Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes

Mostly Redneck
Rusty Barnes
978-1-934513-32-3

Reviewed by Timothy Gager

I’ve known Rusty Barnes for close to eight years and I previously have read every one of the stories found in Mostly Redneck. After absorbing the book cover to cover, my first reaction was how heavy the plots, the prose and the words were. Also, don’t let the title fool you, as rednecks are stereotypically viewed as unintelligent, Barnes is a word craftsman of the finest kind. Language, pace, place, conflict and plot are carefully considered within each story and I found myself comparing the author to writers such as Andre Dubus II and Raymond Carver, masters I respect greatly.

Story wise, if you can take a punch in the face and be able to brag about it, this is where it’s at. Teen pregnant lovers kill the fathers of their babies. People party and have sex in the woods. Scores are settled in complete beat downs. Women compete against each other for men and their own self-worth. Men want women that are unavailable or they hit the road and never come back, leaving others destroyed.

Two of the stories which stood out for me were “Rick’s Song”, where the main character, Jimmy starts a new life, one torn apart from a car accident, by taking a crappy job at a Chinese restaurant. The other story I loved was, “O, Saddam”, a fine satire, completely different than the rest of the book. (Note: The mostly in Mostly Redneck). Here, a tour guide in Boston becomes involved with Saddam Hussein, who is hiding out as a nut vendor. Barnes creates a brilliant display of humor and heaviness intertwined within the set up.

Mostly Redneck, packs a wallop and as mention full of excellent writing. The denseness of subject matter was in stark contrast to the physical length of the book (153 pages) and the smallness of the font which were both, in my opinion, too small.

Sept 13, 2011: Newton Free Library Poetry Series--Mnookin, Mazur, Triedman, Helfgott-Hyett

(Click on Poster to Enlarge)

http://newtonfreelibraypoetryseries.blogspot.com


Newton Free Library 330 Homer Street Newton, Mass Poets of "Poets for Haiti" anthology to read..... Host: Doug Holder

Spared: Poems by Angie Ellis

Spared
Poems by Angele Ellis

Main Street Rag
Charlotte NC
Copyright © 2011 by Angele Ellis
ISBN: 978-1-59948-277-4
Softbound, 39 pages, $10

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Ms. Ellis’s volume of poetry may be slim, but it is packed with punches from the opening poem “Mauches,” a polemic on ethnic prejudice that burns into any immigrant group which has contended with what Ms. Ellis experienced as a young girl. The same prejudice that exists today from liberal Massachusetts to gun-totin’ Arizona – being different or yourself does not conform to the norm.

In “Spared” good is bad, bad is good, escape (being spared) can turn nasty, can remind one of another person, while “On The Corniche, Beirut” shows the heartbreak of war,or civil war, how death comes up suddenly, how it never ends and leaves “the hole in the heart of the afternoon.”

Spared can also mean the reader is spared superfluous words, unneeded similes, unnecessary metaphors. Can it also mean being spared excess explanation or over dramatic verbiage resulting in a hollow ache inside.

While we are spared a lot in the relatively short poems, there is the feeling we would like to know more, but with good taste she lets us know in “World Of Glass” When language runs clear,/no explanation is desired.

About midway through the book you will find “Strike Sparks” an erotic homage to sex, to a lover any male would want to be, to be in that place of hot jungle love and sex, or is it all failure, all imagined, all hope or all true? Ah, Ms. Ellis can light the fire and our imagination does not want to put it out. Does she? Grab this small volume as you might her and hang on.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

By Doug Holder

The scene—a middle-aged community newspaper journalist—the Sherman Café in Union Square--one delectable oatmeal scone… a paper cup of strong coffee to wash it down, and add one mezzo-soprano—Allegra Martin. All but the last item I was familiar with. Allegra Martin, who joined me for a morning repast and an interview is a Winter Hill resident and a member of the singing group “Anthology.” According to the website of the group it consists of “… a professional quartet of enchanting women’s voices. Their expansive variety of music is presented with the fine polish of classical training and an effervescent whimsy that arises from an enthusiasm for all styles of performance.”

Martin met at one of my favorite haunts to discuss her group and their music. Anthology consists of: Vicky Reichert, who is a soprano, Anney Gilotte a soprano, and Michelle Vachon, a mezzo-soprano, and Martin, a mezzo-soprano. All four of these accomplished singers live in Somerville.

Martin, a native of Lexington, Mass. told me that she naturally gravitated to Somerville. She smiled: “It’s a great town. Not too expensive. There are many of my peers here--fellow geeks, musicians, and a strong geek culture that includes gaming, sci-fi groups that feed their obsessions at the Diesel Café in Davis Square.” (Where Martin stops by now and then), she said.

“Anthology” is a cappella group so they do their stuff without musical accompaniment. Their range is impressive; they cover the waterfront of hot jazz, classical, renaissance polyphony, world folk traditions, and incorporate the works of contemporary local Boston composers. Martin listed Erin Huelkskamd and Michael Veloso as a couple of local composers the group admires.

Martin, like many Somerville artists works several jobs to keep her going. One that caught my interest was her work with the Urban Voices Program. This program was started by the Met Opera in New York City—and it has spread to Boston. It serves schools that don’t have a music program. Martin goes to the Mission Hill/Roxbury School in Boston and teaches kids K to 5.

Martin, who got her undergraduate degree from Williams College in Physics and Music, thought about engineering at one point but realized music was her primary interest. She teaches at Lassell College in Newton, Mass—where she hopes to grow a seminal music program.

The other members of this band of musicians and friends work as voice teachers, choral directors, and other gigs to keep in their field.

Allegra Martin is a hustler, and has to worry about the next gig, the monthly health insurance payment—you name it. But she is hopeful, and with good reason, that things will move to a more stable lifestyle, and she will be able to follow her passion in the years to come.





For more information go to: http://anthologyvoices.com

Forced Continuities by Miriam Walsh

Forced Continuities by Miriam Walsh


Reviewed by Adrienne Drobnies


My first reaction to this book is either that the continuities are too forced, or not forced enough. On the one hand, it seems a journal of everything that cropped up in the poet’s mind, and interesting as much of that is, much of it also felt superfluous and inadequately revised. On the other hand, the seeming need for the poet to document everything in her experience made the poetry seem too forced, as though no random thought could go unrecorded. Nonetheless, there is a sense of abundance or plenitude to the book, some original language, and some great titles: “mating ritual,” “optivore,” “decoherence,” “lazuline,” “utopiaries.” The references to mathematical and scientific phenomena were engaging elements to the work (e.g., “Wigner’s Friend” – recalling a thought experiment by Schrodinger involving his hypothetical cat and friend, the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics, and the mind-body problem):
“The quantum
plays as fireflies
and my hairs
stand in reverence
to their electricity
against the night.”

