Coyote Bush Poems from the Lost Coast By Peter Nash

Coyote Bush





Poems from the Lost Coast





By Peter Nash





Off The Grid Press





www.offthegridpress.net





69 Pages





$15.00



Review by Dennis Daly






The beauty of the natural world skulks around the edges of these poems, making inroads here and there. The impressive color photograph of a coyote bush on the cover, almost a montage of direct light and shadow, sets the ambivalent tone as mankind’s sensitivity confronts the indifference of nature.





The poem Sitting Under a Maple Tree portrays the poet’s persona resting under a tree, observing nature and its gorgeousness, and looking up at the sky for yet more inspiration (an upstairs, downstairs effect) . Seems almost perfect, but, alas there are a couple of problems. The poet demands food, warmth, and affection. All would be right he says if













…someone brought me





Bacon and eggs for supper,





Covered my shoulders with a blanket





From November to April





And kissed me good night













But even then he would be subject, like all living things, to the aging process—admittedly natural, but unpleasant for most of us. He says,













…I’d be





No great green tree





From whose branches white birds sing hosannas,





But an ancient horse





All hide and bone





Alone in a pasture





Feet splayed





Bowing to the earth.













In his poem Tracks, Nash lies down in the dry needle imprint left by a doe and her newborn. Is he communing with nature, becoming one with a pantheistic earth spirit? Well, sort of. At first the poet’s soul and the doe’s soul simply merge in a moment of apparent understanding. But there is more (again upstairs, downstairs). High over grounded nature,













…Orion





stands with his great bow by the River Eridanus.





Beside him the deerhounds





Tense at his sudden whistle,





Then rush down the star trails.













The killers from on high are also driven by natural instinct, lest the poet forget.





The affecting dedication of this book reads, “For Judy, who figures in some of these poems and all of my life.” It occurs to me that the beautiful, yet cruel context of nature only heightens human emotions such as love with tragedy and intensity. One good example of this is the poem entitled After You. The poet details the degradation of his household, the loss of pleasant detail and tasty cuisine. The meditation then turns internal. His thought patterns would change. The light would leave the sky. And finally the essence,













I’d gradually withdraw from the future.





There’d be nothing to look forward to—





No smell of rice pilaf and garlic,





No watching videos side by side,





Nor you breathing when I wake up.













In Judy’s Garden, Nash sees clearly the detail’s of his aging wife: her sore back, her dirty gloves, her baggy jeans, her gray hair. These are now inseparable from their shared life, their memories, and most importantly, his love for her:













“You look the same as ever,” I say.





She’s wearing her father’s felt fedora,





her gray hair in a neat bunch





covering the little hump above her shoulder blades





that doctor Dick said was osteoporosis.





“Yeah, right,” she calls out…













Maybe that’s a sarcastic “yeah, right,” or maybe it is an embarrassed “yeah, right,” but she knows for a moment anyway that he’s telling the truth. Love’s intensity cannot be hidden. It’s impossible.





Young love is expressive and sometimes explosive. Timeless love is more subtle and sometimes depends on subordinate clauses and gestures. The scene is the poet’s birthday party. He’s giving a speech and says,













At this age you can’t expect to run a mile,





I announce, looking at Judy,





and you’re damn lucky to hobble the distance





with someone who gives you a hand…













Later in bed:













she says she liked the part





about giving someone a hand,





then wiggles her toes against my feet—





our old signal…













The scene ends wonderfully with man’s unique or artificial nature resisting the pull of the natural order of things. In the poet’s words,













my bantam cock crows,





another old man yelling at the moon.













Nash expands his vision of man’s domesticity under siege with an extraordinary poem called The Garden. It begins with a description of wildness and beauty,













Once this was the flood plain of a river.





Bunch grass and wild oats fluttered in the silty soil





and poppies followed the sun with golden faces.













Then comes the tale of how this wild was made habitable for humans by art or, to be specific, his wife’s vision of her garden.













She put the garden in by herself,





mixed peat moss with fertilizer in the wheelbarrow





then eased dozens of roses





into the chocolate earth.





