The Hotel Oneira by August Kleinzahler

 

The Hotel Oneira
August Kleinzahler

Farrar Strauss Giroux

New York, NY

© Copyright 2013 by August Kleinzahler

Hardbound, $24, 89 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

What makes a poet memorable to me is the ability to make me sit up and feel a wow moment, an idea, a poetic line or a usage of words that says to me this poet is unique.

August Kleinzahler is that kind of poet.  In three previous poetry volumes of his that I have read I have had those moments when I get excited about what I am reading.

In his latest book Kleinzahler produces many wow moments for me.  Take for example

A History of Western Music: Chapter 63:

They follow you around the store, these power ballads,

you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs,

cookies, 90 fl. oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid,

buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind.

You stand, almost hypnotized, as the rosticceria counter

staring at the braised lamb shanks, the patterns

those tiny, coagulated rivulets of fat make,

both knees about to go out from under you.

So many images in the supermarket.  We have all experienced these moments, though I must admit I have never spent much time looking at coagulated rivulets of fat, though I have been buffeted sideways like a punishing wind.   This has been particularly true in a Whole Foods where they seem to push the carts the way they drive their cars—blindly and with abandon.  

                                                               .

Then there is this scene from Hollyhocks In The Fog in which a reader who has spent time at a seaside shore might relate:

Every evening smoke blows in from the sea, sea smoke, ghost vapor

of lost frigates, sunken destroyers

It hangs over the eucalyptus grove,

cancels the hills,

curls around garbage outside the lesbian bar.

Kleinzahler is a favorite because not only do the images come with super glue so they stick in your mind and warp your senses, but because the poems themselves are written to make you reread and thoroughly enjoy them.

And there are the memorable lines like: my name is on everyone’s lips:/-August, they say,/with resignation and dismay, pulling up their collars against the wind. 

Or:  Two turkey vultures, wings unfurled like spinnakers,/dry and groom themselves,

Hotel Oneira is out this week by the author of nine books of poetry, winner of the  2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Sleeping It Off In Rapid City.

There is much to discover in Kleinzahler’s poetry: individual lines, couplets and whole poems.   It is highly recommended.

_________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7& 8

Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut by Alice Plouchard Stelzer

Title:                     Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut

Author:                                Alice Plouchard Stelzer

Publisher:           Merrimack Media

ISBN:                     978-1-939166-21-0

Cover:                   Paperback

Pages:                   161

Price:                    $14.95

Reviewer:           Pam Rosenblatt

While some people may disagree, people’s lives make good readings – no matter how mundane a person’s life may seem. Take the pauper “Oliver” in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist or the rambunctious “Huckleberry Finn” in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the unstable “Willy Loman” in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  Each of these characters led rather insignificant lives, but the authors make remarkable, memorable stories from them. These writers seem to suggest that everyone has a story, no matter how insignificant that person’s life may appear to a lot of people.

                Alice Plouchard Stelzer seems to agree! In Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut, a 161 page non-fiction paperback published by Merrimack Media, 2013, Stelzer shows how important people are not just to themselves, not just to their families, not just to their friends, but to history as well.

Stelzer has written about a subject little researched and written about before: the women behind the men who emigrated from England to New England, mainly Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Often essential facts about colonizing women are not available or only minutely available. But Stelzer has gathered enough information about the lives of twelve women who assisted in colonizing New England to make an interesting, amazing read. 

Stelzer mentions how the colonizing woman had to do to with establishing New England’s towns. These resilient women tended to chores like cooking, gardening, sewing and mending clothes, and “have had a large part in the struggle with the wolves, bears, Indians, hardships and disappointments of New England,” as noted in Rev. George L. Clark’s 1906 address, Unremembered.[1]

 “Discussing men’s departures for war, Clark asks: …who were more dauntless than the mothers, wives and sisters, who with sad hearts, yet brave faces, spun the yarn, wove the cloth and made their butternut coat; filled the knapsack and with a kiss and a trembling, a thrilling word sent those men of nerve on their way of duty and death.”

In the past, women were only slightly recognized as vital figures in the history of the United States. But their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, or sons have been acknowledged in the history logs much more regularly. But they all made a durable mark in colonial society, according to Stelzer.