I would prefer though that she use language that refers more precisely to the firefly’s bioluminescence rather than use what seems like an unconsidered word: “electricity.”

There are some nice images in the work, e.g.,“umbrella lidded eyes.”

I am most attracted to the poems that stress the link between personal emotional and universal experiences of wonder.

“I place
my hand upon your chest
to somehow
reset myself
to the rhythm there…

my lips pressing
upon your temple
here
I found a place
to worship.”

The author is also a visual artist, and the interesting cover and arrangement of the words on the page attest to her skill. The hallucinogenic quality of the cover reflects a similar tone in the poetry. There is, however, too much exhortation and philosophizing for my tastes. The title poem on the back cover says:
“The moment comes and we must follow, though it makes no guarantee that those that follow will be any easier. For all our poetry and hope, sometimes life is just forced continuity.” There is much to enjoy, some to dazzle, but too much of the forced for me in Walsh’s book.

***Adrienne Drobnies received her doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and now work as a research project manager at the Genome Sciences Centre of the British Columbia Cancer Agency. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including Scrivener, NeWest Review, Waves, Poetry Canada Review, Poetry Toronto. Some of my poems have been included in anthologies New Voices (Mosaic Press 1984), From Sinai to the Shtetl and Beyond: Where is Home for the Jewish Writer? (Hamilton Jewish Literary Festival 2009), and emerge (Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio 2009).


********

"Night Flight” by Kenneth Frost

"Night Flight" Kenneth Frost
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Charlotte, North Carolina

Reviewed by Alice Weiss

Kenneth Frost is a native of crowded New York and environs who in moving to Maine and staying there, has become a poet of solitude. His chapbook, “Night Flight,” is a publication of the Author’s Choice Chapbook series and the recommending author is Jonathan K. Rice, the editor and publisher of the Iodine Poetry Journal. Frost’s poems of winter and night, darkness and transformation compel by their play of syntax and metaphor. Everything is chilly, drawn through a winter’s night and the source of light is reflected or occasional, the moon, or fire or lightening. The poems are brief, the lines are short. Many of the poems exhibit an underlying grim humor in their syntactical games.

“When the forest had burned down
to a cathedral

smoke
evensong

one branch kept falling
whistling to itself in the dark”

In a poem about trains, “Country Crossing”, he identifies train tracks as “last century’s flat ladder/to paradise.” Indeed upending natural and human things that ordinarily operate in a horizontal universe is one of the constants of his poetic imagination. So coyotes float out of the trees, a flotilla bowing and twisting, “A heartbeat walks/on the moon’s plague of eggs,” or “The heart jumps over the moon/time and again trying to teach/a cow to be a hundred sheep.”

Not content with nature only, he peoples the poems taking us into glimpses of the imaginative worlds they inhabit for him: Mandelstam in the gulag, Wittgenstein in Norway, a senile aunt who does not recognize the figure in the mirror as herself and waves.
Take this example of concise exploration of a dark figure in our cultural life:

The Assassin

lays
one
hand
on
the
clock,
pets
its
daggers.

The simple comparison of the minute hand and the dagger is transformed by the picture of the assassin petting, suggesting an attachment both sexual and affectionate and reflecting an important aspect of what is strange about our current moral universe.


The poems do indeed take us on “Night Patrol” sifting through images of loss and disfigurement and moral distress. He grieves that “Extraterrestrial life/is answering terrestrial life/ No one should be here or there.”


And yet the bleakness of this last quoted line does not, in fact, operate as the last word. Frost takes us into darkness with a commitment to an operating ideal of call and response. Images act on images, everything is connected by the interplay of language. Verbs are especially empowered to conflate disparate objects. Take the poem “Blizzard.”

Snowflakes tear
their rags deep
inside alphabets
searching for vowels
to beat into
wilderness,

long hollow notes
finding a home
in a wolf’s throat
where the wolf
before a bleeding
mirror drinks
each crack.

The verbs: tear, search, beat, find, bleed, drinks take us in surprising ways from unnatural nature through language into sound, finally expressing its mournful howl in a bitter synthesis of matter, animal and mineral.
Frost creates small dramas that have a large reach but not everything works here. There are poems in which the structure is rickety or the images banal, or the poem should have ended sooner. Sometimes the poet appears to wish the language worked better than it does. Writing for example about spiders he refers to their “tutu/ legs en pointe,” which I found coy rather than arresting. But the truth is the tiny forms he uses throughout the book exact a hard discipline which he often turns to good use and the larger impression is that the book succeeds.

Review of SUNSET AT THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES, POEMS BY PAUL SUNTUP

Review of SUNSET AT THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES, POEMS BY PAUL SUNTUP,
Write Bloody Publishing, Long Beach, California, www.writebloody.com, 97 pages, $15

Review by Barbara Bialick

I think all you small press readers should buy a copy of this book SUNSET IN THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES so the author, Paul Suntup can impress on the public that he is worthy of fame in the greater poetry world. Billy Collins already took note of him in his book 180 MORE EXTRAORDINARY POEMS FOR EVERY DAY, 2005, by choosing “Olive Oil”, which also appears herein: “If there were olive oil cologne, I would wear it and if/there were olive oil goldfish, I would have two in a bowl on the/table For some reason, it is also a man swallowing lighter/fluid because the pain in his belly is bigger than the Kalahari/Desert….and sometimes it tastes like Brigitte Bardot...in the scene where she is sunning naked in Capri, an impossibly/blue ocean wrestling with the sky in the distance.”

Paul Suntup’s voice has elements from Billy Collins, Charles Simic and others who are even more surrealistic and bizarre, who I can’t quite name. The voice he is most like is himself, which includes funny, weird, dangerous, and surrealistic. His little “stories” remind me of those bizarre little John Lennon books we of a certain age used to covet. In “Amputee”, he writes, “Judy was born with a tiger at the end of each finger. When she was six, the tiger on the tip of her right index finger bit off the two middle fingers of her left hand one night while she was sleeping…” For the upshot of the story, I say, buy the book.

