Michelle Reale’s This is Not a Situation in which You Should Remain Calm

 

  Michelle Reale’s This is Not a Situation in which You Should Remain Calm  (Cervena Barva Press, Somerville, MA 02143) $7.00

                                                          

                                  

Review by:    Deborah Leipziger     

                         

To write a chapbook is an act of courage. Michelle Reale’s chapbook: This is Not a Situation in which You Should Remain Calm is a very courageous book, tackling themes such as immigration and domestic violence. The poet’s voice is distinctive and unforgettable.  

 

Reale’s chapbook is a good antidote to winter, as we travel through the poems throughout Northern Africa and Sicily.  We journey along with a couple through vineyards where the “wine tastes like strawberries and almond” through processions in dusty villages.

It is the work of the poet to speak the un-nameable and Reale does just that:  

…My tongue will soon be

thick with what can never be said. I will not leave in the same

condition in which I will have arrived and the way you look at me

means we both know this..”

As we meander through villages thick with layers of history, the prose poems themselves seem to groan with the weight of time.  The heat of the places we travel through is also dense and thick, following us like a cloud. We traverse with the man and woman through markets where sundried tomatoes, eggplant and artichokes are on display.  The poems evoke a sense of place and dislocation, often with food as a theme, a touchstone.

Violence reverberates through the poems, melded somehow with a strange beauty by the poet’s alchemy. 

The bruises on the woman’s breasts are described thus:   

…purple and green

and yellow flowers bloomed like a night flower.

Wine and blood run through the poems.

Consider the beginning of the poem Tilt:

Shall I open a vein? We can do this all night, you know. Become

transfixed watching ruby formations, drop by agonizing drop. But

maybe you prefer a gush like a fountain…

The sounds of the places echo – there is a hiss, there are screams, there is a sense of malice and cruelty that accompany the couple on their journey thick with wine and blood. A snake is cut in two. The poems are inextricably linked to one another with echoes and reverberations that make a kind of pace, thick with fear and foreboding. The poems are dense with textures and emotions as Reale describes the landscape of desolation and dislocation.  We are her witnesses.

Unconquered: A Tale of a Girl’s Survival During the Holocaust Lucie Burian Liebman

Unconquered: A Tale of a Girl’s Survival During the Holocaust

Lucie Burian Liebman

(Merrimack Media)

Review by Alice Weiss

Sometimes the things that give us misery are also the very things that save us in the end. Nowhere is this more true than in Lucie Burian Liebman’s “Unconquered,” an account of a three year trek by the Burian family from Vienna through Prague to New York, 1938-1941. . Starting out in Vienna on the day of the Anschluss, the Lucie places herself as the ten year old daughter of a successful businessman who has been aware for some time of the Nazi’s intentions towards the Jews and who has provided money and a plan in the event. In spare and prose Liebman relates sometimes breathless accounts of fleeing Nazis, ducking them,and surviving but with a father and mother so cold and cruel they rival the Germans in their impact. 

Burian’s underlying theme is enunciated by reference to the William Ernest Henley poem, “Invictus.” No matter what horror or menace, or punishment, her is head is ‘bloody but unbowed.’ It was an early lesson, a demanding and dictatorial father and removed mother. Her brother, four years older but much less stubborn and independent was the person she protected and comforted. And there was a nanny who gave warmth and love. Strangely, a recipe for survival. 

That the family was never interned in a concentration camp or rounded up and shot is due at least in part to luck. For example a scene in Prague: Lilie is walking to the JCC where she goes daily once Jews are expelled from schools, for sports and other training. She sees the yard is crowded with people falling over. Nazi soldiers are shooting into the crowd. Two of her cousins are in the crowd, but bodies fall on them and they, as well as Lucie, survive. If she had been there earlier in the day. . . However the survival of the Burians is due to the persistence and intelligence and clear vision of her father, Theodore. 

Survival appears to have been his only goal. Thus the scene in the Spanish train car where two Nazi officers entered the Burians compartment and took turns raping Lucie while her parents literally looked the other way. Although she doesn’t say this one, wonders if the virginity of the thirteen year old girl was the price they paid for safety getting to Portugal. Speaking though, as the child she was Lucie complains that her parents failed to comfort her or indicate in any way that they were concerned about her welfare. Except of course that they made sure she obtained an abortion once they got to New York. That she says is the only intelligent thing her parents did. The interesting thing about the book is that you both agree with her, as parents, and don’t agree with her. Despite details that make you see them as the harshest and coldest of parents, you end up with a grudging respect for their perseverance and coolness in the face of frightful people and events.

