Lorna Crozier “The Wrong Cat”

Lorna Crozier “The Wrong Cat” Review

By  Victoria Pulvidente


Lorna Crozier’s The Wrong Cat takes on a couple of themes that are displayed throughout her poetry in this new collection. These themes are nature, animals and relationships. Each theme that is explored has some repetition (of some) of the same images that are revealed in the different poems. For nature there are the repeating images of the moon, rain and body, for animals there are the crows, cats, and other random birds. The poems here seem to have a "relationship" theme. They are either between a man and a woman or a man and an animal or man and something in nature.

Crozier’s poetry is captivating; she draws the reader in with all her descriptions and imagery. In her poem “Book Of Small Mistakes” there is so much description that the reader can literally  picture every single flaw of her husband down to a tee. She writes, “...he leaves crumbs on the breadboard every morning, doesn’t tighten the cap on the toothpaste tube, doesn’t replace the toilet paper when it runs out.” This description among others in her poetry attracts the readers’ eyes and minds, through the minutiae of everyday.

Crozier effectively divides her poetry into four different sections with a poem written in italics before each section begins. She also presents poems in both long and short form throughout each section of the book. Along with themes and repetition she also uses similes and personification. In her poem “The Beginning Of Abstractions” she writes, “Raindrops shivered as they touched her face…” this line portrays both simile and personification all in one little line. This line jumped out the most since it is a unusual and original  way to describe rain hitting someone’s face. Another example of simile and personification in the same line is in Crozier’s poem “January”. She writes, “It tips and spills a wash of rose, each tree in the grove flushed like skin from a bath, the heat held minutes later.” She successfully uses these literary devices to bring the reader into another world through her poetry.

 “The Wrong Cat” is recommended to others that enjoy a well-written book filled with poetry, striking images, and great detail . It will appeal to a great range of audiences and seems like it will definitely succeed in the literary marketplace.


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 Victoria Pulvidente is currently a sophomore English major with a concentration in creative writing and also a minor in Internet Studies Communications at Endicott College. She is an editor on the Endicott Review the school's literary magazine and she also writes creative pieces for the Endicott Observer the schools newspaper. She loves to read and write and hopes to work in the publishing industry and write her own novels in the near future.

Doug Holder Wins Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award-- 2015 -- Newton Writing and Publishing Center

Poet Doug Holder

For more information go to:   http://newtonwritingandpublishingcenter.com/awards.html

A review of g emil reutter’s Carvings

A review of g emil reutter’s Carvings

Paperback: 144 pages

Publisher: StoneGarden.net Publishing (November 20, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1600761895

ISBN-13: 978-1600761898

        Review by P C K Prem

A collection of verses, Carvings (Stonegarden.net Publishing California, USA 2010) celebrates life’s experiences picturesquely and underlines universal viewpoint.   

            g emil reutter is effortless and placid as he thinks, writes, and excavates the trajectory of life, its little experiences, happenings and words. He talks of feelings and tiny thoughts and recognizes familiar patterns in trivial happenings, otherwise infusing meaning to life. He looks at life, its wrecks, uproars and triumphs, losses, childlike promises and pains, paints pulsating and striking word pictures, clings to the soil of experiences and hides a few truths and half-truths. g emil’s lyrics dig deep, thrill, coax and abandon in between somewhere or possibly nowhere, and you still breathe in lyrical sparkles. He charms, haunts and taunts with the objet d'art.  Like Anne Ridler, g emil’s lyrics focus on experiences is significant and it highlights modern perspective with subjectivity in narration of tiny incidents constituting life.

  If a man aspires for more, life is miserable. Limiting desires enriches and world looks worth living even in chaotic settings. A petty man often does not boast but speaks truth in great lingo. If one humiliates a little poor man, even if wisely pragmatic it repulses. Men hide intrinsic flaws and inanity. Adoring man lives with a rationale ‘Brief Moments’ conveys. A man is hardnosed and uncaring to others’ sufferings. Ambulance and police car are symbolic of fake tragic anxiety- a paradox.   ‘Sirens in the night’ is a wakeup call to get up, help the suffering, bring innovation and avoid a beaten track, for stupor and passivity immobilize an impotent shrunken age. Visiting and collecting remnants of past turns out a possession 26 he thinks.