Here’s another one, “In a Black Sky”: “There’s no relaxing here. The one they call Van Gogh empties the/salt shaker for the second time today. Small white planets are counted,/then arranged in miniature orbit around a Medjool date…The first thing I’m going to do is think/the world out of existence. I’ll start with the trees, then move on to/animals…Water can stay until I swim to Africa…find the bones of my ancestors, then I’ll/make them disappear too. I’ll keep going until there’s nothing left/but orange swirls in a black sky.”

I hope u can get a general idea from these clippings from his literary plant. He seems to have had some interesting life experience as well. Originally a native of South Africa, he currently lives in Southern California where he is a freelance web designer. Oh did I mention this book was nominated for a National Book Award? In our world where money is so hard to keep, I would like to think Paul Suntup’s book is worth the fifteen dollars

Friend Request: Garden XV Literary Journal of the Boston Conservatory

Friend Request: Garden XV
Literary Journal of the Boston Conservatory
A SGA project

Review by Rene Schwiesow

When you think Boston Conservatory you probably think: music, dance, theater – performing arts. But at The Boston Conservatory the students are looked at as “whole artists.” For this reason the Conservatory offers its students a wide range of programs both in and out of the classroom designed to enhance their lives. A student literary magazine is one example. Recently, I spoke with Judson Evans, advisor for “The Garden.” Judson has an affinity for the Japanese poetry form “Renku” and he teaches the form to his students. But in keeping with the ideology of the “whole artist,” Evans does not leave Renku in a classroom. I was intrigued by the fact that the students often have Renku ongoing in their dormitory rooms.

What is Renku? It is a series of linking Japanese verse. Each can stand on its own, but also links with the next verse. Typically a Renku is a 5-7-5 verse followed by a 7-7 verse. When a student in the dormitory of The Boston Conservatory begins a Renku, other students may drop by at any time and add a consecutive verse to the string of poetics. Traditionally Renku is a collaborative work.

The 15th anniversary edition of “The Garden,” entitled “Friend Request,” contains examples of this Japanese poetry form as well as other poetic works. A poem entitled “Fourteen Days After Treatment” addresses hair loss as a result of chemo treatments. A friend of mine recently finished a round of chemo. This work hit home for me:

And when people ask, I’m always honest.
What did we do this weekend?
We shaved my mom’s head
and then got ice cream.

Several pieces speak to the social networking aspect of the title. A work entitled “Logged In” is one of them:

I live in mini-feeds,
friend requests,
event invitations,
status updates,
video links,
comments,
profile pictures,
chat sessions,
and game requests.

The connections people can now make over long distances gets a nod in “Skype:”


wanting to grasp
the person I can’t touch
one click brings
a pixelated bond

For students living in dormitories far away from their homes, today’s social networking offers the opportunity to remain in touch with family and friends and, as “Friend Request” shows, social networking can lend itself to inspiration. Judson Evans offers the opportunity for Conservatory students to express themselves through the written word in addition to their music and dance. “The Garden” helps to fulfill the Conservatory’s commitment to the well-rounded and articulate student.

For more information contact Judson Evans/ c/o Liberal Arts/ The Boston Conservatory/ 8 The Fenway/ Boston, MA/ 02215

Rene Schwiesow is the co-host of the popular South Shore venue: The Art of Words. Rene can be contacted at: duetsdove@yahoo.com

Somerville Poet Harris Gardner: Bringing his poetic passion to the Paris of New England

Somerville, Mass. Poet Harris Gardner: Bringing his poetic passion to the Paris of New England

By Doug Holder

Somerville poet Harris Gardner is many things. This fairly recent transplant to our town is a substitute teacher at Somerville High, a real estate broker, and founder of the much lauded poetry organization “Tapestry of Voices” that has put on the Boston National Poetry Festival for the last decade at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square.

Many of Gardner’s students at Somerville High refer to him as Einstein because of his curly halo of gray curls, and he is a genius in his own way. Since 1999 he has created a literary community of readings that span from the soon to be defunct Borders Books in downtown Boston, to the Liberty Hotel, the former home of the infamous Charles Street Prison. Currently he and Somerville poet/publisher Gloria Mindock host a poetry series that meets every third Tuesday of each month at the Arts Armory on Highland Ave. ( 6:30 PM) in our burg. The readers of the series has included many Somerville poets like Lloyd Schwartz, Ifeanyi Menkiti, yours truly, and others.

Gardner who has lived on Beacon Hill for many years has not only organized poetry readings but he is a well-published poet with credits in the Harvard Review, Midstream, Ibbetson Street, Aurorean and many others. He has a number of collections under his belt, the most recent: “Among Us” published by Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press.

I asked Gardner what he thinks about the lack of interest of the powers-that-be about creating a Poet Laureate in Somerville. Gardner opined: “I think Somerville is slow to pick up on what 23 cities in Massachusetts have already. I was on the Committee for the Poet Laureate in Boston that selected Sam Cornish, as well as working with the city of Cambridge to establish their Populist Poet. This is a very worthwhile… to bad the city can’t realize it.”

Gardner, like me, bemoans the fact that a number of independent bookstores have closed in our city—most notably McIntyre and Moore Used Books—a long time icon in Davis Square. Gardner believes that Porter Square Books is a great store, but it is really in Cambridge, and they don’t sell used books. “I really think we could use a bookstore in Somerville that sells new as well as used books”, he said.

Gardner is also a co-founder of Somerville’s Bagel Bards, a literary group that meets every Saturday at 9A.M. at the Au Bon pain in Davis Square. I asked him if he writes when he is at the group. Gardner smiled: “I wrote a poem while coming up from the Davis Square subway. I write everywhere. If I did write in a café regularly I think Bloc 11 in Union Square would have the right atmosphere.” I pointed out that Sherman Café in Union square was equally as good a writing spot—he took notes.

Gardner has recently been appointed the Poetry Editor of Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press, and in that capacity he has attracted such noted poets as Diana der Hovanessian, Richard Hoffman, X.J. Kennedy, Maxine Kumin and others. So even though Gardner has been in the Paris of New England a short while; he has already accomplished more than some have in a lifetime in our city—welcome aboard!



Who?

This stoned cat puffs fragile rings
in my face. He’s pretty pushy, he is.
Asks imperiously, “ Who are you?”
You better believe that stops me on the spot !

Who am I? Starts right off with the tough question.
Am I in jeopardy if I reply? I stall to buy a number.
He starts to do a fade, already bored.
He blinks, yawns, ready for a snooze.

