When Men Bow Down By R. Nemo Hill

When Men Bow Down

By R. Nemo Hill

Dos Madres Press

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-933675-76-3

87 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

The crafty author of this book of poems, When Men Bow Down, manipulates words, meter, and rhyme into traditional forms, testing his perceptions of reality from odd angles and in unusual ways. R. Nemo Hill seems intent upon capturing flickering moments of inspiration from the heavy texture and weightiness of life’s sordid drudgery and inexorable burdens. He succeeds on a number of levels.

In Looking Glass, the first poem in his book, Nemo recreates Plato’s cave with modern complications. The narrator waits for his plane at the airport, looking out the airport window. Through the window he can see the shadowy shapes of grounded planes in a rain storm, as well as the reflections of people coming and going in the climate-controlled building. This vision begs the platonic question: what is reality? The poet observes,

It’s hard to know what’s here and what is there,

what’s in, what’s out, what’s on or through this glass,

what’s real and what’s a phantom—. Though I stare,

the solid state my eye presumes can’t last.

The focus cannot hold. What then remains?

As the various images transit the window, a voice of the usual kind pages lost travelers, defining even more the ghostly nature of our everyday world. The rain alone provides weight and a sense of gravity. This is a first rate poem searching for an anthology.

The poem Pastel describes the desire of the poet to retreat from the stark heaviness of his reality into a lighter shade of being. He says,

I long to fade from action

into stupefaction,

slipping through the cracks

that restless fullness lacks.

The poet’s collapse into insubstantiality ends only with death, when his gray suited body is laid out in brown mud.

Hill again emphasizes the primary substance of illness and death in his poem, A Bit of Life.   Mother and son catch a firefly, put it in a jar to cheer up the sick man-of-the –house intending to turn off the television illusion box. It doesn’t work out. Reality out of context, in captivity, becomes something else. The perception changes as the fire goes out and with it the original inspiration. The poet puts it this way,

…halfway down the darkened hall she stopped,

and gazing through the glass, sighed with dismay.

“It won’t light up,” she said. “It knows it’s trapped.

I guess the idea’s silly anyway…

I’ll let it go.”

Another poem that pits the brutish world against the weightlessness of inspiration is Men Like These. Hill meditates on the slow and steady men, the quiet men who carry the burdens of mankind on their backs. Besides the usual bundles of ice, furniture and fowl, some of these men carry gold fish, another version of the firefly. The poet describes his discovery as artificial fruits which prove to be

bouquets of plastic bags, filled with water,

then knotted and suspended carefully

like ripe grapes, or trussed animals for slaughter.

They’re drinking water salesmen! one decides—.

Until a flash of orange sparks provides

swift proof that circling endlessly within

each liquid satchel—three bright goldfish swim.

The liquid satchel used to transport them is of course artifice, in the present context: poetry.

The poem Still Life With Weightless Gift offers a seahorse in place of the firefly and the goldfish. This seahorse , original carved from ebony no longer exists as a tangible thing. It has evolved into a dream, a perfect weightless message. After leaving his artifact in the store, un-purchased, the poet says,

I came home empty –handed. I still am.

And yet a gift in dream or reverie,

where purchase is beside the point, may be

of far more value—freed entirely

from its box and paper wrapper, from its baggage

of counted coin, its ribbon and its bow,

and its delivery tax…

But no less real. This is clearly a platonic universe of forms we live among.

In the poem entitled Eggs and Strawberries weightlessness and timelessness are states sought after and ultimately attainable for a lucky few. The poet argues,

Such carnival attractions may deceive.

And yet the evidence accumulates

that while the awful weight of living grieves

all those who bear the burden of brute fates—

yet, some things and some bodies make escapes

quite unexplained by normal means of measure.

Hill poses this argument within the extraordinary measurements of poetic meter. Very artificial, yet very effective!  Art, specifically Hill’s art, abets man’s escape from the mundane and awful heaviness of life.

When Men Bow Down, Hill’s spectacular title poem startles with its mythic and religious intonations. The ritual aspect is so strong that the scene could be a mosque, a church or a temple instead of a barroom. The metronomic rites performed by each drinker lends to competing interpretations of community and loneliness. Although captured by the regularity of meter there are bits of subtle inspiration here also. Here is the second of four very strong stanzas,

When men bow down to sip their drinks

in dimmed down day or midnight’s glare,

in common rows or solitaire,

in a silence startled by the clink

of ice on glass—as if in prayer,

their eyes close and their focus shrinks

when men bow down to sip their drinks.

Hours easily vanish in this bar (think Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks with more people or even Van Gogh’s Night Café with its atmosphere of evil), only the iambic scans and rhythms deliver us safely from the boozy brink of despair and dread presented here.