It sound weird to say this but aside from its horrors this is an easy read. Ms. Burian is always careful that we see her adventurous spirit and the joie de vivre that keep her relatively intact throughout the journey. And she does give us ample evidence that the unpleasant, unloving father is the medium of both their survival and the sense that it was living with him as parent the first ten years that necessitated her developing the distancing skills that enabled her to survive intact.

Gallery of Harlem Portraits by Melvin B Tolson

Gallery of Harlem Portraits

Melvin B Tolson

Edited with an afterword by Robert M. Farnsworth

University of Missouri Press

Columbia, MO 1979

Copyright © 1979 by The Curators of the University of Missouri

276 pages, softbound, no price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Melvin B. Tolson was an interesting man who was born in 1898 in Mississippi and died sixty-eight years later in Dallas, TX.   A black man, he was a poet first and other things second. He is the author of several poetry books, but his masterpiece is considered Gallery of Harlem Portraits.  Its more than two hundred pages of poetic portraits of those living in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s, though by the titles (often the names of his subjects) one cannot tell if the people are real, or just the title is made up. Nonetheless it is a fascinating read of Harlem lives.

With language born of Langston Hughes, French surrealists, blues singers and the imaging of white poets, Tolson produces numerous memorable lines. Here is part of the poem Augustus Lence as an example.

When a man is down

He’s all alone.

When a man is down

He’s all alone,

Like a homeless dawg

Without A bone

Augustus sat on the stoop in the November night.

Oblong patterns of yellow radiance

Shaped themselves

Along the naked ugliness of tenements.

A block away,

A homing elevated train

Stabbed the Harlem night

With blades of light and sound.

When you’s got de blues

‘Tain’t no use to pray.

When you’s got de blues

‘Taint no use to pray.

Takes a brown-skin gal

To chase de blues away.

In the first stanza or two of every poem the reader is quick to understand where Tolson is headed.  In Duke Huggins we are treated to:

Duke Huggins was master of the Subway,

A gambling den housed in the sheltering shadows

Of a chambered basement on Upper Lenox Avenue.

He was a bronze colossus of a man

With restless gray eyes

Whose hollow chest was framed by enormous shoulders

Bowed from sitting over gaming tables

Through long, tightening hours.

Or there is the man of the cloth who Tolson describes:

The Reverend Isaiah Cloud preached a doctrine

That wormed its way under the skins of churchgoers.

Like an expert sharpshooter,

He hit tirelessly the bull’s-eye of their egotisms.

He never preached in pleasing generalities,

But discoursed on specific private sins and social corruptions

That left no hearer with that lofty hypocrisy

“I thank God that I am not like other men!”

Tolson’s Gallery of Harlem Portraits is interesting from a number of angles. First, the “bios” of the individuals. Second, the poetry. Third, from an historical view of the people who roamed and lived in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s and finally, for those interested black literature, blues poetry and some history when blacks were Negroes and life was different, this book is where to begin.

_______________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010)

Author,  Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies #7 and #8.

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Devotion: A Memoir by Miriam Levine

Miriam Levine

Devotion: A Memoir by  Miriam Levine ( University of Georgia Press) http://www.ugapress.org

Review by Doug Holder

  Each family and each life have their own secrets, their own beauty, and their own warts. Yet each has its own universal characteristics, after all as the song goes "It is still the same old story." And though Levine's story has her own distinct flavor, every person can relate to the overall themes presented in this book. In Miriam Levine's memoir Devotion, Levine an accomplished poet and writer, recounts in stunning detail about her life as a Jewish kid in New Jersey with an idiosyncratic family, and her maturation into a scholar, writer, wife and mother. There are no stick figures in Levine's lush memoir. The people are fleshed out, and Levine, with her gimlet eye, does not miss nuance , affectation, the stray aside, or the damning gesture. In this passage Levine describes her grandmother Molly, and at the same time her own emerging artistic sensibility:

  " The memory of Molly's serenity does not interest me: there are no quirky bumps, no sticky places, and certainly no passion. If she had a personality, her clothes did not reflect it. They were like a habit: old woman's costume. She wore cotton self-belted house dresses, sometimes a white linen babushka, blue felt slippers...She never wore jewelry. Molly was unadorned as a nun--even more so: she had given her wide gold wedding band--it had come from Europe-to a daughter-in-law. Thinking of Molly's hands disturbs me. I wish I could have given her a ring--two rings. She never knew the exact date of her birthday. Sometime in the spring, I believe. Peasants don't keep those type of records."