I volley it right back, barely clearing the net.
Who are you to ask who am I?
What’s next, “where are you?”
That should be my question.

Only his face hovers, can’t see the strings;
the rest is buried in a billow
of deconstructing rings.
Aging memories bruise like pinched fruit.

“Who are you?” Seems simple enough;
however, it’s complicated.
Who will I be when I remember?
If I could answer that riddle,

It would prove my genius,
like solving the sphinx..
Whose family lives under my roof?
What is my proof?

Who am I, a part of your dream?
When I pinch you awake, I fear
that I, a wraith, shall simply disappear.

Harris Gardner

Review of IN THE CARNIVAL OF BREATHING, a poetry chapbook by Lisa Fay Coutley

Review of IN THE CARNIVAL OF BREATHING, a poetry chapbook by Lisa Fay Coutley, Black Lawrence Press, Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, www.blacklanternpress.com,, 31 pages, $9, 2011

Review by Barbara Bialick

Every now and then I read a baffling book that has the unique complexity of a droll and yet lyrical voice. This volume, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, is composed of 24 poems whose lines transform into disparate oppositions of themselves, from the beginning of each poem to the end. You may think you got it right away, but don’t be disappointed that you didn’t. This is a book that would appeal to people who like demanding poems you have to figure out, yet which has poems with such interesting images, you can also just like it as it is.

For example, the poem, “Transplant”: “These aren’t his slippers, and this isn’t his/robe or his morning, its dark shade hung/against wet brick, against a TV’s low-sung/story of an uptown subway burning/…Let my wrecked lung be swaddled in hay./In this chest: tangerines, a fistful of lilacs./Today is purple, today is orange. Today/a subway caught fire and I wasn’t on it.”

I also like the imagery in “Errata”: It begins “As the story goes, the raven’s wings/aren’t black. They’re waves, capping /dark omens. Crows with curtained throats/…and continues, “I’m sorry you won’t see your son, his skin/peeling its white scarf through blizzards…” and ends up as: “Listen: my heart’s a gutter of ravens tugging at the firmament.” Interesting book. You may want to read it…

And one last example: The poem “My Lake”, which was included in BEST NEW POETS 2010, and begins: “My lake has many rooms and one, which is red/with a door that’s always open but chained./My lake owns boxing gloves. She owns lingerie./…She has been classically trained in lovemaking./…She freezes just before she murders her own shore…”

Lisa Fay Coutley had another award-winning chapbook from Articles Press in 2010,
BACK-TALK, in the ROOMS Chapbook Contest. She holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she was poetry editor of “Passages North”. She lives with her sons in Salt Lake City, where she is a doctoral fellow and poetry editor for “Quarterly West” at the University of Utah.

Poet Kathleen Spivack: Boston as a Literary City

Boston as a Literary City

By Kathleen Spivack

Boston is a historically literary city. The beauty of Boston for writers today is that it is manageable, friendly, diverse, and non-hierarchical. I am sure the reverse is equally true, of course.

Whether you are a young aspiring student or an established writer it is easy to meet and speak, read your work and share ideas. Boston is non-intimidating and, despite its variety of poets, very democratic actually. There are numerous presses and as well as many writing centers that encourage our work. Our long winters help: we huddle together around the metaphoric campfires and warm our hands on writing.

In 1959 I came to Boston on a fellowship to study with poet Robert Lowell, both in his famous workshop and in private tutorial. He introduced me to other poets. They included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Basil Bunting, Jonathan Griffin, and others. Later, writers Frank Bidart, Andrew Wylie, Robert Pinsky, Jonathan Galassi, Lloyd Schwartz, Fanny Howe, Gail Mazur and James Atlas; to name only a few, gravitated to Lowell as well. Lowell championed his writers, and the experience of working with him changed lives.

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop has always been a historic center for poetry, and survives today under its new owner, Ifeanyi Menkiti. Founded by Gordon Cairney, it was a home for the young T.S Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, and later for Margaret Atwood, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, James Alan McPherson and many others. Its roster of patrons mirrors aspects of our literary heritage. It is lined with photographs.

The young Louisa Solano who had worked at the Grolier took over the store when Gordon died. She brought it into the 21st century. One of the legendary dedicated great booksellers in America, Louisa’s knowledge, taste, passion, width of book buying, and her reading series reflected the whole span of American poetry. She also sponsored prizes for young poets.

Seamus Heaney was in Boston during that time and often at the Grolier. He inspired us with his poetry and also with his open generous nature. The Woodberry Poetry Room, at Lamont Library, Harvard University grew under the directorship of Straits Haviarias. The Woodberry Poetry Room opened to all members of the writing community and had a vast collection of recordings, books and little magazines. The Voices and Visions series was one of their projects. Christina Thompson, Don Share, Christina Davis and others continued with the Woodberry Poetry Room to make its archival material available. The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in conjunction with the New England Poetry Club, sponsors readings on its patrician grounds. The Boston Public Library hosts several festivals for writing.

And on the grassroots level, the Bagel Bards as well as many other community writing groups welcome local writers, editors, and publishers to weekly networking sessions. There are similar groups in other parts of Boston. Our city is small and multicultural and there are many opportunities for writers of diversity to come together. First Night, a city wide New Year’s celebration, began in Boston in 1976 under Clara Wainwright and Zaren Earles. It opened its doors to literary readings from writers from every community.Later Patricia Smith was instrumental in bringing the Poetry Slam here, which helped youth of all backgrounds to hone skills in writing and performance. Poets in the Schools started in the 70’s as well, and linked writers working in schools with each other, and with the diversity of Boston’s school population. Sam Cornish, Boston’s current Poet Laureate, a writer and scholar teacher and former bookstore owner, has been tireless in his efforts to encourage poetry. We’ve seen many Boston area literary festivals blossom.

Under its recent ownership of the Grolier, the warm and wonderful Ifeanyi and Carol Menkiti have brought a specifically multicultural approach to the store and it is once again a lively magnet for the poetic community, with its own ambiance. Theirs is a labor of love indeed and we love them for keeping this historic bookstore alive. We also cite the presses of Steve Glines, Doug Holder, J. Kates, and others. The work of Harris Gardner and Jack Powers. Sajed Kamal at the Fenway. There are many links between the writing circles in Boston. We are lucky to have the resources, the dedicated bookstore owners and teachers and administrators, the open heartedness of our poetic institutions, the diversity of community, and the manageable size of greater Boston’s literary landscape to support our writing life. Generosity is the word that best describes Boston’s literary scene.


