What the Quiet Accomplishes By Marshall D. Dury

By Marshall D. Dury

Marsh.dury@gmail.com

20 Pages

                                                          ( Marshall D. Dury)



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



This modest chapbook by Marshall Dury chronicles breaths, and whispers, and wordlessness. These are quiet poems, and at their best—haunting. There is a lot of soul-searching going on here in a very literal sense. In Cicatrix (Prelude) the poet considers the nature of memories,



tender the memories,

tender the changes.



a new softness rising in you,

the suppleness of skin, gone.



The body of his lover loses its suppleness as our memories of the past soften and lose their essential tension. As the strength of a mountain can erode, so can our past, which in this poet’s words is a “delicate vessel.” As the poet seems to imply, the past changes with time, becomes set as a story or series of stories, and then changes yet again. Then with time the past collapses into itself losing substance and eventually vanishing.

The poem Being Gift Enough celebrates the sweet breath of life. It seems to argue that life alone is blessing enough and that all of us should stop and take it in. This pantheistic vision is exhilarating with the breath of life literally dancing in one’s heart,



if you breathe it truly.

let it dance in the beautiful mess

of veins and heart





that the night is quiet, is still:

your dog’s soft chirps of dreaming,

your wife’s skin soft love, warm breath of joy,

that these, most any night,

be gift enough to truly know

what a blessing is.



By the way, dogs do really chirp in their sleep, while dreaming. At least my dog does. Good observation.

In Reverie, not only do we dream our life in nearby houses, but as we listen carefully the two realities merge, and the poet and his lover merge,



Where dreams show us what beauty our lives are now,

If we be willing to listen

If we be willing to live the reverie of this life together

Until there is no difference.



Sharing dreams do cement lovers together (even in other people’s houses) like nothing else.

In an unusual poem, entitled For Sylvia Plath’s Audience—The Ones Who Repeatedly Tried To Carve Out The Last Name ‘Hughes’ From Her Headstone, Dury attempts to explain the unexplainable with, I believe, mixed results. The poem is clearly aimed at Plath’s infamous husband, the well- known and accomplished poet, Ted Hughes. Dury mulls the complicated human desire for correcting great mistakes and wonders what a life would be if, by some magic, a destructive flaw could be chiseled out of the story of one’s life, in this case, Plath’s unhappy marriage. These lines show insight and are memorable,



Peeling away cold days

Like we can forget them

By choice. The motionless

Fissure where your chisel

May strip from stone

All that misunderstanding…



The poem entitled Plain upon Plain meditates on the mystery and artistry of writing. An internal geography emerges from the tip of the poet's ball point pen,



… words falling through the funnel of your pen—this ballpoint,

received as a wedding gift. You see:



dewed, silent hills. tall grass,

small twists of morning light..



And,



life held up, hoisted over your heart.

the inner country of your soul unfolds,

plain upon plain…



I think the best poem in the book is the last: On the Failing of Words. A fourteen year old boy seeks communication with his very sick brother. The poet details the limits of art. Sometimes words fall short. It’s one of the flaws in humanity,



because sometimes,

that is all you want.

for your words

simply to be

enough.



And sometimes they just aren’t. Dury nails this poem and a good many others in this surprising chapbook.

Strong as Silk The story of the Gold Hill Wakamatsu Tea & Silk Colony by Brigit Truex

Strong as Silk
The story of the Gold Hill
Wakamatsu Tea & Silk Colony
Prose & Poems
Brigit Truex
ISBN978-1-929878-83-3
Lummox Press 2012
$15.00


Review by Irene Koronas
 
Truex juxtaposes her small poems next to journal entries by Lady Jou, 1869-71:

"One last leaf remains,
turning, spinning east, then west.
Wind carries it off"

And from the journals of two other residents of the colony. Truex weaves, steeps the leaves then presses the stories between the pages. The settlers form a tea colony in California after coming from Japan. The history of the colony is in the back of the book and is as interesting as the prose and poetry. The people within the book migrate to California to make a profit from silk and tea trade. The book poetically informs all our senses; each journal page reveals the expectations and the loss felt by the settlers:

"...Last night, as we settled into our rooms, I found a book. Whoever
lived here before - the Graners, perhaps - must have dropped it.
Inside, a tiny lotus - until it fluttered away! The petals were splayed
wings of a small green moth. Surely it whispered blessings as it
circled overhead. I send prayers for us and our venture in this new place."

It is the story of beginnings and separations. It is how the poet relates to the journal entries:

"Hanging upside - down,
small bird robed in black scholar's cap -
our worlds are reversed"

The writing is magnificent, a blend of the past and present. We readers are able to discern
the subtle differences between the then and the now, the land and purpose of being, all
from the journal, 1874 and the recent poems:

"The moon was so full of itself, it echoed like
a bronze cymbal. It drowned out all other sounds.
Even the owl was silenced, still as the mouse
he pursues. He too was in awe of the night.

Far away, I heard the miners' music. It is difficult
to enjoy. I do not understand it. There are too many
sounds at once.

The light drew two moths as well. They danced in the darkness,
performing for the empress-moon. Mirroring each other, spiraling,
separating, only to return again. I am reminded of cherry
blossoms, released from the branch, drifting down when
no one is there to watch them fall."

The above journal entry takes my breath away and I can feel the longing for and the love of being where she is. She is nineteen years old and does not live much longer. Truex writes her poem next to the entry:

"Etched on still-black lake of sky,
porcelain petals
flutter to the moon."

Wow. Don't miss this book. Buy it and keep it and pass it to your children.

-- 

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

www.whlreview.com 

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Review of The Georgia Review

Review of The Georgia Review:

“We Are All of Us Passing Through”

Review by Ralph Pennel

In his introduction to volume 65, issue 4 of The Georgia Review, editor Stephen Corey, seemingly offhandedly, draws the reader through a brief history of time as illimitable as our collective imagination and as succinct as the word “time” is in instructing our understanding of the concept of time. Corey, when he asks, “Whether the words old and new having the same number of letters could be a sign of similar meanings” (667), reminds us, by demanding we consider their relativity and flexibility, and the expansion and contraction of language itself, that words—and all narratives given breath by them—can be simultaneously culled from their etymologies into new histories and back again in a single postulation. Before we even begin to read this collection of writings, the boundaries of time have collapsed. And, with each new piece, both individually and collectively, these boundaries are refashioned into the spaces between the boundaries, linking us all to the dark matter between all points of light, the very spaces where we construct the meaning of our lives, the spaces where, “We Are All of Us Passing Through.”

