Lorna Goodison’s Supplying Salt and Light poems

Book review: Lorna Goodison’s Supplying Salt and Light poems

Reviewer:    Pam Rosenblatt

Title:        Supplying Salt and Light

Author:        Lorna Goodison

Publisher:    McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, 2013

Pages:        121

Binding:    Paperback

Cost:        $18.99



To most people, religion is simply a belief in a god or gods with rules to abide by. But this word “religion” represents even more to you personally when you think about its importance in everyday life and about why it is so important to you.

    Lorna Goodison’s Supplying Salt and Light is a 121 page poetry book, published by McClelland & Stewart in 2013, that deals with a lot of themes: identity, home, journey, art, music, family, etc. And these subjects all seem to stem from the major topic of religion. In this review, identity is discussed while Goodison takes you on journeys from Jamaica, where she was born and raised, from Spain and Portugal, from Africa and Europe, and from the United States. She really keeps our minds travelling through her reestablishment or confirmation of her identity. While the topic of religion may make some people uncomfortable, Goodison  writes about religion without forcing you, the reader,  to take sides.  Her religion is part of her Jamaican heritage, and she’s at ease trying to figure out what part it plays in her life.

    In her opening poem, “To Make Various Sorts of Black”, Goodison writes about different types of “black” colored objects.  Although she is African from Jamaica, she doesn’t use the word “black” as a colloquialism for people of African descent in this poem. She refers mainly to “several kinds of black colours” that are “derived from soft black stone./It is a fat colour; not hard at heart, a stone unctioned” or “a black that is obtained from vine twigs” or “the black that is scraped from burnt shells” or the “Black of scorched earth, of torched stones of peach;/ twisted trees that bore strange fruit” or “And then there is the black that is the source of light/From a lamp full of oil such as any thoughtful guest/Waiting for bride and groom who cometh will have.” While the pain of the indentured slaves who traveled from Africa in the slave boats is present here, and Goodison refers to those buried at sea when she writes “Markers of Atlantic’s graves”, the poet never directly writes that her ancestors or she are “Black”. She only implies it. This point makes the opening poem more abstract and difficult to understand. But after reviewing “To Make Various Sorts of Black” many times and reading the other poems in the book, you probably will understand that Goodison’s identity is not “Black” but African along with a mixture of artist, poet, mother, daughter, traveler, and religious person. Here is the opening poem:

To Make Various Sorts of Black

According to The Craftman’s Handbook, chapter XXXVII
“Il Libro dell Arte” by Cerrino d’Andrea Cennini

who tells us there are several kinds of black colours.
First, there is a black derived from soft black stone.
It is a fat colour; not hard at heart, a stone unctioned.

Then there is a black that is obtained from vine twigs.
Twigs that choose to abide on the true vine
offering up their bodies at the last to be burned,

then quenched and worked up, they can live again
as twig of the vine black; not a fat, more of a lean
colour, favoured alike by vinedressers and artists,

There is also the black that is scraped from burnt shells.
    Markers of Atlantic’s graves.
Black of scorched earth, of torched stones of peach;
    twisted trees that bore strange fruit.

And then there is the black that is the source of light
from a lamp full of oil such as any thoughtful guest
waiting for bride and groom who cometh will have.

A lamp you light and place underneath – not a bushel –
but a good clean every day dish that is fit for baking.
Now bring the little flame of the lamp up the under

surface of the earthenware dish (say a distance of two
or three fingers away) and the smoke that emits
from that small flame will struggle up to strike at clay.

Strike till it crowds and collects in a mess or a mass;
now wait, wait a while please, before you sweep this
colour – now sable velvet soot – off onto any old paper

or consign it to shadows, outlines, and backgrounds.
Observe: it does not need to be worked up nor ground;
it is just perfect as it is. Refill the lamp, Cennini say.

As many times as the flames burns low, refill it.

