Except For That by Rachel Goldstein

Copyright 2013 © by Rachel Goldstein

Cervena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

Softbound, 33 pages, $8

ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



From her bio on the back cover we learn that Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person’s hospital. At the age of two she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada where she completed her education.



I once sat on the Board of Trustees of the Zamir Chorale of Boston with Ms. Goldstein and never knew this information. However, I was impressed enough with her poetry to publish one of her poems in my online journal, Muddy River Poetry Review.



In this volume of poetry, which lives up to my high regard for work, Goldstein presents her parents’ story. Many of the poems, are sparse, direct and harsh. They reveal truths that some still deny, but cannot be denied when you read realities from survivors and their children. In House of Mercy we encounter the realism of dead children.



Children burn. We go on

without them – ashes, ashes.

The neighbors hack and sing:



Kill and clean

til your work

is done. Soon

the roaches

will be gone



A blue sky cobbles sorrow.

A boy tucks into a nun’s

old habit, keeps his heart

from freezing in the House

of Mercy. There is no mercy.



Certainly during World War II Jews under nazi rule knew no mercy. They died in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Treblinka and other camps. She also writes about places wiped out, people murdered.







First Cousins, Once Removed



Yankush, Leah, Salek! See them

dancing beside the river. Here

the flour mill was once enough

for them. The willow still stand

faithful in leafy gowns.

Do not throw off their green

voices, the circle of voices ringing

in Shreniava.* There is nothing

here. Everything they know is here.



*my grandparents’ summer gather

place for all the young cousins





In another poem she writes For an Extra Piece of Bread, a recurrent theme in Holocaust poetry because a slice of bread – or even a piece of a slice – was a very valuable commodity, sometimes even keeping someone alive for a day or two, or if lucky longer.



For an Extra Piece of Bread



The prisoners were asked to name

the twelve sons of Jacob. One man

tried and tried, was beaten to the ground.



The commandant’s wife came by.

All prisoners were ordered

to look away. My father did not.



He saw how she stood, legs apart,

ten little fox heads, open mouthed,

dead, smothering her breasts.





Some of these poems are before the war, some during and others post World War II yet each poem is poignant, piercing and a valuable contribution to the still growing oeuvre of Holocaust literature. I found this volume of poetry a superb addition to my collection of Jewish and Holocaust poetics. I think every reader will find this volume both accessible

and valuable to own.



____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

The Cranberry Island Series by Donald Wellman

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Donald Wellman’s The Cranberry Island Series was published by Dos Madres Press in December 2012. Like his Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009) , Wellman has written another book that sometimes offers a challenge to read and understand. That’s probably because Wellman is working with literal translations, or transliterations.

The Cranberry Island Series has essays that are not reads that you can simply sit down, turn the pages, and figure out what this author is writing about. To read The Cranberry Island Series is to have the book in one hand and a dictionary/thesaurus in the other. Or, more practically, you can utilize internet access.

                In this book, Wellman writes in a multitude of genres: essay, poetry, translation, autobiography, family history, and more. A most intriguing piece is “A Poetics of Transcription” in which Wellman discusses Charles Olson’s Maximus. Wellman writes, “I am seeking to go beyond projective verse and approach a practice that is more nearly my own…” In this essay, Wellman analyzes how Olson takes prose and puts it into poetry without changing any of the words. It’s called:

                …metaphrasis…,

                                     Weather

                                  comes generally

                                              under the

                                                                     metaphrast.]

…a process that occurs in moving from prose to verse as in the

many examples that are to be found in Maximus.

Wellman does nice work translating The Seafarer from Old English(ll 1-65a) into modern English. He writes in a lyrical, steadily moving style that is easy for the reader to read and comprehend. Perhaps this is because Wellman is being true to his writing style:

I want to speak the truth, to tell

about my travels and the hardships

which I have endured, the feelings

in my breast when I heard the keel

groan, terrible heaving of the sea

Nights I had to keep a close watch

clinging to the prow when the boat

plunged, seas breaking over ledges

Chains of ice, held me fast by the

legs, iron fetters of frost Sorrow

sighing hot in the heart like fire

I fought hunger and mind sea weary

from watchfulness. You who have it

all so easy on land don’t know how

poorly I fared on the cruel winter

sea, loneliness, longing for close

friends  Rime, icicles in my beard

Hail-scur flew  I heard naught but

hammering seas   Gannets sang to me

The ducks played games to amuse me….