Each piece housed in this issue of The Georgia Review is a reminiscence—ruminative in content and context from each piece’s own beginning and end, through the entire collection’s beginning and end, and ruminative in the way that most purposeful, personal resolve is emotional acceptance of the unresolved flesh.

Fittingly, the opening essay, titled “In the Flesh,” by Martha G. Wiseman, begins here, with acceptance of all she has gained from all she has lost. Wiseman finds herself, at the onset, “back among the dancers” (669), a lifestyle she inherited from her namesake and godmother, Martha Graham, and a lifestyle she extracted herself from years later before she caved entirely into herself. In reflection, she recalls her “futile striving for a perfect dancer’s body” (676) though what she was actually striving for was, “a clear attempt to defeat [her] shame” (676).  She is at no time kind or forgiving, recalling each failed attempt to reconcile with her own body that resulted in a loss of her own sense of self, until the recalling is a kind of a mantra. A prayer of sorts.

This idea of paying homage to the letting down of our wills, of honoring the dark matter, is carried throughout the review, and pulls the works together the way time pulls together the dissonant trajectories of our lives into a cohesive narrative. This homage, this accounting for our failings as evidence of grace, is further explored in Carol Edelstein’s poem, “Close as I Can Get to Prayer.” Edelstein’s poem, with all its elegiac weight, like Wiseman’s essay, begins at the end:

Slowly the amaryllis unpacks its massive blooms.

At the end you were a fighting bird, all sinew and

will.  (689)

However, it is an end both seasoned with stoic resolve and almost unpalatable longing:

            But I’ll take anything—world in a stupor

            after the night shift, emptying its pockets

            of coins, bills, whatever can be cast down

onto the square of light. Anything—any creature

peeking forth, root or leaf, smudge, crease—

I’ll take. (689)

We can’t help but feel from Edelstien’s poem that the size and shape of personal accountability, or remorse and repentance, is contingent upon our sense of relatedness to the world around us, to the interior landscapes of our lives, and to the land itself.

Eugenie Torgerson’s works carry with them the same sense of longing. Charting and plotting the earth’s surface in her work, she reveals the intimacies of the lives of the land she photographs, as if time itself were capable of longing. Torgerson’s works inhabit the page, render the page as history, trajectory, stasis, and breadth.  They are at once cartography and the land they map. Each landscape has two histories. Histories with us. Histories without us.  Contiguous. Confluent.

Torgerson says of her own work that, “My own images are not of a specific site but are generalized and universal representations of the weight of the land and the energy and allure of the horizon . . . of what makes people decide to leave, what causes them to stay, how they endure with grace” (712). It is hard not to assume that in each of her images, when Torgerson says people, she is speaking of the land instead, the land a dancer, too, a body from which those who inhabited it have attempted to render perfection.

            It is in the writings of Henry Crews where, at nearly the center of journal, the ideas explored throughout the works of the review culminate, edify, and expand, the way light is drawn to and then bends around a celestial body. Crews is not spare in his ideas or language, stating directly what each Wiseman and Edelstein (and even Corey) have already asked us to consider in their own way. Crews, in his essay, “We Are All of Us Passing Through,” pleads with epistemological conviction, “Deliver me from men who are without doubt. Doubt makes a man decent. My most steadfast conviction is that every man ought to doubt everything he holds dearest” (723). And, once again in The Gospel Singer, that, “Suffering is God’s greatest gift to man” (739). It is through the pain that we gain greater vision, that we achieve higher levels of consciousness, where the self is born with acceptance of the body’s death, where beginnings are endings, where old and new concord.

            That this is the final issue of the 65^th year is not unremarkable against the backdrop of its content. It could be no other way.  Though this issue marks the end of the season, it serves to also lead us forward into the next with unquestionable elegiac eloquence.

 ***Ralph Pennel is the Fiction Editor, and one of four founding editors, of Midway Journal, an online journal published out of St. Paul, Minnesota. He teaches Creative Writing, Composition, and literature online for Globe University in Minnesota and currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Review, Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing, Holocaust Edition,

Review, Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing, Holocaust Edition Spring 2012, PO Box 11014, Norfolk, Virginia 23517, www.poeticamagazine.com, Michal Mahgerefteh, Editor-in Chief, 64 pages.




Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES



At my age, the word “holocaust” reminds me of when I read about all of the horrors, as a child in Hebrew School, of the slaughter by the Germans of 6 million Jews during World War II from 1939 to 1945. That was in the 1960s. But I never forgot… On looking at this special issue of the fine journal Poetica, my thought was Oh no, I can’t read all this again! Yet in well-written poetry by 40 fine poets, is chronicled different views of the nightmare stories of the killing, incarceration, burning and starving, as well as thoughts and memories by and about the survivors.



But I realized who this important collection is really for—the younger generation, who need to hear about it also, or everything that happened will be forgotten. Jews continue to need to be reminded how we have been hated throughout history, even as Israel is often hated today by certain Jews as well as the Palestinians, indeed the whole Middle East.



In the poem, “Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2012”, Helen Bar-Lev writes “the oven warms; a cake bakes/a siren wrenches the heart/the radio plays somber songs/and people retell of the holocaust…of the loss”.



“Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awaken, do not/reject us forever,” writes Bernard Otterman in “Psalm 44 at Auschwitz.”



Another moving poem is “Budapest Shoes” by Jena Smith: “Sixty shoes line Pest bank, cast iron shoes…/shoes of the Jews, Hungarian Jews.”