    Just the lines read “Refill the lamp, Cennini say./ As many times as the flames burns low, refill it”, suggesting the reader keep renewing his or her faith as in religious and/or ethnic identity as well as imagination, Goodison writes how important it is for you to use “Bookmarks for Eyes”.
In this poem, “Bookmarks for Eyes”, she has created a persona of a puppeteer who may or may not be representative of Lorca. This puppeteer says, “Bookmarks, he says, they will keep reading/for you long long after you close your eyes.//So we buy a purple one and pray it will not strain our sincere tries at clean clear prose.”  Goodison has abstractly caught your attention. The image of a bookmark pressed against the words written on two pages of a closed book is visually present through the imagination.
Then Goodison interjects her own personal and religious fears and conflicts about reconstructing her identity. In the two stanzas below, she nervously questions God:

        What do You want from me? All I desired
        Was a quiet life grafting poems onto roses
        singing slow at home near blue mountains.

        What am I searching for outside this known
        World, why am I a followfashion Columbus
        gone off the map, and here there be dragons.

Having journeyed such places as Spain, Portugal,  Denmark, and parts of the United States, the narrator is an explorer, interested in finding new experiences through traveling new countries as well as through the mind’s imagination.  She is “a followfashion Columbus/gone off the map, and here there be dragons.” Things are not as “quiet life grafting poems onto roses/singing slow at home near blue mountains.” She is experiencing life that she had only read about before in books while in Jamaica, and some of the experiences are not “clean clear prose” but are like “dragons”, or perhaps Goodison means sinful and frightening. Her morals are being tested through her quest to explore “outside this known/world”.
    The narrator speaks about her pilgrimages to Egypt and north and south Africa as well as the atrocities that happened to the abducted Africans during slavery times in her long and wonderfully powerful poem “Remember Us in Motherland”. Goddison writes how she hopes history will never repeat itself:

Jacob, I want to know not for recrimination
for that could make everyone criminal
all over again, I just want to know in the way

of a hard-head poet on whose left knee is a maroon
birthmark triangular: goods, slaves, sugar.
Marked by Africa.

Like “a friend who swears fear rode shotgun, sat sour/beside him, protecting him from being surprised by joy,/until the year he made African pilgrimage,” the narrator recalls, “I spoke so to the golden head of young King Tut, sweetfaced as my own son. Jacob, I went to Egypt, which too is Africa. I have journeyed to the north and south of Africa.”
    The narrator’s travels make her and her assumed-to-be son, “Jacob”, aware of the pains of her past ancestors, as implied when Goodison writes:

Jacob, your voice calls me back. “Where in the world,” you ask,
“are the burying grounds for slaves?” And my mind answers:
In the blue boneyard of the Atlantic; along whale roads, railways,

and highways; in mortar edifices of empires, field of sugar cane,
cotton, tobacco, and humus at the root of cotton trees; in Jazz,
and Rocksteady, in our music. I crossed with my people, you know

I came with them as a chanter girl.

Gladly I toil for my people as chantwelle, to sing of patron saints
of the overworked. Annoint with almond oil the limbs
of girlchildren fanning that wringing wet pile of southern girls

underdressed, hoop skirtless Kara Walker belles, Gone with the Wind….

    Goodison ends the poem with the simple request to “Jacob”, “… So Jacob, if you find the griot tell her, tell him, that till I lend/my blacktar skin into whatever earthroad I will be interred; on behalf of/foremother who pushed back downpression through muzzle-tongue of iron,//remember us in motherland.”
    Lorna Goodison has compiled a fine book of poems with Jamaican idiomatic expressions and perspective on life. Through her religious influences, Supplying Salt and Light delves into Goodison’s love of ethnic and cultural identity.  What she has to write is important as is religion vital to understanding the makeup of a person’s being, or identity. After all, wouldn’t we all like to be “remember(ed) in (our individual) motherland”? Supplying Salt and Light is an eye-opening, thought-intriguing read for you readers who appreciate a solid reach into the theme of identity.



###

Surviving the Virtual Path of Perils in the poems of Jennifer Jean article by Michael Todd Steffen

Surviving the Virtual Path of Perils in the poems of Jennifer Jean

article by Michael Todd Steffen

Poetry, this seemingly sedentary trade, bespeaks what might be called a strenuous act of psychological survival. Whether it’s the sonneteer trying to resolve the paradox of his beloved’s beauty and cruelty in a contrapuntal structure of 14 lines, or the epic poet’s thousands of lines recounting a hero’s battles and voyages, nearly every poem that elicits our sympathy and concern does so by evoking challenges, problems, conflicts or dilemmas which it is the poet’s task to overcome.

