River of Bones Poems by Holly Guran

River of Bones

Poems by Holly Guran

Iris Press

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

ISBN: 978-1-60454-228-8

93 Pages

$15.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Perfecting a persona in poetry can be a tricky business. Personal feelings to the point of intimacy need to be balanced with distance and a level of objectivity. Holly Guran, in her new collection, River of Bones, achieves this equilibrium with a consistent well-modulated tone. In fact this modulation of diction astonishes with its adeptness whether she is speaking as one of her forebears or a young nineteenth century millworker or herself. Even at her most confessional Guran never descends into the rabbit hole of obsessive self-importance and soggy feelings. Her descriptive words reveal the wonder of both hurt and joy in her chosen contexts.

Guran takes us down a tidal river into a murky ancestral past in her poem Phragmites that opens the collection. Marvels abound. The nature metaphor suggests an expedition into the dim mirrored past, a trek through time tethered to genetic clues, as well as personal memories and soulful cross-century identifications. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Our canoe barely leaks

and the hawks dip in pairs

at first haphazard

then in tandem hungry

poised for the dive.

A lone muskrat’s shining fur,

our dark underwater path

And ahead the golden

Phragmites and all around they

barely speak in silent tongues

a wall between water

and shore they grow uncontrollably

hold the marsh mysteries

in papery stalks and tassels.

Notice how the apparitions (muskrat’s shining fur, hawks diving in tandem) disassociate the reader from mere private emotions with their intrinsic interest. The images become omens, predicting the surprises and scope of what follows.

 Fortune’s ups and downs compose tragedies writ large for those lives gripped by them. Unsteady Cradle Rocking, Guran’s gut-wrenching poem of dashed hopes and survival, uses a combination of commentary and fragments of correspondence between her grandfather and great grandfather beginning just prior to the Great Depression. The technique works extraordinarily well, aided by the understatement of their letter-writing diction. That said, you can feel the desperateness and the guilt of both parties. Consider this request and reply,

wishing for a son to ease the fear

drive the long miles

inject hope into the troubles

            Now I’m short on funds to meet the taxes.

            Can you help me out?

            I made some mistakes in investments,

            thank you for your check.

loyal son helped with money

never made the trip too far

his own life, his own fortune’s slings

            Times have been so dull

            our income barely enough

to keep us from hand to mouth.

I long to see your faces and grasp your hands.

The matter-of–fact delivery in Guran’s unsettling piece entitled Daddy’s Girl conceals a sense of profound foreboding. The poet sets her mnemonic landmines artfully: a word or phrase here or there within the narrative. Her school girl persona hints about what is broken and imparts a vague feeling of unease. Understanding arrives in a perfect metaphor. Here’s the metaphor,

Remember the paper about deep sea divers—

among the first to journey down,

lowered by stages into heavier waters?

Coming up they’d get the bends.

Nitrogen bubbles formed in their blood.

I marvel at anyone

Willing to travel into darkness

In her poem Shock Treatment Guran uses the same tone as Daddy’s Girl, but the approach is markedly different, more analytical. She drains out the emotion and chooses her words carefully. The connected phrases are both economical and exact. She straight-forwardly describes her father’s dual illnesses in this way,

…I find you

wandering. You stand and talk,

even smile, mostly stare off

somewhere and take pictures,

pointing the camera at me

as you’ve always done, this time

empty—broken father,

a fractured vertebra, chalky

marks on either side of your forehead

where the shock went in.

Borrowing from A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom, Guran versifies the Lowell millworkers’ experience of the early nineteenth century in a series of 16 poems. The genuineness of the pieces take your breath away. My favorite poem from this section is Turn-Out, 1834. I have some first-hand knowledge on how this works, and Guran nails it. The piece opens brilliantly,

From the upper rooms

women walk out.

In the lower rooms

those who discussed strike hesitate.

Should we? Then Harriet’s

I don’t care. I’m turning out.