The mix of traditional forms and unsettling weighted themes works over and over again. Hill obviously took some poetic chances writing and compiling this poetic collection and they paid off. He’s top shelf.

Somerville Poet Tara Skurtu: At the cusp of med school to the depths of poetry.

Somerville Poet Tara Skurtu: At the cusp of med school to the depths of poetry.

By Doug Holder

  Somerville poet Tara Skurtu has followed an unusual path. She started out with ambitions to go to medical school, and indeed she got as far as an interview at UMASS Medical School, but didn’t get by the gates. As the old saying goes: “One door closes and another opens.” So Skurtu decided to follow her old flame: poetry. She was accepted in the very competitive MFA program at Boston University.

  Skurtu, who lives in the Union Square section of Somerville, met me at my usual window seat at the Bloc 11 Café. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, she could pass as a fashion model. This 30 something poet counts as her mentor Lloyd Schwartz, another Somerville poet who won a Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism, and has taught at U MASS Boston for many years.

Skurtu said: “Lloyd has been the best editor I ever had. He has the rare ability of tweaking a poem without changing its essence.” Skurtu also admires Schwartz’s conversational style in his poetry, and she employs elements of this in her own work.

  Skurtu likes working either in a café work amidst the white noise, or in a perfectly quiet setting in her apartment. She reflected: " My poems start in memory or visual images or both. I eventually put them together in a skeletal structure. I do a lot of revision. A single poem can take me years to complete”.

  And in spite of being part of a generation that did not use typewriters; she still pounds out some of her work on one. “With the typewriter you are very aware of language. You think more of the moment—you feel the typing of the words. I also hand write my poems, but I finish up with my computer,” she said.

  Skurtu who has lived in Somerville, Mass. for 12 years has compiled a number of impressive publication credits. Her work has appeared in the Poetry Review (London), Hanging Loose, Salamander, and she will be a guest editor of the online literary journal Amethyst Arsenic  started by Somerville resident Samantha Milowsky.

  Skurtu expects that she will be spending the fall and winter immersed in writing projects for school.  And who knows?

 “You may see the young poet /scribbling away/ at the Bloc 11 Café/ on any given day.”  




         

The Art of Craft

(for Elizabeth Bishop)

The art of finding could be such disaster;

if memory restored be cumbersome,

to lose may be a better craft to master.

To conjure those things best forgotten faster:

the fear of death, love lost, an illness from

the past—this craft, it would be such disaster.

If dreams spy memories left in the past, or

startle you, fearful, paralyzed and numb,

their loss may be a better craft to master.

This morning I discovered how at last, or

perhaps it was just why or when you’d come?

Regardless, what I found felt like disaster.

You’ve come and gone. Now I long for vaster

loss—the mind be numb, speech dumb until some

memory loss becomes a craft that’s mastered.

You’ve long forgotten me yet I still clasp, or

scout for strands of your hair like beggar’s crumbs;

The art of finding could be such disaster

—if only loss were easier to master

---Tara Skurtu

…. Hiram Poetry Review

Duckwalking Is The Only Way Out Of Armageddon by Dustin Holland

 

Duckwalking Is

The Only Way Out

Of Armageddon

by Dustin Holland

Kanev Books

New York

Copyright © 2012 by Dustin Holland

ISBN: 978-0-937131-19-7

Softbound, 119 pages, $10.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

The enigma of Dustin Holland is: is he putting us on, or is he serious?  My guess,a little of both. He is funny, perhaps experimental, with undertones of seriousness that the reader needs to find for him/herself.  For example In Capitalist Anxieties:

poetry is

handed out on

street corners

no one is starving

doctors and food

for everyone

shoes and warm

too

property is a

myth in the business

man’s nightmares

war is over

and the earth

still has room

for the human race

the banks and

ammunitions factories

are closed

while supermarkets

hospitals

and libraries

open up

everywhere without

cash registers

the streets are art

galleries in

capitalistneofacist

bad dreams full of

smiling masses

swapping stories

in what used to be

government buildings

and television studios

This poem presents what appears as a humorous poem, but as you read and re-read it the

seriousness which may also seem as obvious as the humor, suddenly hits you – Holland is writing about a future utopia, but is that utopia only in Holland’s head? Is it the anti-Orwell utopia. Is it a libertarian view?  Is it green? Is post-apocalyptic?  What exactly is Holland’s message to us?  Is he prophet or fool?  Like a law school challenge, any answer might be correct.  What do think?

There are more poems of humor intertwined with horror with titles like Lenny Bruce Is Not Afraid, Cartoon Villains, Disgruntled, I’m The Child, A Dramatic Think Establishing Elizabethan Liberation/Revolution,  02750, Listening To John Cage’s Fonatana Mix and many others you cannot help but revel in.