Wellman’s poetry is clear, original and captures the reader’s attention, as seen in “Memorial Day”

No one  took my photo when I wore the uniform

In those days we did not wear it in the streets.

Instead we dressed like the kids back home

and sang, “Lay lady, lay across my big brass bed.”

Everything was bigger then and the smell of wax

and shoe polish mixed with acrid tobacco

and made us unhappy to be men at all

but I had a child, a golden tender boy for whom

the sparkle of a ring on a chain meant incandescent joy

and his mother nursed him in the forests of Oregon

where we lived for a time under a translucent tent

and fished in the Three Sisters with a Cherokee

named Joe. The blue glacial waters turned flesh

to ghost white radiance and the war continued.

The journey through the pages of The Cranberry Island Series is not a lazy one. It keeps your mind active, and the book is quite a memorable read.

Diverting Angels by Deborah Diemont

 

Diverting Angels

by Deborah Diemont

Copyright 2012 by Dos Madres Press inc.

Dos Madres Press

Loveland OH 45140

Softbound, 43 pages, no price

ISBN 978-1-933675-75-6

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

For those of us who live in New England Deborah Diemont seems a candidate to replace “Wrong Way Corrigan.” She spends winters in Syracuse NY, with its lake effect snow and summers in Mexico. So being bi-lingual, one would expect the poems in Diverting Angels to be in English and Spanish. However, it is all English, which is a benefit to many of us.

The books is one of sonnets, broken into different construction: 14 lines, the standard sonnet, 4-4-6, 4-4-4-2, 4-4-3-3 and of course 8-6.

These are fascinating poems telling stories about people places, things that keep you into each one through the fourteen lines. Take for example Housemate a bittersweet, humorous verse in which we learn that furniture and jealousy make a bad combination:

The walls loomed a metallic oyster gray.

The lamps, Tiffany roses upside-down

bloomed to themselves. Stray artifacts broke ground

in dusty corners where the baby played.

For less than half the rent – the room in back –

I shared the lap dance of another’s life,

cast iron rusted with soap, a hobbled bike,

a garden overgrown with Grickle-grass

Perhaps we’d be friends now if I hadn’t paired

my shaky antique chairs with missing screws

and her deco table, showing too much wear

before I stained with my mug. Nor stared,

discreetly, at her new boyfriend’s tattoo,

a butterfly that straws fermented air.

Ms. Diemont has intriguing titles such as A Modest Blindness, Mountain and Spine, Face Book, The Last Time I Read People, The Poet in Victoria’s Secret™, Photos in Newsweek. All the poems live up to my expectations. They provide insight into a poet whose views ultimately coordinate with life, all types of people and of course, the reader.

In Mountain and Spine

I like the mountain, I adore your spine,

the way you stand as if pulled by a string

toward the sky, palms turned out by your hips.

And how you steeple, arch, curve down to dive.

How emptiness exacts a transformation –

dog-to-cat, child-to-warrior, a tree

where right foot meets the left thigh easily.

Your toes dig in like roots, and your frustration

powers down, with knees and chest and chin

against the floor. I like best when you clasp

your hands in prayer, right at the end, akin

to someone who believes. Roll up your mat –

crave nicotine, pour coffee. We’re aligned,

my tree, my mountain. I adore your spine.

If find her poems compelling in that they don’t go where I expect them to go, like Grandmother, which begins one way and end another is typical of Diemont’s verse.

In To Dye Or Henna a whole lifetime passes in fourteen lines, an explanation of a woman’s thoughts and her history.

This is a book of poetry I savored and which I believe you will as well.

____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Earlier Lives: Poems By Sara Dailey

Dos Madres Press

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-933675-86-2

79 Pages



Review by Dennis Daly

Can writing poetry console? Can it deliver solace in the face of unbearable grief? Perhaps more to the point—can poetry do or accomplish anything that aids ordinary people in coping with the human condition? I think so. Apparently, so does Sara Dailey. Her book of poems, Earlier Lives, looks at anguish in an angular, near scientific way that includes sharp observations and a hygienic reductionism. Together Dailey’s collection of poems deals with the traumatic loss of her younger brother in a motorcycle accident, made more intense by her broken family history and the subsequent closeness of their sibling relationship. Throughout the book the poet studies the various facets of her overwhelming sorrow and that very act seems to engender a useful catharsis. Indeed, Dailey lords over her tempestuous territory with absolute control and the reader gets to see this commanding poet define a very difficult subject.