            A figurative reprimand in ‘Puddle in the dust’ pierces as thoughts of absolute void reoccur in ‘Rain and Linear Lines.’ Emptiness confronts a man with a lost objective. It is atypical when g emil raises eternal questions in ‘Ever So slowly’ 29, as destiny puzzles.   

Pull up the shades open the window,

Fresh air fills the room venture out.

The time when one is alone,

Reality sets in, choices made,

A new home, time to move on.

            Man takes birth, wakes up, works hard, grows bald, belly protrudes, and abruptly, he faces the enigma of redundancy from failure to success amid agonized tang.

                                                        ****

 Invoking nature for interpreting love is a strong weapon men pick to enhance intensity. ‘Nature’12 avidly talks of created beings as sunrays pierce and instill life. He recalls old romance as beauty and vastness of love of the beloved electrifies.  

 I know the myths of great

power, emotion, seduction; all that pale when

I look into your eyes…

I had forgotten long ago; your soft touch surreal

until your lips meet mine, my hands cup the

small of your back and reality takes hold.

Love-feelings seize in ‘Eliot and Love’ 15 as a beloved eternalizes a joyful experience. Magical feelings travel in ‘The Waters by New Hope.’ Time spent in love carries an ineffaceable impress –the eyes, the red cheeks and a warm embrace charm and thrill ‘as hope continues to /be restored each day I am /drawn closer to you’. To resurrect intensity defies portrayal and sharing, an exclusive experience that trickles in ‘Yellow Pages, Concourse and Shopping’ and speaks differently of love-tale-time gone, as memoirs revitalize thrills and pains.

Recognition of the eyes never seems to leave us

Histories exchanged we said our goodbyes

She as beautiful as that first day in junior high…

                                                (Shopping)

  Intimacy continues undefined as a slow collapse in relations cautions. A voice known and still anonymous, perhaps an old love with unstipulated identity, turns an instant, sensitive.

Façade of elegance and grace

gives way to words

that draw me near

to bask in the radiant smile

eyes I cannot look away from. (Not an Old Testament Psalm 39)

            Debris from past refresh old bonds lived and cherished passionately make running away edgily irresistible and create an aura of supernatural experience when a fanatical lover (Orbit 139) loves words dipping from the lips of a beloved…and takes a lover to unfamiliar land of ecstasy. 

                                                         ****

Ironically, experience of a night wasted proves acerbic. People drink but it offers no pleasure. A man enjoys life if sane or else stimulants dishearten and renounce. ‘Beer and Marlboros’ 13 signifies feral life wasted. In many verses like ‘Stormy Night’ 48, a night of drinks, passions and joys appears vain and sordid. A thought of joy flows in Blue Jay 17 narrating a strictly private experience.  When one watches nature alone, one cannot share fulfillment. ‘Nature’ fills man with an experience of hugeness and stunning depth.  

I cannot for if I do the flow will turn to a trickle the ocean will not be met.

Sun showers break out, droplets caress my skin and I envy the Atlantic.

                                                                                 (Envy the Atlantic 34)

 A man is a merely a droplet, a trickle before the huge ocean. Awfully engaged in various pursuits, ‘City’ paints a picture when roads bubble as ‘Sweat beads drip along her arching spine, / chest heaving forward—/moaning and alone./The homeless guys /wear coats in the summer’ 38.  The kids run about and play mischief and worn-out women sit to relax without ever thinking why the cops run around. Everyone is busily hectic and lives in safe restricted dwelling.  Anxieties of a father for a daughter who travels on an errand are genuine, for security perturbs in a difficult age and women’s safety worries parents.