Take one of the shortest poems: All

art if

you can call

it that

is meant

to be

misunderstood

loudly

So much truth in so few words, 13 to be exact, in which he puts down critics, people who speak loudly about art in a museum and the modern gobbledygook art of Pollack, the neo pointillism of Lichtenstein, perhaps even Picasso or any other number modern artists for whom a critic’s explanation is necessary for the average viewer to understand and the ultimate put down of the critics who determine whats is good or great and what is a trash.

In many poetry books you may get interesting ways to use words, or you might be challenged by the poet or perhaps you get political statements buried in verse. Rarely do you get all three.  However, Dustin Holland has risen above the ordinary, beyond the dull or romantic, away from the everyday and presented a book you will have to read a few times to absorb the many facets of his writing.  In the end, you will enjoy the time spent with it. And at $10.95 it is a bargain (also available as an ebook).

_____________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling is author of Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011), King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010)  and the forthcoming Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva). He is Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review and Bagel Bards Anthology #7.

New Lummox Press--Nov. 2012, Release.... A Collection of the Best Poets from the Independent or Small Presses.

.......I am glad that I have been asked to be a  Contributing Guest Editor for this great new anthology put out by R.D. Armstrong's Lummox Press. I am representing the Boston Area Small Press Scene, and I have selected these significant poets: Dan Sklar, Zvi A. Sesling, Timothy Gager, Irene Koronas, Deborah Finkelstein , Robert K. Johnson, Harris Gardner, Gloria Mindock, Dennis Daly, and Sam Cornish.  My own work will be included as well . Many of these names you may recognize as significant contributors to Small Presses and Independent Magazines for the last few decades.  Best-- Doug Holder


Some other contribtors include:


Doug Draime, Matt Galletta, Ed Nudelman, Aaron Belz, April Ossman, Patricia Fargnoli, Grace Cavalieri, Sam Rasnake, Pris Campbell, Tara Birch, John Macker, Frances LeMoine, Frank Kearns, Frank Reardon, Gary Jacobelly, Tim Peeler, Mike Meloan, Jane Lippman, Gary Moody, Janet Eigner, Joan Logghe, Judith Toler, Mary McGinnis, Blair Cooper, Elizabeth Raby, James McGrath, Yves C. Lucero, Catherine Ferguson,

Jayne Stahl, John Yamrus, Tony Moffeit, Krikor n. Der Hohannesian, Kyle Laws, Larry Rogers, Marie Lecrivain, Linda Lerner, Luis Campos, Lyn Lifshin, Micheal Spring, Mather Schneider, Mike Adams, James Taylor III, Jared Smith, Jerry Smaldone, Karen Douglass, Phil Woods, Captain Barefoot, Mike Grover, Nancy Shifrin, AD Winans, Marc Olmsted, Lynn Hayes, Rick Smith, Sheryl L. Nelms, H.L. Thomas, Guy R. Beining, RL Raymond, Ron Koertge, Sean Dougherty, Simon Perchik, Judith Skillman, Suzanne Lummis, Terry Sanville, John Swain, Larry Gladeview, Tim Tipton, M. Mitchell, Walter Ruhlmann, Adam Walsh, Wanda Clevenger, William Doreski, Will Taylor, Winnie Star, Wolf Carstens, Jay Passer  

 http://lummoxpress.com

Author Becca Chambers is Beyond the Great Abyss

Author Becca Chambers is Beyond the Great Abyss

Interview with Doug Holder

  At one time author Becca Chambers found herself weighing over two hundred pounds, chronically depressed, with a litany of health problems. If you saw her today you would see an animated and fit woman who has left her ills in the dust. Chambers, a Doctor of Naturopathy, has discovered energy therapies that have transformed her. She has a written a memoir of her experiences Beyond the Great Abyss. I talked with Chambers on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: Can you tell us about the Whole Body Vibration you practice—the very therapy that transformed your life?

Becca Chambers: It is therapy that involves standing on a platform that visually moves. It sends vibrations throughout your body, and it is enormously therapeutic on many levels all at once: body, mind and spirit. It has changed my life.  Vibration is part of everything. Every part of you is made of molecules that are vibrating. It works on the vibrational energy or life force. It is sort of like acupuncture. It works on your energy. The Russians invented this therapy 40 years ago. Astronauts use it—it increases bone density. It is an extensive workout. It has great systemic benefits. It increases serotonin levels in the brain, and gets the toxins out of you.

DH:  The cover of your memoir has a picture of a half owl and half woman.  What is the idea behind this?

BC: The idea is that I grew up depressed—I had thirty years of  depression. I felt hopeless. But the owl is symbolic of wisdom. And the Great White Owl—is very powerful—so watch out! So this was a symbol of my transformation.

DH: So the memoir is about transformation?