She planted the potted salvia,





wrinkled pea-like seeds of nasturtiums,





onions, carrot starts, the chunky eyes of potatoes,





three kinds of summer squash,





and dug iris bulbs in deep.













Once the earth has been defined by her art, the poet marvels at his wife’s closeness to and her understanding of nature,













She loves the feel of dirt between her palms,





the shovel against her boot,





the pull of the hose against her hip,





the heft of buckets dragging her shoulders.





Sometimes he sees her head bend close to the earth





inhaling the rough viney smell of green tomatoes.













There is an end of course. It may be tragic as man’s destiny will end as it began. Or maybe it is a marvel that it took place at all. The poem ends this way













In twenty years they’ll be gone,





the garden a few stalky rose bushes





poking up through the grass.





Plenty of time, he thinks,





for the ragged coyote bush,





the milk thistle,





to come back in.













And then, just possibly, somewhere in time, someone else will plant another garden and human love, so obvious in these poems, will flower again.

Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems Edited by Archie Burnett

 
Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems

Edited by Archie Burnett

Copyright 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Hardbound, 729 pages,  $40.00

ISBN 978-0-374-12696-4

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

You get a book of collected poems and think you have everything by that poet. But the new Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems edited by Archie Burnett is the penultimate book that every Larkin fan (and even those not totally familiar with his poetry) will want to have in his or her library. In fact, Burnett points out in his introduction the failures of previous editions of Larkin’s poetry. 

One thing about the British and certain academicians is their ability to dredge up every bit of minutiae on a given subject. And this is what makes Burnett’s Larkin collection complete.  Burnett has seemingly plumbed everything and anything extant on Larkin and crammed it into this volume.

Purists believe that publishing material an author chose not to publish is overstepping because he [Larkin] either had some reason not to publish them or felt they were not of sufficient merit to see in print. Yet, by choosing to do so Burnett has revealed a Larkin who is complete, that is to say, we gather new insights into a poet who ranks among England’s favorites both in his lifetime and after.

Burnett, however, does not stop merely with poems, he adds 339 pages of text notes that

trace nearly every source Larkin can be shown to have drawn on, and even, according to

a publicity piece, may have half-consciously drawn on.

Just published, this book is worth every cent, and includes poems from The North Ship, The Less Deceive, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Also included are other poems published in Larkin’s lifetime and poems not published in his lifetime as well as undated or approximately dated poems.  These are followed by commentary on the poems and appendices which include Larkin’s early collections of his poems, dates of compositions and finally an index of titles and first lines.

Burnett is co-director of the Editorial Institute and professor of English at Boston University.  And this marvelous undertaking will be hard for anyone to improve on and lovers of poetry owe him a grand thank you for this work.

Why is Larkin loved? He had an ability to put class in its place and academicians in theirs, witness the following:

Epigram on an Academic Marriage

You see that man? He has a month-old wife

He married from emotional cupidity,

Hoping she’d ‘put him into touch with Life’—

Now finds all she’s in touch with is stupidity.

Or this view of age:

Long Sight in Age

They say eyes clear with age,

As dew clarifies air

To sharpen evenings,

As if time put an edge

Round the lost shape of things

To show them there;

The many-levelled trees,

The long soft ties of grass

Wincing away, the gold

Wind-ridden vanes – all these,

They say, come back to focus

As we grow old

These are but two short poems in a book full of magnificent poetry, a number of them quite longer. And as you read them remember that he never married and was quite anti-social, according to some sources I have read.  Yet Larkin’s ability to touch cords is what will make you love this book as much as I do.  Very Highly Recommended.

_________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010) and Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 20110)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Rosie Rosenzweig: Creativity with passion and compassion.

Rosie Rosenzweig: Creativity with passion and compassion.

  By Doug Holder

  Rosie Rosenzweig is a woman who has studied the creative mind for years and has found that creativity is a meditative process that often leads to compassion. She is a Jewish woman with a ravenous appetite for all things Buddhist, and speaks with a rapid fire cadence about many subjects with intelligence and authority.