“I see

you and remember all those things a father never forgets about

a daughter; you are with me, safe from your travel.” Travel 55

In an age of crisis, each one wants an identity.  To leave footprints and identity in a period of convolution overwhelm. Man exists and still appears nonexistent. Life between yes and no, with no specifics, torments in contrasting mind-sets.  Man thinks people love but hate governs life as he suffocates in stifling emptiness and builds shelter in a hollow carrying philosophic strain. He talks of pragmatic approach, warns against meddlers in life, for they do nothing but only talk, suggest and advice, gossip and run away from responsibility.  

                                             ****

Nostalgia lengthens out, as one looks at the frames pegged on walls, opens windows but looks at the world inside.  

people in frames hang on wall

shelves full of memories…  (Window open, 14)

            Breathing in reminiscences, offers contentment. Everyone goes back and back to reconstruct cheery meadows. ‘Snowstorm’ 27 is reliving ‘and I savor this small memory /of those who have passed on to another place.’ Man vibrantly recalls days spent in the warmth of mom, now dead but the house breathes in mother’s aroma.  In Carvings 40, a common wish finds expression. Somewhere, a man wants people to remember or may be, if he comes back, he revisits areas of shared memories.

It makes one wonder

where these people have gone,

and if they are standing

as tall and proud as the tree.

Memories of dead relations stay refreshing. A man without feeling for human relations is almost dead, for among bonds one lives a happy and definite life. (Emil 79) Past opens a photo album, a journey begins and one finds the dead alive the moment one touches…for little memories are tiny ‘pieces of life’.  A man ignores the living and enjoys in memories of the dead –a hypocritical, perhaps an unwise outlook.  ‘Open Hearth’ relates to frightful tomblike experience. When man experiences death so near, he fears, tastes, defeats death to relate an experience and goes back, and observes a melancholic strain in depiction elsewhere in ‘At the Station.’

In a slightly different vein, ‘Leather Couch’ 43 talks about the mental state and gives feelings of hell and heaven. “in this moment of silence so much is said and I know/ what heaven is like, not what the pious say it is,/ just what it is when I sit on the couch holding you.’ A man lives in false awakening, false youth and dreams and as old age dawns he resurrect jaunts.  

  Curiosity rises each moment as one sits on the steps and finds a girl next-door smoking even as pleasantries excite, an old woman looking questionably at the man flinging glances and at another corner, old women’s talks barely interest adolescents, creates a scenic marvel. None is prominent, nothing happens ever and still ordinary people stay central. A few loving, warm and passionate moments offer unique stimulation. One rejoices in impish feelings as coffee, cigarette and smoke define movements of words, lips, feelings and passions.

The telephone rings and I hear

your voice, extinguish the smoke, the coffee goes

cold. I sleep in the warmth of your voice.  (Warm January Night 44)

It speaks of the state of mind, a bare truth. Engaged in various pursuits, a man visits graveyards and pays floral tributes…in many verses he evokes tepid loving moments.  

Plastic flowers can be as cold as granite

even when the intention is warm…  

 In that strange way, cemeteries are for the

living not the dead…  (Resurrection 45)

   He speaks of depth, of reluctance in expression and love unlimited and the strain of love continues.

“Do you think we will live that long?”

“Yes,” I say

And we will make it look dam good

            Again ‘the beauty that is you/draws me near each day/the smile/that took away darkness’ (You 75) speak of love, earthily and ethereal. ‘A Day without You’ 81 demonstrates passion as the lover waits for the beloved and glorious time.  Elsewhere, he requests to understand life, for each little episode or occasion is noteworthy. Genuine efforts to value the mysterious flow of life reveals rationale and import. In ‘Re-creation’ 122, the poet is thoughtful and talks of a botched, withered life, wishes to restructure life and trim ‘infected’ weeds to recreate a lost man.   

                                                        ****

He talks of a routine human attribute. One reads a newspaper, and observes most of the words provide irrelevant gratification and joy. Papers speak of incidents, events, politicians, persons noble and scoundrels, films and actors -hot and frigid that in nutshell constitutes psyche of society. Soldiers’ death somewhere does not create a stir. Families suffer but none worries.  Men are inhuman and cold but sympathy looks false, a two-faced attitude. News about the price of rice, gas, oil and daily necessities attracts interest. A man lives in cocoons of self-image, and death of close relations creates little noise and so a man lives secure in self-built cubicle.