Levine recounts her years as a student at Boston University; her courtship with an older man who she really did not find attractive, but at the same time she was drawn to. His satyr-like face haunted her for years, and she realized the devil in this man's details was an aphrodisiac. While driving through
Somerville, Mass, the memoirist had an epiphany:

"..I remember Mike's face, the habitual smirk was now a genuine devilish leer, unselfconscious; his head was tossed back; he was about to speak, or rather, make a sound, one of his buzzing sounds of pleasure. There he was-naked, his high broad chest, the glint of fair hair, the flat belly, and narrow hips, and strong, well-shaped legs. His penis was erect, pointing up. His skin was delicate and pink. I found myself grinning into his awful satyr's face. He was ruined and potent. I laughed out loud and let myself remember."

 So often today our writing is in tweets, bytes, flashes--punctuated with LOL--inexpressive fragments of frenzied 21st Century life. Levine is decidedly old school. She is not plugged in to some high tech device, but she is plugged into the world. She stops, she listens, she breathes in deeply, and exhales so the reader can take it all in before returning to the endless rush, the press of the flesh, and the pounding heels of the crowd.

Jacquelyn Malone: A writer of historical verse and poetry of memory lost.

Jacquelyn Malone

Jacquelyn Malone:  A writer of historical verse and poetry of memory lost.By Doug Holder

 Jacqueline Malone has recently written a historical verse novel, and a collection of poetry dealing with her father’s dementia. In many ways she uses research in her creative writing to bring back the memory of the past, and in her new poetry collection she explores the existential crisis of loss of memory and loss of the “self.”

  Malone has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship grant in poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. The poem published in the Beloit Journal was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. One of the poems published in Poetry was featured on the website Poetry Daily. Her chapbook All Waters Run to Lethe was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011.  She is the editor and writer for masspoetry.org.


Doug Holder: You are editor for http://masspoetry.org-- the website for the Mass. Poetry Festival.  Tell us about your work.

Jacquelyn Malone: Yes. I have been doing it for about two years. It reminds me a great deal of what I did for IBM and Lotus. And that is to make a homepage story that is interesting. I get a lot of stories about the Mass. Poetry Festival up as the event comes closer. I created a series “ The State of Poetry.” And what I find interesting about everyone who writes for it (and there are 14 all together so far) is that everyone has a different sense of what the state of poetry is. I loved learning how different people viewed poetry years ago vs. now. There is an interesting essay from a poet in Western Mass. about the small press and reading scene in that part of the state. We have had such well-known poets as Richard Hoffman, Jennifer Jean , January O’Neil, Charles Coe and others in this essay series.

DH: I read somewhere that you studied poetry with Louise Gluck. How was she as a teacher?

JM: She was very good. I had her my last semester at Warren Wilson. I worked with a lot of accomplished faculty. You had to write a contract about what you were going to do during the semester. I studied with Stephen Dobyns, and well as Gluck, and they both had very different ideas about what makes good poetry. For instance: Dobyns wanted to know how the poem went from here to there, and Gluck would feel you didn't that detail. So it was great...very challenging.

DH: You wrote a historical verse novel “James and Lottie.” It concerns the founding mother and father of Nashville, Tennessee.

JM: Yes. James Robertson and his wife Lottie led the first settlers from the mountains in North Carolina to the Cumberland River in the 1770s. This was about 250 miles if you went overland. The women went by the river route that was supposed to be easy--but they didn't expect the whirlpools, rapids, small pox, Indian attacks, etc...

DH: Why did you choose this to write about?

JM: I am from Tennessee.  I chose it because as a kid I would vaguely hear these stories and never really paid  attention, until all the people I could have asked about it were dead. Then I happened to be in the state archives in Nashville, and started read these journals about this time and the perilous journey these people undertook.

DH: You also explore in this novel how cultural differences and misunderstanding can spark brutality.