     Jennifer Jean maintains this strain of poetic tradition in her fourth book, The Fool, a title which, as Fred Marchant has wisely observed, “comes from an archetypal figure in the Tarot cards, one typically imagined as a wanderer, someone open to life, needing freedom but perhaps buffeted by it too, a figure not beyond fear, but not afraid of the dark either.” Like the titular subject Jean has here re-invented, her method is to venture into perilous psychological areas, those of love, as daughter, bride and mother, confronting the awkward conflicts, confrontations, the risks of difference, aberrance and of loss.

     Jean’s manner and language are abrupt—no punches pulled, no beating around the bush, no suspension of syntax—and often the poems open swiftly with drama:

            Every fool knows death is change. So,

            after the quake struck I dreamt “the Tower” card—

            man and woman leaping off

            Los Angeles skyscrapers…                              (The Fool, p. 11)

            Remember yesterday, when an 8.8 hit Chile

            and the earth’s axis tilted?

            800 died and

            the days became shorter…                               (Getting to Know You, p. 12)

                        We didn’t go too far

            back into the tenement. We knew a curious woman

            had been shot by stray bullets…                                  (Garden Apartments in Canoga Park, Ca, p. 32)

            Oh, Fool. You’ve got the “Death”

            card. You’ve got travel plans,

            oh chopper pilot. To crash

            and make death mean

            change, you need to lose

            your back rotor, swivel and nod

            nose down

            so the blades face a mountain of pines…                    (Five Card Tarot Spread, p. 53)

The violence of the imagery and its scarcely prepared presentation is indicative of what any of us who find ourselves in front of screens, television, cinema or computer, are prone to witness over and over every day. The volume of human wreckage and its relentless display and repetition in the news, primetime dramas and movies have a callousing, desensitizing effect, which the poetry of Jean conveys.

     As daughter missing a father in a foreign war, as child in general lacking, painfully so, trustworthy guidance, as bride in a world of convenience and short tempers getting glimpses at the life-long commitment of espousal and parenting, Jean again and again is challenged to breaking points, to “deaths” on obscure barriers of metaphor and reality—in our collective induction to virtual spaces—and has gained the vinegar of character and blizzard-bound shortsightedness to take it on and handle it. If she is dire, impatient, at moments dismissive or sardonic, we are left to consider the world she is dealing with, perhaps not unlike the cliff’s-edge landscape designed to make the wanderer depicted on the Tarot card The Fool.

The Fool, poems by Jennifer Jean

ISBN: 978-0-9830666-0-6

is published by Big Table Publishing Company  Boston, Massachusetts

bigtablepublishing.com 

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Young Poet Series Authors Meghan Perkins and Emily Pine( Left

Left--Meghan Perkins ( The Girl Who Wore Sunshine)  Professor Doug Holder  Emily Pineau ( No Need to Speak)  Professor Dan Sklar at the Gloucester Writers Center

Somerville Artist Matthew McCosco: Portrait of a Portrait Artist By Doug Holder

Somerville Artist Matthew McCosco: Portrait of a Portrait Artist

By Doug Holder

 Matthew McCosco by his own description is a private person, and being interviewed is not his favorite pastime.  However he agreed to be my subject after I was introduced to his work by Gil Barbosa, owner of The Book Shop in Ball Square—right across from the office of The Somerville Times. In Barbosa’s fine, independent bookstore I noticed the usual eclectic collection of books, but also accomplished pencil sketches (That McCosco recently framed) of such noted authors as Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mark Twain.

 Because of a hand injury some years back the artist perfected his pencil sketches because he was unable to do his usual watercolors. I asked McCosco about his method; he told me: “I like the preciseness of the pencil sketch. I am able to have much more control of a person’s face. The shadowing of the face is very important. I apply graphite, and smudge it in the contours—I shade and smudge.”

