Daisy Fried: MY BROTHER IS GETTING ARRESTED AGAIN

The opening poem, “Cordless,” in Daisy Fried’s My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, her second collection of poetry, contains the telephone monologue of a flighty female—who cannot drink because she is taking antibiotics (“what do people do in the evening when they can’t drink”)—left on a friend’s answering machine. The one-sided conversation begins with the young woman’s rationale for calling: “I was feeling interesting. I was feeling fragile / so I thought I’d call / and leave you a message.” Throughout much of the book, Fried’s various speakers seem to believe this reasoning as well, many offering readers detailed narratives that might be “interesting” and revealing a variety of aspects about themselves, while often also displaying a “fragile” or uncertain side of their personalities.

In fact, when entertainment and anxiety combine in these poems, Fried delivers to readers some of her finer work. As the caller in “Cordless” confides at the end of her amusing, appealing, and affecting poem: “I have to go lie down now. I’m not feeling / very brave. I am feeling like / there is nothing left / in the world except me in this house alone.” Much of the entertainment in Fried’s poetry arises from the active and imaginative language presented by her narrators or other individuals in the poems. Although the book’s pieces frequently reveal their details through the use of monologue, the poet’s speakers manage to keep a consistent tone yet avoid falling into the trap of merely maintaining a static or stale voice.

Sometimes personae within the pages of this collection, almost like motorcyclists on Harleys weaving in and out of turnpike traffic to move ahead more quickly, exhibit an uncanny ability to slip from one topic to another, shifting from personal opinion to social commentary or from objective observation to emotional response even in the span of a single sentence, as in this excerpt caught in mid-sentence from “Some Loud Men, Some Women”: “insurance policies everywhere jump / a couple hundred bucks and a motorcycle zips / or unzips our sense of elsewhere / crawling across the screen of our brains, / and the neighborhood children clutch / their Jennifer-the-Friendly-Faun dolls . . ..” The same sentence later suggests “children may be distractible, we may be distractible,” and before Fried ends this the speaker considers “a whale caught in the Delaware River” where rescuers try to guide him into “water deeper, less polluted with leads, chlordanes, PCBs / and he can turn somersaults and find a whale lover / as the sun breaks like an egg over Liberty Tower . . ..”

The figures in Daisy Fried’s poetry occasionally remind me of intriguing personalities found elsewhere. At times, Fried’s lines read like dialogue spoken by city sophisticates or ethnic relatives in a Woody Allen film: “‘Your father giving his atheist mother / a religious funeral with that schmuck rabbi—why?’” (“Aunt Leah, Aunt Sophie and the Negro Painter”). Sometimes her personae appear to resemble teenage screen characters from a John Hughes movie: “In her observatory, her little red room, / the daughter sings ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ / into her hairbrush” (“Go To Your Room”). In different instances the pieces seem similar to uneasy scenes one might find in an outtake from American Beauty: “You and city and life / and home and history and shopping / like a bunch of cars / getting backed up on a turnpike / one of those massive fog pileups / cars spanking off one another’s bumpers” (“Some Loud Men, Some Women”). When the women in these poems discuss their lives, they may even seem more believable than the characters in Sex and the City: “‘I still miss him.’ / I nod. I poke Kinesha’s belly, her nose. / ‘U-G-H,’ says Kinesha, annoyed. I’m bad with kids. / ‘I’m teaching her to assert herself,’ Shoshana says. / Her wrist chains jangle. I twist my wedding ring. / An organ somewhere plays ‘Ode to Joy’” (“Shooting Kinesha”).

As one might notice in Fried’s attention to specifics (such as the chains on the woman’s wrist, the twisted wedding ring, and the song in the distance), the poet’s close focus on significant features can be very effective. Indeed, in those poems that offer more intimate pictures of the personae and explore emotions through examination of an individual’s particular personal experiences, Fried excels. The people in these poems come to life before our eyes through their sharp dialogue or their distinctive behavior. As readers, we become fascinated by their characteristics and their perceptions.

Perhaps Fried’s background as a past working journalist for Philadelphia newspapers contributes to her skill at filtering out extraneous remarks from interviews with subjects while preserving a sense of each speaker’s personality. In the beginning of “Sugar,” Fried introduces a new persona: “I’m trying to quit, licking chocolate / off my fingers. I’m the new counterperson / at Miss Julie’s Sweet Shoppe. I nibble / scones, snack on truffles. Sugar sweat, / sugar grit jumps me almost out of my skin. / It itches.” Nevertheless, the profiles in Fried’s poetry are framed by lyrical language one would rarely see in a newspaper story: “The lady, in her plushy coat, speckled / like dog fur, collar up (it’s chilly in here), / with wilted lips, watches, swivels back, / then front, then back to the bar. She sings along, / her different song, je mens” (“The Drunkard’s Bar”).

In the many instances like this, where Fried’s fine ear for picking up the peculiarities of a voice blends with vivid description lyrically written, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again provides an attractive and engaging set of works seemingly sketched with keen attention, especially to the particulars within each poem’s setting. However, one weaker poem, “New Boyfriend, 14,” seems too inconsequential. It begins as if the start to one of Fried’s more finished portraits, but this piece just stops too short of completion, and it feels as if it needs some of the highly effective elements desired by readers, who find such technique evidenced in other poems, or a more developed empathy, as witnessed elsewhere in the collection. Another less successful work is the political poem that paints with a broad brush. Whereas Fried’s poetry frequently appears more persuasive because of its wit and subtle social commentary conveyed within perceptive reports of her personae, on a couple of occasions statements in the poetry resemble the editorial page of her former newspapers. Consequently, “Hawk”—an all too obvious metaphor that reads like a political cartoon caricature—even as satire appears less complex and somewhat awkward when contrasted with the more absorbing pieces, including others with similar political messages, one has noticed throughout the rest of the volume.

For instance, in “American Brass” Fried effectively relates ambivalence in her associations as an American overseas during the initial bombings of Afghanistan just months after the events of September 11. As an American high school marching band plays from a bandstand in the Luxembourg Gardens, the speaker and her husband reveal conflicting emotions over the spread of American influence and the violence occurring halfway around the world: “holding hands, / listening to American / brass filling up all of every thing, the trees, / the park, these interrupted spaces, paths, / kids, dust, the French, our hearts, with its / sound like money, like bombs falling in air // bombs falling now on Afghanistan.”