I really like the poem “I Would Have Called You ‘Oma’” by Joanne Jagoda, about the grandmother she never met: “They shipped you on the train to Auschwitz/and you walked to the showers of gas/your precious light extinguished forever/And when I hold my own sweet grandchild/I think about you…”



This book exists like a holy encyclopedia, written and ready to read, too awful to be quoted so haphazardly. Just buy it and give it to someone of the young generation and let them get sick, too, before the old generations of witnesses and their children disappear, leaving no one to remember what really happened…

Women’s History Month Event: Hilary Tann Premiere Featured at Concert Celebrating 400th Anniversary of Anne Bradstreet’s Birth

 

Women’s History Month Event:

Hilary Tann Premiere Featured at Concert Celebrating

400^th Anniversary of Anne Bradstreet’s Birth 

By Beth Purcell

Cappella Clausura presents Mistress: A Celebration of the 400^th Anniversary of the Birth of America’s First Poet, Mistress Anne Bradstreet.  The commissioned Contemplations (8, 9) by composer Hilary Tann will receive its premiere, joined on this Women’s History Month program by her Contemplations (21, 22), written earlier for the Radcliffe Choral Society.  Dorothy Crawford’s A Portrait of Anne Bradstreet, based on the poet’s letters and poems, and Naushon will also be featured.  Madrigals and motets by Barbara Strozzi and Isabella Leonarda, Bradstreet’s contemporaries, will complete the concert. 

Tenors and basses will be added to the female chorus for the Strozzi and Leonarda works, along with harpsichord, violin and recorder for some of the pieces. A festive reception with birthday cake will be held at the concert on March 17, when Hilary Tann will be in attendance for the premiere. 

Known as America's first poet, Anne Bradstreet was born in England, then moved to the greater Boston area with other Puritan emigrants in 1630.  A freethinker and intellect, she wrote poetry on religious and domestic subjects with at least one collection published in her time in both England and the New World.  Both her father and her husband served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; both were also prominently involved in the founding of Harvard College (where a gate now bears an excerpt from one of Bradstreet’s works). 

In Contemplations, the poet stands in awe of God’s universe.  This long work was written for her family and published posthumously.  Tann’s musical setting of the 8^th and 9^th sections of the poem is adventurous and rhythmically vibrant, with hints of a Japanese aesthetic.  Clausura has sung other works of Tann’s in the past.

Tann’s music is influenced by the love of her native Wales, the natural world and traditional music of Japan. 

Ensembles that have commissioned and performed her works include the American Guild of Organists, Louisville Symphony Orchestra, European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Thai Philharmonic and KBS Philharmonic in Seoul.  She lives in the Adirondacks and serves on the faculty of Union College.  For more information, visit:  www.HilaryTann.com.

Crawford’s works have been performed by many ensembles including the Longy Chamber Singers, the Unicorn Singers, which she founded with her husband, composer/pianist John Crawford, and at the Bloch Festival where she was a participating composer.  She is the recipient of a Composers’ Guild Award for Choral Composition and lives in Cambridge.

Concert Dates/Locations:

Saturday, March 17, 8PM,  Parish of the Messiah, 1900 Commonwealth Av., Newton

Saturday, March 24, at 8PM,  University Lutheran, 66 Winthrop St., Cambridge

Sunday, March 25, 4PM,  First Church in Jamaica Plain, 6 Eliot St., Jamaica Plain

(MORE)

Contact:          Director Amelia LeClair  617-964-6609  or manager@clausura.org

Tickets:           $15 - $25.  Purchase online  at  www.clausura.org  or at the door

Cappella Clausura brings to light works written by women from the 8th century to the present day:  twelve  centuries of “new” music.   While this ensemble of sopranos, altos, and period instruments performs music solely by  women composers, and champions living composers, it concentrates on repertoire by women in the

cloister – clausura – during the Italian baroque period.  During this extraordinary time, women were allowed to

express themselves spiritually and artistically, and to publish their own music.  Clausura’s intention is to dispel the notion that there are not now nor have there ever been gifted women composers.  History has been blind and deaf to these remarkable works; Cappella Clausura  brings vision and voice to them.

About Amelia LeClair and the context of Cappella Clausura:

LeClair received her Bachelor's in Music Theory and Composition from UMass Boston in 1975.  Having noticed throughout her education the dearth of female composers in the historical canon, she lost faith in her own ability to compose and moved on to raising a family and owning a business.  

Musical scholars in the 70's unearthed the works of female composers which had for too long moldered in libraries:  scholars such as Robert Kendrick, Craig Monson, Candace Smith, Judith Tick, Jane Bernstein, and many more.  Then the Norton Grove Dictionary of Women Composers appeared on university shelves.  The work of these scholars became the impetus for Cappella Clausura.  In 2001 LeClair entered the masters program at New England Conservatory, studying with Simon Carrington in choral conducting. She made her conducting debut in Jordan Hall in March of 2002.

Shortly after gaining her masters, she founded Cappella Clausura, an ensemble of voices and period instruments specializing in music written by women from the 8th century to the present day.   She has presented and premiered the music of Hilary Tann, Patricia Van Ness, Abbie Betinis, Emma Lou Diemer, and many more. Now in its seventh year, Cappella Clausura has to date received annual local cultural council grants from the city of Newton, three grants from Choral Arts New England, and a grant from the PatsyLu fund of Open Meadows Foundation.

LeClair greatly enjoys the discovery and presentation of music not in the standard repertoire, such as women's early music and works that expand on Euro-centric strictures.  She is director of choirs at the Church of St Andrew in Marblehead and Director of Schola Nocturna, a compline choir at the Episcopal Parish of the Messiah in Newton.  She directed Coro Stella Maris, a renaissance a cappella choir in Gloucester, for five years. She has directed children's choirs for First Unitarian Society in Newton, and Revels. She lives in Newton with her husband.

What the press is saying: 

"...eavesdrop on paradise... personal and inviting, extravagant and intimate."
- Matthew Guerreri, BOSTON GLOBE

  

"...riveting...pure, rich.." - The Boston Phoenix

  

"...the cadences of each phrase and each piece were nothing short of exquisite. There were many divine moments of perfect sonority..."   - Boston Musical Intelligencer     

###

*Photos and full artist bios are available at http://www.clausura.org/  

Photos from the Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Visiting Author Series

Photos from the Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Visiting Author Series

*** Mack performed excerpts from " Conversation with my Molester." It had been premiered at the Boston Playwright Theatre at Boston University.

                  Left Poet/Performer Michael Mack, Right Series Director Doug Holder 

( Click on pic to enlarge)

( click on pic to enlarge)

Train Wreckard 1-14 By Dennis Sheehan

A BagelBards Second Look Book Review



“Track Wreckard 1-14”



By Denis Sheehan



Bone Print Press, No price listed







Reviewed 2/13/12, Re-reviewed 2/20/12 by Paul Steven Stone







If it wasn’t a pun, I’d say here’s one for the books! How often does one write a book review one week, then come back the next week with an entirely different interpretation of what he read, and what the author achieved?