You won’t read about families

grieving, devastated by loss

of never being complete again

those complaining about

the price of rice, gas and parking

of global warming

of how bad your day has gone. (News 18)

Greatly stressful yet warm, agonizing but pleasure giving strain travels in a few verses. Life in routine offers no pleasure. One meets people, talks, smiles, separates and forgets but life moves with a motif and still without purpose. Everyone looks at life through a window and experiences joy of a large park, a mere thought.

            One is mechanical in acts and words, and acts even when none watches. Engaged in monotonous matters without inkling, a man feels focused.  He starts with an objective and ends up without any purpose as vanity stares.  ‘It is Just the Nature of Things’ 116 that a man grows and, ‘…sees the real nature of things, /‘as I move toward the noon of my life/ with these eyes that have witnessed the/ worst in the human condition…’ speaks of life’s experience in bits and in whole but a man reaches everywhere, and still nowhere.

 He is graphic, vivid and genuine. ‘It’s Tuesday’ 133,  a wonderful lyric tells about the business and jokes aged men indulge in, speaks of the puffs and dreams of youngsters at some isolated corners, of pastors getting ready for prayers… nothing escapes him -an observer par excellence. Bitter and unsavoury experiences and encounters educate. Time, place and persons do not always favour and gratify. Even adverse happenings offer a lesson but adversity also exists without a rider, for ‘Everyone has something nice to say.’

‘Smell of Pines Oak Canopy’ 59 sings song of beauty and charm. He is realistic- ‘winters are tough /energy drained /natures’ renewal/ fills me /a seedling/ canopy above.’ Love for nature thrills in ‘Boom Boom Boom’ with a different strain. He is disturbed when ‘gray clouds above weep/ and you/ can’t stop thinking …  and ‘You can’t stop thinking/ as water beads streak across/ windows that surround you/ joining the gray clouds’ ‘Gray Day’ 123. A man relates pains and anguish to the objects of nature and nature sympathizes with the man in suffering, ‘April sun stands behind dreary/ clouds with no intention of casting/ streams of light, rainbows, just the/ melancholy of mist, gentle wind/ drizzle sprays the soggy ground,’ ‘Melancholy’ 124.  

Melancholy haunts a sensitive poet and in contemplative moments, man tries to seek relief in nature, a perennial truth.

g emil experiences life in little bits and pieces and presents a rational viewpoint. He looks at life, paints fantastic word-pictures, and connects each one to everyone without philosophic stress. As one reads verses, one enjoys a pleasing fragrance without intellectual hang-ups and encounters enlightened realization in love despite balmy ennui life offers. Through seemingly little and often unobtrusive incidents and innocuous experiences, he builds a structure of thought and creates a favourable audience response and here, g emil demonstrates poetic strength.

                                             ****

An author of more than forty books in English and Hindi, P C K Prem (p c katoch)   post-graduated in English literature from Punjab University, Chandigarh in 1970, taught in different colleges before shifting to civil services and then served as a Member, Himachal Public Service Commission.  With three books on criticism in English, seven novels and two collections of short fiction, he has brought out nine volumes of poetry.  Katoch Prem (a winner of several awards) is a poet, novelist, short storywriter and critic in English from Himachal, India

Where I Sit, poems by Donald Lev

Poet Donald Lev

Where I Sit, poems by Donald Lev, Presa Press, P.O. 792, Rockford, Michigan 49341, 88 pages, $15.95.

Review by Barbara Bialick

The first thing I noticed about the book Where I Sit was the appealing cover painting of a young woman sitting alone in a restaurant with a glass of red wine.  This collection must be by someone who knows a lot about life, I thought. Then I felt the paper, the paper of the book itself, which was so smooth, I could easily turn from poem to poem. I did not however, pick up sensuality as a theme, however. More like thoughts from a craggy, older, male journalist who writes for a living, never at a loss for a word he thinks will be a zinger.

