the same poem he puts his fathers’ serf-absorption in its proper military context. He relates a very telling story how his dad

...once drank scotch with McArthur

and told him, I know you and I will get along just fine.

He just took it when McArthur answered,

if there’s any getting along to do, Sir,

you’d better be the one to do it.

If your well-respected superiors have a way of making you feel small, it is only natural that those under your command, including a son, will get at least a taste of similar treatment.

The poet divides his book into two sections. The first sees life through a general’s eyes. In the second section the son of the general becomes the poet’s persona.

In the poem Fort Benning , Georgia  1942 the callous but sensible general describes his technique of training raw recruits how to kill using a bayonet. He says,

… I make them practice

sticking their weapons between the vivid

ribs of Savannah’s put-down

dogs I have them hang by rope

from branches of the drill field’s oaks.

I want them to feel resistance and retraction,

to witness the propulsion of sudden

blood—so much the better…

This hardened man knows how to save lives and in his own way—once you get by the stabbing of the dog’s bodies—cares profoundly and imaginatively for the humanity of his charges.

To be hard is one thing but to be totally aware of it is quite another. Awareness after all leads to consideration of feelings and all around sappiness.  The general explains in a poem entitled Sleepless,

On the army cot, I kiss the palm

of my own hand, wishing it were

my sweetheart. I miss the way

her instinctive fingers could amaze

her Steinway, one note rising, one note

kneeling. I have been 2 years 5 months

gone…

Back to the father and son relationship. Being a tough-ass dad is bad enough, but being an absentee dad easily trumps other short comings. And absentee-ness very often begins in the beginning.

The opening of the poem entitled Day My Son Is Born puts you inside the general’s conflicted head and it’s not pretty,

My son reports for duty

as the cord gets cut.

And where am I?

off somewhere buffing

Two silver stars…

On the battlefield numbers rise in importance beyond the personalities and flesh and blood they represent. In the poem Spit the general makes this clear,

More men arrive, enough to plug

the holes in three battalions.

They are just rounds of ammunition,

replaceable parts in the Machine.

The poem Landmines also gives us scary insight into this general’s mind. The general explains,

If you were to dismantle a bomb,

ask the right question of the fuse.

Rely on tweezer-work to negate

the panic side. Remember

every overtaken village must be dissected

into friend or thin transparency.

Don’t assume the innocence of the nameless

shanties…

Good generals never assume innocence.

In the poem, Home of the Brave, the poet’s persona, now the son, observes closely as his mother tapes up the general’s broken toe and fuels a precious moment of family happiness as she

starts to laugh

huge laughter,

until tears drag rivulets

of eyeliner down her cheeks.

And my father, who rarely

seems happy, seems happy’

almost proud…

In Skeet Shooting the poet back up a bit and accepts some of the blame for the strained relationship. He says,

Marry within the faith,

be a soldier, not a poet.

And why didn’t I scream, I’m not you!

but blamed him instead.

Lately, he’s stopped playing

the part of gunpowder to my trigger.

In fact the poet had become just like his father, but without the military necessity.  He confesses in the poem After All:

Didn’t I have to convince you

when I left to start college

you needed a new typewriter,

so I could take your old one with me

determined as I was to be a poet, just

because you were not.

In the poem, Balance is the Riddle the general now becomes the child and the poet kneels to tie his shoes. In Veterans’ Day Parade the poet steadies him during the festivities. And finally in Death of a General the respectful and dutiful poet-son says,

I take off his false coat,

put on this shroud, stitched from thunder,

buttoned into mud.

These are honest poems not easily written by a poet who comes to terms with a decent man in a difficult but necessary profession. Both father and son deserve our admiration.

Poet Jean Monahan : A Meditative Writer

Poet Jean Monahan : A Meditative Writer

By Doug Holder

I like to write my poetry amidst the din of a café—the atmosphere for some reason makes me able to focus.  Poet Jean Monahan needs quiet. For her poetry is a form of meditation—and at times painful meditation.

 Monahan, is a single mother, works a full time job, and tries to write when time allows.

She is the author of three books of poetry: Hands (chosen by Donald Hall to win the 1991 Anhinga Prize); and Believe It or Not and Mauled Illusionist, both published by Orchises Press (1999 and 2006). She has received several awards and an artist residency at Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Poetry, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Salamander, as well as in several anthologies. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV Show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: In the manuscript you sent me Pomegranate you write a lot about fruit.  You could say it is a kind of a fruit bowl of a collection. What is it with you and fruit?

