Review of Poplar Hill, a novel by Stephen Ramey Glines

Steve Glines

Review of Poplar Hill, a novel by Stephen Ramey Glines

Wilderness House Press, MA 2019

Review by Marcia Ross

Stephen Glines’s novel Poplar Hill takes place in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. The complex story is well crafted and up close in delivery: it’s a hoot, a wild ride, and an exposure of war, and a portrait of love. Kitty, a woman in the last months of her life, and the central figure in the story, stars in a series of incidents and conversations that hark back to her youth, which had its own share of incidents and conversations. It so happens that Kitty had been not quite a ingénue, but a talented young lady when, in the late 1920s, because of the (unspeakable) onslaught of the Depression, her family had to sell off houses in Bar Harbor and New York City, etcetera. Kitty was sent luxuriously off to Germany to study opera and take advantage of that country’s relaxed financial circumstances. There she stayed for years, “spending money” in German marks, worthless anywhere else. It was first class all the way.

But when we meet Kitty at the beginning of the story, she has been living Nova Scotia for many years in a house that was perhaps once rather grand. It is the summer of 1994 and she will wince, and nearly collapse, from an acute angina attack during her own “wake,” a party she’s arranged for herself, down to the tee. We meet some local folk, hear Kitty’s dramatic rendition of a Scottish brogue, watch her work a crowd, and keep her distance from her not-so-amused son visiting from the States. It is impossible to miss her unflagging spirits, her subtle but formidable will, and love of attention. This woman in her 80s can seriously party, and not heed the warning signs of a coronary seizure.

By the end of following chapter, winter of 1998, we know a good deal about Kitty and her life in Poplar Hill, as well as of her earlier life in 30s because, now that she’s hooked up to an oxygen tank and can barely walk, she has a willing and loyal audience. Her local friend Barb hardly leaves her side, and, by default, we learn about an American life abroad in intriguing detail.  There are gay and tipsy nights, frustrating attempts at studying, love interests, a meeting with the ultimate Nazi in Café Heck (he with the high voice and magnetic eyes). There are breathless train journeys, and parties, and Kitty’s budding success as an opera singer cut short by the misfortune of impending war. Glines, who skillfully handles the crowded plot, writes with affection for his central character, divulging key details of her life and serving up examples of her sense of humor, and, well, her ample self love. He air-drops the youthful scenes from Munich into Kitty’s aged rural life with its angina attacks and desperate gasps for oxygen. But Kitty doesn’t shrink from telling her story, even with plastic tubes up her nose.

By the middle of the book, it is true, the reader may struggle to stay abreast of the many incidents, the dual what-the-heck high life in Munich, Kitty’s noblesse oblige, her sophisticated friends and accomplishments (she’s an accredited chef!), not to mention whatever happened to end her marriage.  An eccentric woman of many talents, she is perfect for Glines, a writer of narrative skill and a remarkable familiarity with two worlds, enveloping both 1930s Nazi history and the everlasting rural Canadian life. Glines’s mandate, I would bet, is to make the incidents in these disparate worlds convincing, and it’s accomplished without a hitch, despite the two complex plots— racing or plodding as they  must be—plus the buildup to Kitty’s impending death. Along the way, it is true, the reader may yearn to know more of how Nova Scotia looks and feels, what Kitty sees from her kitchen window, how the weather shapes the ways of country life, why her son James keeps a cool distance and seems loaded with some resentful baggage. It is a given that Kitty is more comfortable and free with her friends, especially her Nova Scotian friends, has a plan up her sleeve, a tendency to boast, and an incurably generous nature.

It can be challenging to keep track of Kitty’s friends, not to mention of the evolving gossip and growing dread of late 1930s Europe; several characters are never fleshed out. But Glines understands that some features of Nova Scotian country life are par for the course: horrendous snow storms, stuck trucks, downed power lines, savvy timing, and neighbors as eccentric as the old gal herself. The two stories can strain our focus, swinging back and forth, present and past, with pop-ups of small town characters and sketches of chilling Nazis, but Kitty never misses an opportunity to tell her friend Barb about her past adventures, and Barb is always there.

Glines keeps an admirable track of time, historical and present, and has an ear for spoken Canadian language, not to mention a broad appreciation of character. He lets himself go to good effect when he is loosens the narrative in the Nova Scotia scenes, bringing his own voice into the fray, noting the smells in the cab of a truck or the mysterious look of fresh ice on the highway at night. His brief but sharp attention to the details of local weather and relationships is gratifying. His affection for places and persons are much in evidence. In the Introduction he states that the characters and places in the story are real, and the reader doesn’t doubt it. As Kitty would say, “Splendid altogether.”

Fever by Irene Mitchell

Fever by Irene Mitchell*

                        Dos Madres, 2019

REVIEWED BY MARCIA ROSS

The temperature in Irene Mitchell’s stunning new collection of poems, Fever, holds steady throughout at about 101.5°. give or take an occasional cooling breeze. Mitchell’s excitingly named book makes several mentions of the word in poems throughout the slender three-part collection. With a title like Fever, one might expect some aroused panting, a bent toward hot sensationalism, warm corpses, a very sick sickness, insanity. 

That is not what she has in store for us.

A reader could easily miss a “fever” or two on a first perusal; there are many mentions. But that is not a sign of carelessness, or careless repetition.  Mitchell’s subtle placements of the title word (and overarching theme) are reminders that everything is already before our eyes, if only, as Dickinson wrote, “gentlemen can see.”  The dangers of fevers are at our fingertips, in our pulses.