The collection’s title poem also appears to be another more effective piece with subtle facets of political content within an interesting and witty context. The speaker’s brother, whose political leanings are so far left as to approach anarchism (“He doesn’t have politics.”), is continually arrested at civil disobedience protests. His behavior concerns family members whose own political points of view range from the speaker’s left wing attitude to the father’s belief that “‘being pro-Palestinian / is anti-Semitic.’” None of the family are able to “talk politics” with the brother. Nevertheless, rather than didactic like “Hawk,” this poem is a richer mix, with its insertion of some ambiguity because readers, like the speaker, may not know what to make of the brother, who could be creating social statements in a more constructive manner, as the poet indicates: “He is not weeding community gardens. / He is not climbing on roofs to bang / with hammer on shingles.” By the final lines of the poem, one wonders whether the brother should be admired (as he loudly claims, “this is what democracy looks like”) or if his activities are silly and counterproductive acts of intellectual narcissism. Perhaps both are possible conclusions, an understanding which adds to the complexity in one’s reading of this entertaining poem and elevates it to a point where it may achieve more thoughtful response from readers than a political poem that might be as one-sided as the conversation in “Cordless” would receive.

With this second collection of poems, Daisy Fried demonstrates great energy and a still developing sense of style. Her multitude of monologues and singular portraits of believable people entwined in the middle of ordinary events or emotional conflicts encountered during everyday living, but rendered in evocative and ever-engaging ways, already signal this poet’s promising potential and continuing future of fine poetry. Indeed, thinking of what lies ahead for Fried, I’m reminded of lines from “Used One Speed, Princeton,” an understated yet seemingly revealing self-portrait of the poet: “I sometimes feel rather shaky / but that’s OK. I guard against regret, / disapproval, those middle-aged emotions. / I am still young. I feel I am.” By the close of the poem, the speaker steadies herself, squints her eyes “against gnats,” and she steers ahead: “a certain feeling comes over me, / something that feels like foolish bravery, / I glide, concede, I sit straight up.” One hopes such steely resolve and determined direction will guide Fried as she writes the new works readers already anticipate based upon the accomplished and remarkably delightful poetry she has produced thus far.

Fried, Daisy. My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

Charles Simic: MY NOISELESS ENTOURAGE

Readers who have followed Charles Simic’s poetry since his first small press collection four decades ago (What the Grass Says: Kayak, 1967) or his initial publication from a larger press (Dismantling the Silence: Brazillier, 1971) have never really been surprised by the direction his poetry has taken. Likewise, one would immediately recognize the work in his latest book, My Noiseless Entourage, as identifiably Simic’s. With the possible exception of his endeavors in prose poetry, Simic’s distinctive distanced voice rendered in brief and crisply lined poems presenting odd or surrealistic perspectives with an ironic edge to them are easily known by sight.

Nevertheless, despite encountering an expected approach again in his new poems, readers are rarely disappointed due to any onset of predictability or boredom. In fact, sometimes it seems Simic’s return to his familiar formal mannerism or distinguishable subject matter adequately masks the atypical results one finds by the end of each poem. Consequently, while his style might lull us or, like a magician’s diversionary tactic, distract us for a moment while the language’s sleight-of-hand shift in focus occurs, by the close of the poem we discover another unforeseen, though often ambiguous, disclosure that could disturb or unsettle us.

Occasionally, the speakers’ plain diction and apparently flat declarative sentences in Simic’s poems open him to legitimate criticism, as in the opening poem, “Description of a Lost Thing”: “Horror movies, / All-night cafeterias, / Dark barrooms / And poolhalls, / On rain-slicked streets.” However, at times these scenes and their speakers remind me of the ordinary events or everyday unsuspecting individuals inexplicably caught up in extraordinary scenarios and dramatic activities in an Alfred Hitchcock film. In “Pigeons at Dawn,” the book’s final piece, Simic describes such a scene: “Under the vast, early-dawn sky / The city lay silent before us. / Everything on hold: / Rooftops and water towers, / Clouds and wisps of white smoke.” As with Hitchcock’s innocent characters that find themselves in the middle of unusual circumstances, the speakers in Simic’s poems almost appear unaware of the startling consequences of their actions or the substantial significance of their words.

During the book’s title poem, the persona reports: “It was disconcerting, downright frightening / To be reminded of one’s solitude.” No other poet portrays anxiety so gracefully. In “To Dreams,” Simic’s speaker moves through a series of uneasy scenes: “On the hush-hush sharing my bed / With phantoms, visiting the kitchen // After midnight to check the faucet. / I’m late for school, and when I get there / No one seems to recognize me.” Phantoms, ghosts, the dead, and the absent haunt the pages in this book, perhaps as a “noiseless entourage,” while Simic continues to contemplate mortality and the existence or absence of God.

Within “My Noiseless Entourage” Simic makes a comparison to “reading about stars” in “a children’s book”: “How they can afford to spend centuries / Traveling our way on a glint of light.” The poet controls the language of his speakers so much that at first the words often camouflage deeper meanings and, like the far stars, delay enlightenment until after careful consideration of choices between alternative readings. In “Shading Exercise” the speaker concludes: “The sun doesn’t care for ambiguities, / But I do. I open my door and let them in.”

In an essay (“Negative Capability and Its Children”) Simic had written nearly three decades ago, he discussed “the principle of uncertainty,” determining that the best poetry is that which presents “a new and unofficial view of our human condition,” as well as “its contradictions.” Simic suggested the task of the poet was to offer readers ways “to think without recourse to abstractions . . . to sensitize thought and involve it with the ambiguity of existence.” In the best pieces from this collection, Simic still delivers just such poetry, extended metaphors and short narrative allegories especially relating to his aging characters, facing death or contemplating the possibility of God.

Poem after poem, Simic’s personae are surrounded by evidence of death or abandonment. In “Used Clothing Store” one comes upon the “large stock of past lives / To rummage through” until “you turn to flee, / Dead men’s hats are rolling / On the floor, hurrying / To escort you out the door.” “The Centuries” opens with a pair of ominous lines: “Many a poor wretch left no trace / Of ever having lived here.” However, even when a trace of one’s life remains, it also serves to remind us of an absence, a life lost: “A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm. / Of riding in a balloon over Lake Erie” (“Used Book Store”). In “Graveyard on a Hill” Simic accepts an image that diverts attention and allows temporary avoidance of considering the dead: “I’ll take the January wind, so mean / It permits no other thought / Than the one that acknowledges its presence / Among these weedy tombstones.”