This girl of eleven leads a line

into the street where others stream

from brick mills so much water

bursting the dam

suddenly weak

with the weight of heavy looms

and arms lifting

Young women aging fast

Through a series of petitions to the Massachusetts General Court the mill girls asked for some redress. Guran uses this historical information to fashion a piece entitled Fight for the Ten Hour Day. The complainants speak thusly,

… we write of contagion, privation

toiling fourteen hours a day,

breathing poison air by the looms, we stay

inside barred from proper physical exercise

and send home what’s needed, much of our pay.

Exhausted. How can any mind realize

its vigor? Now as we organize

you will learn the perils of our labor.  

Guran closes her collection with an epilogue poem she calls Summer, Marshfield. This striking nature piece doubles as a delicate love ode. Just reading it relaxes one with a sense of continuance. The poet rhapsodizes,

He moved with ease and, once inside,

set a bowl of raspberries on the table.

And then his willing back offered itself,

dough for my hungry fingers.

There I lived.

Sprouting moments encircled the house.

Love’s sluice grew an opening in the deep canal,

and we paddled, a pilgrimage down

longing’s great channel …

Guran deftly commands her material, and the artistic boat she propels so effortlessly into the tidal wilderness seems uncapsizable. Exquisite poetry!      

Interview with Somerville Poet David Blair: Author of the poetry collection “Arsonville”

Poet David Blair

 

Interview with Somerville Poet David Blair: Author of the poetry collection “Arsonville”

Interview with Doug Holder

David Blair is a poet who is firmly rooted in Somerville, and on any given day you may see him walking the streets of our very walker-friendly city, closely observing, taking in the sights—and pondering his next poem.

Blair grew up in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three books of poetry, Ascension Days, which was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize, Arsonville, and Friends with Dogs. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Slate Magazine, and many other places as well, including the anthologies, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Devouring the Green, and Zoland Poetry. 

I spoke to Blair on my Somerville Community Access TV show, “ Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: David—you use a quote by Alexander Ristovic, “ Behind your back, if you turn, you'll make out the sheep, trying to fly with their wooden wings.” How do this center your book?

David Blair: Well the things I write about are pretty much what I catch from the corner of my eye. This quote meant a lot to me when I started out writing.

DH: I get the sense that most of your poems are never far from grief.

DB: Well some of the poems in this collection centered around my mother's death. Also—they were written when my daughter was born. There is a sense of happiness and grief happening at the same time. That's the way life is.

DH: I often tell my creative writing students to unplug themselves, and go out into the world and observe. How does this work for you in Somerville?

DB: Going out and looking at things drive my impulse to write. I love Somerville. The city is a great place to walk. I have lived in Somerville for twenty years now—so I am well-acquainted with the terrain. Years ago I worked as a waiter and manager at the now defunct restaurant Tallulah's in Davis Square. I saw a lot there.

DH: In the collection “Arsonville” you exhibit a great eye for detail. You see the “rat town” kids on the subway, a woman with a lip like a couch, chin-studded dancers in some bar—and you are a scholar of the people and detritus found on and around Revere Beach.

DB: One of the pleasures of writing poetry is the concentration it requires. Details pop in my head. Settings, people,etc.. suggest feelings. I like to write around things. I realize how hard things would be if you did lose hearing and sight.

DH: Who are some of the Somerville poets you enjoy?

DB: Lloyd Schwartz, Joe Torra, Julia Story, Tanya Larkin, and right over the border in Cambridge—

David Rivard. All their work has a lot of life. Their work implies something much bigger. They describe a new world based on the old world, but with a new twist. There is something familiar in the unfamiliar.

DH: You examine both the glorious side and the underside of Revere Beach, in your poem “ Revere Beach in Spring.” On one hand there is a beauty on the beach, as well as spent rifle cartridges, and condoms.

DB: I love Revere Beach. But with anything you love, you have to tell the truth. There is an ugly/beauty there. At the same time I am writing about the Jersey Shore, Orchard beach, etc...

