Ibbetson Street #38
Somerville, Mass.: Ibbetson Street
Press, 2015.
$10
ISBN 978-1-329-66814-0
Reviewed by David P. Miller
The November 2015 issue of Ibbetson
Street offers poetry and prose featuring a wide variety of
styles, approaches, subject matters, and moods. (Disclaimer: two of
my own poems have appeared in past issues, but nothing of mine
appears here.) It would require a most lengthy, and patience-testing,
review to cover everything. In addition to those discussed here,
notable contributions include poems by Marge Piercy and Ted Kooser,
an elegy for Hugh Fox by Eric Greinke and Glenna Luschei, and a
review by Lawrence Kessenich of Charlotte Gordon’s study, Romantic
Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her
Daughter Mary Shelley. We are also fortunate to have “Douceur,”
a poem by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, with a translation by Boston Poet
Laureate Danielle Legros Georges. This is part of an ongoing project
(see
http://www.friendsofsouthendlibrary.org/2013/09/danielle-legros-georgess-reading-of-her-recent-work-ranged-far-and-wide-including-translations-from-the-french-of-haitian-poet-ida-faubert/).
I was interested in “Aglets” by
Gary Metras even before I knew what aglets were. It turns out that an
aglet is altogether commonplace: it’s the “small plastic or metal
sheath typically used on each end of a shoelace, cord, or
drawstring,” according to some website or other. So most everyone I
know handles them every day. Metras begins with two references to
aglets, which spark a series of free associations: from a quoted
“inelegant” pun, to a trout’s leap scattering water droplets in
the sun, to jewels atop a pool table, somehow landing us with a
turtle in a tree.
Tomas O’Leary’s
“Dining Out With Our Zombie” is a hilarious kind-of-shaggy-dog
story. It’s premised on a highly open-minded family who not only
takes a zombie into their home, but even takes him out to eat in a
very liberal-minded neighborhood indeed: “But with ribs and pasta
smothered in sauce / and a cheering family circled around, our zombie
/ assumes a transcendent grace, which gives / added charm to the
famously tolerant eatery.” Of course, this is also a ploy in the
service of training their house guest away from human brains: “down
to cauliflower, which had the right look.” And by the end (the
shaggy dog moment), this might only be a way of marking time: “We
know the climate’s changing as he eats. / Why skimp on raw
gestures, bereft of good will, / while the world grows warm enough to
toast us all?”
“The Teacher’s Prayer” by Afaa
Michael Weaver is, for me, one of the standout selections in this
Ibbetson Street issue. Weaver, who teaches at Simmons College,
testifies movingly to the depth of responsibility and
self-questioning felt by anyone who takes seriously the complexity
and ambiguity of the teacher’s challenge. Here is the incessant
circling of the mind and its sometimes painful leaps to doubt and
memory, even in the middle of one instant of intended purpose. One
brief selection may suggest the extent of this work:
& they are all
so young, and something hurts in all
of where my joints
connect, where the memories and dreams of my life
are connected with
locking tubes and cylinders filled with jelly,
and it is another day
without a Motrin, because I take pain
over side effects
whenever possible, so I begin the questioning,
ask myself how I came
to be a man who teaches women how to make
the world something
they can trust will given them what they need
on their own terms,
and I see my mother in her old slippers
and blue house dress,
the one my father and I put in the trash
In “Casa de la Luz,” Krikor Der
Hohannesian provides a sharply recalled vigil at the death of a
family member, after an apparent period of separation. It begins with
the abrupt declaration, “Nothing more could be done, so / on a
bright desert morning they came,” although as things develop the
“they” might be hospice personnel, loved ones, or anyone outside
the skin of the dying. The speaker feels like a stranger in the
environment, musing on the feral cats, marijuana plants, and four
vintage Volkswagens. The moment of death is given an image that take
the deceased’s final breath, suggests his passage outside the body,
and ends ambiguously, without punctuation: “Sun-up, three loud
breaths, then / silence, a settled hush, a wisp of a breeze /
flutters the curtains. You, unfettered, / a fresh memory stripped of
its flesh”
The Fukushima, Japan, nuclear disaster
may seem geographically remote to most of us on the U.S. East Coast,
but it is closer than we’re willing to acknowledge, as evidenced by
Teisha Dawn Twomey’s “They’re Not That Unusual.” An unsettled
vagueness pervades the poem, beginning with its “Meanwhile, mutant
daisies grow” and compounded in “Or so I read that day I had the
nightmare for the first time” and later “… or so I read or
heard somewhere // about the two-headed daisies or daughter / or was
it just a single girl, one only stem // to the flowers I continue to
string / individually in my nightmares.” An always-almost-present
disaster, however much out of sight, will link the reality of mutant
daisies and a dream of mutant daughters. The poem’s title might
refer to two-headed daisies, but given that there is no “away”
from radiation, might it not come in time to refer to two-headed
girls?