Simic’s wit shows as he begins a motif in “Ask Your Astrologer”: “My stars have been guilty of benign neglect.” He then presents an address: “To our Lord who has withdrawn / Into a corner with his wounds / I say, that world out there / Is a riddle even you can’t solve.” With the opening line of “To Fate” he reveals: “You were always more real to me than God.” By the final section of the four in My Noiseless Entourage, Simic narrows his focus more closely on the existence or, more precisely, the absence of God (“The Absentee Landlord”). Through metaphor Simic further proposes a God either unresponsive to humans (“He Heard with His Dead Ear”) or now unavailable, like “Our Old Neighbor”: “Who hasn’t been seen in his yard / Or sitting on his front porch / For what seems like forever. / Whose house stays dark at night, / The garage closed, the great / Hearse of a car parked in the back.”

Although one’s instinct sometimes leads to a regret at re-occurrence of the cool or reserved tone in a number of these poems or an apparent lack of range in these works, and some readers may desire greater emotional attachment in Simic’s poetry, while others might seek more substantive exploration of the larger complex subjects this poet only hints at addressing in his brief pieces, these valid concerns also may serve merely as reminders of what defines his style of writing or what borders he is willing to observe. In addition, a few poems in the collection, “Minds Roaming” or “One Chair” among them, seem much too slight to carry any sufficient weight, as though Simic were experimenting in further minimalism and testing the boundaries, sometimes unsuccessfully, of his succinct poetry.

Still, as Charles Simic has demonstrated since his first collection forty years ago, and as he indicated in his early essay, even within these admittedly evident limitations, the poet intends to prove he can offer a new “view of our human condition” and “a principle of uncertainty.” He hopes to show he may be able to relay aspects of ambitious and abstract concepts—including thoughts on mortality and the existence of God—through common, even humorous, settings that have been heightened by application of playful imagination or through engagement in ironic wordplay with an intelligent and witty use of language. Finally, as with the speaker in “Shading Exercise” that Simic mimics in his poetry—and unlike the sun shining brightly on the exterior world, not caring for ambiguities—this poet prefers the darker interior, would rather open his door to the ambiguities and the uncertainties, inviting all of us to enter as well.

Simic, Charles. My Noiseless Entourage. Harcourt, 2005.

Honor Moore: RED SHOES

When encountering Honor Moore’s poetry, readers may find it difficult to escape the fact that a family legacy in the visual arts exists. As Moore chronicled in the highly praised 1996 biography (The White Blackbird, Viking/Penguin) of her grandmother, American painter Margarett Sargent (the fourth cousin to John Singer Sargent), a couple of her ancestors have exhibited a talented history of image creation. Consequently, coming upon so much vivid language throughout Honor Moore’s poems in Red Shoes resembling a painter’s palette with its rich mix of tints, one sometimes only wonders how wide the range of colors may be that she will achieve. For example, in “Homage,” a brief early piece in the collection, the speaker refers to the “purple” and “orange” clothes she’d worn one evening (on a day “the sky was so blue . . . / You could cut it”), as well as the “white” of a bedside lampshade and of her “white” nightgown which “shimmers under the purple lamp.” Additional variations of these colors are mentioned, and the imagery includes implied color or texture in a “mahogany” table with drawers that have “crystal knobs.” The poem concludes: “The lamp is glass, its finial brass. / I’ve kept it a long time.”

Clearly, Moore’s approach to depicting a scene seems similar to the manner in which a portrait artist or still-life painter might arrange and catalog objects within a field of vision, those props that fill up the canvas until aspects of an atmosphere abound to such an extent as to evoke emotion or allude to a subject’s mood. In “Summer” the poet shows readers a setting almost solely through a pictorial inventory illustrating an emotional state: “In her garden birds bewail the singe / of absence. It was almost five, / the brick wall greened by a veil / of moss, artifact of city heat.” Even seemingly ordinary objects become essential elements: “Fire escapes / zigzag brick, balconies barred / with spiraled iron.” The poem closes with a subtle image indicating a passage of time and a tone that suggests some condition of deficiency or wanting: “Make a note: / Beneath the windows, water / stained the brick. Assume years of / air dulled the color almost white.”

In the first of three sections in Red Shoes, Moore presents short pieces elegantly executed. “January Light” contains luminous imagery, written in eleven lyrical lines filled with alliteration and internal rhymes, reminiscent of a moment frozen in a carefully drawn sketch: “slipping, you dip / Even fall as daylight widens and I / Saunter through dusks that lean, / Lurch, break, hallucinating sunshine.” At times, Moore also surprises the reader with imaginative metaphors or similes that inch toward surrealistic depictions, as occurs in “Hotel Brindise”: “The glass door was spinning panes / like an open book.” In fact, by the end of this poem the female speaker becomes transformed into a mermaid with a colorful description: “His hand fell to the glacier / of my thigh and held on. / My gold tail swam dark green water, // the ocean smelled of gardenia.”

Although a danger in this initial part of the collection arises when a work seems so spare as to appear slight and inconsequential, as in the slim eight-line “Doorway,” most of Moore’s brief lyric pieces are magical and affecting, evincing a sophisticated and sensual nature, which many ought to feel appealing, often shifting between real scenes and the “strange landscape” of dreams. As the first lines of “The Robbery” blatantly state: “The sky turned purple, bright purple / so I wasn’t sure if it was real / or part of my dream.” Whenever this slip into a dream-like vision happens, Moore’s poetry resembles impressionist paintings. Her poems captivate readers with inspired subjective rendering of evolving events or glimpses at the transitory effects created by light and color.

A curiously ambitious but less successful second section contains three lengthier pieces written mostly in prose-like language (“Exactly Perpendicular” and “Gnostic”) or long lines that stretch the width of the page (“Wallace Stevens”). These three works, apparently narrating disquieting dreams, involve engaging subject matter, including the deaths of her parents, and show occasional retreats into lyrical and luring passages, such as in this excerpt from “Gnostic”: “Your hand will slide from my skin like silk falling from a polished table.” Nevertheless, the transition from poetic diction comes across as more of a distraction with lax language lacking the intensity and impact of Moore’s more compact poems. Even in the dream during which Stevens appears, “seducer” to the speaker, to discuss “the limits of image,” the poem seems to overreach. Its lines give the impression of extending in a nearly self-conscious attempt at imitation that draws attention away from a number of otherwise brightly hued items—“a flag of scarlet silk,” “vermillion epaulet. Crimson of manicure. Large red man reading, / handkerchief red as clitoris peeking from his deep tweed pocket.”