Woman who were once alive and have impacted early American history are documented in a clever, readable way throughout the book. Their families are written about, too. Stelzer has made an attempt not to acknowledge all of the people who have touched these women’s lives significantly; she even includes genealogical data.

Three women are discussed below. Each woman shows how Stelzer makes even the most unassuming woman adventurer important:

Margaret Barret Huntington (Her husband died at sea from England to New England):

“As the ship Elizabeth Bonaventure approached the Boston harbor, what must Margaret Huntington have been feeling? It was the end of a terrible ocean journey for her. The ocean passage created an unbelievable challenge for the emigrants. Margaret and her family would have been on the ship for probably six weeks with poor sanitation, the smell of seasickness everywhere, and no water for washing herself or clothes. But the end of the journey, there would have been no firewood for cooking and most of the food would have spoiled. Then there were the storms that tossed the ships around, wave to wave. Disease preyed on the weak travelers. Serious illness spread fast in the cramped quarters and smallpox stalked this voyage.

                In fact, Margaret’s husband, Simon Huntington succumbed to smallpox before the ship arrived in Boston. It is likely, from what we know about Puritan beliefs, that Margaret spent the time during Simon’s illness and death praying fervently to God for Simon’s soul and for the salvation of her children and the other passengers. All would have been in prayer as they committed Simon’s body to the ocean.”

How difficult the move to Windsor, also known as Roxbury, Massachusetts, must have been for Huntington, as Stelzer writes:

“Many questions remain unanswered because almost none of these women could write. What would Margaret’s life have been like in Roxbury? She was stranded there with four little children. It is plausible that Simon had a sizeable investment into the Massachusetts Bay Colony before coming. Since no researchers have been able to find a will, Simon probably died intestate, which would guarantee Margaret her one-third dower of Simon’s estate, but what exactly was the estate? Later the children were given land grants, but was there cash available for her to live? Margaret’s rather wealthy family may have brought servants with t hem, but none show up on the Bonaventure passenger list—like many of the passenger lists, this remains incomplete.”

Like Hester Sherman Ward, (an informant on a witchcraft controversy):

Here is some background to Ward:

“Hester married Andrew Ward in 1627 in England. Some sources say she was married in February 1619 but that would have meant she married at the age of thirteen, which would not have been a common practice in the wealthy Puritan family from which she came. The 1627 date is more likely correct. According to Roger Thompson’s Mobility & Migration, the emigrants leaving England for Massachusetts traveled in companies. All the citizens of one area would plan to leave at the same time. This was when an extended family would gather and make plans to migrate. Hester and Andrew, her father, Edmund Sherman and Stepmother Judith Angier Sherman, along with many of Hester and Andrew’s siblings, came to New England in 1632 on the ship James. Having so much family traveling with her would have been comforting to Hester, as some migrating women left their extended family behind. Hester was married for four years when it came time to emigrate to Watertown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hester and Andrew had two children, the youngest only a year old, and possibly a stepson, Edmund.”

A few witchcraft controversies arise in the book. The below incident shows how important the opinions of women, especially Ward, were in colonial New England:

“Goodwife Knapp was not the usual suspect of the superstitious search for witches. She had a good reputation and did not get involved in arguments with her neighbors. On the other hand, Mary Staples, according to Taylor was a

               

Shrewd and shrewish woman, impatient of some of the

Puritan social standards and of the laws of everyday life.

She openly condemned certain common moralities, was

reckless in criticism of her neighbors, and quarreled with

Ludlow about some church matters.

During Knapp’s trial, Roger Ludlow, who was a very influential man throughout New England, tried to get Goodwife Knapp to name Mary Staples as a witch but she refused. Before then, Ludlow had had several arguments with Goodwife Staples because he thought she was a liar….”