Kathleen Aguero’s “Night Beckons”
reads to me like a curiously detailed set of images of inner stasis.
Although “Night beckons like an empty staircase / promising to lead
where you didn’t know / you wanted to go,” the speaker doesn’t
seem to move. She stays with a whole set of blockages, perhaps
preferring some kind of collapse: “Maybe you want the house in
flames.” There is day as well as night, but it seems no better:
“Day, the familiar hazard. / Night, the vacant dream.”
Charles Coe spins a whole series of
meditations from a single sound in a historic jazz recording in “A
Woman Laughs.” The title sound was captured in 1961, during a
performance by the Bill Evans Trio. It’s likely that most listeners
either barely notice this laugh, or let it go without thought, but
Coe takes it further. He first puts the “jarring, even
sacrilegious” sound in its context: “But then again, a jazz
club’s not a concert hall, / listeners in polite rows, knees
together, / waiting to cough in the space between movements.” He
then imagines many of the possible “worlds within worlds” that
might also have been associated with the moment:
In one world,
A man who follows
Evans from gig to gig
sits at the bar
alone, transfixed,
ice melting in the
forgotten drink.
In one world,
The bartender counts
his cash
while dreaming of the
waitress’ embrace.
What would we also learn from our
infinite number of daily moments, if we could reflect on them in this
way?
The story of a family finding itself in
sudden danger is at the heart of “Lost on the Little Island” by
Alexander Levering Kern. A father and two children are threatened
with stranding on an island far from the mainland after the son cuts
his foot. Kern brings the reader to the heart of the story by
structuring it entirely as a set of rhetorical questions, mostly
beginning with “If I told you” and concluding with an appeal to
the reader to enter the situation, for example:
If I told you that
invading species curl their tongues
that chokeberry and
poison oak lie in wait
would you walk this
path with me?
Although the story is told “as if,”
as the poem unfolds its actuality becomes clear. We don’t know the
extent of actual danger the family faced, but we do understand their
perception, which is reality enough.
In “I Just Called to Say I Love You,”
Lyn Lifshin unfolds a complex series of memories, framed by a single
moment in a ballroom dance studio that ricochets back to her mother’s
final days. The song (by Stevie Wonder) was both played in the studio
and a favorite of the mother, linked too to the daughter’s
phone-home or the lack of one:
waiting for another
call
from me, already
becoming
a balloon pulling
away, getting
smaller and not the
girl in college
with curls and still
white teeth
getting so many calls
and dates
the other women
wrote,
wrote, “Frieda,
give us a chance,
No one can get to
us.”
And the memory of the studio moment “in
a tall dark stranger’s / beautiful arms, will soon become / a half
remembered mirage,” as has every other association with the same
song. (Or with anything.)
The overwhelming barrage of bad movies
swallows everything, like a black hole or “the ganged living dead,”
as Michael Todd Steffen tells us in “Bad Movies.” Even the
sensible ones in these productions “cannot escape their roles,”
and neither apparently can we, as bad movies are warped images of
“our tilted lives” or perhaps vice versa. The world of the bad
movie invades the holiday weekend and makes it an overstuffed thing:
“torpid, overfed, / Indulging the star-studded team of special /
Forces, another dirty dozen of them.” There’s not even relief in
“wholly accidental glimpses” of naked actors in these films, as
they are of course “bad actors.”
Pui Ying Wong’s “The Wind Takes
Off” speaks of an understanding of the intricate relation between
the living and the dead. Or rather, of one living person’s
conflicted relationship with her dead, “my dead.” Is she
solicitous enough, she wonders? “I cause them worries. / I know
because I worried for them / when they were living.” Does she bear
enough responsibility for them, even past grief? “Some days go by /
and I wonder if I miss them enough.” Somehow, she hears her dead
“chuckle” and say no: “like the wind they have gone far and do
not need my grief.” This brief meditation exemplifies the potential
for poetry to express much with comparatively little, allowing us
unexpected breadth for our own reflections.