*******Kathleen Spivack is the author of A History of Yearning, Winner of the Sows Ear International Poetry Prize 2010, first runner up in the New England Book Festival, and winner of the London Book Festival; Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds/Grolier Editions 2007); The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow 1986), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf 1986); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood 1981); The Jane Poems (Doubleday 1973); Flying Inland (Doubleday 1971); Robert Lowell, A Personal Memoir; (forthcoming 2011) and a novel, Unspeakable Things. She is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award 2010, the 2010 Erica Mumford Award, and the 2010 Paumanok Award. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, some of her work has been translated into French. Other publications include The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters, and others. Her work is featured in numerous anthologies. She has also won several International Solas Prizes for “Best Essays.”

Kathleen Spivack has been a visiting professor of American Literature/Creative Writing (one semester annually) in France since 1990. She has held posts at the University of Paris VII-VIII, the University of Francoise Rabelais, Tours, the University of Versailles, and at the Ecole Superieure (Polytechnique). She was a Fulbright Senior Artist/Professor in Creative Writing in France (1993-95). Her poetry has been featured at festivals in France and in the U.S. She reads and performs in theatres, and she also works with composers. Her song cycles and longer pieces have been performed worldwide.

-Kathleen Spivack-_--

Review of Dead Beats by Sam Cornish

(A Young Sam Cornish)







Dead Beats by Sam Cornish, Ibbetson Street Press, 2011. $14



To order send $16 includes postage and handling to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 or go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress



Review by Hugh Fox







Dead Beats is a vivid trip back into the world of the Beats. I mean you’re there, Cornish brings them back as alive as they’ve ever been, all the little personal details, here come William Burroughs, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, Margaret Lockwood,William Carlos Williams, Kerouac and Ginsberg….tons more. The little details are what really get to you: “the Poet looking for cigarette butts/in the gutters of Common//wealth Avenue is not a bum living alone on Joy/Street he’s John Wieners//his friends in poetry will speak well/of him after he’s dead at MIT the Blacksmith reading/reciting//but see him now and then/out of his fucking mind//he will be okay he’s dying his poems are collected/in a signed limited edition//that poets cannot afford.” (“Dead Respectability,” p.41).



I mean you’re there, all the wildness, the rule-breaking, the interior word/feeling wars surrounding you. Let’s get liberated, free, say what we want to say, feel what we want to feel, and screw the restrictions of the world around us. You want to get inside the wild sanity of the Beat world, this is the best place to begin. It’s the world Cornish grew up in and it totally and forever dominated his whole world-view: “These were the days of my young/America in the pages of City Lights//and the Evergreen Review/ Allen Ginsberg recalling the days/of his naked youth being policed by Time/ Magazine the lovers of J Edgar Hoover//America Sacco and Vanzetti/ the Scottsboro Boys rotting//in history Ginsberg lost/in his poems…” (“My Young America,” p.9).







And there’s another special touch here too, Cornish being black, seeing the white world through black visioning: “the jazz/man beats//his drum/like he whips//his women his/black face//purple with rage//my jazz



man/ with his nigger/face//wants to/marry//me my horn/player//jazz man/plays a sunny/day/something back//blows /his horn//like he/got/his thing/in me//his music/is he/jungle/in the city/bars/stompin’/his blues/into me.” (“My Man,” pp.14-15).





One of the most powerful books of poetry ever, ever written. In the Ginsberg-Kerouac mode, telling it as it is, but somehow, with ALL the academic writing-rules tossed away, you’re there, it’s not just writing but time-travelling back into Cornish’s reality that we can all identify with because we were all back there too, even if we never got so totally inside it as he did.





**** Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize.

Margaret Young: A poet who uses all the trappings of the world as material.

Margaret Young: A poet who uses all the trappings of the world as material.

By Doug Holder

Poet Margaret Young uses costumes, food, old pop songs, as well as nature, and just about everything else on this world stage for material for her writing. Nothing is too insignificant or marginal: she gives a voice to it all. As her mentor the poet Gary Snyder taught her, poets should give voice to that cannot be voiced; this includes everything in the human world.

Young is a poet and a professor at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Her latest book of poetry is “Almond Town.” She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and co-founded the Open Door Theatre Company. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: You have an extensive background in theater. Does this inform your work?

Margaret Young: I kind of grew up with poetry everywhere. My father is a poet, editor; he is a theater teacher, and Shakespeare professor. We went to plays all the time and it was really when I started teaching theatre myself that I started to feel as though I was an artist. I was good at writing and other aspects of the theater. But something happened when I was doing children’s plays. I was working with little kids that didn’t have a lot of stuff in their lives. It was sort of out of the comfort zone for me. But I started to do it and it gave me all the belief in the power of art to change lives. In a way this is what I wasn’t able to achieve as a poet for many years. This maybe because there are not as many opportunities.

DH: Has your theater background helped you when you read from your work?

MY: When I first started reading I was at UC/DAVIS. We had a reading series. As things turned out I signed up to read last and I saw all my friends and colleagues read before me. And they would do what beginners do. They would get up and read their work, and they would sound a little scared. And it finally hit me—of course they were scared. Of course you don’t have confidence, etc… So I learned to use my acting skills and pretended that I had all this confidence. And I got up there and everyone said “Wow!” I tell my students about this. As you know teaching is all about acting too.

DH: You got an M.A. in Creative Writing not an MFA. What is the difference?

MY: I wish someone told me about the difference. I know now it is considered a less complete degree. But this was the early 90’s, there was an internet, but I didn’t have access. I really didn’t know anyone studying in these programs. So I got some brochures from three or four places. I didn’t notice which one had the “F” and which one didn’t have the “F.” The program I chose might have had more an English emphasis than the MFA programs. We wrote a creative thesis. Each thesis had to be grounded in reading. I was taking classes with English students, which made for a richer experience for me.

DH: You have written about clothes and costumes. Do you feel the role of the poet is to strip away facades such as these and get to the meat of the matter?

MY: He or she can. But the poet can also pay close attention to what the clothes mean. We all pretend that they are meaningless and invisible. The essays I wrote about this subject took certain theatrical costumes that were associated with characters. One of the jobs of poetry is to look at the overlooked. Poetry should reexamine and refocus.

DH: You teach a course on Popular Culture at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Tell me about it.