For me, this is the first time.



I felt pretty confident when I wrote my original review that the author had taken the easy way out in writing his book (novel, memoir?) by merely writing up 14 consecutive evenings spent in a local Rockland bar. His refusal to edit his writings, or even correct misspellings, made it seem like a labor of lassitude and, here’s the trap, a reflection of blue collar antipathy to the requirements of white collar literature. I’m afraid I wrote my review accordingly.



After all, if Denis Sheehan was going to force me to read about him sitting at a local bar night after night and get stinking drunk half the time, without even crafting his presentation, then I was going to call him out (always politely, of course) for his laziness, his lack of literary focus and, of course, for his obvious inattention to MY needs as an experienced reader with high literary standards.



It was only the next day after I submitted my review, when I was working on a new novel in which I play serious games with the reader’s status as a fly on the wall, that I realized what games Denis Sheehan had been attempting with his book, and that I had fallen into his trap.



If I can steal from my earlier review of Track Wreckard, I wrote…“Aside from developing a drinking problem, or feeling like I did, reading the book did an excellent job of replicating the boredom and pointlessness of a life spent without challenges or significant interests.”



I had hit a bullseye and didn’t even know it. For now I see that Track Wreckard is totally about conveying the blue collar grind of nightly visits to the Pub and daily penance paid at whatever form of grueling employment fueled the author’s need for nightly oblivion. Far from creating a novel that focused on sharing those short ups and deep downs in any literary sense, Denis Sheehan chose to dunk the reader almost bodily in the boredom, repetition, small glories and minor triumphs of his life. Unedited, uninterrupted by literary pretension or Spellcheck, unapologetically served out across 14 evenings of his life!



I apologize to Denis Sheehan for first reviewing his book from my point of view, which caused me to miss how well he had hit the mark from his point of view. By taking exception to the fact that most of the writing was done when the author was half- or wholly-in-the-bag, and not prettied up afterwards, I missed or misinterpreted the author’s ingenuousness in sharing himself and his world when they were at their most vulnerable and unattractive. Rather than accept my immersion in his world, I complained and wished for a world and a protagonist more attune to my tastes.



Whether you’re looking for a non-violent drinking companion or some insight into a world strangely close but ineffably distant, “Train Wreckard 1-14” might be just the cocktail for you.



Don’t be surprised if you find, as I did, that it merits a second sip.

Last Call: The Bukowski Legacy Continues

 
Last Call: The Bukowski Legacy Continues

Editor: RD Armstrong

Lummox Press

www.lummoxpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-929878-86-4

$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Here you will find shit jobs, mad women in miniskirts, junkies, cigar smoke, insomniacs, booze, broads, swollen testicles, and despair.  Sound like the world of the late writer and poet Charles Bukowski. Well it’s not. But it is an anthology inspired by him and Bukowski remains the central reference point throughout.

RD Armstrong edited this ambitious book (apparently his second attempt to get it just right) hoping to lay out the legacy and influence of Bukowski for all to see.  Like their mentor’s own work many of these pieces are angry and defiant in both style and subject matter. One of their repeated targets, and deservedly so, is academia.

Michael Ford’s poem, Not Celebrity Bowling: Cerebrally Bowling, goes right to the heart of it,

spare me the hypocrisy of the gutless rituals of

anthologized poetry; English Department ivory

tower cowards publishing what they have turned

the art of poetry into: bubbles on a fat vat full of

bland oatmeal.

Mark Terrill puts it another way, but no less effective, in his poem Bukowski: 3/10/94,

..there are the

Great Living Poets

the Great Dead Poets

and then there’s me

another two-bit guttersnipe.

In an obscenity- laced poem, appropriate to the book, FN Wright’s Bukowski and Me makes the point that the underside of culture where Bukowski  found his muses is not only alive and well but still a suitable setting for intense poetry,

I attract bad women

drunks

junkies

whores…

catholic girls gone bad

& Baptist minister’s

daughters

are particularly

fond of me

unlike Bukowski

I am not

a great poet

but I’m damn good…

My Comrades, a poem by Joe Speer with a provocative title, needles the literary establishment. Speer allies the underclass, non-elite writers with luminaries such as Sir Thomas Malory, a prisoner, Cervantes, impoverished, Thomas Hardy and Emile Proust, self-publishers, William Faulkner, a rum smuggler, and others. He details his points of comparison thusly:

this one teaches

that one lives with his mother and cat

another pencraft master takes drugs, non-prescription

and cleans house as his wife earns a living.

In other words, here are poets from the real world, not that rarified artificial world of artsy-fartsy elitism.

Poets, who emerge from this seamy world of damaged creative people, have advantages. In order to measure out the truth, they lie better than most. And that is only the beginning of it. Ellaraine Lockie in her clear-eyed telling poem, Poets at Any Price, says,

They’ll exploit

confessor, friend or family …

And,

I tell you

Because I’ve been truth’s victim

Verbal accounts reiterated

verbatim in someone else’s poem

Secrets exposed as sonnets

Composites as transparent

as the silk panties I wore…

Plato was right: never trust poets.

The world of Bukowski and his acolytes is reduced to a piece of bruised fruit in an interesting piece by Doug holder entitled, It Is Late and the Fruit Is Bad. Beware there is a little bit of DH Lawrence’s poem Figs here. Holder’s persona chooses to eat in a way not acceptable in polite society. He says,

I take its flesh

deep into my mouth

digest the ferment

of its rotten skin

cut the lights

Cutting the lights seals the deal. We are among the vulgar. Not just everyman seeking satisfaction and a high, but an artist, who, even in miniature, meticulously records the truth of his appetites. If eating rotting fruit this way seems vaguely licentious, eating rotting fruit in the middle of the night in the dark seems downright obscene. 

Another all-nighter was had by G. Murray Thomas. In his poem, To the Editor Whose Name Will Appear on my Next Rejection Slip, the poet says,

I sat up all night

drinking beer

and going over my

unpublished poems

searching for one written

in the cheap…

The poet tries to match expectations of a Bukowski –like poem. He finally gives up, becomes himself again and writes this poem chronicling the process. I wonder if the rejection letter he expected was from this very anthology.

