Eating Grief at 3AM by Doug Holder: A new release by Muddy River Books

I am thrilled to have this chapbook coming out from the new small press Muddy River Books. The first chapbook they put out was Pleasure Trout by Gloria Mindock--the founder of the Cervena Barva Press. 

Brightness Falls: Poems by Ellen Steinbaum

Brightness Falls, Poems by Ellen Steinbaum, CW Books, P.O. Box 541106, Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106, www.readcwbooks.com, 88 pages

Review by Barbara Bialick

Ellen Steinbaum, known in the Boston area as the former literary columnist for the Boston Globe, is now the author of her third collection of poetry, Brightness Falls.  Gail Mazur has written that this collection “maps the brave, risky journey from bereavement to the "stunned contentment of new love.”

“Last night his late wife/came to him in a dream/then slid away, kept/slipping out of reach/down foreign streets/while I slept beside him…” writes Steinbaum, whose own late husband “calls to me from time/to time, wants help/finding his cufflinks, keys.”

A big part of relationships is where you go together. Boston area readers would be intrigued by the poem “Shopping at Bread and Circus after/Hearing a Poet Read Poems about/her Trip to the Low Impact/Wilderness.” Steinbaum pens “we glide down aisles/smile beatific thoughts pure/our Saabs and Volvos parked outside/bumper-stickered ‘Free Tibet’/…shelf life is short here/infant eggplants artichokes zucchini/reaching their destinies fast/baby spinach ripped/from its mother earth…”

She takes us around New England, where in “Thursday, February, New England” “It has snowed more than seems possible…” and to Boston from Cambridge in the cover poem, “Brightness Falls” in which “the Red Line train/rises out of the tunnel just past/Kendall Square Station,/crosses the Longfellow Bridge,/sunlight glinting off the/Charles and the hammered gold/State House dome….”

The metaphorical atmosphere in “A Hundred Forevers” rounds out the end of the book, where the author is buying the desire to have love last “forever” when she purchases one hundred Forever stamps at the U.S. Post Office: “Can I exchange this and for/just two dollars more have/a hundred forevers./Forever—not, we know, a word/to be believed: a note held on/past breath, the Dennis beach/beyond the oyster beds where/sand blurs into fog, or the/unlikeliness of this—our stunned contentment that/has not, as yet, eroded into boredom, irritation, those sodden,/all-too-human stats that could/unspangle our small future. But/the enormity turns doubt aside: in this quantity,/no option but belief.”

Ellen Steinbaum, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. Besides her past post at the Boston Globe newspaper in Boston, Steinbaum writes a blog called Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe—at ellensteinbaum.com.  Her two previous collections are Afterwards and Container Gardening.  She also wrote a one-person play, CenterPiece.

Before Whose Glory, by Lawrence Kessenich

 

Before Whose Glory, by Lawrence Kessenich

FutureCycle Press, 2013

There is a lot to enjoy and admire in this collection of poems by Mr. Kessenich, who won the prestigious 2010 Stokestown Poetry prize. Rather than comparing it to another book of poetry, I find myself thinking of Don DeLillo’s 1998 novel Underworld, one of the most ambitious, momentous, and critically acclaimed works in the history of American fiction.

At only 81 pages (compared to Underworld’s 827), Before Whose Glory is naturally a more modest proposition. But it shares its predecessor’s ability to illuminate half a century of American experience by utilizing the viewpoints of multiple characters, in situations ranging from the historically pivotal to the curious to the seemingly inconsequential. Along the way, Kessenich manages to elicit a full range of appropriate emotions—delight, despair, awe, and more than one world-view changing epiphany.

The collection is presented in five sections: Permeable Borders, Even the Biggest Family, Paper Boy, Beauty on the Bus, and Blazing Heart. Along the way the reader learns about—among other things—Fatal Insomnia (a real disease), Henry Miller and ping-pong, what it might have been like to sleep with Jacqueline Kennedy, how the Atomic Bomb changed children’s and adults’ thinking on a visceral level, and the journey of a piano to the top of a mountain.

One of the great things about reading any of these poems is never saying to yourself, “I wonder what that was supposed to be about,” an all-too-common problem with much contemporary writing. Besides poetry, Mr. Kessenich has also published a number of essays, and had several plays produced; it comes as no surprise, then, that he can actually communicate.

If you’re a writer, you’ll probably find yourself shaking your head after reading some of these poems, asking “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s perfect, and it seems so obvious, now.” This, of course, is one of the marks of a great poem.