BC: Well there is my story in the book. It is also about a man I met. It starts about five years ago after I got divorced. I was married 23 years; it was traumatic. I met this man about a year after the divorce. He too, has been deeply traumatized by things that have happened to him in his past. And I had my own baggage with 30 years of depression.  . So we came together and it was rather dramatic and scary at times. But we are changing. We use Whole Body Vibrations, and homeopathy. This is vibrational energy medicine. It is really energy transforming medicine. It helps you overcome your negative energy, fear and anger. I can’t begin to tell you how functional I am now. I’m happy, creative, and have good relationships. I didn’t do anything for years.

DH: You chose the diary format for your book—why?

BC:  It is written directly from my journals. I kept a journal through this whole period. A  few years ago I was looking through the journals and realized there was the book. I actually had a huge fear of writing. I had to fake my way into this. I really like the diary form. It is so immediate—it has a lot of power. I had to polish it up of course. I had some excellent writing coaches.

DH: Some memoirists have told me you have to exaggerate things  to get to the greater truth.

BC: I did not have to exaggerate. My life has been dramatic enough.

DH: Has writing this memoir helped with the healing process?

BC: I would say so. It gets your brain thinking, reviewing. You have a distance. Just the fact that I could write a book was a very healing thing for  me.

For more information go to  http://www.beyondthegreatabyss.com

Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl, produced by the Circuit Theatre Company

Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl, produced by the Circuit Theatre Company, directed by Skylar Fox with music direction by Linda Bard and set design and lighting by Christopher Annas-Lee

review by Tom Daley August 4, 2012

Last night I went to see Passion Play, a play by Sarah Ruhl produced by the Circuit Theatre Company and directed by Skylar Fox. I believe this company coalesced around Fox and is largely composed of people who worked together at Newton North High School (with a few additions from Fox’s contacts at Brown). Last year I saw their production of Enron, a dazzling entertainment and a memorably professional creation. Chris Annas-Lee, Bagel Bard Pam Annas’s son, designed the lighting and sets in both productions, and he acted in Passion Play. Chris is a powerful presence. He has a strong, deep voice and his long face and sturdy jaw accommodate both the deadpan humor and the deadly serious pieces of his repertoire in this extravaganza. He was best as the young director of the last of the four incarnations of the passion play (one set in Elizabethan England, one at Oberammergau in 1934, and two in Spearfish, South Dakota —one in 1969 and one in the era of Ronald Reagan (circa 1984)).

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this production was the music—this is a very gifted ensemble of musicians.The harmonies on the songs (a list of which, alas, was not given in the program) were flawless, and the instrumentation bright if not exactly bold (neither the banjo and the cello always achieved, given the acoustics of the Cambridge Family Y Theater, the volume needed). And how on earth did they get that piano to work? I was told, when I rented the same theater for Every Broom and Bridget, that it was nigh near impossible to tune. Spirituals, folk tunes, rollicking ballads (one anchored by a swaggering and spunky Natalie McDonald), old hymn chestnuts—all of them were handled with astonishing savoir-faire; all made a profound impact. 

Director Fox, deft at staging and a sensational choreographer of big productions, has not yet been able to coax many of the actors in this troupe out of their earnestness (or perhaps he is coaxing them into this, but I doubt it). If at times some of them had a hard time sorting out intensity from industriousness, there were some brilliant individual moments manifesting nuance, particularly the performance of a very big, very imperious Queen Elizabeth (Elizabeth I—played by Emma Johnson). The Queen, whose face had a greater thickness of white clown paint than the mug of Tammy Faye Baker had of facial powder, abruptly entered the village where the play was being produced. She delivered a monologue about how monarchs must paint their faces so that their subjects cannot see them growing old or getting ugly. She asked if there are any Catholics being hidden in the houses and then proceeded to cancel the passion play. Johnson (who later played, somewhat less innovatively, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan) managed, as Queen Elizabeth, to be both haughty and scarily comical, to come across as caricature and character, to tower over the rest of the players (she is very tall) and seem detached and yet excruciatingly connected to the electric static emanating from the body politic of the little village.

Of his three characters, Louis Loftus managed best as a rather tamped-down VA psychiatrist—the subtleties of his acting craft emerged more completely in that role than they did when he was a hectic and passionate friar or an insufferably English aesthete/reviewer. An energetic Juliet Roll played the Village Idiot, and at times was ridiculously, hysterically little-girlish, although when the passion play’s exasperated director (Caleb Bromberg) put her in a cage at the Oberammergau production, she abandoned the screechiness and became prophetic and compelling. The female lead (Madeline Schulman, who had the female lead in Enron) was damn good, especially when she broke out of the souped-up sincerity. In the final scene from the Elizabethan section, she is carried back from drowning herself in the river and laid on the stage by a very tender John the fisherman (Sam Bell-Gurwitz), and water pours out of her mouth. She is sensually dead, an Ophelia dragged from her river, her white gown wet and revealing her comeliness. This was one of the most arresting scenes in the play.