Breaking the mood, but not the context, the short story by RD Armstrong, Two Drink Minimum, grabs you with its great musically obscene refrain. The refrain breaks up the story of a construction job gone bad. Add the battle of the sexes and the result is a hilarious read.

Another one of the stories is an odd but serious piece by John Macker, called Not Too far From the Maverick Bar. The protagonist has packed his dead dog’s body in dry ice and trekked into the desert to bury him and seek redemption. The story takes a neat and satisfying turn at the end with Bukowski doing a cameo.

I found all the essays interesting, but one was especially memorable, A Buk Remembrance by Michael Meloan. Three quarters of the essay describes the legendary Bukowski alit with booze and on a rampage. The last quarter portrays a thoughtful, workaholic, with more than a touch of irony in his pronouncements.

That Charles Bukowski would really get a kick out of this book.

Review of “Are There Zombies in Heaven”

 Review of “Are There Zombies in Heaven”, poetry by Eric “The Moebius Kid” Morlin, Wilder Publications, Inc., PO Box 10641, Blacksburg, VA 24063, 149 pages, 2011




Review by Barbara Bialick



There are some 101 poems with interesting titles listed in the table of contents of this book, 102 if you count the disclaimer as a prose poem. But the title poem boasts a great line in this tome about love and life as a street poet in Little Five Points in Atlanta, who’s currently working on a bachelor’s degree in the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Morlin, who lists scores of acknowledgments of people who have helped him, writes: “Are there zombies in heaven/are there undead angels waiting for me/when I die?”



Morlin will surely face down the zombies like he does the rest of his life.

He uses blunt, sometimes rough language in a lot of the poems, but in others, if he just edited some lines a bit differently, he can even murmur like a Shakespearian sonnet writer, as in “Anti-dotes and Sequels”: “Love doesn’t abandon when clarity/unravels, it weathers self-hate and intellect/baffles. They stymie detection, of where/the souls scarred in weals, but love is like/braille, where it touches it heals, Love/navigates us to learn to forgive, and in/learning the process, remembers to live...”



In contrast, consider the language in “Blessed Are the Weak,” where he pens, “for they shall go for the kill/every time and tell you/they love you./They shall offer soft words/And watch as you/Hemorrhage,/and they’re still too terrified/to tell you how they frakked/you over with intention…/What prize is there in/beating down someone/who loves you and/ won’t hit you back?”



In the Introduction by Warrine Lapine, the book’s publisher, it reads “”Moebius is a street poet. His work is uncompromising, raw, bold; it takes you to places that you’d probably rather not go. And Moebius is fine with that…truth is beauty” as Keats reminds us…



In his “Disclaimer” and/or prose poem at the end of the book, “Morlin declares “The world is an IQ test. We all fail some of the time. OBVIOUSLY, but that’s part of the point…”

The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber by Hugh Fox

The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber (Skylight Press, Great Britain, England)

www.skylightpress.co.uk

By Hugh Fox


Review by Pam Rosenblatt



In 2011, the late Hugh Bernard Fox published The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber (Skylight Press, Great Britain). Also, in 2011 – September 4, 2011 – Fox sadly passed away. This short 110 page book reflects Fox’s writing, poetic, and anthropological finesse.

Also, in 2011, Mr. Fox published three other books: e Lord Said Unto Satan (Post Mortem Press, Cincinnati, Spring), Reunion (Luminis Books, Summer),and The Year Book (Ravenna Press, Summer).

Mr. Fox was a writer, a poet, a reviewer, an anthropologist, and, perhaps most importantly, a friend to people. He had friends all over the place. And he often wrote about his friends under different names in his books.

Along with Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, Anaïs Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, Mr. Fox co-founded the Pushcart Prize for literature.

He was published in the Small Press arena prolifically. Even though he had been very ill for years, Fox kept up writing reviews and books. Over the years, his book reviews could be seen in the late Len Fulton’s Small Press Review. From time to time, Mr. Fox would visit with the Bagel Bards on Saturday mornings at Au Bon Pain, Somerville.

In 2006, Fox’s Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of an Invisible Man was published by Ibbetson Street Press.

I personally didn’t know Mr. Fox very well. I did often read his reviews in Small Press Review. I became indirectly acquainted with Mr. Fox after he wrote a review of my first chapbook published on The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene. His review showed his love of word economy. And then I actually met him at the Bagel Bards one Saturday morning shortly afterwards. But I had never read any of Mr. Fox’s books. So when Doug Holder asked me to review The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber last Saturday, February 11, I said “Okay!” I didn’t know what to expect…

What I discovered is that Mr. Fox’s The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber is a short book about three women – Magda, Nona, and Bernadette – who are in Brazil. They are lovers. Inseparable. Sometimes intellectual. Often times sexual. Often various serious political, health, and social issues are raised and challenged. Here are a few paragraphs from the book that explains the three women’s relationship:



xv.



Sonia took the message, scrawled on a pad on Magda’s desk:



Quero falar com voce urgentamente/I urgently want to talk to you.

Bernadette



It must be Boss Bernadette (who else?) so she calls her office.

“No, I didn’t leave any message, it must be Bernadette Lundardelli, she’s doing an article for Jornal da Semana about ‘foreigners’ in Santa Catarina…”

“OK.”

So maybe I oughta call her Magda thinks, but she doesn’t, the next evening this almost-middle-aged moonface appears at the door.

“I just took a chance you might be home …”

And in she comes, the other Bernadette, and Nona is on Magda’s bed reading (English lesson) Wuthering Heights, toasty (heater) warm, all three of them in black tights and ponchos as if they were a uniform, all these black-veiled thighs.

“How do you like it down here?” Bernadette reporter asks Bernadette and Nona.

“OK, except for the bichos/bugs,” answers Nona.

“We can talk in the living room,” says Magda slightly … the word in Portuguese is ‘exltada’/hysterical-happy.”

“You three live together?”

“Bernadette, the little one, she’s not really ‘living’ with us yet full-time, but she will be … after she leaves Medicine …”

“Oh, she’s a doctor going to leave Medicine? Another American?”

“No, Brazilian …”

“But you and the …”

“We’ve been together for more than ten years now …”

“Together?” She’s shamelessly (reportorially) curious.

“Off the record,” says Magda pointing to Bernadette’s notepad/pen, “I mean really off the record. I don’t want my job jeopardized.”