However, in the final section of Red Shoes Moore appears to accomplish much of what she may have been aiming to achieve in section two by this time blending the expansiveness of subject matter with a continuing concentration on crisp and vibrant imagery or by mixing expository passages among lyrical stanzas. Indeed, the third section, which takes up half the book’s pages, is best read as an elegiac sequence dedicated to the memory of photographer Inge Morath, a close confidante of the poet and the wife of playwright Arthur Miller. Notably, Moore dedicates this section to the memory of those two friends. When the individual pieces of this section, sub-titled “Beauté” for the affectionate term by which Moore was addressed by Morath, are seen as strung to one another with a common theme, the cumulative power becomes greater.

For one who has authored a biography of a painter who was her grandmother, this poetic recollection of a photographer who served almost as an older female family member to Moore merely represents a natural next step: “she is in me begging to come back” (“Night”). The poet acknowledges in this first piece of the sequence Morath’s important personal influence: “Nothing will bring her back // and she is in me breathing.” In “Beauté” Moore embraces the term her friend had bestowed upon her: “I knew somehow when she said that word, she was / making new life for me. When she said ‘Beauté’ / those syllables were light and I was in that light.”

In another part of the elegiac sequence, “Alive,” Moore recalls the last conversation between the two, and how she read Emily Dickinson’s poetry for the dying woman, choosing carefully the works: “Why should the living proclaim hard truths to the dying?” The poignant final lines of this poem provide a fine example of Moore’s ability to evoke emotion and stimulate thought, as she supplies a touch of closure while at the same time leaving lingering images reflecting the cycles of life: “evening was darkening the gray // church walls as in the silence we watched pigeons slowly wheel / in winter sky. I put my coat on, touched her arm, leaned to kiss her, // the distant shouts of children leaving school across the street.”

However, equally effective and equally valuable, Moore offers readers an opportunity to know her friend’s life and livelihood. In “Portrait” the poet discloses those moments when she sat for a photograph by Morath: “The portrait is black and white, the settee / blue and orange, behind me a corner of my grandmother’s // self portrait.” Significantly, not only does Morath include the link to Moore’s past with the grandmother’s form in the photograph, but also the poem advances a portrait of Morath, seen at her work: “I watched her, long fingers moving // in failing light, framing the air with stretched hands.” Likewise, this image’s language echoes in a later piece, “Gloves”: “One long-fingered hand strokes / the other chemo-scoured wrist // as if pulling on an evening glove.”

The first poem in this book, “Tango,” begins with a provocative image: “A man crosses a street. / The red glove // Pulls him toward her.” In the final lines of the collection’s closing and title poem, “Red Shoes,” the poet ends with a memorable moment: “she puts her arms around you // she is wearing red shoes.” Throughout the many pages in between, with words and phrases as brilliant or textured as thick brush strokes layering paint across a canvas, Honor Moore often offers portraits of those once closest to her—parents, lovers, friends—and in doing so she also delivers an impressionistic self-portrait consisting of colorful memories and surrealistic dreams, frequently fragmented, sometimes emphasizing absence or loss and an accompanying emotional stress, but almost always tinged with some manifestation of love and, as she writes in “Gnostic,” invariably using “imagination, unceasingly seeking understanding of what is concealed.”

Moore, Honor. Red Shoes. W.W. Norton, 2005.

David Bottoms: WALTZING THROUGH THE ENDTIME

The centerpiece and longest poem, taking up an entire middle section of the three in David Bottoms’ Waltzing through the Endtime, focuses on an incident the poet remembers happening “one night in ’65.” In “Homage to Buck Cline,” a seven-page eleven-part piece of personal recollection from four decades ago, Bottoms elaborates upon a fairly ordinary occurrence in order to provide source material that allows him to muse upon elements “lit in an uncluttered niche” of memory. The work winds its lines of reminiscence and speculation around a teenage experience in which the speaker, “stoned on a glass of Mateus rosé,” is pulled over for running his father’s Impala through “the traffic light at the corner of the North Canton Store / where sour Buck Cline sat in the dark patrol car with the gold badge / of the Canton Police stenciled on his door.” Out of respect for the boy’s father, whom the officer recalls with reverence as a tough high school football star wounded in World War II, the teenager is let off without arrest or the need to answer to his father for his recklessness.

However, this narrative of actual actions does not represent the most significant aspect of the poem. Instead, the various mental associations evoked by those events for the poet present a pattern of thoughtful rumination that may fascinate readers, especially when imagination and memory are blended: “And imagination, of course, depends on so much . . . // Take the polished memory of my grandfather’s horse barn / and its hayloft full of jewels.” In fact, Bottoms finds everyone holds “something divine in the memory,” perhaps even when we are reminded of painful moments in our history, as when the father’s war wound can be felt with each step he takes “across the concrete garage / on that splinter of a bone the Japanese navy left in his leg.” By the end of this poem, the poet declares: “memory toughens us up for that tumble / and drift of eternity, for the unpatrolled landscape / of the psyche unfurling.”

Indeed, throughout this collection, David Bottoms patrols those crossroads where memory and imagination intersect, as in “Kenny Roebuck’s Knuckle-Curve,” a boyhood recollection as extended metaphor where “once again the world isn’t what you think, / and the memory, already wobbling, knuckles off / into voices, laughter, jeers.” In “Black Hawk Rag” the speaker plays notes on an old mandolin as he tries to revive images and sounds of his grandfather hunched with a “fiddle under chin” in a garage beside his store; although, the speaker believes it may be “silly to lean on the rhythms of memory, / which will hardly give back even the threads of that rag.”

