Green
Midnight
By
Stuart Bartow
Dos
Madres Press
Loveland,
Ohio
ISBN:
978-1-948017-12-1
69
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Breeziness
in poetry has its advantages. Stuart Bartow draws one into his new
book, Green Midnight, with an easy, light touch. Martian cat women,
New Age vampires, cannibal Sirens, and quacking ravens open the
collection by amusing and baiting the unwary reader as he or she
drifts inexorably into the poet’s sublime and deepening hive of
nowhere and everywhere.
Bartow’s
opening piece coyly mulls over the source of artistic inspiration,
his muse, and the tenuousness of that normally one-way line of
communication. The poet asks,
… Who
needs to make
a
poem every day
when
one has real work to do,
shoveling
snow, washing dishes,
drinking?
And doesn’t she
have
other things to do, like
tend
to her other loves,
that
mountain in Greece, the wind
at
4 a. m., the Milky Way?
In
the last line of this poem, Bartow divulges the unlisted shared phone
number of dual petulant muses, the whisperers of love and lyric
poetry, and for those, like myself, who often have trouble contacting
either of them, it is easily worth the price of the book.
Merging
cosmology with biology in a wonderfully crafted villanelle entitled
Without the Stars, Bartow looks at life in a pantheistical and
hopeful way. He dwells on our deeper universal knowledge that we can
and should waken, its causes, and the happiness that often ensues
with this conjuration. The piece concludes wonderfully,
Without
the stars there’d be no us.
We
can watch the stellar gusts,
can
rue the meteors we’ve missed,
still
not forgetting we are stardust
that
somehow makes us know the stars enough,
the
knowing enough to conjure bliss.
We
know without the stars there would not be us,
all
of us made of ancient stardust.
Do
Not Open After Dusk is my favorite poem in this collection. It
delineates a coffee shop with a magical door into our own
imaginations. Not unreasonably, there is a warning sign. Although the
entrance into this dusky world offers mere mortals visionary status,
it comes with a catch. The door, once used, disappears. Bartow
introduces his Twilight Zone in this way,
… Of
course the sign was about fear
but
I always like to open portals
to
see dusk, to go out into
space
and time between
like
William Blake, who,
in
sunrise and set,
saw
a golden chorus singing.
I,
too, have dreamt
of
opening that door
to
meet something on the other side…
More
than a few of Bartow’s poems are about birds. These pieces are
chock full of curious detail, often setting up stunning metaphoric
constructions. One of the best the poet entitles Carolina Wrens.
Consider this detail that the poet uses before setting up (later in
the poem) his poetic trap,
They
thrive when winters are mild
but
heavy snow and cold
can
devastate them. They like
woodland
thickets, ravines,
rocky
slopes covered with brush.
Their
eggs, usually five, are white
with
brown spots. Rich brown above,
buff
or yellow chests, these wrens
have
a distinct white line
In
his poem Invisible Bartow deals with the nature of ghosts and then
speculates on their psychology. He restates with images Shakespeare’s
oft quoted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and continues down that
path of inquiry. Here is one of the poet’s speculations, the first
sentence of which terrifies me,
Perhaps
ghosts can view their own lost lives the way actors
Watch
movies in which they star, flawed performances
that
cannot be changed, long ago released to the world’s
audiences.
Maybe through fissures, cracks in time, ghosts
might
break a window, turn a clock’s arm, make a foot-
print,
but the beauty is in invisibility. It must feel strange
when
people walk through you, a brief rush, erotic.
Some
poems are just “cool.” Bartow’s Midnight at the 24-Hour
Laundromat in Corinth, New York is one such piece. After the reader
figures out who the skipper is of this poetically-fueled, cosmic
submarine, the poem continues thusly,
Without,
the Adirondacks loom,
sonar
forces immense around the sub.
The
engines of the dryers cruise on
while
the washers’ portals sing song
an
ocean’s madness. The sub is on chart
through
the frozen mountains and beyond
to
the infinite sea of stars.
A
monk-like world of activity inside of a tree’s womb stirs up a
philosophical buzz on perfection and infinity in Bartow’s poem
entitled Wild Hive. Single-minded bees, encouraging one another with
songs of praise, produce a dynamo of ferocious sweetness. This
ancient fable reverberates with measured metaphor and unpredictable
menace. Follow the effervescent verbs,
… Who
conducts their hymns,
Gregorians
gone mad, fiercely
composing
bee-wine. Their oratory churns
electric,
mind of guardians, bristled with stingers.
More
than the sky, the wind’s robots,
they
concoct ambrosia for the prophets
that
is the same gold as their bodies,
fly
like grooms into the flowers and wallow
like
messengers gone drunk. Then, propelling body
as
compass, return to that aerial cathedral,
that
clandestine brain, and with an alchemy
of
spittle and pollen create combs soaked
in
amber, smelt the earth down to its essence
of
honey…
It’s
morning—about 4 a.m.—as I finish my first read-through of this
marvelous, portent-laden collection. The wafts and brief puffs of
late night zephyrs have steadied and deepened to gale force, like
Bartow’s poems. The curtains flap wildly. Is this applause, or just
the perfect background for this review
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