“Of course, of course,” she answers, her face all solicitously contorted with ‘secrecy’, ‘discretion.’ (p. 31)



A former professor at Michigan State University, Mr. Fox has taken on the job of educating his readers about a different lesbian lifestyle amidst the social and professional conventions of Brazil and the United States.

Mr. Fox has written a book that’s not a passive read. Some people may get uncomfortable with his honesty, his off-the-cuff humor, and his direct approach to relationships that don’t conform to social norms. But the book is well-written, descriptive, and has impact. His poetic muse is often apparent. A darker side is often spoke of by the characters, and Death is often a subject of conversation by these three intelligent woman whose female personas are so realistic that it’s hard to believe that a man could create them, as seen when Magda speaks to Bernadette near the conclusion of the book:



“I don’t want to die slowly. I mean when I do die, I don’t want to face it slowly like peeling an artichoke, becoming less and less inside the awareness that I’m really becoming nothing at all. I can’t stand the idea of consciously unraveling and dissolving. Or being like Hubert Humphrey, you hang on, become transparent, all tubes and sacks, and the bichos/bugs are still inside you like termites in an old house … you know, being gay, you’re outside, crazy … and you see it more fully … visão global/global vision … I mean I never for a moment think that exercise or diet or surgery are going to make any real difference … the only reality is the diss-olving ….” (p. 101)



The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber is an unusual book, one that has an impact on the reader – positive or negative. And, by the way, Skylight Press has informed us that more books by the late Hugh Fox will soon follow!



Bibliography:



Holder, Doug. “Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off On His Final Road”. Ibbetson Street #30, Ibbetson Street Press, June 2011. p. 22 – 23.



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Hugh Fox”. http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Fox

Secrets No One Must Talk About: Poems by Martin Willitts Jr.

Secrets No One Must Talk About
2011 Dos Madres Press Inc.
Poems by Martin Willitts Jr.
Loveland OH
Softbound, 31 pages, No Price
ISBN 978-1-933675-44-4


Review by Zvi A. Sesling

There are places, like a dust storm, we cannot avoid.
They prick like cactus and sting of scorpion rains.
They hold secrets better than a poker game.
The people in this place have to know how to survive.
It is a scrap-by living, full of possible dangers, yet they survive.
This is such a place.

What a way to begin a book of poetry…this is but the first of six stanzas of Willitts’s Introduction, the first poem in this short, tidy volume the first few of which remind me
in some ways of Spoon River Anthology in that Willitts channels a knife sharpener and a peddler. He echoes the best of the best poets who wrote in Spanish: Vallejo, Lorca and Neruda. He bases poems on the photographs of Consuelo Kanaga. Yet his best poems are those he conjures from the deep within himself like these lines from At the Funeral:

Men fear their own tears
like they were forbidden and
shameful. So they so inwardly like rain.

Or some lines from Joshua Trees:

They reach out into the endless desert skies
for some answer that never comes. The silence
is arid, dry as a belief no one believes.

Willitts’s poems a mostly brought up from his inner self, from his observations of life, of
people and we are left to determine for ourselves whether his “observations” are those he
makes of other people or if they might be autobiographical. We care which because as one line in the Slaughterhouse of the Crows states: “We did not understand this obsession.”

Willitts is a librarian as was Philip Larkin, and while I do not attempt to compare the two, I find it interesting that they both write poetry that cuts a path of enjoyment for the reader.

Martin Willitts Jr. presents us with a strong, fearless volume of poetry that dares to be obvious and mysterious at the same time, that takes mythic songs and captures the heart of experience.

let it be now by robert collet tricaro

let it be now
robert collet tricaro
Finishing Line Press 2011
ISBN 1-59924-927-8

"Life's theme is accretion, sapling
and fawn. Each seeking to add..."

The poems in "let it be now" is a Spartan chap book of couplets; they
reach for the quiet tones:

"As though taking hold of the ends of a rope
we jump at a pace that builds

as the music gathers. We hear
countless lines of repetitive

interlacing melodies. Piccolos
jump in, as to dismiss notions..."

Most of the poems in this chapbook, read with an expectation
and a loss, but the couplets hold each line in the way only a
good writer can hold the theme, line by line. Tricaro
writes with confidence in what is being put before us, the reader.

"The iris of my mind
becomes a cobalt stillness..."


Irene Koronas
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press

Looking Up by Linda Pressman

( Linda Pressman)
















Looking Up
Linda Pressman
Available at Amazon.com
$12.67

Review by Rene Schwiesow

Linda Pressman is the adult child of two holocaust survivors. The horrific ordeal that her parents, family, and their friends endured was a constant underlying trauma throughout her childhood.

The number 7 is a sacred number. In Hebrew the number signifies completion. Linda was the sixth female child out of seven girls. “Looking Up” is the memoir of growing up in the fullness of a Jewish, but not too Jewish, household. The war drove God out of her parent’s immediate vision; survival was all. Near the end of the book, Linda describes her family as being a member of “Holocaust Judasim.” This, she says, “consists of the joyous celebration of the food that’s been handed down to us by generations of Jews who believe in the God my parents no longer believe in. There are other tenets, like both a fear of being Jewish and a longing for the lost Judaism of their childhoods, when my parents had been sure that God was out there somewhere, up there somewhere, that if they looked up they’d find Him, but most of it centered around food, especially since they’d had none during the war.”

Pressman’s parents met post-war at a Displaced Person’s Camp. Her father spent the war in Siberia, a fact that explains his belief that Chicago weather was balmy even during the dead of winter. Her mother’s war time childhood was spent hiding in the forests, scavenging for food and knowing that trees were not safe to hide behind after a relative was found behind a tree and shot. Pressman says this about her mother and the traumatic effect of the war: “Mom doesn’t just come out of the war with missing family, with a missing tooth; she was missing other essential things, like a sense of well-being and of being right with the world that the other women had.”

After immigrating to the United States, her father became a self-made man, building a lucrative laundry business, supplying the large family with sufficient means toward a lifestyle that allowed Pressman’s mother to remain at home to raise the children. As a father, however, he was rarely present, though there were exceptions. Her mother is most often described as being tangled perpetually in a phone cord that reached from the base to her downstairs laundry/sewing area where she spent most of her time at the machine and talking to friends and relatives. We are left with the idea that the 7 girls had plenty of time to fend for themselves. As a reader, I had to wonder at the metaphorical reasoning for Pressman’s mother spending so much time on the phone. Of course there is a stereotypical idea that homemakers were cooking, sewing, or spending their lives gossiping via telephone; however, from the metaphorical standpoint one can see the phone cord as umbilical, a cord that kept Pressman’s mother fed by her family – her remaining family.