“Listen and I will fill your ears with truth,” says Dailey in her opening and introductory poem, Globe Artichoke. She lets her readers know that they are in for a rough, not a smooth experience. The tipped spikes and leathery scales need to be worked through and the density needs to be thinned out. The poet continues,



…What you desire of me, sparse

in proportion to what you will discard.



Ardishauk, ground thorn, artichoke:

Like a throat full of accordions

in a sommelier’s nightmare,

Come taste my heart.



Dailey’s persona, in the poem Dressing for Funerals, studies her every move, watches her dress appropriately for sorrow. She says,



But it is always sorrow

that moves you from speech.

In the mirror, your face, sepulcher,

practices humanity,

feels skin soft over bones,

the racketing click as jawbone clenches

and teeth tier into caged smile, mouth a cave

Aristotle would never see

his way out of.



Black linen slides over hips,

sways in rhythm with the body’s rocking,

how it shoulders sobs

like cliffs being crested by waves…



A Recognition of Being Left Behind is another poem which makes good use of a mirror. The poet sees her brother’s features in her own face and describes the phenomenon thusly,



When you became no more than my haunt,

ash bits boxed on the mantelpiece,

I sometimes felt the bathroom mirror



was my enemy, showing skin pale like

paper or oak brown eyes, a crooked smile

no longer shared



by anyone. You startle in my heart

like blood welling up, brother.

Who’s to know my secrets now?



The poem entitled Mary to All Her Painters insists the reader confront the reality of death (like the poet confronted her younger brother corpse). It’s never pretty when you’re caressing your dead son. In this case the material feel of the dead Redeemer is a carcass of meat or a formless octopus. Mary additionally admonishes her painters on the state of her being. She complains,



I’m never dirty in these paintings,

despite how far I might have walked,

and the flush you see is faith

not the red of too much weeping.



None of these paintings show

how the hard stones of ovaries

shrank to the dead pits of plums

or how I turned my face away.



In the title poem, An Earlier Life, Dailey’s persona relates her engagement with life before her brother’s death and after it. She once lived with risk and joy and lighthearted love. No more. The poet says,



…Not this life.



Here it isn’t like riding a bicycle.

You must relearn the falling,



the getting up after,

even the willingness to try.



And she does try. The Poet turns scientist and like Gregor Mendel she reads the microcosm of nature and sees her brother’s genes inside herself. She meditates on this in the poem, Gregor Mendel’s Peas on the Anniversary of my Brother’s Death. Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion, she comes up with an interesting question. Dailey asks,



When my blood at last spills,

or my body gives in to entropy

and finally rests, brother

will you still be there

in the strands of me, in DNA

like threads in the loom

of some cosmic weaver

leaving each breath

a silver shimmer?



Dailey composes a good number of Mendel poems for this collection. Her persona seems soothed by the sureness of scientific research that connects humans into families. Mendel becomes a surrogate for God. Not only does he breed animals, manage bees, and grow peas with desirable traits, but he offers a hope for coexistence between Daileyand her longed-for brother. The poet in her poem entitled Mendel, Age 27, Breeds Mice in His Room at the Abbey explains,



Because I wanted to believe in something with ease,

without doubt, your name was a prayer on my lips, words



sung into the air like a hymn. I was grown up far too young.

Unavailable mother. You know, the old story where child



sees parent as fallible, learns to trip lies off their tongue

because it is kinder than truth. I spent summers in the wild



overgrowth of weeds with skinned knees while she cried

behind a locked door we learned not to open. I created plaits



of clover and dandelions, found beauty by making it. When my brother died

years later I dreamt of your mice and plants, Mendel, wondered about traits



he would have passed on, the heritage of heredity…



In poem after poem the author portrays herself in as vestigial. Dailey expands on this concept in a poem entitled, That you are gone is but a fact. She says,



…like tailbones, a crude appendix

formed, structure without function, left behind.