Jean Monahan:  (Laugh) Maybe I am a fruitcake.  I have always liked to use inanimate objects and just let them speak for themselves. Something like a pomegranate has so many historical references. One thing that I read was that some people consider this fruit to have been present in the Garden of Eden. With all the seeds inside this fruit it could represent the galaxy. Fruit, of course can be pretty metaphorical. I was working on this manuscript and I began to realize that I had a number of poems that dealt with food. Food has a lot of associations for me.

Doug Holder: When you lived in East Cambridge you wrote in a small, separate room. Now, in your house in Salem you have a room to write. We know that Virginia Wolf talked about a writer having a room of one’s own. Do you need a room to write—to write well?

Jean Monahan:  It is interesting because there are so many ways people work. When I am ready to work I have to be in a meditative state. I need quiet—absolute quiet. When I used to be in the East Cambridge apartment I used to put on a fan or something to create a low level buzz or white noise. Writing can be excruciating—so you need to eliminate the distractions and just focus. The room I have now is wonderful because it is a lot bigger than the little alcove that I had. I am less focused now than I was then because my life is different.

Doug Holder: In an interview I read you say for you—poetry is a form of meditation.

Jean Monahan: Yes I don’t formally meditate. But I find when if I am writing a poem that is going to work as a poem inevitably I will get into a meditative state where the poem comes out of my unconscious rather than my conscious state. That’s hard to do. And since I have not been writing much the last few years it is harder to get in that state. When I was writing regularly I knew the poem was going somewhere when I didn’t know what was coming next.

Doug Holder: You went to the Columbia University MFA Progra. Who did you study with there?

Jean Monahan: I studied with Richard Howard. Tom Lux was there briefly. A lot of people would come in for a week or so and then we would have the regular faculty. I had Bill Matthews—he was a big influence on me, as well as Molly Peacock. Dan Halpern was running the program. The stuff I learned there was great. The environment was stimulating. Very competitive. A lot of people in the program had degrees in English.  My degree is in Psychology. There were a lot of conventions and understandings about writing that I didn’t have. In a way that helped me because I wasn’t overly influenced by some of these notions. And yet there were a lot of things I needed to know.

Doug Holder: You have described writing like mud wrestling with a pig.

Jean Monahan: I think even when I wrote regularly—and more at ease with it; I found it very hard to get to the place where it was working.

Doug Holder: You taught in China around the time of Tienanmen Square Riot in the late 80’s. Did you know poets then? Was there more powerful writing because of the danger of living under an oppressive regime?

Jean Monahan: I was teaching English to university students. I helped them speak English. If someone was writing powerful poetry they didn’t tell me about it because things were quite oppressive then. One of my students told me Mao was a poet. He wrote in the tradition of the poet/warrior. So Mao utilized poetry—metaphor to convey his ideas. He wrote in a tradition of recognizable metaphor.

Doug Holder: There is often an element of surprise in your work.

Jean Monahan: You can’t engineer it consciously. Sometimes you write a poem and you are surprised. A thought can come about in the writing process that surprises you—but it rings true. I like it—it doesn’t happen often. When I don’t see it coming—that’s a thrill. 

Doug Holder: What is a poem? 


Jean Monahan:  Richard Howard said to me: " A poem is a made thing." There is a very big difference between poetry and journalism, as well as diary writing, a letter, etc... A poem is the initial impulse and then all that shaping and crafting.

 

Life After Water

In the life before water, we were rock.
Molten. Singed. The heat was in our mouths:
it took our words away.

Now we swim in the lake of vowels. I and you.

Water is about drift and change.
The trick is to embrace what absorbs
and dissolves you, let each stroke pull

the shadows into light.
When you step on a fish, you take on its power.
The edge of the lake is where we end.

In the life after water,

wind speaks with a louder voice,
the sky is white with dying stars.
Only those with water in their ears

can hear them fall.

originally published in Two If By Sea MIT Oceanographic Institute newsletter--Archives, Summer 2000 and both appear in Mauled Illusionist

Steel Valley by Michael Adams

Steel Valley

By Michael Adams

Lummox Press, 2010

103 pages

$15.00 USA

www.lummoxpress.com

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Michael Adams’s Steel Valley is a 103 page book filled with poetry, prose, and letters that make you aware that there are worlds outside of Boston, Massachusetts. And Adams’s worlds, or places, are memorable and filled with Adams’s appreciation of man-made as well as nature-made environments.