The giant (oil?) paintings (by Nellie Robinson, Amalia Sweet, and Tess Vasiliadis) that were used for backdrop for the Elizabethan productions were quite amazing—there’s a painting of the Last Supper that was a kind of carnival version of Caravaggio, at least in the portraiture--crooked noses, balding pates, and the kind of faces you might have seen in some Jewish ghetto—stark, almost violent profiles of men as they reached middle age. Christ was dark and somberly Semitic-Mediterranean—not the blond ideal of the Renaissance. The paintings had a bluish-gray cast to them, as in Picasso’s blue period, and the profiles were almost distractingly good.

One of the most beautiful musical pieces was a rendition by four or five of the singers of the old-timey ballad “I’ll Fly Away”—sung with such touchingly sincere grace that I felt compelled to sing along. Here the subdued jubilance might have been a model for some of the overcooked talking parts of the play. The earnestness had such an authentic ring to it, such a humanity—as if the actors actually were feeling what they were singing without pumping it up to enhance their projection. There’s a young man in the ensemble (one of the carpenters) who played the banjo who was a particularly good singer. The cellist, Linda Bard, was the musical director. She did an extraordinary job

.

A love triangle with shifting angles between John/Eric/J (Sam Bell-Gurwitz); Pontius Pilate/FootSolider/P (Justin Phillips); and Mary 2 (Madeline Schulman) manifests in all the different productions of the passion play. By the end of Passion Play, the three actors had grown into their roles, and done so beautifully. In the final scene, after “P” returns to South Dakota after years of wandering from VA hospital to VA Hospital, the experience of rejection seems to sober both the character and the actor. His Vietnam War-induced madness blooms into a kind of seer’s glory. In the finale (brilliantly designed and choreographed), Phillips is rolled towards the front of the stage on a platform as he conjures the wind while the rest of the cast flows around him with clouds on sticks and other props, whistling like the wind. I even heard the expert effect of snatches of an instrumental version of the refrain, “Turn, turn to the wind and the rain,” from Bob Dylan’s “Percy’s Song.” Viola, “P”’s daughter (Juliet Roll), gyrates a large pole with a dove over her head—a most affecting touch.

The issue of the rabid anti-Jewishness of the passion plays was dealt with most successfully in a performance at Oberammergau. Hiding under the stage, the Village Idiot (Roll) prompts the Christus, who has forgotten his lines, and improvises, “And I am a Jew.” At the end of the Oberammergau production, the character Eric (Bell-Gurwitz), who was playing the Christus, sends her off on a train because she is not like the other Oberammergauans, and is presumably Jewish. I forget which song the ensemble was singing (perhaps there was none)—but that was another deeply moving scene—the two of them staring quietly for a long time at the future.

The play went on for three and a half hours, with two intermissions, and it was tough to sit through in all that barely mitigated heat and humidity (the company had brought in large portable air conditioners and fans—they moderated but did not massage away the discomfort). They are moving to air conditioned venues  for the next three performances--for tickets to their August 10 and 11 (The Gordon Chapel at the Old South Church) and August 12 (Oberon at the ART) performances, go to http://www.passionplayboston.com/tickets.html.

All in all, a pretty amazing production, especially given the fact that this is such a young company (most of them 18-20). Director Fox and Music Director Bard are visionaries; it will be interesting to watch them as they further deepen their insight.

****Tom Daley serves on the faculty of the Online School of Poetry and leads writing workshops at the Boston Center for Adult Education and Lexington Community Education. He is the author of Every Broom and Bridget, a play about Emily Dickinson and her Irish servants, which he performs as a one-man show. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in a number of journals including Massachusetts Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Diagram, and Rhino. 

Following Tommy: a novel Bob Hartley

Following Tommy

a novel

Bob Hartley

Cervena Bara Press

ISBN 978-0-9831041-8-6

2012   $17.00

“With a crooked scale and a brick stuffed in my pocket,

I weighed 135. still, I played the tough kid with my hair

slicked back and the cuffs of my razor-creased gray

baggies folded...”

In my thinking on dickens and what Dickens would be writing

today, this book by Bob Hartley, satisfies my on going quest

to visit the back streets, the needs, the resolutions from

self discovery, through persons met during needy times; how

a story may transform history into a personal telling:

“How come you care,” I said, forgetting for a second

who I was talking to, taking the chance of getting

smacked. He let out a little laugh, shook his head

and said that he had planned to do his last few months

sitting behind the wheel sucking on cigarettes and

listening to McGovern wisecrack, but then the thing

with Jerome happened and that messed up everything...

Throughout this novel the sentences connect without any glitches,

they run smoothly into each other, chapter after chapter, we

the reader are memorized by the writing as well as the story.