Of loss, recall that even elephants grieve—

The need to touch the bones will make them pause,

Interpret, rage through huts like nettled wind.



As I read through this heartbreaking book of first rate artistry it occurred to me that the poems were working on yet another level. There is a tradition in Ireland and the Scottish highlands called keening. A group of professional mourners are contracted by the bereaved to formalize the grieving process. Each performer has a poetic purpose and together they lament and wail as a chorus. The effect of this sometimes disturbing performance can reduce the inconsolable to merely a singular sadness or even an acceptance.These poems do that. They are the keeners. They work magnificently for the reader. I hope they also deliver comfort tothis deserving poet.

Ed Hamilton: One of the last Chelsea Hotel Bohemians, and author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca

By Doug Holder

  It was the kind of winter day you may remember from your childhood, before things became so heated. Bone chilling winds whipped my face making my cheeks look like they were reddened from deep embarrassment.  On this morning I was to meet author Ed Hamilton at the Grey Dog Café in the Chelsea section of Manhattan to talk about the glory days of the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Hamilton, 53, a longtime resident of the hotel, and author of the book Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, had an interesting tale to tell about this bohemian flophouse.

  The Chelsea Hotel on 23^rd St. in the Chelsea section of Manhattan has a unique history. Built in 1883 it originally was a residential hotel that housed the stars of the theatrical world. But over the years it was also the home for an eclectic group of literary, visual and musical artists of all stripes. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas stayed at the hotel and was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village where he died from the result of drinking himself to death mostly at the famed White Horse Tavern ,near the environs of the Chelsea. William Burroughs reportedly wrote Naked Lunch at the Chelsea, and Kerouac is rumored to have had a fling with Gore Vidal in one of the rooms, and some believed he completed On the Road there. Arthur Miller hung his hat there in his pre and post Marilyn periods, as well as noted Punker and Poet Patti Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. (As recounted in Smith’s acclaimed memoir Just Kids). And of course Sid Vicious and Nancy met their infamous end in a gone-to-seed room in the Hotel.

  For many years the hotel was run benevolently (more or less) by Stanley Bard. Since 1957 Bard had made the Chelsea a welcoming refuge of sorts for young artists to make a go of it in the big city. He provided rooms at a reasonable rate for aspiring artists, and was often forgiving if they came up short with the rent. He sometimes took payment in the form of a painting or labor. But Bard was pushed out. Now with gentrification, condo conversion, astronomical real estate prices, the days of the Chelsea Hotel and others if its ilk are certainly numbered. With Bard’s removal the Chelsea is undergoing renovation and all the artwork that gave the building its unique flavor has vanished. Many of the permanent residents have been evicted. Hamilton told me a total of 58 have been forced out. Sixty residential apartments are left.  Hamilton said: “I was in court for five years, but I finally won the right to stay because I have a Rent Stabilized apartment.”  Indeed, Hamilton , who has been at the Chelsea since 1995, is the last of the breed who came to this hotel and lived the life of a bohemian writer, in a room lined with books, and a bathroom down the hall. He and his wife have lived outside “The broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs,” as Hemmingway once wrote.

  According to Hamilton the building was bought for 80 million dollars by a Moroccan family headed by real estate mogul Joseph Chetrit. Hamilton said:  “ It is a huge conglomerate that bought the Sears Tower in Chicago and other far flung interests…the Chelsea is only a mere speck of dust in the whole perspective of things.” It seems that many of the tenants who were not evicted were bought out for well below the market rate. Hamilton does not want sell, and certainly not for a price that will not allow him to stay in Manhattan. Hamilton said he tried to enlist famed punker and poet Patti Smith, the author the awarding-memoir set in the Chelsea  Just Kids,  but she ignored him. Finally she came out of the closet, but according to Hamilton, decidedly on the management’s side.  She agreed to do a concert for the tenants that was supposed to introduce them to the wonderful new world of the Chelsea Hotel  under Chetrit. Hamilton feels she was working for the management, in spite of the common knowledge of the evictions and the destruction of the interior of the hotel. When the tenants threatened a book burning, in addition to the media deluge spurred on from Hamilton’s Chelsea Hotel blog, Smith reneged.