Adams’s poem “The Soft Fires” brings you quickly into the first of his worlds – his life as a youngster growing up in Steel Valley, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, amidst the steel industry’s final years. Here you find Adams mixing steel industry imagery with sexual imagery to create metaphor:

:

The Soft Fires

I stepped into the fires in the cathedral shadows of the furnaces,

in thrall to a life alloyed of iron and flesh.

It was Pittsburgh where I was tested and tempered,

Pittsburgh that entangled within me the chained indifferent fury

of industry and the unquenchable drives of the heart.

Our first time was in her second floor apartment

in South Oakland, where the city tumbles

down the bluff through blown trash

and woodland to the furnaces of Hazelwood.

The house was tumbling too, but slowly,

succumbing to gravity and the landlord’s indifference

to paint, caulk and shingles. We didn’t care, we

were young, newly free, had lightning

on our minds. The maintenance of structures or love

beneath bay windows that had resigned

the battle against wind and rain, leaving

long streaks of rust in the mustard yellow walls,

flecks of plaster on the sheets and a persistent smell of mold.

Ah, but that night –

there was a red glow

in the belly of the clouds from the furnaces, rain

hammered the windows and the October branches

of the sycamore battered the house.

I tasted the wind and rain and the sulphur grit

of the mill as I entered the fires and found her rhythm,

and we rocked together, welded by our hunger.

The storm’s thunder mixed with a deeper sound,

striking through the earth from the mill,

felt more than heard, some great machine

forming and shaping the bones of our city,

a monster hammering

deep in the soil and rock.

The night, our city

beautiful

molten

riven to the core.

Next, Adams transports you to the second place where he lived – Spruce Mountain, West Virginia in his poem “Spruce Mountain, West Virginia”:

Spruce Mountain, West Virginia

I wanted this earth to speak through me,

to tell you – he tried to make a living

of it. It’s true he failed, but there is no shame

in that. It takes more than a man and a woman,

and a small piece of land, to  build something that endures.

You saw the farms scattered on the mountain,

the small towns of the valley –

            Onega, Seneca, Circleville, Cherry Grove

They may not look like much but by God

they have staying power.  You don’t enter

a place like this lightly.  It takes generations

of blood and sweat flowing into the hardscrabble earth,

and not a little darkness.

The soil here is built of disappointment and fractured dreams.

Leave this land alone for a few years

and you may lose everything to its unassailable patience.

This thick woodland was once a meadow,

and the smell was not that of autumn leaves

and spring water, but the pungent odor of cow dung.

Here is where the house stood. You have to get down

on your hands and knees now, a beggar, dig

in the damp earth to find any trace.

Someone must have carted off

the few things I left that were worth anything

before they set the fire.  The rest is gone

to rust and the voracious creatures of the soil.

Look, there is the spring where we drew water,

next to it the big oak still stands, the one whose branches

sounded like small animals on the tin roof

when the wind blew in the autumn and the leaves were dry

but not yet fallen.

Right here was the kitchen where we would play

guitar and banjo and drink Jack Daniels straight up

until we were brave enough to venture

into the moonless November dark

to confront the mountain’s

unhouseled ghosts.

What words are fit to honor these mountains that rose

to heights unseen to this day, rose before

towering fern forests were locked in darkness

and began their ages-long decay

to the black rock we rend and gut this earth to find?

What words for these former Himalayas, softened by eons

of rain and the slow rafting of continents to today’s tree-

green hills?

            I say there is wisdom here, solace, and much of the sacred.

What do our few decades matter?

Someday our remains will be scattered in a place

not unlike this, a place of trees and sky

and rough-hewn land, a part, finally, of it all.

I wanted this earth to speak as it does,

undeniable and  unanswerable,

as the leaves, like the generations of men,

fall around us on this autumn day.

A man and woman and the great land.

Here for a season, for few turnings

of the wheel to endure, to love,

to give what we can.

Then gone.

Then Adams moves to Colorado.  And he writes a letter called “Wet Mountains      Jan 2003” to his deceased father about how he has matured, or “changed so much –”:

Wet Mountains                                  2003

Dear Dad,

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. But I

woke up – it’s the middle of the night but my bladder

won’t let me get a full night’s sleep anymore – and I was

thinking about you. It’s been 20 years almost to the day

since you died, and I didn’t even think about that but I

woke up with you on my mind, so I guess it was floating

around in there

It’s 12 below zero and the wind’s blowing pretty good,

but it’s warm in the cabin with a fire going. You’d like

it here.  The stars are so close, up here at 9,000 feet. I

think you’d be proud of me, building this cabin with my

own two hands, just like you did our first house back

there on Elizabeth St.

