1 - T Reynolds....................................Ghost Stones
2 - T Reynolds....................................Black Coats
3 - Gary Jude......................................Hymn
4 - Peter Dabbene...............................Spreading Memes is Free
5 - David Luntz...................................The Beach
6 - Patrick T. Randolph.......................The Blue Bicycle
7 - Stephen Brown..............................Age
Reviews
8 - Jack Gilbert...............................Refusing Heaven
9 - Sarah Law................................Perihelion
10 - Matt Merrit.............................Making the Most of the Light
& Rob Mackenzie..................The Clown of Natural Sorrow
Notes on Contributors
-1-
Poems
Ghost Stones
Poised on the locust branch
as if at eternity,
the brown and white hawk
appears to fossilize
into limestone sky,
where no wind rustles feathers
but something in the distance
beckons its blind attention.
Balanced on a bleach bottle
half-buried in muck,
the slender green lizard
could already be stone
but for its quick tongue,
testing burnt air
with a sudden knifethrust
before it too becomes rigid.
On the lake's deserted dock,
I struggle to remain still,
searching for a proper pose
to be immortalized.
Even as I stretch a hand,
my legs petrify,
prickly wooden ache
rising to waist and back.
The hawk slants its head
down toward its breast,
as if perceiving sound
through layers of limestone,
an echo tuned to its ear.
The lizard is all elegance,
staring into dark waves
centuries to the shore.
Even as I lift my eyes,
the hawk makes its escape,
above stilled trees
and overgrown fields,
leaving vacant sky.
And the quick lizard
materializes on a stick
and vanishes in weeds.
Now the dock is empty,
only footsteps to keep
my image when I'm gone,
and in the tall grass,
the bent-down weeds.
The hawk has even less,
the mold of its cry
through empty air.
- T Reynolds
-2-
Black Coats
I was walking through
hedge thick as brush,
every slap of every branch
the sharpest recrimination,
when I heard a low grunt
like a choked-off sneeze,
and parted branches.
On a bed of rotting leaves,
the prodigal heifer stirred once,
moving its head forward
to acknowledge my presence.
Its right eye opened to light,
then closed for good,
though one leg still spasmed.
"Some coyote or pack of dogs
most likely," my father said,
"though it's unusual for them
not to finish the kill."
Wind rustled branches
as we stood above the heifer
with narrowed breath.
We sat in the grass
for our brief vigil,
despite storm clouds
moving in from the north
and the first raindrops
staining our black coats
as if marking our guilt.
- T Reynolds
-3-
Hymn
October's outside
steaming like an old chestnut horse.
Shut the gate,
the sunset is a rusty hinge.
Over the fields evening begins.
Clocks stay up late
talking about winter things,
and the fire's warmth
bustles about the house
I've never really lived in.
On the table The Bible
lays open upon its terrible page.
I look at my hands,
furrows like an old plough has made,
smell the shire
horse plodding its way home.
- Gary Jude
-4-
Spreading Memes is Free
I like to walk the streets humming or whistling an irritating song. Once they hear it, they’re infected; there’s no way to avoid it. This is my equal playing field, this is my created equal. They cannot shut me up, so I take advantage. I explain to bystanders that the world is balanced on the back of all the petrified thoughts of dinosaurs. I tell them that rain is not really water until it comes into contact with something else. I warn them that bugs are plotting to overthrow humanity very soon, by swarming and killing us, one person at a time.
In their heads like radio songs they can’t pretend they never heard me, no matter what I say. And the next time they look at bugs, or the rain, or a picture of the earth, I will have made my mark.
- Peter Dabbene
-5-
The Beach
One should always step into a rainbow through its center.
This is one of the many things the sea has taught him.
He is only four years old and already very wise.
He exists without memory or expectation. So each moment
envelops him like a drop of water that suspends his world
within its soft membrane. Sometimes he hears the stars sing.
When he sleeps, an embassy of brachiopods and bivalves
watch over him. When he sleeps, the roots of his being sink deep
into the sand until they press against the surface of the world.