  Rosenzweig’s early poetry was anthologized in the first gender-friendly American Hebrew prayer book as well as in various feminist anthologies. As the founder of the Jewish Poetry Festival in Sudbury Massachusetts, she hosted outstanding luminaries like the former the poet laureate Robert Pinsky.  Her more current poetry is being collected in a work-in-progress.

Rosenzweig’s interpretations of Biblical women appear in Reading Between the Lines, All the Women Followed Her, and Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women. Her essays have appeared in Ethical Wills, Making the Jewish Journey from Mid-life through the Elder Years, and the Foreword. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la describes the Jewish Buddhist World of meditation.

Women’s Intergenerational issues have been a focus of her work and a recently completed a play, “Myths and Ms.” At Brandeis for almost a decade, she has been interviewing artists in various media and hosting a yearly panel at the Brandeis Rose Art Museum on the creative process in an effort to understand the psychological and spiritual state of consciousness present at the moment of creation. Defining how creativity can transform the artist, she has currently coined  a term called MotherArtTM.

I talked with Rosenzweig on my Somerville Community Access TV Show:   " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: Your early  poetry was anthologized in the first gender-friendly American Hebrew prayer book as well as in various feminist anthologies. Is there a need for a gender-friendly Hebrew prayer book?

Rosie Rosenzweig:  Who knows if God is a man?  Many women feel the feminine aspect of God has been underplayed. They feel that it is time for equal play. That particular prayer book was titled" Purify My Heart." I was written up in the Wall St. Journal, and other places. It is still being used years after it was released.

DH: Do you consider yourself a Jewish writer or a writer who is Jewish?

RR: Back in 1979 I characterized myself as a Jewish poet. I was publishing in Jewish journals, etc... Then my son, who became a Buddhist, took me to France, India and Nepal to meet his teachers. I started to consider Buddhism and wrote a lot about it and my experience with it.

DH: You have interviewed many artists and writers about their creative process  in an effort to understand the psychological and spiritual state of consciousness present at the moment of creation. You also believe that art has transformative power.

RR: I did a paper on this . It was with mothers and how they involved themselves in the mourning of their own mothers artistically: in films, installations, politically, etc... The Dali Lama says if you meditate compassion naturally arises. So one of my arguments is that creating is a form of meditation. When you meditate compassion arises--you let go of the story of your mother's grief and then the compassion comes into play.  For instance the artists I interviewed did creative work that helped the community in some way or a addressed a societal problem. One did a film on disability, one worked with the homeless, etc... And as you involve yourself in your creativity--you can't help but to be transformed in some way--like the women I studied.

Unguarded Crossing by Bob Brooks

Unguarded Crossing


Bob Brooks

Antrim House

www.antrimhousebooks.com

$17.00



Review by Rene Schwiesow



“Unguarded Crossing” is Brooks’ first full-length collection of poetry. However Brooks is no stranger to the written word or to publishing his work. From the nineties on, Brooks’ work has appeared in magazines such as “The Beloit Poetry Journal, “Mudfish Poetry,” “Poetry Northwest,” “Prairie Schooner,” and many others. He has also been published in three previous chapbooks: “Still in Here Someplace” by Pudding House Publications; “A Story Anyone Could Stick To” through Finishing Line Press; and “Three-season Views” also through Finishing Line Press.



Brooks began his post-Harvard life as an army translator, followed by a long-term career as an editor at a computer systems company before entering the writing/publishing arena. “Unguarded Crossing” has received praise from fellow poets, including Massachusetts born Susan Donnelly: “The poetry of Bob Brooks is both startling and inviting. . .”



After perusing Brooks’ Prologue poems and grinning over “One Reason,” a work that gives us an inkling as to why cats may not write poetry, I tumbled into section II, Closed Circle, to be met with one of my favorite sensory experiences, chocolate, in “Her Body Delectable.”



Like chocolate –

it’s so delicious,

I envy it.



My mind made the leap in those opening lines to Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric:” “This is the female form,/a divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot.” What else is chocolate if not divine? Brooks continues to play on the sensory later in the work with:



tongue to lips,



thinking, “These are her lips” or

“This is her tongue,”



and the delicious experience of licking chocolate from one’s lips like relishing the sweet taste of a lover brings a welcome sigh.