MY: It is the trivia. It is the frivolous stuff. It is what surrounds us all the time. Examining this stuff is important in any undergraduate’s education. Why are we surrounded and obsessed with all these trappings of pop culture?

DH: You seem to have affection for food in your writing.

MY: Yeah, I always figured why not study the stuff you consume every day. When I write about food I am writing about love, connection, and place.

DH: In the poem “Pastoral” in your new collection “Almond Town” you seem to imply that we separate ourselves from nature. Does poetry help you connect?

MY: To me one of the primary acts of poetry is to reconnect. So it always deepens my connection to it.

DH: Now… you lived the Boheme life and now you are a mother and wife. How has domesticity affected your creative life?

MY: I was very relieved when I had my first book -child before my first child-child. I felt I was ready. I had two books to mess around with while I was learning to be a mother. It would have been hard to balance them both earlier. It is a different life. But I also have new subject matter. For instance I can use the concept of ‘play’ and how that is aligned with the creative process.

DH: Your husband is a philosophy professor. Do you two complement each other in terms of each other’s work?

MY: We read poetry together. And when we encounter art works together I like having that very different prospective. It is one that is logical. We think differently. I am glad that he spends his thought time in a different place. When we do come together we have great conversations. He is a better poet than I am a philosopher.

Reunion by Lois Ames

A few years back Lois Ames gave me a chapbook of her poetry titled Reunion. I had the privilege to interview Ames, and she is a fascinating study. Ames is the editor of Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (with Lois Ames, 1992), and wrote the introduction to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar. She was a confidante to both Sexton and Plath. I never got a chance to review this book, but Emilly Braille an English major at Endicott College where I teach reviewed this fine chapbook of poetry by Ames. This is part of a series of reviews by English and Creative Writing majors at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.

Reunion by Lois Ames Something Fishie Publications Acton, MA. (1997) No Price.

Review by Emily Braile

Reunion by Lois Ames is a short collection of poetry that reads like a meditation on the world that surrounds Ames, her relationship with that world, with other people, and with herself. Ames writes in a style that is both contemplative yet concrete, reminiscent of Rumi and Lydia Davis all at once. She extracts the essence of a situation or conversation, and then translates it into an assortment of words both romantic and simplistic.

In “Haiku for a College Reunion,” Ames manages to pinpoint the strange, time-warping experience of returning to people and places from one’s past that have, in and of themselves, moved forward:

My seventeen year old self
goes back to confront
all of those aging ladies (4).

In the poem “Last Days,” Ames conveys a love of, and preference for, summer above the other seasons, or at the very least above autumn. She writes:

I try to hold
on to summer
grasping
at the edges
in the same way
I seize
at the eiderdown
slipping
from the bed
in the cool
autumn night (32).

There is no obvious reflection within the language of this poem on how Ames feels with the approach of autumn and the inevitable loss of summer. However, she takes an experience everyone is familiar with, the “slipping” of blankets from the bed, to illustrate the emotions she experiences with the last days of summer. With this simple, relatable image, she is able to capture and illuminate the sensation of the sudden loss of comfort and warmth; something summer brings to her and autumn takes away. This is a sentiment I can relate to and agree with. In twenty-nine words, Ames has told me something about herself, how she views the world around her, and established common ground with me and other summer-favoring readers.


Scattered throughout Reunion are poems, often short and tightly written, reflecting on Ames’s relationship with herself. In the poem “The Scrapbook of a Farm Woman: Portraits, Receipts, Herbs & Seasonings,” she writes:

The task
for everyone
is to find
a way of being
oneself
in one’s own time (10).

In Meditation 2, she writes:

I shed selves
like snakeskins
trying to forget
self trying to melt
into the Self (13).

Ideas like these are not new, yet Ames manages to get to the bones of them. She is a poet who finds the skeletal structure of both simple and complex ideas and draws them to the surface. She does away with extravagance and focuses on the heart of her experiences.

Throughout Reunion, but especially within her poems about self, is an inspiring sense of inner strength and self-reliance, which are cornerstones of many Eastern philosophies. This theme is not surprising when the reader realizes there is a Zen quality to Ames’s poems, specifically the poems similar to those quoted above. The easy connection is gracefully, seemingly unconsciously made, giving Ames’s work an aura of elemental wisdom. It’s clear that Ames is a writer who has spent many years honing her literary skills, casting aside the excess and keeping only the essentials. She is a talented modern writer, and a joy to read.


Emily Braile is an English major with a concentration in creative writing at Endicott College. Over the years she's had relationships with art and theater, but writing has proved to be a constant, understated companion. She hopes to someday be a published poet, and no matter what she does or where she goes, to always have time to write.

Hugh Fox Remembers Small Press Legend Len Fulton

I asked my old pal Hugh Fox to write a piece for Len Fulton, the founder of the Small Press Review, who died at 77, July 24, 2011 in Paradise, CA.

(Hugh Fox)

(Len Fulton)









Hugh Fox remembers legendary small press publisher/writer Len Fulton


Like saying goodbye to Debussy or Hemingway or H.G. Wells. I
first met Fulton in Berkeley in 1968 when we founded COSMEP, a small press org. that had yearly conventions here, there and everywhere: St. Paul, Minnesota, New Orleans, New York, you name it. And everyone would be there, all the editors of small presses and lit mags. And poets and other writers. Always reading-shows, and I'd always read.

I got to know EVERYONE in the literary scene. And visited Fulton up in
his place in Paradise, California, way in the middle of nowhere, or everywhere, if what you loved was California wilderness.



Tall dark-haired, a little moustache, always bright, on the ball, kind of Harvard professorish, but at the same time a kind of exploratory cowboy explorer always moving further into the essence of Nature itself. For years, two or three times a year I'd get a huge envelope filled with books and literary reviews to review for SMALL PRESS REVIEW, and he slowly turned me into a kind of central writer for the mag. Which I loved. Sadly COSMEP slowly disappeared over the years. Run by Richard Morris in San Francisco, it's a book in itself that would go through the slow decapitations of all our dreams and hopes. But Morris died from cancer and COSMEP kind of died with him.There's a huge file over in Special Collections at the Michigan State University library dealing with my connections with the death of COSMEP.


A couple of years back Fulton turned SPR into an on-line mag, which I wasn't crazy about. But he'd always send me a printed copy too, and I've got this huge file in my bookcases, years and years and years of copies with my reviews in them.