Pressman weaves the war time story of her parents in and out of her childhood and the world she experienced on Drake Avenue in Skokie, IL, outside of Chicago. On occasion this may leave the reader somewhat disoriented as to time frames.

“Looking Up” is not your typical Holocaust memoir. While Pressman does offer some grisly views of life on the run during the Nazi Regime, she offers it through her own eyes. This point of view distances the story by a generation. What Pressman shows us is a glimpse at the lifelong after effects of having spent one’s life evading death at the hand of a Nazi and a look at the effect that life had on the successive generation – a generation who grew up in a “typical” suburban neighborhood living the “American dream,” but haunted by a war, a bigotry, an atrocity, that will never go away despite the 7 daughters, despite the number 7 representing the seal of God.

*****Rene Schwiesow is co-host of the wildly popular South Shore venue The Art of Words and serves on the committee for the newly inaugurated yearly Visual Inverse event at The Plymouth Center for the Arts – pairing art with poetry.

Track Wreckard 1-14 By Denis Sheehan

A BagelBards Book Review

“Track Wreckard 1-14”
By Denis Sheehan
Bone Print Press, No price listed

Reviewed 2/13/12 by Paul Steven Stone

“Track Wreckard 1-14” is the linearly told tale of two weeks in the life of the author, who set himself the literary task of recording 14 consecutive nights down at a local Pub in Rockland, Mass, which is on the South Shore of Boston, for all you snootie urban intellectuals who would swear Cape Cod lies just beyond the southernmost border of Boston.

But not to get distracted, as the author of Train Wreckard often does, since he is religiously recording the minutiae of his life as a barfly in a blue collar town where flies come in larger herds than writers and distractions are as frequent as attractive (or eligible) women moving across the landscape of the author’s blurry vision.

Aside from developing a drinking problem, or feeling like I did, reading the book did an excellent job of replicating the boredom and pointlessness of a life spent without challenges or significant interests. Often the most intriguing question of a chapter (evening?) would be which stranger Fate might send to occupy the next bar stool, or two stools down, with the constant gambler’s prayer that it be some gorgeous, unattached nymphomaniac who could give this book some spontaneous sexual gravitas.

To give you a feel for Sheehan’s approach and a flavor of his writing, here from the beginning of Vol. (chapter?) X is Sheehan reminding us of the rules of the game:

“Tonight’s Scenes from the Local.
Here we are again, at the end of a long drunken night out at the local fav. Another Track Wreckard, number 10 (ten). Unedited and unproofed for your uneasy reading and deciphering. The night is over except for this writing…”

Yes, it’s only a small part of the writer’s conceit, but he has chosen to shoot from the hip in telling his tales, never bothering to go back and proofread or edit his output, and rarely editing the flow of detritus that occupies his mind as a proud Rockland townie and barfly wannabe.

Would I recommend “Track Wreckard 1-14” to a friend? Not unless he was at the beginning stages of alcoholism and needed to see how things look halfway down the slide. I would however recommend reading half a dozen or so of the book’s volumes (chapters?) to anyone who might enjoy wiping the cigarette smoke and boozy film off this window on a world not often portrayed in all its fatigue and (did I already say?) pointlessness.

Of course, every once in a while Sheehan offers both a slice of life and corresponding insights, such as at the end of Vol. (chapter?) XIII…
“At some point, I failed to notice when, a couple came in and sat next to me, though separated by a pole. The man is your average looking dude, but the woman has something about her. She’s a bit older but has that “ouch” thing going for her. The woman is trying to be all over the guy, but he’s way too interested in his cell phone, Keno, and the Celtics game. As time passes, she goes from paying attention to him to paying attention to her hair. Men are fools. I know I certainly am…”

“Train Wreckard 1-14” makes no pretense about reaching beyond its grasp to present literature or a compelling narrative. Just 14 nights at the local Tap with all the usual suspects. If you want to read a book that’s proudly different and highly unpretentious, pull up a stool and grab a pint. You’ve got a drinking companion already waiting for you.

Ariel Freiberg: A Somerville Artist who wants you to inhabit her paintings

Ariel Freiberg: A Somerville Artist who wants you to inhabit her paintings

By Doug Holder

Ariel Freiberg is a 30 something artist who recently moved from across the river (I mean the Charles not our beloved Mystic)in Brookline, Mass. to the Paris of New England, Somerville, Mass. Freiberg said wanted to be closer to her space at the Vernon St. Studios. She reports that she really likes the vibe in our happening burg, and believes it is a good fit . The young artist told me amidst the din of a Saturday morning Bagel Bard meeting at the Au Bon Pain Cafe in Davis Square: " I feel part of the larger connective tissue of art-making disciplines that abound in the city." Freiberg finds that artists and art of all stripes inform her artwork, and I was pleased to hear literature is a component of it as well.

On her website Freiberg writes that her painting "...explores nature and literary based female-centric mythologies...Part of the process of my art is to invite the viewer into a visual and conceptual dialogue with the narrative of my personal experiences and observations."

She told me a recent piece dealt with the death of her grandmother who lived in Israel. The artist also explores themes like the seductions of beauty, the frenzy of consumption and copulation, and sexual fulfillment.

Freiberg, who says her influences are Italian artist Giovanni Tiepolo and Watteau, likes how their work( like her own), invites the viewer into the intimate space of the artwork through use of color and other techniques. She wants the viewer to inhabit the picture. She told me: " I want the person to be actually in the picture." I thought to myself that this reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode I saw where the person actually entered the picture in order to get away from the insistent press of the flesh of the everyday, and just fade away between the frames. A visceral experience!

And indeed Freiberg's work is visceral. Her mythical woman are all at once innocent and carnal, child-like, and womanly--all the contradictions that make them real.