Brooks addresses many human themes. Taking leave of sexuality we also find love, conflict, loss and addiction. He deftly compares addiction to the apple Eve offered Adam in “What I Can’t.”





do is, I

can’t pick up

that first drink.



That’s it. Like

what God said

to Adam:

“Of every



tree may you

freely eat

but this one. . .



And loss in “For the Memorial:”



. . .pulling apart

till only their fingers

touch at the tips



to show the sky

empty, and the dark

boats.



There are many more wonderful poetic experiences in “Unguarded Crossing,” making this book well worth experiencing.



Rene Schwiesow co-hosts the popular South Shore poetry venue, The Art of Words in Plymouth and currently writes a monthly column on the arts, which appears in The Old Colony Memorial.

A Very Funny Fellow By Donald Lev

A Very Funny Fellow

By Donald Lev

NYQ Books

www.nyqbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-935520-55-9

108 Pages

$14.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Donald Lev’s poems herein belie the title of this book. There is a deep sadness, which permeates through these poems, and the wit and humor the poet commands make it worse. Even Lev’s cover portrait, painted in airy pastels, complete with an everyman’s baseball cap, only accentuate his pondering, animal-wary eyes and a mouth lost to grief.

The Titanic is a very funny poem indeed. Its humor, however, portrays poetry’s heart of darkness. The scene is utter chaos, the ship lists to one side, and the poet’s love has been swept overboard. The enthralled poet goes on to record,

The lifeboats have all been let loose

and the crew is maintaining order

by shooting the more panicked

among the remaining passengers.

so you see why I cannot write this just now;

till I have a chance to recollect it in tranquility.

Note that he cannot write right now, but he would if he could. Poetry doesn’t always go hand in hand with compassion I’ve noticed and apparently so has Lev.

The ogre in the poem Bowery, Circa 1950 knows something that we all know but keep well covered up. As the bartender pours him another generous glass of cheap port, the old monster rallies, growls, and the following scene ensues,

“There’ll never be another moment like this

moment,” he weeps. Nobody listens, so he

drains his glass and calls for another.

Carpe diem, I guess!

All Lev’s poems are presented in a down-to-earth conversational voice that seems self-assured and unwavering. In a short poem entitled A Window he makes a point of picturing himself this way,

A window you can’t see out of or into:

I sit before it like a cat,

Contemplating what?

There are other places, I suppose—

Other points of view.

But just this one holds my interest.

Well not quite conversational. The lines in this poem all begin with a capital letter accentuating the line and creating some sedentary tension here.

Lev describes a baseball game in Fair Ball pretty much the way most of us see it: a pleasant diversion, a controlled athletic and graceful game played under blue skies. But to Lev that’s the rub,

… crowds of onlookers drawn

from sweetest imagination.

As the third baseman scoops the ball up and

speeds it to its destination—

the peanuts in the air, the lager, the boiling franks—

where can I go with this?

Where indeed? Perfect afternoons do not lend themselves to poetry.

In The Civil War: A Documentary Lev laments the killing and brutality on the battlefield. But of course there is the fiddle music in the background. As Lev points out,

That string music

will get you every time.

And it does. Years ago I had my daughter, the violinist, play it over and over for me. Although I wasn’t consciously thinking of Chamberlain leading his Maine regiment down little round top in a bayonet charge, it was there in the background: the aesthetic or even the poetry of slaughter.

A simple observational poem, almost a throw away, entitled, The Smaller Television, becomes much deeper and, with a little twist, becomes one of Lev’s thumbnail masterpieces. Lions running down gazelles on the TV at the end of the bar begin the festivities. Other carnivores do their thing. George Washington makes a cameo. I remember Ole George was never shy about hanging deserters and spies. Then the punch line,

… evading nature and

skipping history,

my mind returned to its lair.

The poets mind, fitting right in to the context, returns to its lair, after a night of predatory wanderings. Who would have thought?