The world’s changed so much – I’ve changed so much –

that I don’t know where to start.    First off, I married

and pretty happy — been together over ten years now!

No kids, though. I don’t know why, just one of those

things. I always had something else going on and by the

time I stopped and looked back it was just too late.

…

I’m glad for nights like this, when I wake up and can’t get

back to sleep. A near-full moon shining on the snow, the

wind in the trees. You’d like this land – a high, rolling

country of sage and pines. You talked often of Colorado,

of how you fell in love with it in your Army days.

You know, it reminds me of Homeville, and of my farm

in West Virginia. You can’t see the high mountains

from here, just rolling tree covered hills and deep

valleys. I think that’s why I chose it. Funny, isn’t it? A

guy moves halfway across the country to get away and

then picks a place that reminds him of home.

Well, dad, that’s about it for now.

Love,

Michael

            Through his free flowing, descriptive and lucid writing style, Adams wins our attention. He writes about three worlds, or places, that are not easily accessible to us Bostonians: the steel mining industry that is basically longer in existence in Pittsburgh; Spruce Mountain which is located in West Virginia and is quite a drive from Massachusetts; and Colorado which is a plane ride or a many days’ drive to get to from Boston.

It’s a pleasure to read Adams’s Steel Valley not only for its quality writing but for the different but similar perspectives on life that Michael Adams depicts.

Time Being: An Improvisation by Joe Torra

Time Being: An Improvisation by Joe Torra (Quale Press, 2012.  http://www.quale.com  $16)

Review by Doug Holder

  The banal lives astride the profound. Life lives astride death. The comic dwells amidst the tragic. Joe Torra in his long poem/journal/improvisation titled Time Being takes it all in, in this stream of consciousness work that takes place in Somerville and the surrounding environs between Dec 2006 to Dec. 2007.

 Anyone from Somerville, Mass. will recognize Torra’s references: Highland Ave, the defunct Grand Café in Union Square (Where I observed Torra hold court at a poetry group held there on weekends,) the dour day laborers waiting for a gig at Foss Park, the looming tower of the Schraff’s Building, “The Goth chick unlocking the porn store,” the long gone eatery Virgies that Torra describes as a:

 “ … neighborhood joint catering to postal workers, and local tradesman bad bar food, pool table darts and Keno—after its facelift it’s Madison’s on the Ave., no more Bud signs…”

 Like the late poet William Carlos Williams who Torra makes reference to in this passage: “Williams was right when he wrote that it’s the hours we keep to see things make all the difference,” he sees it all and with clarity.

 And Torra observes, makes pasta, sees more, comes back to the meal, and generously mixes his musings about death, Chinese poetry, and dental bills in this eclectic recipe.

 Throughout the book an image of a deceased neighbor who used to live on his block emerges. They saw each other in passing for years but never even exchanged a “hello.” This spectral elderly woman appears rudely in the midst of Torra’s horn of plenty of a life: the noisy clatter of his kids, the creaking and the disrepair of his old house, the notes from his students, the phone calls of his friends, and his conversations with his wife. She is a constant reminder to stop, smell, touch, feel, to experience the here and now.

 And this is how it is, isn’t it?  You can be looking out the window of your car thinking about your visit to the therapist, or the grocery list, or the root canal you have to get, and then the memories flood in. In this passage Torra dwells on the swan song of his father as the author drives by a hospital in his car: “I will always call it Spaulding Rehabilitation my father’s dead eyes look up before the doctor closes them and pulls the sheet over…” And then just as quickly he focuses on: “…down the tunnel and three men in a white pickup truck fuck you out the window they think I cut them off…”

  Torra, with minutely crafted attention to detail, creates a master work, that any man or woman can point to and think: “Hey, I thought that, I felt that, I mourned, I loved… like him.”

Highly Recommended.