Pernicious Ease” is the first of the book’s three sections.  One may flinch at the imagined evil possibilities of such a banner — say, the self-indulgent ennui of the unhappy gods in Milton’s Pandemonium, or the ease with which any of us can nurture harm.  Never in a hurry, though, Mitchell lays it on slow; no need to plummet for nine days and nights into a burning lake.  Her poems float like falling leaves or swoop like birds from nectar to nectar. She sidles her way in, and it is easy to go with her, even if you lose your way.  In “Salt and Burn,” for instance, we may not know what’s happened when

She dipped her brush in ochre and painted each flower’s

center as a wound.

But we feel it in our bodies when the next line knocks us sideways:

Then came the earth’s full wobble.

What wobble? It must be a big one! We grope blindly for an answer. Yet we don’t really need one; we believe it; we feel it in our legs. Thus we remain with Mitchell’s speaker, her imagery, perhaps beneath some maple boughs where,

Like the spikes and ebbs of fever

Flushed peonies are cooling.

There are no road bumps or tangles in Mitchell’s writing: it is never fussy, vapid , pedantic, or tediously promoting a cause. She is delicately (and wisely) witty, plain in her loves, always skillful. And there are surprises, even bursts of humor. “Hey, these coals are heavy!” erupts a man at the end of a meandering, endearingly neurotic poem titled “Joe, carrying coals.”  While her subjects are not without weight, she doesn’t shout them.  In this case Joe gets to shout, ending the poem abruptly. A joy. In other pieces, distant bells ring in mood or an image flashes bright.

Here and there, Mitchell engages in repartee with imagined artists or figures, or with her own notions of what the heck is going on in this life. In a brief poem “Night Over Blue Mountain,” from the section, “Therapeutic Harmony,” she writes that  there “is no fascination in darkness except in trolling for a gleam.”  Someone has been playing close attention.

Further on a small perfect poem, “Status,” is told by a watchful but playful speaker:

According to my shadow,

the prognosis is rosy.

With savvy survival techniques

I shall be transformed

from a fragile parenthesis

to a circle’s

plump perfection.

It is not uncommon for Mitchell’s poems to end in satisfaction.  There may be no place this poet can’t reach with her effortless language, her open mind (looking, listening, imagining, knowing), with her trust in how her words sound—the music her poems make, their modesty, their mischief, their centered and multiple meanings.  Visionary, crafted, awake, delicious, Fever is not to be missed.

*Mitchell is a former poetry editor of the Hudson River Art Magazine

Review of Eric Greinke’s Invisible Wings, Presa Press, 2019

Eric Greinke

Review of Eric Greinke’s Invisible Wings, Pressa Press, 2019

Eric Greinke is a poet with a moderate pallet and a subtle intelligence. His poems notice things, ordinary things, and pursue them; he is curious but he treads lightly and could easily be disregarded because of his plain-spoken disguise. He is worth slowing down for. In his latest collection of 44 short poems, Invisible Wings, every sound and cadence rings true, if the reader listens carefully. He writes of a “nympho wind” that sings songs “into our rainy brains.” This is a “kissing” wind that arouses someone, whose breath goes wild and cries out “like a poem / just before birth.”

The first poem in the collection is “Wings,” where Grienke flirts with the cosmos whose stars were named after “ancient Gods” and whose direction spreads like an (imagined) expanding universe. Its energy is not showy or boastful, and Greinke delivers in a style of language that one could call, without error, plain. Yet, much of the ordinariness in the footsteps of the lines causes a likely embarrassment for one who suddenly realizes that the poem she’s reading has got quite out of hand. “Our collective neurons,” the poet writes, “back beyond the big bang,” have reverberated to become

an infinitesimal compact

of impacted selves,

their endings encoded in

expanding beams of energy.

To recognize the power of the Greinke’s language, his eschewing of sensation, his insistence on exactitude, is to grope about, “blind in every dimension / but our poor human senses.” But arise! We must scramble to keep up with the fusions, dimensions, disasters, collisions, with each “atom alone but connected.“ Really, you have to run to keep up with what’s going down in this poem, until it “plays on all the pages & stages of our days.” He doesn’t need to mention WS.

Now that we see that nothing at all is ordinary about the poem, it’s basically over. The story, that is. But not without transformation. The entire process, the cause and effect, the eons of time, and the vast universe itself are

cast. . . into the frozen fire,

transformed again into invisible wings.

Still, when an opening poem is a tour de force, one may reasonably expect to find some wobbles or potholes up ahead. And Greinke has included a few poems here that may have benefitted from a rest. “The Sunken Dream,” for instance, can be flatfooted in places, or may not know what it is really trying to convey. We get the gist; but perhaps a pivotal image and some liquid language could dive into the deep of a flooded valley of drowned houses. When the speaker says, “He blamed the government, but / his thoughts were persistent,“ we can admire the savvy line-break, but that is not enough to rescue “The Sunken Dream.”

There are other winners, of course. One of those others is “November Nights,” the most sensuous of the lot. It doesn’t strive; it begins gently:

I find your face

on a pillow of leaves,

lately adrift.

One knows that the speaker must go down to the pillow, that the leaves “lately adrift” are gathered meaningfully in one place now, a place for love and rest and listening. Greinke is a listener.

****Marcia Ross, author of the novel Layla and the Lake (Pelekinesis, 2019)