The poem, Gothic Tale, is just that: gothic. But not the language used. The words are easy going, filled with sunlight and blue skies—typical Lev. Then he hits you hard. Adults, apparently years later, return to the graves of their murdered parents and,

…a sour note sounded in the distance

from a soulless trumpeter.

And we began to weep like children

who were, after all, not to be punished.

The last line catches you off guard. What do you do with their sense of relief for escaping punishment. You know it rings true and so do I. As for the soulless trumpeter, well, the dead do not play very well on sunny days. That’s funny. And Lev is, after all, a very funny fellow.

Café Variations Presented by ArtsEmerson

Café Variations

Presented by ArtsEmerson

A co-production with Emerson Stage and SITI Company

The Cutler Majestic Theatre

219 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

April 13-April 22

Music and Lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin

Directed by Anne Bogart

www.ArtsEmerson.org

617-824-8400

Review by Amy R. Tighe

Have you ever wondered what music looks like?  You’ve seen movies with and without scores, and probably listened to concerts.   And you know how music makes you feel.  Triumphant when you hear Chariots of Fire, or beleaguered after any blues song BB ever sang.

But what does a note look like?  Or a chord? Or a well-played and precise bar performed by masters of joy?  Go see Café Variations.  You’ll see.  It’s like walking into a sheet of music that suddenly becomes alive and every note is a miniature Cupid personally inviting you to love again.  Or at least to have coffee while trying.

.

The pre-performance notices say the show is about the simple act of reaching out to another human in the environment of the café.  I thought of my years as a waitress at my local down and dirty coffee dive, long before the plugged-in, tuned-out generation haunting the Starbuck Factories today, and I was intrigued.  But the café presented here is from the 40’s, with a nightclub feeling during a fast-paced date night.  It starts with a waiter in classic Viennese café attire , who falls in love at first sight and still has to wait tables amongst the throngs of clients clamoring for coffee, cakes, romance and meaning. 

The performance is a collection of musical numbers, written by Ira and George Gershwin, several monologues and sparse, tight dialogue by Charles Mee and precise choreography by Barney O’Hanlon.  The ensemble cast is a mixture of troupes:   the professional SITI troupe from NYC, and newly graduating Emerson students.  Anne Bogart masterminded, nurtured and directed the collaboration between the students and professionals to create a superb and entertaining investigation into and celebration of love.

There isn’t really a plot. It’s more like watching a complicated romp at the café, where keeping score of the various couplings and re-couplings captivates you.  A group of customers  arrive in a cluster of pretty dresses topping vibrant petticoats, outlandish gloves, simple hats and shiny suits. They sit at tables, kiss, slap, or marry and move on.  Moments later, another line of customers arrive, the music changes, they sit, kiss, slap, or marry and move on.  The ensemble becomes a refrain, each performer a bright note and together they create a familiar melody you can’t wait to hear again and maybe you even want to hum along.  Constant motion, chronic mishaps, connection, introspection and accusations between loves all while the head waiter moves tables every few minutes to redesign the stage.   There is a gang war between men and women, moderate occasional cross dressing and a hilarious and explosive break up between two lovers who firmly hold you in the tender clutches of their coffee date.  Then the next refrain arrives, coupling and re-coupling, you see Desire’s tempo, and you step in, ready to accompany it now.

A live orchestra performs flawlessly behind a fountain that keeps changing colors.  For such simple staging, the effects are complex.  Moods shift as effortlessly as the next solo arriving on this jazz train. The music enfolds the actors into its story, and enlists the audience into finding their own. 

This collaboration between a world renowned established and professional troupe and Emerson’s own students just starting out their careers ends the second season of ArtsEmerson.  It’s a stunning example of how ArtsEmerson is bringing innovative, international and essential work within the reach of our local Boston world.  Live.  No You Tube and no instant replays.  Whether the performance takes place at the thoughtfully and attentively restored Paramount, or at the familiar, beloved, velvet worn Cutler Majestic, ArtsEmerson programming always offers  us a place at the table in the café of life where we can sit, sip and muse. Your table is waiting.

Memberships and tickets for next year are available now.