Nevertheless, the rhythms of memory continually fill this book to revive characters and contexts from the poet’s past, even to the point of reliving some circumstances similar to those in Bottoms’ first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, but this time with a more mature perspective. In “Shooting Rats in the Afterlife” Bottoms insists “the memory is so persistent, and territorial. Take Macon, Georgia, 1971, / which I carry around in my head, like a classic video.” (The word “memory” appears repeatedly in this poem, as it does so often throughout the rest of the collection.) Bottoms concludes: “through memory we create our own afterlives,” those narratives of the former times that define for us who we are or where we have been. As the speaker recalls the situation of driving to shoot rats in a dump with his drunken buddies, he reveals: “ We rode slow, / although everything moves slowly in memory. / Which is part of the act of savoring.”

One set of memories arises when the poet visits a former home of his favorite musicians (“In the Big House of the Allman Brothers My Heart Gets Tuned”) where twenty-eight years ago he stood outside and listened to the band rehearse. He also recounts an episode during which—“stupefied / and afraid, skulking on all fours through those briary terraces / of Rose Hill Cemetery”—he sat at the “slab of Elizabeth Reed,” the inspiration for one of the group’s finest songs. (In Vagrant Grace a similar poem, “At the Grave of Martha Ellis,” references Duane Allman’s song, “Little Martha.”) Ironically, two of the band members mentioned in the new poem, Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, were buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery upon their untimely deaths. But Bottoms also remembers those days when he could “hear through bricked Tudor wall / and blanketed windows an electric concussion of bass / and guitar,” when he even met Duane Allman “eye to bloodshot eye / in a Kmart.” Bottoms wonders whether remembering such activities constitutes “strung-out memory / or middle-aged panic.” As the poet indicates, such memories overcome the transitions time has dragged with it, and when brought to mind, for him it is “as though the house, / my heartbeat, the larger night, were all tuning up for the lifting / of some curtain.”

In an extended essay I had written about Bottoms’ previous volumes of poetry for the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of VPR, I suggested that Bottoms displayed greater complexity when his meditative lyrics developed slowly in lengthier poems. As in his last collection, Vagrant Grace, Bottoms appears mesmerized by the intricate nature of one’s memories, especially as they are introduced or interpreted through the imaginatively manipulated renderings of the poetic process. Therefore, the longer form for most of the works in this book (which contains only 14 poems in its 59 pages) complements the contemplative temperament of the pieces’ speakers.

Bottoms establishes early a relaxed, pensive, and reflective atmosphere in an excellent opening poem, “Easter Shoes Epistles,” which contains a sequence of observations or narratives threaded together by images of shoes and statements that explore variations on the issue of faith: “we have to travel on faith, struggling not to notice the absence, / the stray shoe in the street.” The speaker’s mother even refers to faith as “just like an old shoe.” However, memory remains central to the poet: “It’s odd what the memory smuggles into the afterlife— / the squeak of my mother’s shoes, / or a baseball game from the fifties, my father’s wing tips / kicking up a coaching box—pocket charms against oblivion.” The last section of the poem brings together its different items—shoes, faith, Easter, memory—in a traumatic second-grader’s situation, experienced by the speaker’s wife when she was young and poor, “with one dress / salvaged from a house fire,” and “ashamed of her shoes.” Taken by a Sunday-school teacher to the mall, the cathedral for consumers, she is suddenly confronted by “fountains of brass cherubs, / chandeliers, skylights, and that one fragile storefront of glass / where every wall sparkles with shoes.”

Additionally, Bottoms expertly combines the narratives’ gritty realistic details with some subtle philosophical introspection. The poet’s language comfortably accommodates natural colloquial conversation as well as lovely and lyrical description of nature. Apparently disparate sides of the poet come together nicely with “Melville in the Bass Boat,” where the speaker, unable to catch a fish despite hours “throwing deep runners, live shiners, rattle-bugs and jigs,” opens his “slightly soggy” paperback edition of Moby Dick. As the epigraph hints, “meditation and water are wedded forever.” Indeed, throughout these poems a number of literary figures are invoked and quoted by their speakers, including Homer, Blake, Whitman, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Coleridge, Jung, Rilke, Lawrence, O’Connor, and Warren.

Nevertheless, the most prominent quote is drawn from the poet’s mother-in-law, whose phrase, “Waltzing through the Endtime,” provides the book’s title. In the closing poem of the collection, “Three-quarter Moon and Moment of Grace,” Bottoms tells readers that’s what she calls his worrying and wondering about life, his habit of “wringing out my spirit like a dirty dishrag.” Near the end of this final work Bottoms once more turns toward the sense of recollection as a primary influence in our lives: “doesn’t it all come down to memory . . .?” However, just like the book’s first poem and others in between, this last poem also raises unanswered questions about faith and its mysteries: “and what are we dragging in that heavy sack / if not the cornerstones of Heaven, or the charcoals of Hell?”

As witnessed in his recent previous volumes, David Bottoms frequently seeks spiritual significance from among everyday experiences or observed ordinary events, and he offers life lessons learned from scattered fragments of remembered adventures. With his more mature voice, Bottoms also demonstrates a greater penchant for self-reflection in meditative language: “Days now I’ve pondered / what my mother-in law calls the Endtime” (“Vigilance”). Nevertheless, his poetry continues to be based in precise and persuasive descriptions, and the language remains narrative yet melodic. The poet’s balance of vivid imagery and expressive lyricism nicely combines nature with art in Waltzing through the Endtime, regularly giving readers a sense of pensive composition, much like that “mandolin trilling out the indecipherable harmony” in “O Mandolin, O Magnum Mysterium” with its music of “melancholy little sparrow-cries / fluttering over the riffled water.”

Bottoms, David. Waltzing through the Endtime. Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Kay Ryan: THE NIAGARA RIVER

When I read Kay Ryan’s poetry, I am sometimes reminded of my first visit to a Jasper Johns retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum nearly three decades ago. I recall my initial reactions to all that artwork with images, symbols, and signs that seemed so ordinary upon a quick glance. The paintings of targets appeared merely as concentric circles on a square canvas, the different depictions of American flags or bronzed beer cans seemed nothing more than clever alterations of reality, and the stenciled letters spelling out “red” or “yellow” in colors at variance with their wording represented only an obvious attempt at irony. However, upon closer scrutiny the banal suddenly became a more complicated set of symbols or signs, each inviting viewers to see beyond an icon’s surface meanings and to seek deeper readings in its unconventional appearance. I concluded an additional aspect of wit made the experience linger and even more enjoyable. As John Ashbery has written of Jasper Johns, “One may puzzle over his pictures, but one does not escape them.”