There they drink the ichor of his dreams. There the world
dangles perfectly still from a silver thread that imperceptibly joins
the minerals to the stars. There, along the extreme edge of
consciousness, he intuits the precise tension by which everything
exists.
And he fears, upon waking, if he disturbs the slightest
spider web, or lifts a beetle from its leaf, the world will disappear.
- David Luntz
-6-
The Blue Bicycle
That hot summer, the cool rains didn’t stop.
All day, all week, all month there were always
Rain drops dancing on the old garage roof.
I repaired my injured blue bicycle,
Dad helped me change and grease the ball bearings.
I found a bike seat at the county dump,
Cleaned her up and made it look like brand new.
But that hot summer, the rains wouldn’t stop,
So the bicycle stayed in our garage
Like a lonely star baseball player in
The dark late spring dugout waiting to play.
The rains continued, the blue bike rusted.
Years later I pumped up the flat tires,
Took it for a ride on a clear autumn
Afternoon, the air dry and hot; but still
I could smell the rain of that hot summer
When the ground was so wet that white mushrooms
Appeared like large snowflakes on the green grass,
And the cool night earth reflected the moon
Making the ground shine like an April sun.
The bike squeaked down the path as if in pain.
A balmy October breeze soaked my face.
Fallen leaves scattered everywhere— making
The music of rain on a summer roof.
- Patrick T. Randolph
-7-
Age
My hair desiccated:
rotting leaves in the cold sun.
My skin shrunken:
a desert of quicksand.
My skeleton desolate:
roots in arid ground.
My top teeth giving in to gravity:
stalactites in a forgotten cave.
Eyes like open graves.
Lungs dwindling to twigs.
Mantle with its grass stains,
ant larvae, starch and cracked semen.
My spine the devil's ladder.
Nerves of lightning bolts.
My heart like a rusty can
of plum tomatoes.
I move with a symphony of sighs
like the first stirrings of the Polar ice caps.
I give everything up and for nothing.
My future a closed book in a ruined library.
- Stephen Brown
-8-
Reviews
Refusing Heaven
Jack Gilbert
(Alfred Knopf, 2005)
ISBN 9781400043651
$25
Jack Gilbert is now in his eighties and he has been publishing collections of poetry since the 1960’s.He has won many awards for these intermittent collections including nominations for the Pulitzer prize. His poetry is both personal and accessible and the sense of loss that pervades his new book is both tragic and poignant, revealing a man who loves women, but who has also lost women.
Many of the opening poems have a spiritual clarity about them that make them simple yet touching statements. We get a sense that memory is very important to Gilbert, and in ‘Having the Having’, he suggests that even though time can make memories imperfect, one must still remember:
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember.
The wretched sense of loss and regret is summed up so universally in ‘By Small and Small: Midnight to four am’ that the reader can almost feel the pain of the loss of a loved one to cancer, and can fully understand the need to shake the feeling of impotence by doing anything one can in the hospital room:
I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms
Although many of the poems are concerned with loss and the ending of relationships, Gilbert’s unique stance enables his very descriptive poem ‘Failing and Flying’ to touch the reader with his positive outlook. Just because a relationship has ended does not make it a failure, he seems to say, and the reader is warned against being judgemental:
How can they say
the marriage failed?...
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
His love of women takes him to places which are usually frowned upon, and his ability to make love to his friend’s ex-wife with his friend in the house show his insatiable appetite. However, it is not presented as a sordid fling, but as a joining of bodies and spirits:
You in the front room, and me
upstairs with your discared wife in my bed. The sound
of your loneliness pouring over our happy bodies.
When reading these poems, one gets a sense that time is slowing down, and Gilbert’s lucid and conversational style enhances this. We are constantly reminded of the pretty back streets in Greece or hot balmy days in Provence and, in ‘Burning (Andante non Troppo), we are shown that people no longer take the time to notice the things which they should:
The grand Italian churches are
covered with detail which is visible at the pace
people walk by. The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see them from the car.
There are some lighter, amusing poems, even though Gilbert explains that he doesn’t ‘write funny poems’. There is also a sense of dissatisfaction with his ability to write poetry. This sometimes turns into self-consciousness, and some of his references to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Keats and Blake seem slightly forced and reverent.