“Spring has come,/With a lot of wind and sun/And rain./Pain, too,/To rhyme with rain./Not that I needed the rhyme. I just/Wanted it.” 

Such are these poems. The author writes them short and quick because he “wants it” that way.

His style then is like in the poem “One Brick at a Time”—in which he steals bricks from a shopping mall construction site that seems to be overly loaded with them. The shopping mall long built, he still hasn’t built anything with the bricks he took.  He’s still “working on it”…

But Lev has thought a lot about time.  He’s older than us baby boomer poets who think we know it all. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, in 1945, he was already nine years old and “had known no other president…I thought I’d tell you this,” he wrote.

So if you buy this book you can probably learn a few ideas. In “All Art” he says, “I always begin with the frame./All art is limitation.”

He may say he’s “clueless” that he’s had a “long, clueless life”, but that is his “boast.”

He’s not really clueless at all…  Donald Lev, born in 1936, lives in High Falls, New York, where he publishes The Home Planet News, which he founded with his late wife, Enid Dame in 1979.  He went to Hunter College and worked at both The Daily News and The New York Times. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry including A Very Funny Fellow, NYQ Books, in 2012. He has coordinated poetry readings at many venues and hosted “Open Poetry” on WNYC Radio.

The Moon in the Pool Poems by Gary Metras

Gary Metras

The Moon in the Pool
Poems by Gary Metras
Presa Press
Rockford, MI
presapress@aol.com
ISBN: 978-0-9888279-7-4
65 Pages
$12.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Riding the downward arc of life through dreams of innocence and the corrupting madness of unresolved history, Gary Metras finds resolution and rebirth in the gravitational rush of flood waters and nature’s indifferent but wondrously mnemonic tokens. Right at the onset of this collection Metras stakes out his territory. In his piece Seven Stones for Seven Poems the poet considers how the human mind connects with the past utilizing tangible mementos infused with poetic power and timeless wisdom. But when the past intrudes, watch out. Unsettled memories and discomfort may ensue. Here follows one of the seven poetic sections, a telling but uncomfortable one,

In Biloxi, Mississippi, in the filth
at curbside,
I saw a stone so ugly
it  could have been carried great distances
by trolls. I shot it
with spit, walked on and heard
someone shout, “Hey Yankee!
Fuck you in your Yankee asshole!”
I didn’t know it
then, but I was safer
walking among the beggars of Istanbul.
And these
Rebel-minded youths
my own age asked me,
in their forceful way, to lick
the stone
and take it with me, which I did.
This is the stone of hatred.

Unrequited dreams command attention when they nuzzle into the work-a-day world of survival. Metras accommodates love’s ignored details in his aptly titled poem Working Class Villanelle. Hardships of patched denim and diapers and food stamps aside, dreamy obsessions will out. The poet’s sense of lyrical balance and tone in this formalized piece, which doubles as the title poem, leaves one breathless. The composition concludes with a measure of pluck,

Oh yes, work and denial have a grace.
But what becomes of the love
Drowning in the lack of midnight?

Come, moon. Come, shouts a ten year dream.
There is money in the bank to be spent.
The lovers are loving in the grace of midnight
In the moon in the pool.

Passing on a hammer from generation to generation serves multiple purposes. First, it gives one a token to remember the past. Second, it connects lives over time by creative function. Thirdly, it instils almost a godlike (think Thor) responsibility to pass on stored memory to those who come after. By this transfer of knowledge seniors offer continuing protection to human kind.  Often this stored wisdom needs to be tweaked or repaired wholesale in the face of changing nature or alien threats. The importance of tools and practicality Metras reflects on in a poem that he, not surprisingly, entitles The Hammer. Consider these lines detailing the efficaciousness of this powerful symbol from the heart of the piece,

And now the hammer needs a new handle. Thirty years
of apartments and houses,
of shelves for clothes and books and out-grown toys,
of warped and ant-eaten clapboards,
door jams out of plumb, tree forts,
even the stuck faucet felt the hammer’s weight.
Its wood handle gripped and stained with sweat and
   memory.
Its steel head dull but solid, older even than I am.
The wood handle split down the middle one day
when banging chisel to name a rock in the flower bed.

