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Saturday, August 25, 2018
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
White Storm by Gary Metras
White Storm
Gary Metras
Presa Press
Rockford, IL
Copyright © 2018 Gary
Metras
ISBN: 978-0-9965026-9-6
81 pages, softbound,
$15.95
Review by Zvi A. Sesling
Gary Metras is best
known as editor, publisher and printer of Adastra Press. He is also known as
an essayist and reviewer-- certainly as a superior fly fisherman-- and as a grandfather. But he is, perhaps, best known as an
award-winning poet and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
Metras’s most recent poetry collection is White Storm,
which covers the full range of his multi-faceted poetic talent-- this includes a number of titles such as “Robert Frost’s Chair,”
“Pausing With Tchaikovsky,” “Listening to the Poet Laureate on
NPR” as well as poems on “The Anecdote of the Chihuahuas,”
“Chicken Fingers,” “A Hiker” and many more.
In “Torino” one
would think the title refers to Ford’s former automobile which
Clint Eastwood drives in his movie “Gran Torino.” But no, the
poem takes place in Italy and may or may not explain religious
history and legend.
This far north we see no
Roman ruins
but downtown is torn up.
Piles
of fractured asphalt and
cement, trucks
queuing, men shouting, steel
beams
awaiting use. In the
distance, blue alps.
In a few years this city will
shine
with Olympians and the crowds
will not
know the dust and rubble we
walk
to find the small church with
the Shroud
of Jesus, where a handful of
worshipers kneel
in pews. Tourists flash their
cameras. We see
in the worn cloth the shape
of a man,
face and arms, legs and
buttock, his life
leaked onto this sheet. Is
this our God,
mere stains on cloth like a
rumor of joy?
The guide says this is only a
copy, then points
to where the real Shroud
rests behind
bulletproof glass, sealed in
a metal box,
a treasure for the ages. She
says
science disproves the cloth’s
age, but
people believe, free to think
as they will.
Metras’s “The World
in Reflection” presents a pessimistic view of what could be,
instead of what could be seen another way-- happy, and
joyful.
The dirty clouds flare yellow
and orange
with city bouncing over the
black
mountain into our quiet
valley.
If this was somewhere else in
the ord,
think fire and murder ruling
over there,
that, amid such destruction
and death,
no one making love, no one
snoring sleep’s sweet
oblivion,
that people couldn’t be
laughing in parties,
that there were no parties,
not one single thing to
celebrate,
and none were driving home
after dancing
in clubs, music still hot in
their blood,
the night’s light aglow in
their eyes.
In Derry, NH Metras was fascinated by Robert Frost’s chair and pictured in his mind what the
great poet did or did not do on this piece of furniture. It is on the road of the mind that
Metras traveled with Frost’s chair, a poem similar in style to the work of
Billy Collins.
Robert Frost’s Chair
He would rest his elbows and
the writing desk he made
on the flat maple-wood arms
of the chair a few feet
from the living room stove.
He sank into the gold and
green
flowery cushion, like sitting
in a meadow in August
as goldenrod bloom.
From the impression he left
in the seat, you can tell
he chose the way less
traveled and journeyed
miles and miles in that
chair.
The hay unmowed,
the wall unmended,
cows to milk at midnight,
but the notebooks fat,
leaking words all over
the sun washed carpet
Finally, there is
Metras’s memorial to a woman. Probably very few know who she is,
yet she is immortalized in song:
Believing in Eyes
Lucy
O’Donnell Vodden 1963-2009
So there’s Lucy, dying
sadly in middle age.
None of her friends ever
believed
there were diamonds in her
eyes. But there were,
When he first saw them in the
class room,
little Julian Lennon painted
them as stars.
And his father wrote that
song.
He believed in those eyes,
those diamonds.
They were shining in my
wife’s eyes
that first dance in high
school.
And in my daughter’s when
she first held
her daughter in the hospital.
And in my granddaughter’s
eyes
that time we rolled on the
floor, singing,
giggling. So let us praise
all the women
who ever showed us that joy,
that hope,
which men by ourselves
can’t know.
There is always
something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the
optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it is the
accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White
Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a
place on your bookshelf.
________________
Zvi
A. Sesling
Reviewer
for Boston
Small Press and Poetry Scene
Author,
The
Lynching of Leo Frank and War Zones (forthcoming
from Nixes Mate Books)
Editor,
Muddy
River Poetry Review
Editor,
Bagel Bards Anthology 7,8 & 12