This is an excellent book of poetry, which has a cathartic effect on the reader. The universality of the themes of loss, love and time are immediately understandable and expressed so simply. However, the second half of the collection seems to be the weaker half, which is, unfortunately, slightly repetitive, continuing on the same lines but without the emotive power of the first half.
Wikipedia begins Jack Gilbert’s entry with the words ‘a little known American poet.’ Hopefully this collection will go some way to addressing this neglect.
- Felicity Amswych
-9-
Perihelion
Sarah Law
(Shearsman, 2006)
ISBN 0907562825
£8.95
Sarah Law’s third collection of poetry, Perihelion, is more like three short books in one. At 112 pages it contains three long sequences and other shorter pieces,. The first sequence, A Clutch of Monsters, twenty fourteen line poems, opens with ‘Fake’ and a desperately vituperative first line.
You ancient doll. Your wax film of a face
careers across the living room and fills
my vision.
In many ways it is a representative poem, of the collection and of Law’s style. The lines appear fractured and compacted, the syntax squeezed together, leaving the reader to work out the, at times, crossword puzzle complexity. It is often easy to appreciate the skill that goes into these poems but much more difficult to say with any certainty what they are about.
Take, for example, the second poem, ‘Duellist’ which opens with, ‘Burnt bird in a rich fruitcake,’ and the lines that follow:
A patch, a yin-yang pattern in a cup; the black
is part of therapy, smelling of wretched ether,
cuts a desert dash, my own flash choice.
These poems raise issues about difficulty and how much leeway we can allow a poet who is considered experimental. I suspect that many readers will be repelled by the opacity. Others will decide that the poems sound like bad translations from French surrealist poems. A few will be intrigued enough to look closer and invest the time and effort that these poems demand.
‘Spare Part’ which comes next in the book is perhaps more successful in that it remains tightly structured and intricate and yet it gives up more on initial readings. It is about a relationship, expressed in warped cinematic terms. The reader is left wondering whether the lover is a generic film character or the TV box itself.
Later there is a clear reference to John Donne in ‘Vegetable’.
A ring around the wrist is like
A sentence, far from the world’s bright hair.
Perhaps Donne is the best point of reference for these complex poems which are at times reminiscent of the metaphysical blend of unusual ideas and strained syntax.
The title poem seems to speak from the point of view of a planet or comet at the point of its orbit nearest to the sun. I found it impossible to read without thinking of Icarus.
How flammable I am.
...
... burn me up, according to your plan.
But this speaker heads for the sun with a self-destructive relish.
I feed my friends
into the fire
...
all their loving mouths and outstretch hands
fluttering to charred oblivion.
The companion piece, ‘Aphelion’ however, is about withdrawal:
I can’t resolve the elements, I’m scared
To add a drop of passion to the mix.
The second sequence, ‘Tai Chi Sketches’ contains more fourteen line slabs of thick-textured syntax. More than ever, the titles are an indispensable aid to meaning. And again, there are memorable lyric moments.
I love the gilded loss of autumn, where
my sadnesses are squirrels in the bank. (‘Moving Hands like Clouds)
As if the collection isn’t esoteric enough, the third sequence appears to be inspired by Italian renaissance art. Again we move towards abstraction in language.
Take me out with berries of redemption
your final style of interludic racing
dis-ease of connection is raw,
falling into single trance, kissed
in a cobalt memory, unpeeled cell
of attraction, the chemical wonder. (Madonna Del Rosario)
Overall this is certainly an ambitious collection and, to my mind, not without its successes, but these come at a high price. There is a delight in finding unusual combinations of words. There is also frustration with lines like, ‘deliquescence of iconostatic applaud.’ Too many of the poems here carry their learning as a shield. They will float past your eyes and you wonder what they are about and you wonder whether it would be worth back tracking and forcing yourself to work out the meaning. But too often it seems a lot to ask.