When the hounds of heaven are loosed Trappist monks and certain poets pray. Metras, after invoking the ghost of Thomas Merton, seems to number himself among those poets in this collection’s masterwork entitled The Rain, The Flood. In this seven section piece Metras’ Cistercian-like persona voices his personal stoicism in the face of collapsing society. Surrounded by the merciless music and madness of existence, the poet counsels acceptance and forgiveness. Water acts as a great destroyer, but also exhibits even greater powers of cleansing. Metras puts it this way,

Who questions rain
pitting the asphalt of our lives,
clotting in the turnings of culverts
and storm drains with the litter
of our lust, when all it wants
is that singular, downward journey?

Down the river bank
the old beech tree at the bend,
its roots rain-bared a little more
each year, will soon plunge
into the welcoming surge with
the grace of a clipped-wing angel.

Set in Istanbul Turkey Metras’ piece entitled Meditation on Chestnuts emits in its smoky timelessness an exotic fragrance indeed. I like this poem a lot. Outside the Grand Bazaar (I’ve stood in that exact spot—years ago) this purveyor of roasted chestnuts tends to his business through the centuries. Details change but the essentials survive and connect the ages. The poem opens inscrutably,

The chestnut roaster on the street outside
the Grand Bazaar ignores tourists coming
and going, ignores the glitter and noise
inside the shops, so busy cooking and
peeling, so intent arranging chestnuts –
arcs inside of arcs on the hot plate, row
after row, some cooked, some raw, all
arcing like a prayer…

Toward the end of the collection Metras places his poem April. Tulips and melting snow bring with them more unwelcome happenings. It is, after all, New England. Cruel jokes, thawing dead animals, and gossip carry the day. Yet there is beauty as seen from above by the universal lunar observer. The poet urges connection and cautious engagement and he expects nothing but the raw material of living. Metras opens this poem with man’s adaptation after the tumble of a failed dream. He says,

A neighbor is a builder. He loves April,
digs foundations, whistling. That before
the housing crash. Now he has some
sheep and goats. He doesn’t sing to them
as he shovels hay in, manure out.

These poems in total beget silence and contemplation. Like fast moving water from ice-packed heights, Metras’ words fall over us, crystalline and cleansing. Their impact: indisputably bracing.

Margot Livesey to read at Endicott College April 13, 2015

 

 

Margot Livesey

 


On April 13 from 5 to 7PM there will be a talk and reading with novelist and Writer-In-Residence (Emerson College), Margot Livesey, at the Hospitality Suite at Endicott College. Livesey  will discuss her novel  the Flight of Gemma Hardy, and her writing life.
 
http://vp.telvue.com/preview?id=T02351&video=228102 Creative Writing Faculty  Doug Holder interviews Margot Livesey


Margot Livesey grew up in a boys' private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published six novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona and The House on Fortune Street. Her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, was published by HarperCollins in January 2012.


Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

Alice Sebold says, "Every novel of Margot Livesey's is, for her readers, a joyous discovery. Her work radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery."

David Ferry and a Difference with Poetry: Ellery Street, a new selected from The Grolier Press

David Ferry

David Ferry and a Difference with Poetry:

Ellery Street, a new selected from The Grolier Press

article by Michael T. Steffen

Because he has been accomplished and acclaimed as a translator of literary classics in poetry (Gilgamesh, Horace, Virgil), the achievement of David Ferry’s original poetry has been little taken on. It is a question that made Poetry magazine’s editor Christian Wiman speculate in his presentation of Ferry’s Ruth B. Lilly Prize back in 2011. Wiman’s thought was that in time Ferry’s own poems would be equally acknowledged and appreciated. One step toward that has been taken. As part of the Grolier Series of Established Poets, Ifeanyi Menkiti has brought out a choice selection of Ferry’s original poems with the title Ellery Street, after one of the poems selected from Ferry’s 1983 Strangers: A Book of Poems (and an actual street near the Cambridge Public Library where the poet lived between 1960 and 1996).