JM: When I first became interested I was primarily interested in the women, and what it must of been like to be a mother of two of three children and traveling to a place where you couldn't use a wagon and you had to ride on horseback, and all all the hardships it evoked. Later I became interested in the relationship between James Robertson and the Cherokee Indian chief, Attakullakullah. They got along well...the chef having been to England and fairly literate and Robertson was a very literate man. But things didn't turn out well in the end. The chief's son realized that if the white man came over the mountain it was the end of the Indian way of life.

DH: What are the challenges of writing historical verse?

JM: First of all I read a lot of novels in verse. The challenge is to lead people through the story and not be monotonous. I was very influenced by Christopher Logue  who sort of re-created the Iliad.  It was wonderful-- full of great dialogue--it made quite an impression on me.

DH: You have a new book of poetry  "Playbill for the Gray One." This deals with your father's Alzheimer's Disease.

JM: Yes. There are so many elements of Alzheimer's besides loss of memory. There are personality changes--depression--anger. It was hard to say when it started with my father. My mother reported that he was doing strange things like putting mail in the refrigerator. My brother and I thought my mother was exaggerating. And then one day my parents came  to visit. We all played Scrabble. And he put down the word "puppet" but instead of starting with a "P"--he started with a "T." My daughter laughed and he picked up the card table and threw it in the air. He was furious. And he always had been this gentle man. He still retained certain things. He would tell stories that didn't make sense at all--but he would still have the cadences, etc...of a storyteller.

DH:  In your poetry book you have a scene out of Hamlet-- and your father is a player of sorts in it. He has an existential crisis of being.

JM:  There are 8 segments to that poem, and the segment you discuss he plays Hamlet's father. He is a puppet also. He goes on stage after the guard says: " Who goes there?" The play ends when my father can't say whether he is king, a player, a fool, etc...

A Quantum Elegy

                                                                for E.K. Malone  1940 - 1986

Each seed drifts toward the windshield like a daytime star

or a floating aura around an invisible force.

They lift with the airstream, riding it the length

of the hearse. The train of cars approaching the hillside

hardly disturbs the peaceful procession

of wave on wave of dandelion puffs, one wave

at a time over one grave after another.

They pass the stone wall and flow down the pasture

alongside black and white cows, the rolling hills

green and pink with spring, the seeds

lifting and falling on their way to rest.

O let one of them be that invisible mass

that can become motion and speed backward in time.

Let it — genius of the corporeal world — move me

to an earlier spring where inside a barnyard fence

a brother and sister vie to scatter first

the dandelion heads we each hold;

in the backward flow of time, let the scattered seed

return to each head. For a moment —

o quantum dream — let regeneration wait

while at this graveside we each indulge ourselves

in the fantasy that memory isn’t all we have.

                        Published in Poetry Northwest..

Bagel Bards Celebratory Reading Jan 15, 2014 at Somerville Public Library

Portrait of the Bagel Bards by Bridget Galway

          

There will be a Bagel Bards Celebratory Reading at the Somerville Library (main branch) , Highland Avenue (next to the High School) on January 15th. There is a pot-luck reception at 6:15 to 7:00P.M. . The reading is from 7:00 P.M. to 8:30P.M. This reading is to celebrate the occasion of the Somerville  Library accepting # 1-8 of Bagels With The Bards Anthologies for permanent archiving in the Local History Room. The Bagel Bards is a literary organization founded by Doug Holder and Harris Gardner in 2004. This group of poets, novelists, playwrights, poseurs, stumble-bums, and whoever joins us on Saturday mornings at 9AM at the Au Bon Pain in Somerville, is an egalitarian group, an informal band of brothers and sisters, outside the mainstream, outside the academy, and just outside from the mandarin environs of the Republic of Cambridge, and the Brahmins of Boston. Some of the readers for the said event:

                                                                  Joseph A. Cohen

                                                                  Dennis Daly

                                                                  Bridget Galway

                                                                  Harris Gardner

                                                                  Steve Glines

                                                                  Lawrence Kessenich

                                                                  Irene Koronas-

                                                                 Gloria Mindock-

                                                                  Limin Mo- 

                                                                  Tomas O'Leary

                                                                  Denise Provost-

                                                                  Lainie Senechal

                                                                  Zvi Sesling- 

                                                                  Wendell Smith

                                                                  Kim Triedman

                                                                  Chris Warner

                                                                  Afaa M. Weaver