Revere Beach in Spring

Forget that purple seaweedy
end of it, with the gross stuff
and the carnivorous sandflies
in the rattle of dried grasses,
obligatory pieces of dried shit,
the bad stories the phytoplankton
tell the sea worms, the messes,
the city having its squalid dream
that is hard to forget, Esmé,
but why would you? It’s April
and there are grandmothers
wrapped like Bedouins
with flat Irish mouths
and punky grandchildren
in the vast sands of different life,
the International flights hooking
down eight-hour early afternoon
loads from Heathrow, Paris
and Munich, enormous as rocs
flying over apartment buildings
their wheels down and wings up.
You get to the middle of the beach,
finally you can see some lighthouses,
the green and the gunmetal water.
It’s terrible to read biographies
of Sylvia Plath and look
at the pincer of her Winthrop
and the pincer of near Nahant,
peninsular from the subverted
bowl or crab body of Revere Beach.
The ocean tanker out towards
the open water of the bay
tilts to one side, a hat, and guys
who have been working outside
or drinking indoors list to the side,
and nobody is good looking
at all. To the seagulls with blood
mottles, this is one big Clam House.
They squawk about it. Have you been out
to the Clam House? Big surf clams
that whole beach, tilting over,
water dribbling out of them,
they try to get their stomach feet
back down into salt muck.
Practically too much clam.
People with strong guts,
the Japanese call them out
for soup and if they were smaller,
they would be cherry stone dozens
on some menus, but most people
figure they are deformed
by waste, tainted, tattooed, gangland
specimens, or bone-head mutants
who break the springs inside
the seats of tractor trailer seats
and have the 64 ounce cups of spew,
snuff tobacco-dipping, inbred
bumpkins of the liminal world
gone to seed, just dangerous
and yucky, like the time
I saw a spent condom next
to a faded rifle cartridge, a broken X.
For the clams, Revere Beach is hell
and Valhalla, dry places
pried open, broken down
into fragments, then sand,
soared up to the sky in the beaks
of Valkyrie gulls, while in distant
clouds, shrouded airplanes reflect
and glow upwards, angelic flights.
These things survived for awhile.

--David Blair

The Sunday Poet: Scott Ruescher

Scoott Ruescher
(photo by Bridget Ganske)

Scott Ruescher won the 2013 Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture from the New England Poetry Club for “Looking for Lorca”—one of the eleven poems in his chapbook Perfect Memory (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Some of the other poems have appeared in Tower Journal, Naugatuck River Review, In My Bed, Harvard Educational Review, and the Larcom Review. His chapbook Sidewalk Tectonics was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Ruescher coordinates the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches in the Boston University Prison Education program. He writes of his poem,

" Like William Butler Yeats in the opening lines of "The Circus Animal's Desertion,"I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/I sought it daily for six weeks or so." Only for me it took ten years or more to figure out a fresh approach to the notorious and troubling Charles Stuart case that tragically confirmed again the legacy of blatant racism in Boston. It was remembering a friend at work running to tell me that Stuart had jumped from the Tobin Bridge that gave me the poem. This originally appeared online in The Tower Journal--and it also appears in my full-length collection, 'Waiting for the Light to Change' (Prolific Press, 2017), along with many other poems on similar themes."



Beneath the Tobin Bridge

Now I close my eyes and see my friend Regina running,

Not from her parents’ Victorian house near Franklin Park

In the Dorchester section of Boston, not from the starting line

On the track in the stadium behind the suburban high school

She attended on the METCO program—for disadvantaged

But aspiring kids from the city—and not from the bus stop

At Mass. Ave. and Tremont to the Josiah Quincy Middle School

On the border of Chinatown and the South End,

As husband Melvin used to do, racing the school bus

With his friends and closest cousins every morning—

But from one polished end of the hallway to the other

On the second floor of Longfellow Hall, where we used

To work together, at the Harvard Graduate

School of Education, on this, the fourth of January, 1990,

At the beginning of the all-too-ordinary workday,

When everything is quiet, the students all gone

On winter vacation, and the professors home in their sweaters;