In the last few years he became increasingly solitary.
Suffering from lung cancer, but not aware that was what was going
on. When I recently told him that I'm dying from cancer, he wrote a
beautiful letter back and mentioned he wasn't "quite up to it" either.
But I don't think he was aware it was lung cancer.


He was/is a central figure in the development of literary
culture in the U.S. He published an INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORY OF LITTLE MAGAZINES AND SMALL PRESSES which I always found of central importance in finding publishers for my books and articles. An odd name for a press -- Dustbooks. Always aware of the transience of life and everything surrounding him/us. Always Señor High Concentration, High Seriousness. I couldn't believe the size of the library in his Paradise ranchhouse. I asked him "Any of my stuff here?," and he walked over the showed me volume after volume after volume, almost everything I'd ever written, the whole library a veritable treasure house of literary treasures.


His death is a huge loss. Will his son, Tim, continue the
SMALL PRESS REVIEW and all the rest of it?
No words from him.


Hard to believe Fulton is really "gone." I always
thought of him, and still think of him, as an IMMORTAL.



*Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize, and has been widely published in the small press.

Len Fulton, publisher of The Small Press Review Dies, 76

Please click on the tile immediately below for an introduction to an interview of Fulton by A.D. Winans and some words from Fulton himself in his interview in Poesy Magazine.

(CLICK ON PICTURE TO READ)

( AD WINANS LEFT -- LEN FULTON RIGHT)

Environmental Novelist Kitty Beer: Writing of a time when Boston is underwater.

Environmental Novelist Kitty Beer: Writing of a time when Boston is underwater.

Kitty Beer, a member of the Somerville Bagel Bards, sets her new novel “Human Scale” in 2062, a time in which Boston is under water and the suburban town of Arlington, Mass has become a seaside community. Beer, a graduate of Harvard University and Cornell University, has been an environmental journalist for many years and to her a scenario such as this is far from farfetched. I talked with Beers on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Was the book “Silent Spring” a big influence on you as an environmental journalist?

Kitty Beer: Well—‘Silent Spring” is very inspiring. But also, I was working on the the nuclear arms race, and I wrote a booklet some years ago that was sold all over the world—there was a huge demand for it. After I finished this, me, and a lot of people switched over to the environment. I think Carl Sagan was very influential with his concept of Nuclear Winter. He said that humans can actually destroy the earth. So the environmental movement was coming up strong at that time. So that is how I got into environmental activism—it started with the nuclear arms race.

DH: In your novel it is 2062 and Boston is basically underwater. Arlington, Mass –miles inland is a seaside community. How likely is this scenario?

KB: Well, I don’t view my novel as a prediction. I view it as a warning. And I am hoping very much that it does not come true. But every time you hear a report from an environmental scientist, they say” Oh, this is happening a lot faster than I thought.” The glacier melt and everything is accelerating, the sea is rising. The temperature has risen one degree Fahrenheit in 30 years. If it raises four degrees –which sounds small- well, it would have a catastrophic effect. I think it is very possible that Boston can be under water. There would be so much water in the city it would be unusable.

Every time I listen to the news there is something dire happening with the weather. The New York Times today talked about 14 states that are affected by this extreme weather. A few weeks ago there were wild fires, and floods, not to mention earthquakes. The earth is going out of balance. And it is going out of balance faster and faster. In a way the earth is fighting back—but I think this is only the beginning. Even if we stop using fossil fuel now, the effect will still go on. I have been an environmental journalist for some years and I am up on the science.

DH: In the novel a totalitarian state arises from the chaos the weather brings. Is this form of government another logical scenario?

KB: When you have all these catastrophes at the same time you will have a huge influx of refugees fleeing to other parts of the country. When chaos comes, historically governments shrink and are displaced. The center does not hold. Tribal enclaves form. So these local governments take over, which makes a totalitarian state more likely.

DH: Basically in the novel priests sort of run things. One of their duties is to deflower under aged girls. What is your personal review of religion?
KB: I think people turn to religion when they are scared. It is very likely that people are going to wrap themselves in religion. It would be very appealing to them—to be told that the earth is in trouble because of God and their sin. If they don’t sin and find God—and obey the priests—then everything will be O.K. So it would be very easy for people like the Priests to take over. If you have total power it corrupts.

DH: But as you told me the story concerns much more than the environment. In fact it is still the same old story --the fight for love—for glory—as time goes by. I mean there is love, lust and violence between these characters—this isn’t a clinical piece of writing.

KB: I write stories about love and glory. My first novel took place in the 2040’s: “What Love Can’t Do.” I shocked my friends with my first novel—but they enjoyed all the lust, and passion—just the same. My new novel is about Global Warming, but more so—the effect on people.

DH: There is an interesting cast of characters in your novel. Some sympathetic, some not so much, and some are despicable. How do you feel about your characters?

KB: I love them all. I even love the evil priest Father Rose. I don’t love them personally, but I love their characters.



*** http://kittybeer.net

beautifully alien refraction by Miriam E. Walsh

Review by Reza Tokaloo
7/11/11
Poetry Book Review

Book 1: Random Series

By Miriam E. Walsh

Ardornata Publishing (2011)



Miriam Walsh’s first book (*in a series of 4 books of her poetry) in her Random Book series titled: “beautifully alien refraction,” is a smattering of various poetic forms that are both visual and audible. The title of the book is taken from her poem “dispel 96” (p.14) and displays many of the themes that occur throughout this lengthy volume (140 pages).

In the first 15-20 pages of her work, Ms. Walsh hangs her poems like paintings, as they take on familiar patterns found in much modern poetry: spirals, donuts, steps, diamonds, words descending, and words ascending, etc... Much of this geometric visual art evaporates in favor of long prose in multiple stanza forms with stanzas between 3 and 7 lines long.

Thematically, Ms. Walsh sets her sights on much religious and philosophical metaphors in poems such as: “Of Gods 02,” “Mayan Amidst 00,” “Spirit Walk,” and “Leaving Eden 99.” The pervading imagery derives itself from a Catholic background that might be explained by Ms. Walsh’s residency in the southern Massachusetts town of Bridgewater.

Much of this work feels derivative as certain phrases and words appear consistently in many of her pieces such as: “I am,” “halos,””soul,” and celestial bodies appear play a heavy role in a quasi-mystic imagery: the sun, stars, universe, etc..