Similarly, Kay Ryan’s work proves puzzling upon opening her new book, The Niagara River; nevertheless, the brief and spare style, familiar from her past collections, remains with the reader and seeps into one’s thoughts about poetry in much the same way Johns’s art has become a reliable part of contemporary consciousness. Ryan’s deceptively straightforward yet complex and smart poems arise from a seemingly simple pattern of slender, usually unbroken, stanzas written in a plain and accessible vocabulary. Despite line breaks that sometimes seem haphazard or normally might create jerkiness as one reads through the poem, this poet appears always in full control, and the lines display a surprising fluency aided by subtle alliteration or other lyrical devices, often including nearly-hidden internal rhymes or near-rhymes.

Like Jasper Johns, Ryan frequently focuses upon objects or language with which we are so familiar that we may have forgotten to pay much attention any longer, forcing a fresh look. Perhaps no other poet, except Ashbery, brings back to life dull and overused terms or platitudinous sayings as often and as well as Kay Ryan. In Ryan’s poetry, clichéd and hackneyed phrases become sources of inspiration. Poems in The Niagara River arise from reexamination of chickens coming home to roost, the elephant in the room, the other shoe dropping, one’s being green behind the ears, and other elements of well-known expressions. However, Ryan manages to infuse new blood into these dead idioms so that they exist with a sense of lively eloquence, clever wit, and original imagery within the lines of her poetry.

Remarkably, Ryan accomplishes all this within a short span of language. Her poems are compact and the lines concise. In this collection Ryan offers 64 poems in the space of 72 pages, and the only reason any poem exceeds one page is due to the publisher’s penchant for stretching the white space between a poem’s title and its first line for nearly one-third of the page. Most of Ryan’s poems extend for no more than 20 lines. Perhaps the succinct nature of these pieces drives the poet to her exact yet intricate style, presenting precise poems filled with innovative and crisp images, as in the title work where a dining room is set upon the surface of a moving river: “As it moves along, / we notice—as / calmly as though / dining room paintings / were being replaced— / the changing scenes / along the shore.” Here, as elsewhere, Ryan reverses expected perceptions, inviting us to look backwards at ourselves suddenly in unsettling settings. One manner of understanding is suggested in “Reverse Drama,” which relates how sometimes actions occur “in ways we don’t expect / and more or less miss except / through reverse drama.” Indeed, Ryan proposes “we need a / backward miracle / that will strip language, / make it hold for / a minute . . .” (“Backward Miracle”).

At other times, Ryan magnifies events or objects to a point that the focus sharpens as it closes upon aspects that summon novel appreciations and enhanced significance. In “Hailstorm,” one of her wonderfully pithy poems involving scenes of nature, the poet shows readers a new view: “Like a storm / of hornets, the / little white planets / layer and relayer / as they whip around / in their high orbits.” As it happens, one might consider “Still Life, with Her Things” to be reflective of Ryan’s approach to poetry as much as it serves to comment upon the technique of Dutch artists who “paint objects as though / they were grace— / the bowl, the / goblet, the vase / from Delft—each / the reliquary / of itself.”

Also, Ryan’s use of “as though” in this poem, and a number of other times throughout the book (including twice in the 18 lines of the title poem), indicates one facet of her method, a repeatedly articulated sense of wonder as to what might be when the imagination is engaged fully. In “The Best of It” the speaker declares: “However carved up / or pared down we get, / we keep on making / the best of it as though / it doesn’t matter that / our acre’s down to / a square foot. As / though our garden / could be one bean / and we’d rejoice . . ..”

The narrow extended stanzas of Ryan’s poems seem much like the shallow surface of a frozen pond separating two worlds, the one above that can be seen reflected in the ice mirror and the one below where life continues though still hidden except in the imaginative vision. In “Thin” Ryan describes such a scene as “a skin of ice / over a pond / only birds might / confidently walk upon.” In another poem, Ryan chooses similar imagery: “Sometimes there’s / suddenly no way / to get from / one part to / another, as though / the past were / a frozen lake / breaking up” (“The Past”). However, here again she opts to reverse the reader’s perspective, as the warmth shattering the lake’s surface comes “from underneath / for some reason— / perhaps some heat / trapped on its own / for so long it’s / developed seasons.”

Nevertheless, despite a slim and sparse appearance in the construction of her work—as well as her apparent preference for establishing a distance through the use of third person or first-person plural narratives, which almost always avoid any autobiographical identification—most often the poems manage to overcome their tendency toward an intellectual wordplay, though sometimes light and humorous, that could cause a cooler emotional response from readers. In fact, as Ryan writes in “Lighthouse Keeping” (in which a “lighthouse / keeper keeps / a light out / for those left out”) her poetry usually proves to be “intimate / and remote both / for the keeper / and those afloat.”

“The Material” carries an epigraph relating to assemblage artist Joseph Cornell and explaining how he would use only one in a thousand of the items collected for his collage boxes, a practice seemingly parallel to Ryan’s paring of material from her own poems. Near the close of the piece, Ryan declares: “we / must extract parts / to do work.” It is as if this poet believes her continual trimming rids the work of needless rhetoric and unnecessary embellishments that might lead to distraction from a poem’s central concept.

However, the compelling closing image in this poem once again brings to my mind the flag paintings of Jasper Johns: “As / time passes, the / promise is tattered / like a battle flag / above a war we / hope mattered.” Whether one speaks literally of war or metaphorically alludes to work and life, as well as the individuals absorbed by both, the passage of time will bring change and wear on all; however, time’s passing—whether in history, art, or one’s own life—also serves as a test for what matters most. As with those odd Jasper Johns images I’d seen three decades ago that I still hold well in my memory, I believe Ryan’s unexpected and idiosyncratic poetry also to be work that renders indelible images readers will not let go easily, work they will determine matters to them.

Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River. Grove Press, 2005.

Kwame Dawes: WISTERIA

After accepting a position in the English Department at the University of South Carolina in 1992, Kwame Dawes began to realize that, despite his self-identity as a black man, he did not hold a full understanding of the emotional depth with which those in the African-American communities around the university still responded to the area’s history of racism and segregation. Born in Ghana and raised mostly in Jamaica, Dawes had lived in Canada during the six years prior to his relocating in South Carolina. In an attempt to comprehend the deep-seated feelings of his new neighbors, in 1995 Dawes interviewed senior members of Sumter County, South Carolina, about their memories of segregation and experiences with racism, as well as other aspects of growing up black in the South during much of the twentieth century. The anecdotal history they told in their taped testimonies provides the basis for the story lines behind the poems in Dawes’s collection, Wisteria.