  Hamilton and his girlfriend Debbie Martin came to the Chelsea after Hamilton’s stint at the University of Maryland, where Hamilton was teaching philosophy and working on his doctorate. But Hamilton did not really like the academic life. He was a product of the suburbs, and he was horrified to think he would wind up in a conventional lifestyle near some strip mall. Hamilton and Martin always knew about the Chelsea and its rich history, and they were determined to come to New York City to live there. According to Stanley Bard to gain entrance into the Chelsea was harder than getting into an Ivy League college, but the duo got in through a sublet. Since then, with the help of Martin, Hamilton started the Chelsea Hotel Blog, and penned the book Legends of the Chelsea Hotel….

  Hamilton made a point in his book to write not only about the famous folks who lived there but the unsung holy fools as well. Hamilton said: “The everyday folks who lived in the Chelsea brought this weird energy to the place. I think this contributed to the creativity of the Chelsea. I am sure some of the great works conceived here as well as the obscure were fired by the sparks in the atmosphere.” Hamilton told me that many artists, even after it was long apparent that they didn’t have the talent or luck to make it on a big scale, stayed on. Most folks after achieving some sort of success moved out. For the ones that stay it can be a negative experience… a reminder of what they are not.

  I asked Hamilton about some of the long term residents who are still pursuing their passion. One lady Bettina G. has been in the hotel for many decades. She is a visual artist, and a young artist who lived in the Chelsea, Sam Bennett, produced a documentary about her. According to a newspaper account she had her paintings stacked to the ceiling, and she was partially living in the hallway. Gerald Busby a current resident and a protégé of Virgil Thompson had early success (He wrote the film score for Robert Altman’s 3 Women), then went into obscurity and now has been rediscovered.

 Since I always have had an interest in the poet Charles Bukowski, I asked him if the Buk ever spent time at the Chelsea. Hamilton thought Bukowski spent one night or so there—and the poet mentioned the hotel in a poem and short story he wrote. Hamilton then went on to tell me that Harry Smith, the noted archivist, ethnomusicologist, experimental filmmaker, also known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, was a resident as well. He died at the Chelsea in 1993.

 I remember in the late 70’s when I came to Boston I lived in a number of rooming houses in Boston and Cambridge. One, the Irving Inn in Cambridge, advertised itself for Lean Pocket Transients. The other was on Newbury Street in the Back Bay of Boston. Many young people and not a few artists were able to get a reasonably priced room in the city to pursue their art or passion. When I came to the city there were a number of these places. Now they have seemed to have disappeared. Hamilton said this is true of New York as well. Rent Stabilization is vehemently opposed by the current city administration, and tenants can’t stand up to the moneyed interests they are in conflict with.

  Hamilton, continues to write fiction, his first love, and has had his work in online and print journals such as Penduline and Omphalos. Some of his fiction is loosely autobiographical and at times deals with is life growing up Catholic, and all the repressive baggage that comes with it. Although Hamilton’s Legends of the Chelsea continues to sell and sell well; he is having trouble finding an agent for his fiction.

  Hamilton has hopes for his fiction as well as for the last outpost of bohemia, the Chelsea Hotel. He thinks the chances that he and his partner will remain in the Chelsea are slim. But hope springs eternal…and he still holds a candle in the encroaching darkness. Hamilton is a creature of the city—he needs to breathe the asphalt, blink back at the blinking neon, and pursue that ephemeral light that the artist seeks. And the city, this Naked City—New York City, that has a million stories, is the one that will keep the pilot light of his creative life burning.

The Poetry Czars of The South Shore Visit Somerville

                             


By Doug Holder





Jack Scully is the co-founder with the late Mike Amado of two ongoing poetry venues in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Poetry: The Art of Words a monthly poetry series and The Poetry Showcase a yearly poetry reading held in conjunction with the Plymouth Guild for the Arts yearly juried art show. In 2012 Scully organized Visual Inverse a joint effort between poets' and visual artists at the Plymouth Center for the Arts.



Mike Amado published three books of poetry during his short time on this earth. Scully and poet Nancy Brady Cunningham have edited his fourth book. Scully, who currently serves as the literary executor of Mike’s work has read Mike's poetry as a feature reader at Greater Brockton Poetry and Arts Society, Boston National Poetry Month Festival, Main Street Café, Poetry in the Village, Stone Soup Poetry, Poets Pathway, Poetry at O'Sheas' and Salem Literary Festival 2010. He also serves as the unofficial photographer of numerous poetry venues.