There are so many tucks and turns in the story that the

reader will be carried along without being able to stop

reading until they get to the end. This is a powerful first

novel by an accomplished writer:

“We drove back to the garage. Hippo was passed out

in the back seat, one arm over his eyes, the other at

his side, his head hanging over the end, his mouth

wide open, snoring. Tommy was banging away at

the mailbox with a hammer and chisel...”

Hopefully this novel will evolve into a movie. I'll be on

a front row seat eating popcorn with out any anticipation

of the end. This is a must read.

Irene Koronas

Reviewer:

Ibettson Street Press

Captive Cities B.Z. Niditch

Captive Cities

B.Z. Niditch

Presa Press

2012 $8.00

“Neon passing hours

fallen out of sleep

in restless illusions

and you, Andy Warhol

waiting for the factory

to gate crash, to start rolling

the film in your cinematic

Valhalla,

extras, even murderers

replete with manifestos

arrive on the scene

even now the Sixties

still has bitter nostalgia

when art deconstructed

in your time.”

Niditch pitches his poems into the past, bringing

the reader into the present place and time. Along

with his experiences, political and otherwise, he

relates and sculpts the poems with sensitivity.

“Off  Gloucester

with the wind sails

burning up the coast

that tomorrow's red sun

disappears at first light,

my brow beaten

into a Melville frenzy...”

Irene Koronas

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

The River Within By Ann Taylor

 River Within

By Ann Taylor

Ravenna Press

www.ravennapress.com

ISBN:  978-0-9835982-8-2

65 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, exclaimed “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” Ann Taylor goes one better and internalizes the river, punctuating each bend and turbulent eddy with her own riveting memories and graceful musings. Her faith in the legitimacy of her singular vision and her ability as a passionate observer sustains a measured tempo and delights with intelligence and occasional twists of wry humor. 

 

In Jenny and Charles, Taylor portrays the historical obsession that Charles Darwin once had for an actual monkey named Jenny. As the poem progresses the monkey’s actions become comingled with the human observer’s. Darwin in fact is introduced into the piece as a “cagemate.” The cagemate is observed by the monkey scratching incomprehensible markings into a notebook. This neat twist the poet accomplishes in a seamless fashion. Jenny seems to evolve right before our eyes into a child. Here are the last three stanzas:

Darwin was entranced with Jenny,

housed himself with her, smiled, and wrote

when she threw a tantrum for an apple,

placed his gift of a mouth organ straight

to her lips, astonished herself

with her own image in a mirror.

At home, he was happier still to record

whatever she and his children had in common—

their monkeyshines, her humanness.

Jumping into history’s river again, unhesitant, Taylor grabs hold of Cleopatra, Queen of the mighty Nile and remolds her into a model of excess and consumption. Antony is left in the background with plain pancakes and peasant fare. Taylor’s queen knows her magical power and uses it,

She removes her huge pearl earring,

the largest in history, a king’s treasure,

richer than all roman banquets combined,

dropped it into her cup of wine vinegar,

and as it sizzled

drank it.

Again the poet dares history in a poem entitled Annie Taylor takes the Falls. Here we are presented with another river queen, the poet’s namesake. Over sixty this schoolmarm took a terrifying chance and found fame tumbling in a four and half foot barrel over one hundred and seventy feet down Niagara’s magnificent Horseshoe Falls to find her place in this world. A true artist: Taylor the daredevil. Coincidently, this reviewer composed your present reading material standing in the mists of those same falls and he does attest to the crushing power of Taylor’s metaphor exhibited in the water’s cataclysm, first hand. A true artist: Taylor the poet.

The poem concludes by quoting the daredevil Taylor cautioning,

“No one ought ever do that again!”

She warned, quaking,

Propped from rapids across a shaky ramp—

A “Queen of the Mist,”

Numbered forever in the company

Of daredevils.

Maybe. Or was she just scaring off potential rivals who might diminish her feats by their future accomplishments, in other words protecting her immortality.

Sigmund Freud famously said that sometimes a pencil is just a pencil, nothing more. Our poet makes the opposite case in her poem, Pencil. Here this writing tool brims with generative powers. Taylor intimates,

I read that a pencil can write 45,000 words,

draw a line thirty-five miles long—

consume itself

with its own verbosity.

The poet clearly makes this pencil, snatched from her river of memory, her own. Her first confession, a traumatic affair to begin with, as every Catholic child knows, included the theft of pencils.  And now her husband’s personal use of them tie past and present together in her memories. The poem ends with very little ambiguity this way,

Less hungry, I love them still—

my glittery red stocking- stuffer

rolling to me across the desk,

my husband’s just sharpened

hexagonal yellow at the phone,

the one touting in green script

down its side a challenging

Dixon Ticonderoga 1388-3H, HARD

In the poem So much of my journeying has been with you, Taylor beautifully describes discrete incidents in her travels as if they were flowing past her, river-like. Each incident she reconstructs with details defining her companion more than the geography. It is, of course, a love story. Her lover leads her though the darkness in Oxford. He provides the cheese and wine in the Alps. The Taj Mahal exists only in shadows without the presence of her lover. The Great Wall of China exists only as her lover’s running course. Her lover in the heart of the poem appears as her classic protector against life’s physical threats. Speaking to her lover she remembers the scene this way,

My memories of Kenya bring you

Tugging my camera from the robber monkey,

Your breadknife protecting our tent

From the lion roaring just feet away.