After viewing a number of his sketches, I was impressed how McCosco captured the eyes of his subject—the eyes being the windows of the soul, etc… McCosco told me he makes a very detailed study of a subject’s face, usually relying on a photograph. This process--the measurement of the eyes--can take many hours. And to maintain a clear head McCosco has to take periodic breaks during this arduous procedure.  His portrait of Mark Twain was more difficult to undertake than, say, of Hemingway because there are a limited number of photos of Twain, and the quality of the photos are not as sharp as more contemporary images usually are.

McCosco grew up in Cambridge, Ma. and now lives in the Winter Hill section of the city. He said his style is hyper realistic – a style that requires photographic precision. He feels that many of the artists in Somerville are impressionistic—putting their personal view into the image. McCosco likes being around all the artistic fervor that Somerville has to offer, and it informs his own work.

McCosco studied at the Pratt Institute in New York City, and has done work for the Alvin Alley Dance Company, as well as creating tourist brochures for the city of Brookline.  McCosco feels the best way to learn the craft is through the life and practice. He feels his formal education has taken second place to his practical one.

There will be a showing of his artwork at The Bookshop in Ball Square, Feb. 7, 6 to 9PM.  If you want to commission a portrait from McCosco contact him at: cherato2000@yahoo.com  and look at his website http://fineartbymatthew.com

Review: What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned by Sherman Alexie

 
Review: What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned by Sherman Alexie

                           Hanging Loose Press

                           Copyright 2014

                           156 pp.

                           $19.00

            Review by Myles Gordon                                                                                               

            Author of twenty-four books, and winner of the National Book Award, Pushcart Prize, PEN/Malamud Award,  and a slew of other prizes, Sherman Alexie remains a prolific and successful writer in multiple genres: poetry, short story, essay, novel, and screenplay. A member of the Spokane/Coeur d’Aleve tribe, Alexie currently lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons. He also has spent much time living on various Native American reservations. Tribal culture and topics deeply influence his work and create a central conflict in many of his poems: how does someone whose people were crushed by America come to terms with the America where he’s earned his golden ticket?

            In What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, his thirteenth book of poetry, he does so with brilliant writing, a deep appreciation for life’s grey areas, wit, and an often self-deprecating sense of humor, as in this excerpt from “Happy Holidays!”:

I am asked this question at least a dozen times every year: “Do Indians

            celebrate Thanksgiving?”

That’s like asking: “Do Jewish people celebrate Oktoberfest?”

The answer is: “Yes. Indians celebrate Thanksgiving.”

            This ambivalent push pull with the ironic assimilation into the culture that nearly destroyed his own permeates the collection. In the poem, “Rest Stop,” the protagonist pulls off the freeway at 3 A.M. to relieve himself. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he realizes he is peeing in the front yard of a small church of a small town. He notices the houses, the gas station, the town common. Although the protagonist professes a love for American small towns, one senses the malevolence of the gesture: a full Indian uprising may be a pipe dream, but at least he can piss on America, if only covertly. As he finishes, a herd of mystical deer surrounds him and they sprint off together into the wilderness, but he can’t keep up:

And then I do fall. If one hopes not to fall

Then one will surely fall, and so I do fall,

Falling and rolling down the hill, as the deer

Leave me behind, as I thud to stop against

The base of a tree, as I stare up through

The branches to see the night sky, the stars

The new constellation of one sad and lonely man

Chasing and failing to catch a herd of deer.

His tribe “departed,” he remains awkwardly alone, his uncertain identity mimicked by the night sky.

            No single theme poet, Alexie proves equally adept at riffing on Aristotle, 1980s pop culture, and paying homage to Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor Of Ice Cream,” with his own “The Shaman Of Ice Cream.” The scope of his skills also impresses. He creates dozens of sonnets that are prose poems broken into fourteen sections, allowing for wistful ruminations unachievable inside a standard sonnet’s constraints:

14. If you punch a kid once, then he’ll cry. If you punch a kid once an hour for a year, then he’ll learn how to make the fists feel like flowers.

            But he also knows how to fling the rhymes. Noted as a tremendous lyrical poet, the poems in this book live up to the hype, as in these couplets from “Possible Epitaphs For My Gravestone”:

Why did you bury me with this hand drum?
This whole Indian thing is overdone.