And here is what Ward accused Mary Staples of:

Hester Ward, wife of Andrew Ward, being sworne

deposeth, that aboute a day after that goodwife Knapp

was condemned for a witch, she goeing to ye prison house

where the said Knapp was kept, she said Knapp, voluntarily,

without any occasion giuen her, said that goodwife Staples

told her, the said Knapp, that an Indian brought vnto her,

the said Staplyes, two little things brighter then the light

of the day, and told the said goodwife Staplyes they were

Indian gods, as the Indian called ym; and the Indian told

her, the said Staplyes, if she would keepe them, she would

be so big rich, all one god, and that the said Staplyes told

the said Knapp, she gaue them again to the said Indian,

but she could not tell whether she did so.

And Mary Blott Woodford, (a possible “maide servant” who had left England for New England), can be read about in well-written, clear sentences.

Here is the chapter’s opening paragraph:

“Researching seventeenth century women is difficult in all cases, but servant women are especially challenging because they leave no footprint behind. By following the men to whom the women had connections, I develop suppositions on the movements of the women. Mary Blott Woodford is such a case.

                Both Mary and her future husband, Thomas Woodford, migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the ship Francis and Mary as servants. It is probable that they met on the ship because it was the rule and norm that servants would only socialize with other servants. It is not likely they knew each other before their voyage because Mary lived Bedfordshire, England and Thomas from Lincolnshire. These towns are one hundred miles apart.”

                Woodford lead a simple but hectic home life, as Stelzer writes, “While in Hartford, Mary was busy with her family, gardens, and the myriad duties of a seventeenth-century wife and mother. She also had two more daughters.”

                And there were additional hardships for Mary, too, including several moves to different places in New England:

                “Just think about how many times Mary had to pack up her life belongings and move into another wilderness. She went from Bedfordshire, England to Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Springfield, Massachusetts, to Harford, Connect. She would need to create new gardens and set up a new home,  which was a challenge in these wilderness towns. At Roxbury, Agawam and Northampton. It would have meant loving in some crude shelter until the lots had been assigned and their house built.”

Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut has much intrigue, even though it is a scholarly book. The excitement of colonization, genealogy, love, marriage, death, witchcraft controversies, crime and punishment, the supernatural , etc. in well-researched, not- too-long chapters are all topics discussed in this book. Notes and Endnotes about individual women adventurers, their families and friends are even included after each section.                               

Alice Plouchard Stelzer’s Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut is a fine book about New England in the 1600s. It will hopefully leave the reader wanting more concrete examples of female adventurers in colonial America, something which may not be so plausible as the historic records are so far and few.

---

[1] Stelzer, Alice Plouchard. Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut, Merrimack Media, 2013.   All quotes and information supporting this article was found in the book reviewed –

Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut, by Stelzer.

With an old friend at Jacob Wirth: Jim Resnick and I.

  **** This was written for my late friend Jim Resnick. Jim passed away last week at the age of 54. Jim was instrumental in helping me put out the first issue of the literary magazine Ibbetson Street in 1998.


By Doug Holder

I have never seen him look so bad...his face was ashen...he was skeletal..he was heavily medicated...it was heartbreaking. I picked him up at his house in Allston, and we went to Jacob Wirth, an old hangout of ours in Boston for dinner. When we walked in there was a loud entertainer in the main dining room, so I pointed to the waiter for a room in the back. We sat next to this woman of formidable girth, dressed like an old hippie, gray hair and granny glasses. She had this huge meal--plates surrounded her--pot roast swimming in gravy, cornbread mopping up a mash of meat and red cabbage, her pinkie finger circling the plate making sure nothing remained. As the entertainer belted out trivia questions from the 1970s she turned to us, daintily putting her napkin to the edges of her mouth and said " I know the answer to the question--they don't--." She laughed quietly to herself, as if enjoying a private joke.




I didn't think of it at the time. But the universe was talking to me. That woman----  that particular woman--  was iconic for Jim and me; the classic Boston eccentric was a type both Jim and I lived around in rooming houses in Boston, and was almost a re-creation for us from our past. The subject of my latest poetry book  Eating Grief... is all about what she represents--people like her fascinated us, and to a degree  both Jim and I became what was the object of our fascination. For some reason I was compelled to take that back table--I didn't see that iconic woman until I got there. Everything seemed to hit me after the dinner--I know at some point , some point in the distant or not so distant future,  I will see her again....

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.

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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