Ballroom – a love story Christine Klocek-Lim

Ballroom – a love story

Christine Klocek-Lim

Flutter Press

$6.50 on Lulu.com

Review by Rene Schwiesow

Klocek-Lim, the editor of Autumn Sky Poetry, an international poetry journal, wrote “Ballroom – a love story” during NaPoWriMo in 2011.  Taking on the task of writing a poem a day for Klocek-Lim produced a series of poems about the pain, challenge, commitment, weariness and bliss of dance lessons.  From Waltz to Cha-Cha she utilizes fresh phrases to show us images of the dances, the dancer, and the connection to a dance partner and the environment. 

If you have ever taken dance lessons you will find yourself either identifying with the way the poet relates to the lessons or surprised at the differing perspective from your own.  Either way, you will be opened up to seeing a panoramic view that includes the room, the ceiling, the lights, the people, the feet, the shuffling – however graceful or awkward the movement can be.

We swing into line of dance, the floor so smooth

I can almost see my face, a ghost blurred in the wax. . .

we hurtle around the room once, twice, then I catch

our teacher in the mirrors, her forehead surprised, wistful.

The room, itself, becomes part of the dance and voyeur all at the same time and Klocek-Lim tosses in gems such as:

The lights are on.

Dust bunnies gossiping

in corners.

And I’m certain I will remember that line the next time I notice dust bunnies in the corner of an unswept room. . .leave them alone. . .they are gossiping.

On occasion the reading left me wondering why dance; why put one’s self into a place where there is clearly pain and angst?

My mother finds me in the kitchen

with ice and bandages, foot propped. . .

My bruise looks like Argentina,

a forest of color.

Then Klocek-Lim deftly weaves in a beautiful image:

She says, now turn her again

and he unwraps me like a candied chocolate.

An exotic pear, un-netted.

She leaves us, as many women do, with the accoutrements of dance.

I fancy the pair with rhinestones.

Sweet black satin over a 2.5 inch heel.

Shoes.  Something most women can relate to, especially when pairing those shoes with a man dressed in a black shirt, tapered at the waist, and black pants.  A man who is bending his woman backward in a graceful arch, which ends with:

My shoes falling deliciously

off.

The book is about relationship and while there are times I question the jump of the mixed metaphor/images, Klocek-Lim has given us the opportunity to look at relationship through the push and pull of commitment to a medium that can allow the spirit to fly.

Rene Schwiesow is co-host of the popular South Shore poetry venue, The Art of Words.  In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she currently writes a monthly column on the arts for The Old Colony Memorial in Plymouth, MA.

Over Misty Plains By Alessio Zanelli

 

Over Misty Plains

By Alessio Zanelli

Indigo Dreams Publishing

www.indigodreams.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-907401-60-2

8.99 British Pounds

Review by Dennis Daly

These poems of Alessio Zanelli scream out for the twilight tonality and muted landscape of essential beauty. They soften life’s stark edges.  At the same time they chronicle the internal seasons of the human condition. The poet’s art connects these two visions on a planet filled with ghosts and shadows. The title poem Over Misty Plains serves as the touchstone. Mankind appears as a species of “tiny“ figures intent on their little deeds,  striving against all elemental odds. The poem introduces the situation with this question,

Whoever was this tiny man

who used to run against the wind,

through the fog,

In the rain,

on snow-covered paths,

towards the sun—

away from his own shadow?

Notice the seasonal themes of weather and shadow. Zanelli uses them throughout the book to both frame his visions and define them. The mist, through which man must struggle, lends beauty to his otherwise alien context.   AT Lucia’s, a poem set in Lombardy,

…The sky opens,

discloses the plain beauty of the Lombard campagna.

Boscageand lea are slowly unmisted in the distance,

toward the laggard sunset.

The air is just bracing,

not bleak or ungentle.

The distance here becomes clearer through the mist, though it is still misty. At the same time the sun is setting, hiding the clear outlines, softening. This in-between time births beauty. In a poem entitled Chasing Specters Out in the Sticks, the hunters race through the woods tracking down the wraiths of desire and perhaps life-force. The excitement of the hunt is everything. The conclusion hangs in the balance, but a truly insignificant balance. 