Is this death? Is this death? Is this death? Is this death?

If life is a marathon, then I’m out of breath.

            The fragility of life, particularly on the reservation, occupies many of his poems. He frets for his brother who has lost several good friends to drunk driving accidents. He grieves for his late father who also died in an accident. He rejoices in his own hard-fought sobriety, an ongoing theme that often relates to the joy he takes in his own, young family:

My wife, two sons, and I celebrate the New year by drinking root beer

            Floats. I hereby establish the root beer float as the official Native

            American New Year’s Eve drink. It should be the only drink

            Allowed for Indians on New Year’s.

Ain’t gonna happen.

            Alexie also takes on social issues. He dabbles in politics, writes heartbreakingly about loss of life in the war in Iraq, and speaks unflinchingly of the devastation wreaked by drugs and alcohol in Native communities. Humor often proves to be his sharpest weapon. In one hilarious exchange from “Another Proposition,” he offers a slick take on the “threat” of gay marriage:

“But, Sherman,” he said…”gay men threaten the institution of marriage. Gay men threaten your marriage.”

Actually,” I said, “Gay men catered my marriage. You want to know who really threatens my marriage? Who threatens any straight man’s marriage? Beautiful straight women with no boundaries.”

            Sometimes, though, the author offers too much commentary. If there is anything to criticize (and it’s a small criticism), it’s that sometimes Alexie goes on too long with some of the poems, and that some of the poems just aren’t up to the same top shelf standard as others. He is a successful writer and the press has put out a 156-page collection – more than double the usual length of poetry books. But do we really need his tribute to “My Sharona,” one of the most annoying pop songs of all time? And to make his point that rhyme is more memorable than free verse, does Alexie really need to list the top 100 rock hits of 1984? Wouldn’t ten suffice, or even just number one, When Doves Cry, by Prince?

            Still, after 24 books and a raft of major awards, leeway must be made. A little self-indulgence can be forgiven. After all, almost all his long poems pack a punch, his final poem, “The Naming Ceremony,” in particular:

My Indian name is Lies, Lies, Noun And Verb,

My Indian name is Do Not Disturb.

My  Indian name is Bitterroot.

My Indian name is Secret,

So let me share it with you.

Alexie shares his soul in this book and it’s a terrific read.

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Young Poet Series Releases The Girl Who Wore Sunshine by Meghan Perkins

The Girl Who Wore Sunshine

By Meghan Perkins

View this Author's Spotlight

Preview

Meghan Perkins' poems are a pleasure to imbibe. They are straight-shootin' charms of incidental show-downs and revery of memory. Her endings are crafty without being too lick and she seems right at home in her bones and her vision of things. These poems represent a very promising first collection, sharp, concrete and humorous, walking a line between a reverence for life and a discerning and ironic laughter at its ironies and twists. --Lo Galluccio (Cambridge Populist Poet) With disarming precociousness and pearl-like insights Meghan Perkins pulls on life's loose threads and unravels them before our eyes. Her poems speak to what she knows best and her powers of sassy observations amaze.--Dennis Daly (Author of The Custom House) 

A Girl Goes Into The Woods selected poems Lyn Lifshin

A Girl Goes Into The Woods

selected poems

Lyn Lifshin 2013

New York Quarterly Books

ISBN: 987-935520-32-0

$24.95

Many years ago Lyn Lifshin submitted her poems to the Wilderness House Literary Review where I was new to the poetry editorial position. When an email arrived with at least fifty poems, I was overwhelmed. Who was this poet, Lifshin? I learned to take to reading her poems slowly.

Reading the poems one at a time I came to understand or at least I thought I understood what the poems were saying or not saying. Sometimes Lifshin would submit the same poem written three or four different ways and ask me to chose which one to publish.

Through that experience, I realized a poem could work in many different forms and words began to take on many meanings at the same time. The word choices were not better for the poem or not worse for the poem, the words were just different, inferring differences when read in the same context. Instead of thinking of poems as revisions, I thought about poems as individual, momentary explanations, in which one word's meaning could differ, depending on the location the poem presented:

Some Days

Don't you want to just

be invisible? Go out

in one of those full-body

burkas?