Rene Schwiesow is the co-host for the South Shore Poetry venue The Art of Words. A Somerville Bagel Bard, her publishing credits include Muddy River Poetry Review, the Waterhouse Review, and Ibbetson Street Press. Rene’s work has been aired on the Talking Information Network, a non-profit service for the visually impaired. April, 2012, she was a guest on WGDH, Vermont, along with New York/Vermont poet Michael Palma. In recent news, her work, “Shades,” has been chosen as Poem of the Week by the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and will appear beginning January 25, 2013. Rene is a reviewer for Boston Area Small Press, writes a column for the arts in The Old Colony Memorial newspaper, Plymouth, MA, and is currently working on a third poetry manuscript slated for a 2014 publication date by Cervena Barva Press.



I had the pleasure to talk to these two on my Somerville Community Access Community TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.







Doug Holder: The late poet Mike Amado was special to you both. What was it about him that inspired you?



Renee Schwiesow: He was accepting of everyone. So he made it very comfortable to open up to and discuss things. He was inspired by his Native American and Portuguese background. I have always had an interest in many different cultures. So that inspired me.


Jack Scully: Mike was basically a builder. Mike’s great idea was to build a bridge between the South Shore area and the Boston area. Originally I got Mike involved with the Somerville literary group the Bagel Bards. I read about the group in a column by Ellen Steinbaum in The Boston Globe, and I asked Mike if he would be interested in attending. So I took him to a meeting. At that time the meetings took place at Finagle-A-Bagel in Harvard Square. As a result Mike had two of his books of poetry published by the Ibbetson Street Press and the Cervena Barva Press of Somerville.
\
At that time, back in 2004, there was really not much going on in the Plymouth area poetically speaking. They had open mics but that was basically for music. Mike was looking for a place to start something for poetry.



In April 2008 we had our first poetry reading. David Surrette was our featured reader. We had a small audience. Now we average 30 to 50 people. We have a great open mic. So Mike and I founded two ongoing poetry venues in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Poetry: The Art of Words a monthly poetry series and The Poetry Showcase a yearly poetry reading held in conjunction with the Plymouth Guild for the Arts yearly juried art show. Our mission was and is to basically to give poets a place to meet other poets, and a place for poets to read their work. We hope to come out with an anthology in a couple of years.

We also started a new program connected with the Plymouth Center for the Arts where we match poets and artists, and have a public reading.



DH: Renee you are a well-respected book reviewer. How do you attack a review?



RS: I thoroughly enjoy reviewing because it has given me an interesting viewpoint on poetry and fiction. I generally read a book cover to cover. And then I do research on the author and the book. I make sure I include a few excerpts. But I try to highlight the good points, and then delicately discuss the not too good things. It is a ballet of sorts—a delicate dance.



DH: Jack you are editing the late Mike Amado’s 4th book of poems.


JS: In October of 2008 Mike knew he was going to die of kidney failure. So he gathered all his poems and put them into what he called books. And so Nancy and I went to his computer and basically put the Book of Arrows together. The book is in three parts and deals with his childhood in Plymouth, the plight of the Native American, and poems he wrote 3 or 4 weeks before he died. He has several poems about the National Day of Mourning, a Native American holiday that takes place at Thanksgiving. He attended this event shortly before his death.


DH: Jack do you have any ambitions for your own poetry?



JS: I attempt to write poetry. I have dabbled. I have scribbled on pieces of paper in my drawer at home.



DH: Renee any young talents you have discovered on the South Shore?



RS: We have a 12 year old Alicia Reed. She has a lot of promise. But it has been to attract poets under 30, but we are trying

Even the Dead Are Growing Old Poems by Don Winter

Working Stiff Press

dansheridanwsp@yahoo.com

Niles, Michigan

25 Pages

Manufactured in the United States

Don Winter

 

Review by Dennis Daly

I hated these poems shortly before I liked them. They irritate. They grate. They steal your comfort. They screw you up from toe to head with their revelations of dark cruelty and bright cityscapes of emptiness. But pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle you get to see the down and dirty desperateness and shellacked heroism of an Urban Everyman’s life—maybe your own.