Running, that is, to tell me the news that she has just heard

On the radio in her office—that they have just dredged the body

Of Charles Stuart up from the green tidal waters

Of the misnamed Mystic River, beneath the Tobin Bridge

That spans Boston Harbor from Charlestown to the North Shore,

The cover of the psychopath who blamed the murder of his wife

On some anonymous black guy blown at last, his dream

Of living with the rich blonde he worked with at the fur store

On chic-chic Newbury Street now just a nightmare,

His brother Matthew having confessed this morning

That it wasn’t, after all, some desperate black junkie

Who killed Chuck’s wife, the lovely Carol DiMaiti,

In a botched armed robbery after their weekly birthing class

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Huntington Ave.,

In an alley across the street on Mission Hill in Roxbury,

But Chuck himself, who hoped to get the insurance money

And run off with that goddess from horsey Dover-Sherborn—

News good enough, after years of wondering why the tide

Of racism in Boston has not yet receded, to break Regina,

Against the better judgment of her Christian education,

Into a fit of giggles that keeps her from crying

In moral indignation at how the Boston cops, believing

Every word Stuart said, contrary, apparently,

To the intuition of the nurses in the emergency room

Where they sewed up the wound Stuart had made

By shooting himself in the leg to make his story plausible,

Went right ahead and conducted that month-long investigation

For the criminal in question, bringing every black man

On Mission Hill with a record in for questioning,

Even booking on suspicion one repeat offender

Named Willie Bennett who’d been in and out of prison—

News that cracks Regina’s composure open in a carefree chuckle,

Speeding her down the hall, even while her plaid skirt

Restricts her strides, while her brown feet in black flats slap

The shiny hallway tiles, and while the matching unbuttoned lapels

Of her red cardigan sweater open to the white blouse,

Itself unbuttoned at the throat to reveal the gold cross

Against the rich brown skin, which somehow sets off

The red clip in her pressed hair, above the left brow,

And the ornery and elated smile on her broad brown face.

~ LIVE at THE ALGONQUIN in NYC ~ Susan Tepper Interviews Donna Baier Stein

Susan Tepper/ Donna Baier Stein

****  "The Algonquin Round Table, also called The Round Table, was an informal group of American literary men and women who met daily for lunch on weekdays at a large round table in the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s and ’30s. The Algonquin Round Table began meeting in 1919, and within a few years its participants included many of the best-known writers, journalists, and artists in New York City. Among them were Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx, and Russell Crouse. The Round Table became celebrated in the 1920s for its members’ lively, witty conversation and urbane sophistication. Its members gradually went their separate ways, however, and the last meeting of the Round Table took place in 1943. " (Britannica.com) 

Writer Susan Tepper interviews Donna Baier Stein in this legendary literary stomping grounds."

~ LIVE at THE ALGONQUIN in NYC ~

Susan Tepper Interviews Donna Baier Stein




 Donna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Baron's Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Finalist in Foreword reviews 2017 Book of the Year Award, and Finalist in Paterson Prize for Fiction), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist), and Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry chapbook). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received a Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, four Pushcart nominations, and prizes from the Allen Ginsberg Awards and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. www.donnabaierstein.com

Susan Tepper:  Your fictionalized historical novel The Silver Baron’s Wife begins its journey in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during August of 1866.  This is a rags-to riches-to rags story of a particular woman.  What drew you toward this woman, who did indeed exist, and was called Baby Doe Tabor?

Donna Baier Stein:  The seed for my multi-decade obsession with Lizzie, or Baby Doe, Tabor was planted when I was seven years old, during a family vacation to Colorado. Two photographs of Lizzie mesmerized me. In one, she wears an elegant ermine opera coat. In the second, she stands in front of a run-down shack, wearing a man’s old coat and cap and holding a rifle. Even as a girl, I wondered how this woman could journey from Point A to Point B, living in such drastically different circumstances. I was also very intrigued by the fact that Lizzie wrote down thousands of her dreams, many of which are now housed in the History Colorado Center.

Susan Tepper:  Did you ever read any of her dreams?

DBS:  I did.  In fact I photo-copied about 100 or more of them.  I read and copied them prior to the writing of this book.  That’s how much they fascinated me.  A woman during the time period of the early 20^th Century writing down her dreams, well that was an unusual thing.  She jotted them on the back of grocery lists, Western Union Telegrams, scraps of paper.  Anywhere.

ST:  Kind of how a poet works.  You’re in some ‘place’ and your head starts a line of poetry and you jot it on a napkin or anything you can get your hands on.  She sounds compulsive in that same way.  What were her dreams about?