- Marion Lewis
-10-
Making the Most of the Light
Matt Merritt
(HappenStance, 2006)
ISBN 0955028035
£3
and
The Clown of Natural Sorrow
Rob A Mackenzie
(Happenstance, 2005)
ISBN 0955028043
£3
both available from
www.happenstancepress.com
Two new pamphlets from the new Scottish-based chapbook imprint, Happenstance Press. The opening poem in Making the Most of the Light hints at possibilities and alternative lives and this principle echoes through many pieces in the collection.
We both know
it’d be an awkward old age. Him, dictating
memoirs of the man who’s done it all,
and me, signing at the bottom of the page.
This doubleness informs both the subject matter of many of the poems. ‘Man Overboard’ just a few pages later talks of what might have been: ‘All day, we chart courses he might have taken.’ These might-have-beens are often ripe pickings for poets - the idea of changing the disappointing past for a more satisfying one.
‘Director’s Cut’ is a cinematic portrayal of a relationship, re-made, as it could have been:
cut to me, calm – for once
not confused – and back to you
as if we saw the shining truth
between us, and knew it.
Other poems in this entertaining collection use extended sporting metaphors. ‘Comeback’ is one of very few snooker poems in the language: ‘This one’s for all the times / we played for safety / when we could have played / for so much more.’
‘Cooking Jambalaya in Corporation Road’ is a poem as much about making poems, or any work for art for that matter, as it is about food. ‘First find yourself / a good, strong, cast-iron pot, thick enough / to prevent easy burning. Second, always... use your own proper / homemade stock... All it needs is time, a little gentle turning.’ The poems in this chapbook have been delicately honed. They capture moods and ideas with precision. Matt Merrit has a fine eye for a well-turned phrase.
The lavender back cover of Rob MacKenzie’s chapbook, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, tells us that Rob is a minister of St David’s Church in Scotland. Indeed there are quite a few religious references in this collection, happily none are sermonizing, but fit into Mackenzie’s fresh, wide-eyed and at times playful vision of the world.
There is also here an admirable attempt to be topical in these poems. The African refugees in ‘Taxi’ for instance, or the many reminders that this chapbook was written in the 21st century: ‘the stink / of Lynx’, ‘a blowzy swirl of Laura Ashley.’
Certainly this helps to make for poems that are easy to relate to. ‘Ikea’ is, as you might expect, a complaint about the difficulties of constructing a flat-packed domestic dream. The hapless speaker having to ‘dig out instructions drawn, / so it seems, during the great Swedish earthquake.’
The slight conceits of poems such as ‘Concentration’ or ‘Your Eyes’ are entertaining but I wonder whether they will withstand re-reading. I could, however, imagine that these poems would go down well at a reading. Poems such as, ‘While the Moonies are Taking Over Uruguay’:
The Mormons attack Via Garibaldi,
suits and ties in the summer heat
and still they don’t sweat.,
Is it a miracle?
Indeed the blurb also tells us that Mackenzie has performed regularly at readings in Glasgow.
This chapbook demonstrates that he is capable of precise imagery and keen observation. An enjoyable and, at times, a thought provoking collection.
- Stephen Brown
Notes on Contributors
Felicity Amswych teaches drama at a school in Harrow, England.
Stephen Brown teaches at a school near Oxford, England. He has published one novel, Under the Devil Tree.
Peter Dabbene is a Hamilton, New Jersey-based writer. His poetry has been published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud, Wristlet and Apple Valley Review. He has also published two story collections, Prime Movements and Glossolalia, as well as a novel, Mister Dreyfus' Demons.
Gary Jude is from London. He has published poetry in Acumen and The Wolf. He is currently teaching English in Switzerland.
Marion Lewis lives in Pembrokeshire. Her favourite poets are Edward Thomas, R S Thomas and Gillian Clarke.
David Luntz started writing in 2005 and has appeared in Mastodon Dentist, TMP Irregular and Facets. He lives in Connecticut.
Patrick T. Randolph lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is an English as a Second Language instructor at the University of Wisconsin.
Thomas Reynolds teaches at JohnsonCountyCommunity College in Overland Park, Kansas. He has published poems in various print and online journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Aethlon-The Journal of Sport Literature.