If you want to get a feel for the evolving, multi-faceted American experience since around 1950, get a copy of Underworld and Before Whose Glory. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

—Kirk Etherton, 2013

my poems won’t change the world selected poems by patrizia cavalli

 

my poems

won’t change

the world

selected poems

by patrizia cavalli

edited by gini alhadeff

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

New York NY

261 pages, hardbound, $30

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Patrizia Cavalli’s poems may not change the world but they may change how you look at life. In fact, she is quite direct about not changing the world as seen in:

Someone told me

of course my poems

won’t change the world.

I say yes of course

my poems

won’t change the world.

This simple poem that provides the title to the book sums up how Patrizia Cavalli felt in 1974 and how important it was to her that years later in this compilation of her work these six lines are the summation of a lifetime.

It is possible you have not previously heard of Ms. Cavalli previously. However, when poets with the formidable talents of Mark Strand, Jonathan Galassi (who translated the wonderful volume of Eugenio Montale), J.D. McClatchy and David Shapiro, among others, write translations of Ms. Cavalli, you begin to comprehend the level of respect she instills.

More importantly, as you absorb each page you will realize that she is a great poet, certainly as great as any female poet in the 20^th Century. 

I comb my hair

to unwind,

ready or not

here I am.

Behind the bottle

the cat’s whiskers,

I’ll send off those

references later.

I put on a hat,

look in the mirror,

I’m expecting a visit expecting

the doorbell to ring.

Those sleepy dark lovely eyes…

But no love-talk—

I can’t take it.

As for love, I just

want to make it.

She is telling us to relax, to make love without necessarily talking love, without the lies or plaudits or preliminaries.  There is no need to talk about it, just do it.  And perhaps many of us would be better off if we just did it without having to lie to someone or ourselves.

Cavalli repeats this simple philosophy later when she writes: We’re all going to hell in a while./But meanwhile/summer’s over./So come on now, to the couch!/The couch! The couch!

Here she is declaring her independence and freedom to make love with whomever and wherever she chooses. Again, there are no preliminaries no false words of seduction, just the straightforward let’s get to it.

                          

The fact is many of the poems in this book are about sex, love making with or without love.  Yes, there is anticipation. Yes, there is desire. Yes, there is conquering – or being conquered.  Yet despite the seeming coldness of it all, there is hotness of success of getting what one wants. 

There are also poems about life and how it is lived:

Isn’t it amazing that one evening

sliding the bread into its paper sack

I start all over with the same old speech,

reopen the repertory, raise the curtain

to find time standing still, not ever passing?

Nothing has passed, the past doesn’t exist,

born actors never do forget their parts.

Oh my,  I thought, how Cavalli has handed us our lives in seven simple deceptive lines to tell us it all comes back on itself and we know our roles in life and continue to play them:  husbands, wives, lovers, leaders, followers, whatever our role, a variation of Calvinist pre-destination.

There are many more short love poems, and longer stories of life and love, her encounters with the present and past colliding, always amorous, always with subtle humor, yet ever serious reflections of her life and warnings or guides for our own lives.

Thanks to the many shorter works in this volume and translations which give the impression that it is the author’s original work and not the translators attempt to co-opt, as well as Gini Alhadeff’s  excellent editing, one can read and re-read the poems and continuously enjoy a previously hidden (in the U.S.) treasure of poetry.

Sometimes Full of Daylight Poems by Owen Lewis

Sometimes Full of Daylight

Poems by Owen Lewis

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

editor@dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-933675-95-4

79 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Owen Lewis in his first book, Sometimes Full of Daylight, hammers his poems into place as life’s turbulence swirls about him. His clear-eyed, but always passionate, words glint with strange grief-ridden insight from that other-worldly and profound calmness he finds within the eye of his own personal storm. He rails against the gods of this imperfect world and the irrationality of their institutions. In short, like many of us, he tries to hold his family and loved ones together, anchoring them, keeping them from spinning away into the sparking sun and certain annihilation.

In the collection’s opening poem entitled The Walls Lewis hits a home run. With soaring language the poet personifies the exterior and interior barriers to the bone-crushing emotional tempests that assault us all. In a way the piece laments an innocence lost. Here’s a selection,

The wind is always at them, whistling

without melody, kind of eggs them on

into a sort of humming vibration.

And in storms—what howling!

I’ve noticed how it gets them agitated,

blows at them till their middle strut.

I like those storms when the walls

puff out. They get indignant.