In the acknowledgments for the volume, subtitled “Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country,” Dawes expresses his appreciation to seven named elders who shared narratives of their lives with him and from whom he drew information to render poetic versions so lyrical that they have since been accompanied by music composed for their theatrical presentation. As Dawes explains, and as the poems themselves show, the pieces in this book are not intended to be read as transcriptions of oral history; instead, the poetry in Wisteria exists as an artistic adaptation of those original monologues spoken to him more than a decade ago.

The title poem of the collection describes an atmosphere in which the subjects recorded their stories. A woman’s “scent of wisteria, / thick with the nausea of nostalgia / fills the closed-in room” as she begins to “lean into the microphone, / smile at the turning tape.” In this poem and elsewhere throughout the volume, Dawes detects long-suppressed anger just beneath the surface of the individuals’ reports, “almost unspoken, / just a steady heat.” In “Dreaming” one speaker remembers an incident in which a black boy is savagely beaten by a drunken white couple for playing “wrestling games with their white son.” By the end of the poem, the persona confides: “I thought I had forgotten the pulse of hate.” Another poem, “Long Memory,” includes a speaker recalling when she heard “news / of a lynched family friend.” Readers are informed: “The sheriff does not suspect / hate in the stringing-up / of a nine year old.” But the narrator wonders what emotional state could lead anyone to such actions: “And if it is not hate / it must be something / more insidious than hate.”

An underlying anger arises in another poem ("Poems in Everyday Places") during which the speaker tells of a childhood confrontation with a white man who told her that as long as he lived he would “see no colored child // riding a school bus.” When the schools eventually are integrated, “colored children // climbing onto the yellow bus,” the speaker informs readers that the bigoted man got his wish not to see the event, but she got her wish that he be struck blind (as "Vengeance" later reports), and “someone whispered it in his ear / while he stared into the black.” The speaker confesses: “My mother said never rejoice / in the infirmities of others; // sometimes I let my mother down / and commit sins of the soul.”

“Train Ride” portrays one speaker offering impressions concerning the infamous Scottsboro Boys episode in American history, involving nine black youths whose convictions and death sentences in 1931 resulted from the false testimony of two white women accusing them of rape. Although the defendants were eventually set free after years of further trials, convictions, and reversals, the case has remained a prime example of Southern injustice at the time. In the poem’s marvelous closing lines, Dawes’s speaker wonders what the boys could have been thinking even placing themselves in such a position during that era of racial strife: “Can’t believe those Scottsboro boys / had no idea what history they was messing with // rocking on that old freight train, / cutting through the heart of America.” The statement reveals the African-American community’s firmly held belief in the need to protect oneself from being placed in a vulnerable position when among whites, especially at that particular time and place in American history, and an innate distrust in any sense of social justice.

Nevertheless, much of the book contains compelling narratives that cover private incidents or intimate revelations reflecting individual experiences and relationships rather than overtly political or social commentary. In “Still Born” the speaker recalls: “My mother bore nine children— / we chant this as a litany of her strength.” Yet, even in a personal note like this one, there is an indirect appraisal of social conditions in which so many children die, as readers learn: “Three did not live to see the second year.” The speaker laments: “I count those who died before they woke, / those I cradled, caressed, cocooned to life, / hoping beyond the weakness of their cries.” In “Stations” a speaker candidly addresses her mother: “I gather all these memories inside me still, / and there’s nothing to do but line them up // look them over, standing there like stations / of my crosses, and your crosses, Mama.”

In fact, a number of poems appear to consist of characters looking back with new comprehension and appreciation at the lives their parents led. In “Mother and Daughter” a woman reminisces about her own childhood perspective toward her mother: “Foolish, ungrateful child that I was, / I thought that maybe you had a choice.” Even as Dawes shapes these poems to celebrate the achievements of their speakers, they also disclose a renewed pride in the courageous lives of a past generation that paved the way through difficult terrain for further freedom in their children’s lives.

Certainly, an important factor in these poems pertains to the act of remembering and the discoveries of self and society this process realizes, as well as the need to preserve memories while it is still possible: “Sometime I could sit down / and remember better / than I think I could remember— / from way back—better than I can do now” (“Memory”). In “Gardening” a woman is credited with “pages of stories / shaping themselves in her nimble mind. / She talks in pictures, we are enthralled.”

Throughout Wisteria, Kwame Dawes transforms the stories he recorded into pictures, striking images drawn in lyrical lines of poetry. In doing so, he honors the lives of those sharing their tales that inform and enlighten us all, even as those speakers pay homage to their predecessors. A few times, the poetic language appears a little too self-conscious and noticeable, almost to the point of distraction, as when one narrator becomes aware of the passage of time—“I stare at the seconds / switching in spastic efficiency / on the clock radio” (“Sleep”)—or another chooses to use the phrase “homoerotic enigma” (“Gender”). However, almost everywhere else in this collection, Dawes enhances the narratives with his fine ear for language and an astute poetic sensibility.

The musical voices of his personae evoke the blues or even church hymns on occasion, and the poet’s acute insight seems to get the spirit of the narratives just right time and time again. As Dawes depicts the woman in “Gardening”: “her stories carry the cadence of miracles, // striking pragmatic magic in her wisdom.” In this volume, Kwame Dawes repeatedly demonstrates his ability to represent with simple elegance those individuals whose own spirited storytelling skills offer readers an eloquent legacy. Wisteria supplies to readers an impressive series of poems written with precision and rich in passion that also consistently display a great deal of the poet’s own magical wisdom.

Dawes, Kwame. Wisteria. Red Hen Press, 2006.

Ann Townsend: THE CORONARY GARDEN

Sometimes when encountering a poet’s second collection of poetry, readers receive a much clearer indication of the poetic direction his or her work may eventually take forth into a more mature stage. Even when the first book’s content included many fine poems and displayed a splendid array of technique or an engaging range of subject matter, we realize the initial volume of poetry often served merely as an assemblage of early pieces most likely written independent of one another and with little formal thought to their eventual selection for printing in a unified arrangement. Given the difficulty of attaining book publication for a beginning poet, one expects to find a variety of citations among the collection’s acknowledgments for poems that appeared in a wide assortment of journals, perhaps in a case or two with issues dated over a fairly extensive span of time. Some of the chosen works also may seem to be examples of experimentation, the testing of techniques as the author was still attempting to gain a footing in that path forward, moving toward the destination to which his or her craft would eventually lead.