Surrender When Leaving Coach By Joel Lewis

 
Surrender When Leaving Coach

By Joel Lewis

Hanging Loose Press

Brooklyn, New York

www.hangingloosepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-934909-26-3

124 Pages

$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Some poets sing. Some paint images. Some invoke spiritual or philosophical vibrations to carry the mood. Joel Lewis does none of these arty things. Yet Lewis somehow makes poetry happen. His poems emerge from a background of dissonance and human density, like quartz or obsidian out of craggy rock. Lewis creates his context of noise from mass transit vehicles: bus, train, shuttle, and ferry. The noise of these vehicles includes conversation snippets of passengers, storefront sights, quotes from books, jokes, famous and anonymous people, and much more.  What rises to the level of poetry will often depend on the reader and his or her sensitivities. In his poem, Walking Main Street, Hackensack Lewis recalls 1988,

… buses idling against the Transfer Station platform.

A thick goodbye to old Hackensack Saturdays

with farmers swarming off up-country’s

Susquehanna trains—those Wortendyke Dutch

and moody Paramus celery ranchers have left their progeny

a vast Mall to inhabit…

Twenty years later the poet returns by bus and finds most stores of his youth are gone, but his favorite hamburger joint still there, offering some stability in his fast moving universe,

“Is Prozy’s Army and navy open?”

“Nope.”

What about Womrath’s Books?”

“Gone for years.”

“How about White Manna?”

“Some people say Hackensack

should shut down if

‘ the Manna’ closes.”

Well ‘the Manna’ is not closed and Lewis enjoys his comforting potato flour hamburger rolls and the oniony meat before getting back on the bus. Lewis’ vehicles not only transport his reader across town, but also across time. 

The poem, Mass Transit Journal: January, is one of four monthly journal poems in which the poet delivers more context and the poetry of everyday belching black soot grittiness. He records,

1/18, 8:00am, on the S46 (towards West New Brighton)

bus slogs up to the Victory Boulevard stop

meat pies of all nations in a still-gated store window

columns of industrial rain on a Van Duzer Street awning

my butchered hesitations, my inhibited fantasies of power

as the bus climbs uphill

I look back

see oil tankers parked in the Narrows…

The poet counts his blessings while watching his wife as she eats crème brulee at a French brasserie, which is, of course, located inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He comments on the scene,

—a scenario I’d have found

hard to imagine in the late ‘70s,

either marriage or a bistro

in that scary homeless dormitory

where I’d catch the bus back

to my basement warren

in North Bergen

after another evening

of poetry readings…

Like most poets and other people Lewis has had bad times that have made an impression on him, and in his case, he cannot believe his present good luck. (After writing this I would recommend knocking on wood).

In his title poem, Surrender When Leaving Coach, Lewis quotes Barrett Watten:” A bus ride is better than most art.” He then goes on to test this principle in the poem itself, self-consciously dropping names as he writes,

Once again my obsession with

the motion of buses, trains and canal boats

and Paterson has it all

including

a heavy-duty waterfall

elegantly framed in the five-volume Paterson

of William Carlos William

and it’s where I once took Bill Berkson,

Robert Creeley (I have the photo)…

Not to be missed in this poem is the “Zen bus driver,” who I believe I’ve met in a different context. The poem ends with a lovely stanza, a jewel which seems to me to burst through the density of static. The poet describes the scene thusly,

Grey crescent moon above Port Newark’s cranes:

that distant space that stretches out

beyond the grasp, at-history haze

of retreating winter light

along the Jersey horizon.

The poet identifies himself as a true nerd in the poem, The Origins of My Social Marginalization. He corrects “Fun Fact #226” on the underbelly of a flavored tea bottle cap and is rewarded with a case of Snapple from the Schweppes-Cadbury Corporation. That’s funny. But funnier still is the poet’s recitation of the history of Spaghetti-o’s in his poem entitled Spaghetti-o’s. Here is a bit of literature to remember:

Because salesmen had trouble

pronouncing the family name

it changed to the now familiar phonetics

of Chef Boyardee line

of prepared dinners.

Everyone is proud

of his own family name,”

said Chef Hector,

“but sacrifices were necessary

for progress.”

August Yale Professor Harold Bloom makes a cameo appearance noting his adoration of the New York Yankees in the poem, How Harold Bloom Chills Out. But Lewis tops this comedic scene in the poem, Daydream Nation,

Phil Rizzuto, upon hearing of the death of Pope Paul VI:

“Well, that kind of puts a damper on even a Yankee win!”

Lewis’ delivers quite a few one-liners and uses famous names for effect. A dying Babe Ruth says to Connie Mack: “The termites got me!”  And in the poem, The Academy of an American Poet, there is a very unflattering but human picture of Robert Frost in which Lewis makes a point on hero worship and writers’ communities.

I was slow to warm to these poems, but when I did, especially with Lewis’ sense of humor, they grabbed me.