DBS:  Members of her family would appear in them.  Also images of Jesus, Mary, the Devil.  Many vivid spiritual images came into her dreams. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899 but I don’t know if she would have read it. And I certainly don’t think there were many people in America writing down their dreams or noting spirit visitations on their calendars in those days.

ST:  Fascinating.  I would love to read some of those dreams.  Particularly since I’ve read this book and have such a strong sense of the character.

DBS:  Although I didn’t have the language at age seven to articulate any of this, I somehow saw the amazing contrasts in her life—wealth versus poverty, materialism versus spirituality, family versus solitude.

As I matured myself, I learned what we all learn—that the things we are told will make us happy don’t always completely satisfy. Marriage, motherhood, money—Lizzie experienced all these gifts and yet longed for more than these outer trappings.  Here was a woman whose second husband, Horace, was worth $24 million (or about half a billion dollars in today’s currency), who lived in a huge villa with 100 peacocks roaming the yard and who wore a $90,000 necklace at her 1883 wedding, who gave birth to two beloved daughters… and yet still felt, I believe, what Rumi calls “this longing” or what St. Augustine calls “the god-shaped void.”

In her later life, she experienced many visions of Jesus and Mary. Some theologians think she may well have been an American female mystic. Some think she experienced lead poisoning, or had dementia, or perhaps went crazy in her grief. Spiritual visionaries are often seen as crazy eccentrics!

The other important thing that made me want to tell Lizzie’s story is that it has so often been told only from a male perspective. One notable exception to this is Judy Nolte-Temple’s nonfiction book Baby Doe Tabor: Madwoman in the Cabin. But long before Judy’s book, an American opera was written about her by Douglas Moore. Called “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” it focuses primarily on the love triangle between Lizzie, Horace, and his first wife Augusta.

ST:  Before Horace (the rich husband), she went into her first marriage to Harvey with such a clear head and high expectations that all would remain wonderful in their life.  Harvey must have been a huge disappointment as he devolved into alcoholism and lost his will to work and provide for his family.  That’s when her tremendous strength kicked in with such ferocity and she found herself working down in the silver mines, despite a strong superstition that women brought bad luck and danger to miners.  

DBS:  An early movie starring Edward G. Robinson called Silver Dollar portrayed her as a beautiful young blonde who broke up a long-standing marriage (to Horace). To my mind, she was much more than a mistress or wife of a wealthy man. She was instead a woman who bucked all the social expectations of her time. She worked in the silver mines when women simply didn’t do that.

ST:  Out of necessity because Harvey had thrown in the towel.  You wrote him really well, by the way.  A young man who started out so bright and earnest, then collapsed when the weight of life became very heavy.  She carried that burden for them both.

DBS:  Yes.  But I also feel she was drawn to the mines on some psychological level.  She was searching for that ‘invisible something’ that wasn’t part of her life.  Going deep below the surface of the earth may have been a way for her to search out this emotion.  

ST:  Very daring.  I felt she was an extraordinarily strong and risk-taking woman throughout her lifetime.

DBS:  She divorced her first husband, Harvey Doe, when that was rarely done, especially considering she was Catholic.  She remained with her second husband Horace long after he lost his fortune, despite peoples’ expectations that she had only married him for his money.

ST:  When things were going well Horace was worth about $24 million.  I have to admit I might have been less forgiving (laughter).

DBS:  That was a tremendous sum of money for those times, around half a billion in today’s calculations.

ST:  I’m still digesting that.  So he loses $24 million and she sticks by him anyway.  It says a lot about her character as a human being.

DBS:  Yes, I think so. I believe she truly loved Horace and stayed with him despite that the drastic change in his fortune. I feel her story has a tremendous amount of wisdom for us today. It shows the fickleness of wealth, the importance of equal rights and respect for women to enjoy, and the need in all of us to search inside for our own spiritual questions and answers.  



 ****Susan Tepper, an award-winning writer, has been at it for twenty years. Six books of her fiction and poetry have been published, with a seventh book, a novella, forthcoming in the fall of 2017. FIZZ her reading series at KGB Bar, NYC, is sporadically ongoing these past nine years. www.susantepper.com