In the poem Getaway Zanelli comments on the aesthetics of our present environment. He describes an unlovely world, where

Mist and dew

no longer inhabit the dale

Plumes of smoke are the reeds

in the miry oxbows.

The poet then goes on to describe a “snow-hearted” boy, who

now has sand in the lungs

and mineral pitch in the ears.

The acrid smell

of irreparable loss

in the nostrils.

Lord of Winter ices the reader up in its metaphor. The poet’s creative spirit leaves its burrow to face “sharp- cheeked” reality. The frozen season preserves the future’s viability and potential. The awakened poet avers,

As long as your glow resides in my eyes

however dark it is, to be lord again

I just need skin as hard as bark,

a few fluttering snowflakes…

The poem, Snow Runner, is nothing less than a declaration of seasonal preference. The poem starts this way:

You know I like snow

The chilly breath of winter,

Icy roads and rimy trees,

The frosty countryside.

But this winter covering also covers danger. The poet cautions,

Only, if I’m not back by ten o’clock,

Please light a candle,

kneel and pray,

forgive me…

In Summer Fog, Zanelli again softens the piercing sunlight with a fog. Here the fog proves not only an aesthetic decoration, but a potent natural force inseminating the earth with a new generation of life. He exults,

Such phenomenal exhalation from the earth

Betrays the parental nature of the summer

To the dismal seasons to succeed.

Dreamskimmer is a poem about internal coldness and a realization which comes with age. It details the shell of a human being after his dreams slip away and his frantic attempt to recall those dreams. This is perhaps Zanelli’s saddest poem.

Love brings with it a dependency of sorts. In his poem Lost the poet shows how destructive that becomes. There is a nice play on the word “starlet” as the poet’s guiding star. But the end doesn’t bode well for the lover,

It’s gone

No device

no cognizance,

nobody can help.

I’ve been going awry ever since.

More ghosts in the poem The Rolling Soul and Mountain Ghost. Only now the ghosts are the chasers instead of the chase-ees. Those solitary untamed souls that dared the mountain heights are rolling toward the earth whence they came. The more vital fire carried by the soul, the more the ghost gets to eat. I think we are talking about the ravages of time here and the poem’s  image strikes me as honest, if unpleasant.

Knocker of Giants celebrates one of those carriers of fire, Sir Edmund Hillary. Apparently the poet believes a few grand souls can beat gravity at least for a time. Zanelli says,

We salute you

knocker of giants,

mindful of how small we are,

how greater than we thought your feat,

how grand your soul.

Near the end of this book there is a gem of rhyme and formality entitled A Universe’s Song. The poem takes you to a place of creation in deep space, where vibrating spheres communicate nothing and everything. Here’s a bit,

And yet all things there shift

Vibrating spheres of light

Explode and flash adrift

Till fading out of sight.

Don’t read Zanelli’s last poem titled Witnessing’s End last. It will haunt you into silence with its meditation on the end of cosmic awareness. It’s that good. Instead try Absolute Beauty in which the poet wonderfully negates physics and knowledge and praises the efficaciousness of imagination. The poet puts it this way,

In fact,

one of the three must be true:

there is no beauty in you;

or else—unreality is the most real of things;

or yet—all those geniuses of matter, space and time

are nothing but madcap visionaries.

I can live with that.

Performance of Berryman’s Dream Songs To Be Part of Grolier Benefit

Performance of Berryman’s Dream Songs
To Be Part of Grolier Benefit


An upcoming benefit for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square will include a performance of Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. The one-act, one-person play, adapted by Jim Vrabel, will be performed on Wednesday, May 16th, at 7 p.m. at the Oberon Theatre, 2 Arrow Street in Cambridge. The performance will be followed by a Poetry Open Mic, hosted by Harris Gardner of Tapestry of Voices.


