Green Midnight By Stuart Bartow

Green Midnight

By Stuart Bartow

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

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

above and behind the eyes.

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