One thing poetry most definitely allows the individual is a space for private revolt. In the case of Ferry, who has been so diligent, reliable and true under his classical poets—really what could we expect but the snail (an image from Ferry of the beauty of the body) struggling from its elaborate onerous shell and just relishing in venting some complaints about the tomb of scholarship from the point of view of just a man with lungs to fill with air, eyes with light, looking back at the reading room and calling the scholars out for their “imbecile gaze.” Ecclesiastes warns us there’s weariness in writing many books.

It is an amusing paradox for the reader, and a testament to the persistent inspiration of poetry, as well as to the poet’s brilliance with the dilemma to sing of “human unsuccess” (Yeats) with Ferry’s demonstrative rather than literal way about it. Beyond letting out that there is something “imbecile” about erudition and this earnest game of poetry, inextricable—du-uh—from language and scholarship, Ferry’s poetry wants to be awkward, say, enough to include a snail, an old lady with terribly scarred legs and a fat girl as examples of “how beautiful…the body” to consider along with the supposedly enviable, obvious image of youth in its prime:

A boy passes by, his bare

Chest flashing like a shield in the summer air;

All conquering,

The king, going to the drug store.

The bare chest “flashing”—like the shield of one of Virgil’s heroes! And the discreet seemliness of the couplet separated by the spacing (…bare/…air). David Ferry possesses the wherewithal to write as he chooses. Yet for his private fedupness with the insistent triumphal shades and laurels of the fifth art, and genuine sense of humility and love for ordinariness, he chooses to be patient and illustrative rather than argumentative, meandering rather than terse and punchy. It is original, very different in its allowances from the streamline verse that fills so many new books and journals these days.

It is as if, shedding the pomp of Roman empire hexameters, odes and epodes, Ferry has woken another old friend, William Wordsworth, to go outside and look around, at—impatiens in the garden. Or to listen to the timely clicking of leaves on an impossibly hot October afternoon. His ear is so attuned to what’s going on with nature and human nature around him. He picks up on the subtlety of a mature man’s lesson about temperament conveyed to a teenager, through the deliberately slowed rhythm of dribbling a basketball. The ball bounces like the formal scansion of a line of poetry. As there’s a “court” in playing this and other ball games, Ferry reminds us of the original higher ideal of our bearing in this play, called sportsmanship, giving the poem the title “Courtesy.” How we played sports (we used to be told) was just as important as competing to win. Brutal victory at any cost was frowned on. Ferry goes about to remind us, though he is not preachy or pedantic about it, of such effaced virtues. Doing so, Ifeanyi Menkiti has brilliantly observed in his introduction to Ellery Street, these poems countenance “a certain way of managing the breakdown of our various powers and affections, so that all is not lost.”

This particular continuity of sensibility endures the paradoxes of time, to a somewhat disturbing glimpse of the body in the poem “At a Street Corner” from Ferry’s 2012 National Book Award winning Bewilderment:

Look here, look at my hands,

They look like little wet toads

After a rainstorm’s over,

Hopping, hopping, hopping.

This is one of the values of the selection: having the occasion to let Ferry’s original poems echo off one another, with variety reflected in the poet’s signature themes, his suspicion for language and concepts, the intractable element of the world in our observations and experiences (which leave us “bewildered”), the dissociation (even dispossession) between ourselves and our bodies—memorably recorded by the ambiguous arrival in “At a Bus Stop; Eurydice” :

She was amazed, amazed.

Can death really take me?

The bus went away.

It took the old lady away.

Ifeanyi Menkiti has taken great care in editing and introducing this selection. Maybe one reader will wonder, Where is “Everybody’s Tree”? or What about “Learning from History”? Generating discourse will be another great benefit of this wonderful book showcasing one of the Boston area’s and one of America’s most prized and genuinely appreciated poets.

Ellery Street by David Ferry

edited in the Grolier Established Poets Series

is available for $18.00

at The Grolier Poetry Book Shop

6 Plympton Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org