Overall, this volume of poetry display most of the common forms and musicality found in the greater body of work coming out of southern Massachusetts over the last 12-15 years. What I found to be frustrating at times (as a reader) was that Ms. Walsh was not ending her work properly. Her pen seemed to want to keep going, looking for that special phrase to captivate and enlighten when her poems had already made their justice fruitful enough. A good example is the last 3 lines of her poem “the quietening 97” (yes that is the title of this piece): “it is the quietening/ and it is anything/but quiet.”

Ms. Walsh has obviously amassed a large body of poetic work over the course of her life. Publishing 4 books of poetry attests to a high level of dedication to writing while working in industries ranging from the arts and health care. And it is not surprising the influence and exposure to these parts of her life have nurtured the stories and poems she has compiled into this collection. To me, it is not whether a poem is simply good or bad, it is what the poet leaves the reader (and the listener) with afterward that has relevance.

The Broadsider

The Broadsider
A Subsidiary of Yossarian Universal News Service
http://yunews.com/broadsider.html
Limited Edition Issue (numbered and signed) $50.00
Regular Issue (unsigned) $20.00
Individual Broadside signed: $5.00
Individual Broadside unsigned: $3.00

Review by Rene Schwiesow

“The Broadsider” only prints previously published work. Yes, you heard me correctly. Everything that “The Broadsider” publishes has already been found in print or online publications. The concept allows more exposure for a poet’s work and in a unique way. Each work solicited by “The Broadsider” is paired with a graphic and produced as a broadside on 65# paper. The collection of broadsides is unbound.

Broadsides come with their distinct advantages. Incorporating poetics into a poster-style piece of art often creates a wonderful presentation. However, the nature of combing print with a graphic can be a tricky situation for readability. While I found some of the broadsides to be very easy to read, many of them contained sections where letters and words blended into the graphic behind them. Thus, those sections of the poem were more difficult to decipher.

The edition I read re-published notable authors such as Hugh Fox with a work entitled “Dad at 73.” The broadside features a photo of a service man as the graphic, the stock is light blue and, for this particular work, black ink was chosen. The design allows the work to be read easily and Fox finishes up the poetics with wonderful phrases like “crickets like crazy, moon out.”

A piece entitled “teddy,” by leah angstman (No, that is not a typo. I am told she does not capitalize her name), is printed in green ink on a beige-toned paper. The shadowing of the graphic photo behind the poem means that one must expend a little more effort to read sections of the work if the lighting is not “just right.” The poem, however, is fabulous:

maybe now the windmills of
Nantucket can be spinning
on the hills of the sound
where the richies can see

blowin out there with
your legacy your depth
your final great roar as
the last congressional lion

Another notable, poet laureate of West Virginia Irene McKinney, gets my vote for her work entitled “Homage to Roy Orbison.” The piece is printed in black ink over a graphic of the legendary Orbison and, despite the shadowing of his sunglasses in the graphic, the work is very readable.


I think that in the voice’s rise
and wail we finally wake and hear the voice
of an angel, “Sweet dreams baby” Roy throbs.

The sheaf of broadsides makes for interesting reading and visual stimulation and if one or more really strike your fancy – put them on the refrigerator with a poetic-looking magnet, or pin it to the bulletin board above your writing desk. Check out their website at the above url link to read more of “The Broadsider” online.

Rene Schwiesow is a co-host for the popular South Shore poetry venue: The Art of Words. You can reach Rene at duetsdove@yahoo.com

Primitive Awe By Miriam E. Walsh

Primitive Awe
By Miriam E. Walsh
Ardornata Publishing, 2011
142 pages

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Miriam E. Walsh’s Primitive Awe published on June 4, 2011 is 142 pages of fantastical along with experimental poetry that intrigues and arouses curiosity. A former mental health worker at a detox unit, a drafter in the field of engineering, and a graphic designer, Walsh has written a series of four books released in 2011. Primitive Awe is the second book of her random series. Her cover of the book is her own design of a body, complicated yet simple at the same time.


A complex poet, Walsh rarely makes the read simple. But it is a read well the while, though straight answers may never develop, even after analysis of the poems.
In the beginning pages of Primitive Awe, Walsh uses words that may require a dictionary to decipher and often refers to Greek mythological gods. The “difficult” words slowly ease into “easier” words as the book develops. Her metaphors and use of description through economy of words are articulate and wonderful, as seen in the poem, “eros of thanatos 03”.


For better understanding of this poem, “Eros” is the Greek mythological god of sexual love and beauty as well as a god of fertility. He’s known as “Cupid” in Roman mythology. His father is “Ares”, the Greek god of war; his mother is “Aphrodite”, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.


“Thanatos” is a less recognized Greek mythological figure who “was the daemon personification of death.” Throughout ancient Greek literature, “Thanatos” was often implied to but rarely seen. He’s the son of “Nyx” (night) and “Erebos” (Darkness). His brother “Hypnos” (Sleep) is a twin to “Thanatos”.


Now, in “eros of thanatos”, Walsh combines Eros, Thanatos, Aphrodite, Ares, Nyx, and Hypnos to create a somewhat confusing and vividly descriptive work. For instance, Walsh writes:

I am picking upon
a wound again,
licking upon this cut
just to feel it,
just to taste it,
just to bleed
and make sure my heart
is still beating.
Here Walsh suggests Ares and his calling for war, while in the poem’s final stanza Walsh implies that Nyx, the god of night, Erebos, the god of darkness, and Hypnos, the god of Sleep “exist” through economy of word and precise, simple word usage:

to exist
as if it never happened
to glow
when it would be
too easy,
to grow dim,
to stop,
to disappear
to sleep.

As the poems progress in this 142 page poetry book, the poems tend to be clearer, though sometimes they center around the world of the poet herself and are still not easily understood.

this 03

a rebellion
against the hope
imposed upon us.

it is a quiet honesty
that makes a cavern
of your throat
for all it wants to say;
complete
with its quiet
worshipping,
fire-lit paintings;
its primitive awe.

it is an empty place
for that
which will never form.
a space that is
a memory
of a shape
it had imagined
and decided
remembering
will do just as well.

but it is also
acceptance.


a hollow
that breathes,
a grass
receiving snow.

and it is the
only place
where threat
has no echo.

like all things
in life,
merely a ritual
to forget dying

and daily prepare for it.

In “this 03”, Walsh uses the words “primitive awe”, two words that make up the title of her book. Perhaps this poem is filled with “awe”, a word that gently explains the whole meaning of the book. Yet, perhaps not.