On the contrary, a second collection offers the author a fortunate opportunity to present poetry usually written during a shorter period of time and frequently with a determined focus on specific stylistic or thematic concerns. Consequently, as surprisingly energetic and fresh as the material in a debut book may have appeared, the follow-up volume delivers to readers an even richer glimpse at the kind of work that matters most to the poet. Although not actually a first performance, one might consider this second book’s look at more consistent and more confident work the real premiere of a poet’s signature voice.

Ann Townsend’s second collection of poetry, The Coronary Garden, provides precisely that sort of chance to witness a poet’s maturing voice assume control throughout a sustained and self-contained stretch of writing. With crucial characteristics that already had been discernible a bit within some poems in her earlier collection, Townsend sculpts a solid new book of poetry. From the opening epigraph by John Clare (“ . . . as birds and trees and flowers without a name / all sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came . . .”) through to the final poem, “The Enclosure Act,” Townsend propels her readers into and out of an unfolding series of situations linked by complex emotional or intellectual connections, moments that exist as if fastened to one another on a delicate chain, perhaps a charm bracelet of marvelous scenes or a garland of images as vivid as bright blossoms in a spring garden, continually maintaining a momentum in which the flow of the whole always remains smooth and steady.

When held up against most of the work in Townsend’s first collection, Dime Store Erotics (1998), a number of differences are immediately visible in her newer poetry. The long and dense lines have given way to a more spare language in a more taut form. The poet’s growing control over her poetry now fully shows, both in terms of mastery and restraint, as she appears sure of her craft and directs readers with a steady hand. Whereas some of the poems in her previous collection seemed successful in their attempt to overwhelm a reader with a deluge of imagery or rhetoric, honed surfaces of the work in The Coronary Garden more often home in on a particular target with their sharper edges, especially in the many instances where Townsend seeks to unite the physical world with the human body or to relate the natural with the spiritual.

In the title poem wounds wrapped in a hospital's cotton swaths, resulting from a persona’s suicide attempt, are described as “a tulip unfolding from each wrist.” Internal and external landscapes become fused: “Oh chemicals rich / in the blood, oh minor turbulent despair, / the sky unfolds, rinsed with bluing, / the crocuses snap open on their crazy / hinges” (“They Call You Moody”). Likewise, the body and art are associated in various ways, including when a speaker says, “my flayed hand and wrist / resembled a stringed instrument, / a tiny mandolin, tendons and ligaments / glistening in their residency” (“Touch Me Not”). At one point, Townsend even seems apologetic for her metaphorical connections between nature and human mortality, as when in “Geraniums”—an emotional poem concerning the death of a “frail baby”—the poet’s powerful and persuasive lyricism leads to a blending of nature and human mortality: “despite our watering and tender care, the flowers / wilted. I watched the boy die, leaf by leaf. // I kept wishing I had something else / to turn to for the comparison.”

Indeed, aspects of birth and death, life and mortality, infiltrate many of the poems in The Coronary Garden. In “Early Days” Townsend speaks of an infant daughter whose birth made her a part of this natural world, “her skin // translucent, veined, prone / to bruising, yet urgent // to furl herself forward / into the mortal elements.” The poet indicates great admiration for the natural world, but she also intimates an anxiety over the dangers humans face, especially the physically delicate or emotionally vulnerable and the young or innocent, such as the persona of “a palsied boy” in “A Door.” In “Mouse’s Nest” nature supplies a metaphor of a mother mouse protective of her nest in the beautifully lyrical lines of a poem apparently written in homage to John Clare in appreciation of his sonnet with the same title: “soft ones, / all spinning skin and squeak // until, no way out, / she stops and stares up / at me, stilled above her.”

Townsend explains in an endnote referencing a 17th-century treatise that coronary gardens were ones “whose flowers were grown in order to be fashioned into garlands, wreaths, or other ‘crowns.’” These attractive and exact poems, which repeatedly refer to images in nature—whether the numerous nearby garden flowers or “ a fallow field in January” (“Childless”) or “a row of stars drifting west” (“From a Window”), have been arranged into a lovely and colorful bouquet. With the unique link of “coronary” to the arteries around the heart and the flow of blood through the body’s circulatory system, Townsend takes advantage by extending metaphors of love and health a number of times. In “Love Poem, Unwritten” she writes about “our first kiss, when my heart / jumped and skipped. The doctor / calls it abnormality, / just a mild cardiovascular / sickness.”

Continually, nature nourishes and aids: “The sun nurses the grass / to its greenness. It’s a warm thumb / on her forehead” (“As for Men”). Sickness and death often contrast with nature’s life-giving force. In “The Long Illness” a speaker swallows her “pills, in sunlight.” She concludes the poem noticing a geranium’s “new leaves, marking the passage of the season.” Yet, she recognizes: “Those come brightest / who come last, as I might flower, / myself, into something finer.”

In The Coronary Garden Ann Townsend’s poetry flourishes with healthy awareness of the physical or emotional connections between humans and nature. However, the poet also expresses consternation over the encroachment of humans upon nature. In the book’s final poem, “The Enclosure Act,” Townsend observes “the soft depression left where the plow passed, / the squeak sound of the realtor’s sign elaborating in the wind.” This wind brings change, one that creates limitations on the enjoyment of nature and causes physical as well as emotional “depression.” When more and more of nature’s lands face the prospect of being sectioned or enclosed for profit, Townsend sees “the fence imposing a human face on the land.” Just as John Clare witnessed restrictions on the land imposed by humans during his time, Ann Townsend’s speaker sees diminishment of nature in “ranch condos fledged by white fencing.”

By exercising greater control and restraint in her poetry, while continuing to focus closely on detailed imagery concerning the condition of her natural surroundings and preserving an elevated level of empathy for others, Ann Townsend delivers in The Coronary Garden a heightened level of poetry that exceeds the already high standards set for herself in her impressive first collection, and this volume may indicate to readers the productive direction toward which she seems to be steering her future work.

Townsend, Ann. The Coronary Garden. Sarabande Books, 2005.