The beginning verse in 'Some days' we find how, line end words, as in the first two end lines, 'just' and 'out', are short, curt and set the tone, the poem rhythm, which then lends the writing its atmosphere. The poem severs itself, meaning, the end line words, are not extending, to make an easy turn, instead, the end words invite us the reader to pause, to come to an explanation, of the, 'just'. The poem asks us to read, relate, take each word as one would in a haiku, fraught with intention, seen and unseen, visible and invisible. By the time we get to read the word 'burkas' we understand why we are dressing ourselves with the poem. Lifshin uses subject matter, in almost every word, just as early Hebrew writing, uses each word to depict God. Lifshin can be recognized for the writer she is, her mood, her juxtaposition of mood and phrases:

of course even

then people would stare.

Those two lines reveal through the use of 'even, and stare.' I take 'even' as equality. An emphatic equality, even in wearing a burka the poem is seen as naked. We come to be seen, at any moment, even when we cover ourselves, this poem uncovers us from our need to please, to profit from being seen in the right out-fit, shoes, labels, the right body parts lifted to heaven:

“Haven't you ever wanted

to at least get rid of parts

of your body you can't

stand?”

Wow! Who would write such a thing! Only a woman? No! Yet we are sure the poem is about a woman because the only word so far that references woman, is the word burka, until we get to the “I.” The drama, the burka invokes leads us to an uncovering or cutting off from what is meant to be hidden:

Belly and chin,

maybe thighs and every -

thing that isn't as it could

be? I could tell something

was happening when I

stopped lusting for clothes

as if they were a man's

body, stopped dialing

VS late at night like

whispering to a taboo love.

Again a line cuts off the meaning, 'every – thing. The poem is being written by and with a simple gesture, a hyphen, as Dickinson inserted her hyphen. Make of that what you will. I see the hyphen as a fragment, a space in time to meander into the unseen. Just as a nun might cloister herself, as an anorexia girl who seeks the body perfect, which seems demanded of her by her environment, to be perfect, untouched by life or even untouched by sight:

In fine – line diary entries

I often put down a favorite

or hated dress. Other

friends still bury depression

in shopping. Tho I did, it

no longer works, ineffective

as certain long – used drugs.

“It”, that word, 'it'. “tho I did, it”. The poem reduces itself to, 'it'. I am it, “tho I did, it.” the saving grace becomes the word “did.” Did, becomes or takes us to the past and we lose the tense feelings, “it no longer works.” First we the reader must get around the corner after it stops the line with its it:

look at me now, at the

kitchen table in faded yoga

pants and mismatched top

and my hair hardly flowing.

Don't you want to some -

times just not make nice or

look nice?

Just as we read 'just' in the first part of the verse, we encounter, just, in the middle of the poem. Finally the poem finds comfort in being itself and perhaps asks the reader to read the poem on its own terms. The poem becomes a poem because it doesn't have to look nice or read nice. It just has to be accepted as the poem it is:

keep the phone

off the hook, stop checking

email, not have to hear

about anybody else's prizes

or degrees, new books and

just decide to never again

go to any graduation,

any place you have to pretend

to be anything you're not?”

The poem, Some Days, asks questions. Do we have to pretend we are reading a poem. Do we pretend to read a poem by comparisons, by our cover – up phrases, we expect, from a poem, instead of the poem as it being its own poem? Lifshin's poetry continues to challenge me and I’m glad 'it' does:

Drifting

Things I have and

don't have

come from this

moving between

people like

smoke. I've been

waiting the way

milkweed I

brought inside two

years ago stays

suspended, hair in the

wind it seems to

float, even its

black seeds don't under-

stand how any-

thing could stay

that way

so long

Every poem in this giant of a book, A Girl Goes into the Woods, leads the reader to an entirety. Each reader will be able to clarify for themselves what the poet is saying and how the meaning effects each life in different ways. We are privy to the way poetry grows wild, as we walk into a woody area where one can find an assortment, vegetation, sky, animal, bug and leaf. The poems teem with wilderness. “sometimes I'd come in I couldn't tell it was me except for my shape.”

I think this is the best poetry book of 2013.

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

Reviewer: Cervena Barva Press