John Berryman was one of America’s greatest poets and The Dream Songs is one of the masterpieces of American poetry. But its “wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, [and] extraordinary leaps of language and tone” can confound readers. Homage to Henry transforms the poems into a more accessible play and brings to the stage the unforgettable character of Henry, as he encounters wine and women; faculty meetings, fame, and family; old age and God. The play also presents Henry’s portraits of his fellow poets - “expression’s kings” like Frost, Stevens, Williams, Schwartz, and Plath. Poet Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer, calls Homage to Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel Beckett.”



Admission to the event is $15. All proceeds go to the Grolier, the oldest continuously operated poetry book shop in the United States. For tickets online: www.cluboberon.com. In advance: Grolier, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge. On the night of the show: Oberon Box Office beginning at 6 p.m. For more information, call the Grolier at 617-547-4648.

Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam: Selected and Translated by Christian Wiman

Stolen Air

Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam

Selected and Translated by Christian Wiman

Copyright 2012 by Christian Wiman

Ecco

Softbound, 81 pages,  $15.99

ISBN 978-0-06-209942-6

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Translations of poets, particularly Eastern European and even more particularly Russian poets are often difficult for any number of reasons: circumstances under which the poems were written, the difference in language and idioms and most often as we read in English translations of poets like Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam we are reading the translator’s version of what he or she thinks brings an accurate representation to us. I have read such complaints in the past about Rilke’s poetry and Neruda’s. Often I dismiss these complaints because I would have no access to the poet and the poems were they not translated by enterprising translators willing to take on such daunting tasks.

A number of years ago I purchased The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. (New York Review of Books, 1973). These renderings I often found sparse, harsh the way I imagined Mandelstam may have meant them. However, Brown in his introduction makes clear that Merwin has translated Mandelstam into Merwin in the same way Lowell and Nabokov translated Russian poets into Lowell and Nabokov.

So here I am with Wiman’s translation, Stolen Air, Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam accompanied by Ilya Kaminisky’s introduction, which by way of personal preference I find more interestingthorough.  For example, Kaminsky calls Mandelstam a lyric poet which Brown and Merwin clearly did not. Plus Kaminisky spends far more meaningful time on Mandelstam’s Jewish background. 

But all that has In the Merwin version, for example, the poem Black Earth begins thusly:

            Manured, blackened, worked to a fine tilth, combed

            like a stallion’s mane, stroked under wide air,

            all the loosened ridges cast up in a single choir,

            the damp crumbs of my earth and my freedom!

Wiman, however, first changes the poem from four line stanzas thus his opening lines read as follows:

            Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a rich tilth.     

            Everything air, star; everything earth.

            Like a choir acquiring one clean sound—brief ringing

                        kingdom—

            These wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.              

Clearly there is a difference, not only in style but in language, Wiman making, I believe, Mandelstam not only lyric, but more accessible to those who have either not read Mandelstam previously or have struggled with previous translations.

In another poem Wiman brings American sensibility of beauty to stark Russian language which, we must remember, was in its original written in the worst of times for many Russians.  Czarist Russia was not a happy play land, especially for Jewish poets, and Stalinist Russia was certainly not an improvement, and in fact for Mandelstam, his poetry proved to be his undoing, sent off to Siberia he died at the age of 47.

Here is one of my favorite versions by Wiman:

Bring me to the brink of mountains, mystic

Dread, rapture of fear I feel and …fail.

Still: the swallow slicing blue is beautiful.

Stil: the cloud-tugged bell tower’s frozen music.

There is in me a man alive, a man alone,

Who, heart-stopped above a deep abyss,

Can hear a snowball grow one snowflake less,

The clock-tick accretions of dust becoming stone.

No. I am not that man, not that sadness

With its precise ice, its exquisite rue.

The pain that sings in me does not sing, and is true.

O whirlwind, O real wind

In which the avalanche is happening,

All my soul is bells, which will not ring.

With Stolen Air Wiman brings a modern sensibility, a beauty of language previous editions of Mandelstam may not have attempted or succeeded in fulfilling. Yes,Wiman’s is a new Mandelstam, a revision of what has come before and a pace setting for what may come after.  Highly recommended.

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Zvi A. Sesling

Author, King of the Jungle and  Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7