In short the river of reality has been changed forever for this intertwined couple and the objective details of life have become, at least in this one poetic iteration, wholly personal and unique.

Lucky couple.

Terrific poet.

Confucius Say by Martha Boss

Confucius Say


By Martha Boss

BOSSPRESS

22 Pages

Price: negotiable



Review by Dennis Daly



Each unpretentious poem in this amazing little chapbook by Martha Boss sneaks up on you and pulls you in to its seemingly surface world of charming stick characters and humorous observations. But there is something else here too: an unusual texture that produces depth in a hologram-like fashion.

Boss infuses her books with mystery from the moment of manufacture. The cover of each book is fringed off-white canvas held together by three staples and common brown twine. The author illustrates each chapbook with an original drawing. Mine has a primitive sketch of a rather angry and protective bird, a mother I think. The pages are cream-colored sturdy paper stock with retro lettering. Boss uses a Hermes Rocket portable typewriter, circa 1987. Occasional production errors are corrected with the use of white out fluid. The occurrence of imperfection only adds to the three dimensional quality and a comfortable feeling of accessibility.

The title poem, Confucius Say, is also the first poem in the collection. It sets the stage for what comes after with witty observations as well as a hint of something deeper. After comparing the actions of a young woman in the midst of a tai kwon do workout and six resting ducks that are getting fat and therefore fit to eat. Confucius, the observer, then notices a ripple on the water’s surface. The poet continues,



Confucius have cell phone.

henot just sit there

like a duck.

he have number

he call number.

he say something.

he say: ah, ripple on top

of water

come from

under water.



Boss’ poem Let Them Eat Cake shows off the poet’s sense of timing and wit. She says,



… sodium aluminum phosphate

propyleneglycolmono esters

mono&diglycerides

sodiumstearyllactylate

xanathan gum

polysorbate 60

tetra sodium pyrophosphate



now you know

why it’s called

marble cake…



The poem ends with some laugh out loud irony. The baker apologizes but he apologizes for the trace nutritional ingredients that the cake mix contains. And thusly does the poet accurately describe thepresent state of poetry.

Both breathtaking in its simplicity and profoundly sad, the poem Mother’s Work dazzles. Boss’s persona brings new life to the old term describing life’s mortality: dust to dust. The poem is relatively short. Here is the better part of it:



…2 hooked rugs



i made one.

my daughter made the other.



the one she gave me had

her dust in the yarn.

the broom scattered it.



it’s looking for her ashes.

we scattered them years ago.



the ashes, somewhere,

have been waiting

for the dust.



i hope they find each other.



Did I say “profoundly sad.” Well okay, but it’s also a sadness tempered by acceptance and a touch of hopefulness. I like this poem a lot.

In her poem Peace Boss delivers a meditation on the title word suitable only for grown-ups. The poet sees world peace as a quaint expression hiding within more modern slogans. She then fleshes out her own understanding of peace in very personal terms.She says,



i remember the cradle

presumably soothing

to& fro

to& fro

back& forth

back& forth.

there are echoes

of motherly screams

in passive rocking.

blips on the radar.



peace.

a strange word.



Indeed a strange word. In its very essence the seeds of disquietude grow. The poet makes that very point this way,



peace.

it’s like dust

settling down

in the afternoon sun

as calmly

as wars are planned.



Another poem by Boss reinforces this theme of connections within opposites. In the poem The Battle In Surrender, she sees the adult world as a bit more complicated than some would have us believe. She says,



…the good

in the harm



the chink

in the armor



the enlightenment

in capital punishment



the hug

in the closed arms…



Boss in the poem entitled The Old Moviesmeditates on yesteryear’s popular habits as portrayed in film. But, of course, the sum of the poem is much more than that. She begins,



in the old movies

smoking was popular.

almost everyone smoked

especially when they were

angry. They just lit up.

literally.



slapping was big too.

all the women slapped

all the men.

love, hate, it didn’t matter.



The poet’s observations then zero in on the toothy smiles which have apparently replaced cigarettes but not necessarily slaps. We are talking about artists now and artistic fads and it’s quite funny. Boss comments,



if you look closely tho,

doesn’t that smile look

weirdly hostile?

i mean look near the nostrils…

there’s a little bit of grrr…



To read more of this wonderful poet you must find her and her books, a selection of which she carries with her. She reads regularly at the Stone Soup venue at the Out of the Blue art gallery in Cambridge on Monday evenings, and often meets with the Bagel Bards Saturday mornings at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square Somerville.