Each time they never quite go back

aligned, like making a room

becomes odd for them…

The poem The Sea I Ride reminds one of the Wizard of Oz. Instead of Dorothy’s home flying through the tornado, the poet finds himself asea on splitting planks watching his home and family storm-tossed. The tone is almost of a frolic and thus very, very unsettling. The poem ends this way,

the splitting jamb,

my house goes by,

a hand of thanks

my surf-sped bride

must sing her tune

her lover’s swoon,

the family strewn.

The sea I ride.

My house goes by.

The interior rhyme in the last two lines gives the poem a matter-of-fact feel. But matter-of-fact it is not. Troubling and very well done!  

In the poem Philosophy the poet attributes his own ability to find the calm at the center of things to his father’s influence. His own strained relationship with his father creates some interesting irony. The poem begins with these lines,

He schooled me to say so what—

to disappointment and hurt.

To him it was philosophy, armor strapped

invisibly, a gift to a young son

from the soldier whose bad eyes

kept him from World War II.

Long car rides, errands for hardware,

the blue smoke of his cigarette stinging my eyes,

the dialed radio playing Benny Goodman,

each turn a rift of static, over-riding a child-

wailing clarinet, syllables of never spoken

conversations hushed in my mouth…

The poem Psalm comes across as a gut-wrenching prayer of helplessness. An estranged wife and her lover fill the poet’s persona with the concrete of despair. He is beyond reacting. Beyond hate. Only after-thoughts have meaning. And these after-thoughts become poetry. The poet says,

why are they pouring concrete into my mouth

and eyes? it hardens as you read these words.

wife helped lover mix the sand and lime.

I have become a body plank,

and they can do anything they want. what

you hear are after-thoughts that don’t stop.

Revisiting his childhood Lewis’ persona seems to seek strength in defiance. As he walks through holy Rood cemetery he breaks off a flower and swipes it. This petty action brings him back in time and seems almost a family tribute. He remembers a secret habit of absconding with such flowers. The poet explains,

… Portrait medallions

fixed to their tombs watched us,

even nodded to say—yes go ahead, our families

won’t be back this week, so bring them home to yours.

And until the month of the first blanket

frost, prime mums and dahlias, late hydrangeas

found their way to the Lenox vase

on the living room piano, a gathering

of defiance.

Bellagio, the book’s long centerpiece poem, celebrates life changes. New love triumphs over the scars of old love. However ambiguity still reigns. My favorite section is 9. Lewis invents an alternative homecoming for Odysseus. The results are riveting. Lewis describes the scene,

Returning to rubble,

charred beams. Vines

remove the chimney bricks

one by one. Ozone

hovers. Sparks

etched on smashed windows. Smashed eyes.

I’m here but you can’t see me.

Haven’t seen me for

twenty years.

Or ever. Blink

Go to sleep.

Stay asleep.

The poem continues by defining Odysseus’ longing for home as really a longing for one room of hand selected memories. And, oh by the way, his divorce decree is now three years old. Nice touch.

Life within the eye of the storm can, on a bad day, turn to claustrophobia. Lewis’ poem Van Gogh’s Goodbye is a case in point. The poet describes the painter’s last painting in breathless measures. He concludes with sharp, short phrasing,

Wheat burns with black clarity.

Smoke and clouds are moving shapes.

In silhouette minutes merge

and shadows meet,

Close in on the last of light

and suffocation’s blue.

His white eyes whirl in frenzy.

There are a number of very good poems in this impressive collection but the poem Because I Do Not Love You has to be Lewis master work. Its musicality and its wisdom stay with you. In spite of its title it is, of course, a love poem—a calm love poem. Here’s a bit of it,

I can look away

and not make you the sun

As love can make a sun of the moon

and stars of dark eyes—

how lost and confusing the cosmic map

when constellations

must be traced with held hands.

I do not make you the sun

and can see you

Lewis’ poems do not have the feel of a first book. They exude maturity and craftsmanship and leave the reader with high expectations of the poet’s next collection. 

Two Reviews of Pleasure Trout By Gloria Mindak/Mindock

Poet Gloria Mindock

Pleasure Trout

by Gloria Mindak/Mindock

Newton, Mass: Muddy River Books, 2013.

42 p., $7.00

Reviewed by David P. Miller

This chapbook is the first publication by Muddy River Books, a new venture by Zvi A. Sesling, who also publishes the online Muddy River Poetry Review (http://www.muddyriverpoetryreview.com/).