Cold Fact, the first poem in this collection, confronts you with the callousness of unfettered capitalism. The poet fearlessly states his case,

you can find in evil good

if you are good enough.

But where’s the good in

“Ideally you’d have every factory

you own on a barge, tow it to where

labor costs were the lowest.”? Still,

small towns withhold

their terminal truth, too afraid

or indolent or drugged to ask

who is fucking them,

I mean really…

The poem continues with a litany of families broken apart and individuals gone bad due to government supported decisions of greed glutted corporate bureaucrats.  I know something about this subject and I have seen those families in real time. I saw a work force of 16,000 decimated to less than 3000 employees with little transitional training of any value.   Their jobs moved to other countries on that “barge” Winter mentions. The human beings themselves seemed to just vaporize.

In the poem entitled Strip Bar: Hamtramck the poet details the initial excitement of moving into the environs of a strip joint with the dancing, the dangling money, the upturned faces, and the “goddamn of music” and bare skin. The denouement of this piece offers the other lonely side of the tale. Winter says,

When she finally got to me

I stuck a dollar bill

where my eyes had been.

Her face had the alert sleepiness

of a cat’s. She smiled

vacantly, moved on to the next dollar.

I drifted into the night air.

The lights on my rig pushed

the dark aside, moved me

towards the house, towards

no one waiting.

Sometimes the title of a poem summons a back story, which infuses the piece with extraordinary significance and meaning. My Grandfather was a Matewan Miner is one of those poems. Winter sets up the poem as a photograph: a bunch of coal miners posing for the camera. As they stiffly hold their breaths for the shutter we can see that they are dying from inside out. This was about the time of the so-called Matewan massacre in West Virginia—the back story. When the United Mine Workers tried to unionize these same workers, the miners were evicted from their company housing. The local sheriff Sid Hatfield with the town’s mayor and well-armed citizenry in tow faced off against the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency (a private army of company- hired gunmen). A shootout ensued and eleven people died including seven detectives and the mayor. Detectives later murdered the sheriff. Federal and state troops were called in to stop the violence and the union’s organizing. Here’s part of the poem,

Coal’s turned their faces

into dim candles. Their teeth gone at 30.

With each cough they still mine

the coal in the dark

of their lungs.

They stare down the future.

Dust will frame their dreams.

Nice touch at the end. Dust to dust—coal dust, that is.

The poem Visitation in which the poet’s persona laments his inability to visit his child hangs like a pall above this book. His sadness seems to etch itself into these pages. He says,

All night I keep arriving

in someone else’s childhood.

And once a year you send

a postcard of his happiness.

The poem As Time Goes By meditates on the innocence of the past and the reality that dreams once proffered. Winter shows us an aging piece of Americana, the drive-in theater on Route US 31. Then mulls over its memories and meanings. Winter describes a moment of innocence,

… kids from days

of tight pants & tight dreams, we stretched out

under the night sky,

looked for a sign from the stars

like a cosmic lottery.

Of course the title of the poem was the song of innocence banned in Rick’s bar in the movie Casablanca. In fact the song highlighted the cynical son-of-a-bitch that the Bogart character had seemingly become. The poet leads us in the same direction. Describing the present realty of truckers the poet continues,

men slump alone

in rigs & deeply smoke. Big assed, barrel-chested

cowboys who eat double-fisted, steer

with their knees…

But like in Casablanca memory has its moment of triumph. Winter says it this way,

…a few remain, hang on

memory, like those unknown connections

we used to credit to the stars…

The title poem Even the Dead are Growing Old tells a horrible tale of competition with a woman’s dead boyfriend, a boyfriend she loved beyond all logic. The poet mulls over his problem,

…I can see

by her eyes she won’t let him go.

I don’t tell her I knew the guy.

I worked misery whips in Washington

with him on the other end.

Woman he was screwing then

used Maybelline greens, foundation, grape lipstick—

nothing hid the welts, things he’d done to her.

Once she wrote FUCK YOU in empty beer cans

Across the lawn. Then he flicked his knife

Like a match before her eyes.

Okay, so these things need to be told. It pisses me off but I get it. I’m not sure I like Don Winter’s persona. Hell, I’m not sure I even like Don Winter.  But damn this poet can write. He’s a natural and I’m envious.