Ibbetson Street Press/Medicine Wheel Productions/ Small Press Celebration

                                                                                                                                        






Small Press Festival Sept. 29, 2012


( Boston, Mass.)

Medicine Wheel Productions in collaboration with the Ibbetson Street Press is proud to present A Celebration of the Small Presses at the home of Medicine Wheel Productions in South Boston on Sept. 29, at 7PM. The event is free and open to public.




This event is conjunction with Medicine Wheel’s Spoke Gallery’s exhibition, Terrain. The Spoke exhibition is based on the word Terrain and all of its meanings- although maps and mapping will be key the thread of investigation. Many small presses are named after the sites where they were founded. The event is also in conjunction with the annual international event, 100 Thousand Poets for Change which is also occurring on September 29th.




The small presses and little magazines have long been the life blood for the literary community. Many poets from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg got their start in the print and now online literary subculture. The Small Press has been there to give a voice to the emerging, the iconoclast,, the experimental, the mad man, the holy fool, all of whom would not have a chance with mainstream publishers.




Participating local presses will included the Cervena Barva Press http://cervenabarvapress.com/
Wilderness House Literary Press http://www.wildernesshousepress.net/

South Boston Literary Review

Off the Grid Press http://offthegridpress.net/

Ibbetson Street Press http://ibbetsonpress.com/.



There will be a reading from authors from the said presses as well as a student readers Samille Taylor and Kara Bonelli from Endicott College that is now affiliated with Ibbetson. Books will be available for purchase, and a small reception will follow.




"Ibbetson Street Press is a unifying force in the Boston poetry scene, and the most viable way for poetry lovers to keep in touch with what's happening. There's nothing sectarian or cliquey about Ibbetson, and I think the variety of its poets...reflect the breadth of its community." (Peter Desmond- Cambridge, Mass. poet and winner of two Cambridge Poetry Awards)




Medicine Wheel Productions (MWP) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to transform communities from the inside out by inviting all members to participate in the healing and transcendent power of public art. MWP’s Spoke Gallery is an innovative new program that seeks to act as a hub for artists of all disciplines who want to join the conversation.



Medicine Wheel Productions and its exhibition programs are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, and in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency which is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, administrated by the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events.


Medicine Wheel Productions



110 K Street – 2nd floor, South Boston, MA 02127



(617) 268-6700, http://www.mwproductions.org/ , Email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu  617-710-0163 MBTA: Redline Broadway Stop- no 9 Bus to K St.

The Custom House by Dennis Daly

The Custom House

© 2012 Dennis Daly

Ibbetson Street Press

Somerville MA

ISBN  978-0-9846614-1-1

Sofbound, $12.95, 105 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Dennis Daly has been there, done that and the poetry in Custom House takes you there: ancient foreign lands you have dreamed about, places of the heart where we all want to be and the love-hate relationship with work place. Daly is a master artist painting portraits of places and people, telling stories and in the end revealing himself as a sensitive soul whose poetry we will not only enjoy, but ultimately associate with and let enter our hearts.

That is what I wrote for a blurb of Dennis Daly’s book of poetry and a second reading has not changed my opinion. In fact, it may have reinforced my feelings about his poetic prowess.  This is a book one can thoroughly enjoy for the images they conjure, for the imagination they ignite.

Take for example the title poem which could be a movie scene, but is poetry that brings you to the moment of action:

Another age: our greed-governed ancestors

Venture forth, significant super cargoes

Compelling the twins: speed and economy

They bounded oceans

We watch for their return with telescope

Of brass: pennants streaming, hull stowed with teas

And silks.  We dream them into our harbors.

Long doldrumed – their ships in need of repair:

Sails split and rotting, spars sprung.

There is also The Dogs of Mazar-I-Sharif where you are taken to a place where past and present converge in a picture of present into modern horror in the last two stanzas:

…They ordered blood-barbarity

Against Mongol Hazareas. The outrage began

As door to door they slaughtered them where they stood,

Dragging them into the street like firewood

and there they remained by decree. No Afghan

Could touch the on pain of execution.

The starved city-dogs came out and feasted.

The howling that I’d heard was the cry of those cheated

Animals, recalling their lost fortune

In The Violinist shows musical insight and how music plays on the heart:

The action of our hearts

In your instrument’s fire,

Sounding in soulful parts

Celestial: a string choir

The examples exhibit just a bit of Daly’s depth and breadth of observation, imagination and poetic reportage.  His book is well worth a read, but be warned,

reading between the lines or rereading lines or stanzas yields even more satisfaction.  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