Gloria Mindak/Mindock, who gives these alternative forms of her name on the cover and title page (just one in her bio, though), author of three collections of poetry, is widely known as founding editor of the prolific Červená Barva Press (http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/). Pleasure Trout is the first collection of her mistranslations, an approach to writing she has practiced for some thirty years. She begins with poems in languages she does not know, primarily Romanian, Serbian, Italian, and Spanish. Writing quickly, she produces English-language poems based on what the words remind her of or what the originals suggest (affective gestalts, perhaps). The original source poems aren’t specified. Although it would be interesting for comparison to know about the sources, it really isn’t necessary because these are not, after all, attempts at translation, rendering, or even “adaptation.” From one point of view, there isn’t any actual pre-existing version of “Clamour mouth! / The procedure is easy / Tank this weekend!” (“Clamour Mouth”) or “Spill it in Vegas honey / This girl is not bleak / Just because big bomb buicks / race on your body” (“Punitive Operations”).

Reading Pleasure Trout (a phrase not found in the poems, so maybe it’s a mistranslation of the title of some other book), I was reminded of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a card deck presenting over a hundred “worthwhile dilemmas” as aids to kickstart a creative process. I wondered, if Mindak/Mindock (maybe “Mind[a/oc]k”? let’s call her Gloria!) had consulted Oblique Strategies, what might she have turned up? Perhaps the card with a dilemma contributed by Stewart Brand: Try faking it! - given, of course, as non-perjorative. In any case, mistranslation is a method by which the poet leads herself willingly astray, exposing from the misled mind titles such as “Vienna Animal,” “Parched Hands,” and “Sensitive Cottages,” and stanzas like these:

What will happen if I

stretched my wooden walls to their

greatest urge?

Hungry for skin, your

threads are unusual, they

perform on my deep wound. (“Slices”)

or -

What did I do?

I jumped the roof

I fell into your typical face

Born without a name that wasn’t mine,

I move in a life that is yours (“Resurrected Armpits”)

The self-distracting process of mistranslation allows for a surrealism that wears lightly and is easy to appreciate. As she cautions at the start, "Don’t try to understand what is written here. Just enjoy the nonsense.” So – very well then – we’re not required to decipher:

I have cried so much that the tears

have fallen and formed paths

What good is it since I’m not

a mapmaker? (“Mind”)

But hold on: this passage, with its allusion to an unchartable grief, is difficult to try not to understand. Which brings us to another Oblique Strategies card: Honour thy error as a hidden intention.  The original, to our poet incomprehensible, poems seem to have been templates allowing the composition of, in fact, work in her own voice. The reader is initially distracted from this as well: opening the chapbook with the intention of sliding across surfaces of language like “The table in the square/ has gorillas for crucibles” (“Wings”), before realizing it you’re caught short by the unrelenting need behind:

What a combination!

The worse it is, the more the flow

Battle after battle, season after season,

I grow up with stones

Each year my voice feeds on knives

mad for someone to listen (“Feeding”)

or a hint of shocked self-reflection in:

The camera captures

my duty

full of satisfaction

It’s worse than I thought (“Not to Be Broken”)

Out of respect for Gloria’s insistence that these poems are vehicles for enjoyment, not objects of interpretation, I’ll leave it there. Except to note that, after an immersion in Pleasure Trout, it takes a bit of an act of will to read other poets without responding as if their writings, too, are non sequiturs at the surface level. That impression will fade, of course. You’ll re-enter Tennyson or Cisneros, Cornish or Hirshfield, whoever else you’re reading, on their own terms, apart from “Save your / local elegies / fierce cuts / What comes next / The fresh air is exhausted” (“Wrong Hand”). It’s just that a readjustment is called for.

 **********************************************************************************

 

Pleasure Trout

Gloria Mindock

Copyright © 2013 by Gloria Mindock

Muddy River Books

Brookline MA

Softbound, 42 pages, $7.00

Review by Irene Koronas

“I'm a strange woman-

You can see this from my scratched heart”

Pleasure Trout presents the fanciful seriousness poetry

often offers in an age of crisis. Mindock knows how to

place words in verse. Each poem adds humor and seriousness

just as surrealism and the Dadaist did:

“Chances are I'm slender and

love great atoms and marble

men anointed with

a diaphragm that mixes

itself with bronze...”

Her verse is fanciful and dramatic. After several readings

we come to understand the author’s approach to poetry.