Freiberg holds a number of gigs to pay the rent and keep her stomach full. She teaches at Bunker Hill Community College (as does yours truly), as well as other venues of higher education in the area. Freiberg has a show coming up at the Laconia Gallery in the South End of Boston, and she will be part of a show at the Arts Armory in Somerville March 2. For information go to her website http://arielfreiberg.com

From The Viewing Stand Poems by Madeline Tiger

From The Viewing Stand
Poems by Madeline Tiger
2011 Dos Madres Press Inc.
Loveland OH
Softbound, 24 pages, No Price
ISBN 978-1-933675-67-1


Review by Zvi A. Sesling


When I open a book of poetry and find favorable comments on the poets previous work by poets such as Alicia Ostriker, Toi Derricotte and Gerald Stern, I naturally expect to find enjoyable, even deep work by the author.

Ms. Tiger lives up to my expectations. Yes, she is an adult, but the poetry is yesterday, written as if she were still a young girl. She brings the past to the present, her childhood brought forth for the reader to understand as an adult. She told of her young girl’s life from the vantage point of adulthood. She brings the past into the reality of the present. You may find that was acceptable no longer is. Fantasies that one discovers in adult years were reality. The Holocaust, for example. A game seen later as potential child abuse or pedophilia? Dark family secrets…are they real or in the child/adult mind?

In Sunday Visit we learn:

Jovial Uncle Eph, that old man
gnarling toward the end of the garden,
gnashing. “Jovial” the grown-ups call him.
They’re having tea on the porch. Do they
see? Is this the game. Is he a gnome?


From The Viewing Stand, the title poem, presents another of familial memory:

I am four. Nobody told me
how to climb this marquee.
Scary heights, all those
empty benches. Sky far
out there and the trees,
I’m almost as high as
those leafy branches
Mommy and Daddy are far
down, they warned me
I must stay up here.
I don’t want to stay
or go. I only know
how far it is between us
and how hard he swings.
Sometimes he misses but
he keeps on
swinging…

What makes this book work so well is the strong, convincing voice that is both disturbing and compelling, that delivers to the reader a collection of poems of her private fears and, in the end, some modicum of hope.

Wild as in Familiar By Ellaraine Lockie

Wild as in Familiar

By Ellaraine Lockie

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

www.finishinglinepress.com

26 Pages

$12.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly

Wild as in Familiar treats nature’s assaults on man and man’s interventions into nature’s processes with a critical eye and an aggressive imagination. To fully appreciate these poems go immediately to page twenty-two and read Ellaraine Lockie’s tone -setting poem, Rebellion. The debilitating rupture of a disc causes the poet’s doctor to order,



Stay away from amusement park rides

Country roads and horses …



The cowgirl-poet spurns this sensible advice and mounts up, riding a middle-aged horse, which had been headed to a dog food factory. She identifies closely with this horse because of their mutual age and vulnerability. She offers that “we were related long before I adopted her.” She describes them in tandem moving



Toward the flames of sunset in front of us

Like sisters following the same trail

Our manes flying free in the prairie breeze.



In Earthworms in My Hand, the poet’s persona again intervenes in nature, rescuing earthworms from a Katrina-like deluge. She

Rescues in the scoop of one hand

The hollow of the other

Back aching and deadline waiting

These missions claim the entire morning.



She, however, is motivated to accomplish her good deeds by sad memories and intense longings:



They don’t see my father’s faraway gaze into grief



Or my want of a man like these elfin lovers

Who slither on their natural lubricants

Over palms and between fingers.



Another earthworm poem entitled, Walk with Earthworms, makes the case that nature is quite unsympathetic to suffering. In fact it is often malicious,



I’m as fragile this morning

As their flushed-vein colored flesh

Rain bruised without buffer

Of umbrella or outerwear

My body italicized

Bending into stings of sorrow



Zeus is having none of it

And claps his thunderous hands…



SAD is actually a pretty funny poem or rather the idea of it is pretty funny. It details a counterattack against the now recognized disease of seasonal affective disorder. An orange robe, a rhinestone brooch, hundreds of burning candles, a snow- white wall, Christmas lights, a blazing fire, and lemons sucked through a peppermint stick all do their part in combatting the dark mask of melancholy. The poet uses martial imagery and strikes a defiant pose,



You attack after two torrential weeks

This time you won’t find me

Wallowing in any river of resignation



This time my skin is steel.



In the poem, Evolution, the poet confronts the coldness of nature and accepts the callous actions of God’s creatures,



The need of a hawk to systematically pull feathers

From a sparrow before eating it alive

Or a kea to attach itself to the back

Of a sheep and hammer beak to kidneys



A deviant rabbit that eats her own young

The pyromaniac and pedophile…



Then,



I surrender to dichotomy

To the world and the obscure wisdom of its creator…



Two poems, which seem to be at odds with one another, are Drawing Breath and Fallout. In Drawing Breath medical science intervenes against nature by providing a contraption to fight sleep apnea. The poet points out the unnaturalness of this by having her persona read a Stephan King novel and by contemplating the three day life cycle of a crane fly. Fallout deals with a much more serious topic: abortion and the multi-generational scars it leaves. The metaphor the poet uses is the bud on a rose bush that confronts her. Unquestionably, anger rises here,



..nor the bite of thorns

Can protect that bud

From prenatal picking..



And,



A small sacrifice to the tiny worm

Still chewing on a leaf

And to a grandchild stolen

By pro-choice



Not for everyone, but intense, honest, and well written.

Staying with this difficult theme, the poem Wings Clipped asks the question, when is it proper to play God? The poet’s persona discusses the fate of a damaged Monarch butterfly with her grandson (yes she does have a grandchild),



Do we hammer him between the newspapers

I mercy killed a mouse last month



Now it gets tricky

Playing God…



The last two poems in the book deal with death, salvation, and homespun religion. They are lovely and uplifting. A Wretch like Me takes you to



An open casket with thick rope handles, pine

The dust to dust kind

With no metal, plastic or satin lining

Displayed under a Madonna tree that has lived

Longer than the woman in the coffin..



The Amazing Grace hymn played by a bagpipe is the backdrop. Lilac balm becomes the aroma of saving grace.

Saying Good-bye, the last poem in the book, identifies a light, which emblazons a madrona tree as the light of salvation. The poet notes that this light is from the natural world, not the interior of a church,



Not in sixty years of Sundays



A searchlight for lost souls

For the downtrodden, the sick, the guilty, the sad…



It is this light, which gives the coldness of the natural world a warm context. Lockie’s poems do likewise. She takes the terrible beauty of nature and touches it up, line by hurtful line, with human love. Amen.