How ridiculous some experiences are. How splendor

is an artificial sweetener as well as a poetic word. I'm

reminded of the Dadaist writers, especially Hans Arp,

who was both a painter and a poet, often the two were done

simultaneously. Deconstructing experiences and constructing

from the threat of war. The constant threat of war led the Dada

writers and actors to proclaim and appear to be foolish

'banterers', dancing to their stress related environment,

stepping into the sublime instead of relating to the actual

threats and actual strife of living during war times:

“Every hour a new one elected

Still no word

A look, a suffering, a love

to keep outsiders out

as light bulbs trace

this guard of personal

handling-

this possessiveness...

Sometimes we all sit in a

circle

hovering in a cave

This trespasser must be

sought!

Every second the crying of

a wolf emerges inside one of us”

I'm inspired and I'm blown away by the profound agony

in the poems. How miss-translations can lend credence

to our time and to the times past. Gloria's sentences do

not end with a period. Each sentence starts with capitalization.

Some of her verse uses ! exclamation to end the sentence

and an occasional question mark emphasizes the importance

the verse exclaims, how important word juxtaposition implies 

meaning or the lack of meaning which also insinuates through

the lack of meaning the deconstruction of meaning. An endless

repetition of meanings:

“Unless you know me, you don't”

Pleasure Trout is the best experimental writing done in this

century, (in my humble opinion.) If that doesn't get you to

run to read, then, “It is pointless/So gruesome/ Is this

urban life?”

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Ghost Dance In Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray by Peter Wortsman

 Author Peter Wortsman

Ghost Dance In Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray by Peter Wortsman ( Solas House, Inc. 2013)  $16.95

Review by Doug Holder


I admit I am not a well-traveled individual like my friend the noted critic, Dennis Daly. Nor do I harbor a great interest in Germany. Being a Jew , and with Holocaust survivors in my family, my images of Germany have been of grainy documentary footage, with skeletal corpses heaped together outside a concentration camp--never again--I have said to myself--for more than one reason. But Peter Wortsman's memoir: Ghost Dance in Berlin.... A Rhapsody in Gray  caught my interest--not only because it was recommended to me by a writer I greatly admire--Alan Kaufman ( Drunken Angel and Outlaw Bible of American Literature) but because Wortsman brings the gimlet eye of a seasoned traveler, and the sensibility of a poet to his prose. 


Wortsman, who is a 60 something academic and accomplished writer, is an American born son of German speaking Jewish immigrants. The author spent time in a villa overlooking Berlin's largest lake. The spot became his sort of elegant cave--where he collected his thoughts, savored the rich German fare, and let his considerable imagination take flight.


There are many bases that Wortsman covers in this book. Being a lover of all things food, I found Wortsman lyrical description of cuisine mouth watering.  And yes between you and me, I savor shellfish, and a good pork loin like any of my Gentile brothers would. Here Wortsman describes the best and the worst of wurst and is a fly in the soup of any self-respecting veggie out there:


 " No foodstuff better exemplifies the German craving and the Jewish proscription for me than that quintessential Berlin dish, a veritable mountain of pork, comprising the joint between the tibia/fibula and the metatarsals, the tender, fragrant, fat and fleshy part of the trotter joining knee and hip, or elbow joint and foot. Classic Berlin...pub fare, it's pinked, cured, poached, or boiled, and served piping hot with split pea puree and sauerkraut...


A positively Neanderthal spectacle on a plate.It's a dish that stirs up mixed emotions when ordered... Utter disgust on the part of avowed vegetarians, for whom it constitutes a blatant, in-your-face affront, the very incarnation of meat...And awe on the part of repressed, cholesterol-conscious carnivores, who themselves would not dare to go to such extremes in public to satisfy their lust, secretly considering it a pornographic craving  best indulged in private."


Wortsman writes eloquently about Berlin's Alexanderplatz, a famed plaza, and also touches on Marlene Dietrich , that icon of enigmatic come hither and get lost! feminity. Here he writes about Maximillian Schell, who produced a documentary about her.  Dietrich's one condition for filming was that she didn't want to show her face: Wortsman writes:


 " ... Marlene neglected to inform him, until he showed up with the camera crew, that he was free to film everything but her face. She, the original blond bombshell, would remain unseen, a disembodied voice, a teasing absence. But her smoky impression still filled the silver screen, her cigarette smoke grunt and growl made the movie more memorable than any other Hollywood biopic before or since."


But of course the ghost of the Nazis are never far behind. Wortsman, ever the engaged reporter, gives a good New Journalism account about some Neo-Nazis who were stirring up trouble, but were quickly squelched by the Berlin police.


This book can be read for two things: a travelogue, and the other an artful meditation on what it means to be German, Jewish, an American, and an artist.

Highly Recommended.