VPR: Spring/Summer 2007 Issue

The Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review is now available.

Featured Poet: Diane Lockward

Additional Poets: Jon Ballard, Michelle Bitting, Chris Bullard, Michael Diebert, Daniel Donaghy, George Eklund, Clifford Paul Fetters, Anne Haines, Paul Hostovsky, Jen Karetnick, Jessica de Koninck, Sara Lamers, Robert Lietz, Judith Montgomery, Kevin Rabas, Lee Rossi, Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Martha Silano, Dwayne Thorpe, Constance Vogel, Lynn Wagner, Rosemary Winslow, Valerie Wohlfeld

Interview: Sondra Gash interviews Diane Lockward

Essay: "On the Newer Bees in Darwin's Garden," Joseph Powell

Poets Reviewed: Linda Bierds, Jared Carter, Jim Ferris, Mary Karr, Kathryn Levy, Diane Lockward, Ingrid Wendt

Cover Art Commentary: Gregg Hertzlieb on Hazel Hannell

Greg Pape: AMERICAN FLAMINGO

In the closing poem (“Keet Seel”) of Greg Pape’s latest collection, American Flamingo, the speaker treks through an Arizona canyon and across a creek accompanied by another, Jake, who relates how the last time he’d hiked this area he had witnessed an unusual event when he’d suddenly come upon “a half acre / of flowers and bees idling like an engine.” The companion’s description appears vivid as he remembers “the pleasure and peace” he’d felt seeing such a sight. But just as much of a surprise arises as the speaker reveals that at the very moment when Jake recalls the scene, “we round a bend and there it is, / as if his memory has set the place before us.”

That final line of this poem might just as easily serve also as a commentary on much of Greg Pape’s poetry contained throughout the rest of the collection. One of Pape’s greater strengths as a poet comes from his ability to create a setting and an atmosphere based upon remembered events, especially when their activities are intimately linked to a specific time and place. Indeed, Pape repeatedly indicates locations in the titles or sub-titles of his poems (“Moundville, Alabama,” “Bitterroot Mountains, Montana,” “Miami Beach, Florida,” etc.). These geographical tags appear almost as if they were labels attached to old photographs or videotapes chronicling past travels and memorable occasions. Like his companion in “Keet Seel,” Pape often describes incidents with enough intensity of detail that the images seem to suddenly “set the place before us.”

With every successful attempt to evoke atmosphere in his poems, Greg Pape brings readers closer to the emotional underpinnings that matter to the speaker in each piece. Pape provides direction to his readers as if he were leading tourists through new territory. Offering guidance, he colors our observations with his running commentary, all the time subtly supplying a developing portrait of the poet’s personality, or at least a glimpse at some important moments from his private history, and frequently acknowledging carefully considered thoughts about autobiographical instances or hinting at passions he shares with his fictional personae.

Usually, Pape’s poetry describes life and its intricacies with less complex language than one might expect. In fact, listening to Pape’s speakers, we easily could be convinced we’re in the presence of someone familiar—a close friend with an amiable voice, though sometimes wry, privately confiding personal opinions and observations, privileging us with his sense of trust. In “Blossom” Pape discloses an early infatuation with a fourteen-year-old girl. Appropriately, the girl and this poem share the same name, as a blossoming boy relates watching the girl ride a palomino: “I watched her grow smaller as she headed hard // for the barbed wire fence.” When Blossom turns toward the young Pape, “like a barrel racer, dirt splashing / from the hooves,” he recalls how he “stood still as a post, // stirred by her power.” The speaker divulges the state of his innocence at the time: “It would be years before / I made any sort of sense of those stirrings.” Sexual connotations continue through to the close of the poem: “when she smiled down on me, / muddy sweat dripping from her chin, her breasts // rising and falling, her heart visibly pounding, / and offered me her strong hand, I aspired / to mount the mare and ride with Blossom wherever.”

In a poem simply titled “We Are,” Pape presents a more mature moment of love. A couple walks the streets of a worn down town: “We bump our hips together // as we walk.” As he does elsewhere in the volume, the poet develops a sense of authenticity with his accumulation of descriptive details creating an atmosphere into which readers might be drawn: “The town is lit with brilliant / mid-morning winter sun, the sky a soft // accepting blue. Old cars and battered trucks / move slowly up and down the streets. // A blaze of sun on chrome or glass, half / a line of impassioned song, a woman’s voice, // stone grin of a man with a tower of caged / songbirds—we are swept and swayed.” As the couple strolls onward, the speaker feels “the street / is more and more ours.” We are told that others observe the pair: “Young men stare / in envy and lust.” Even an old woman notices the two of them: “calls us her dear ones, as if the desire aglow / in our bodies were already making a family.”

More often, Pape focuses on particulars of nature, item by item, assembling aspects of a scene in the manner a landscape painter may have done, even paying special attention to color: “The cattle / were fat and standing in grass so green // and tall you couldn’t see their legs. / The cottonwoods arched over the road / in places and their leaves clattered, / leaves like small mittened hands, / pale green on one side, paler green // on the other, flicking back and forth / in the breeze with a sound like riffles / in the river” (“Green”). One comes to believe Pape saves these images of nature the way a collage artist collects objects or bits of material, believing they are valuable but never quite knowing when they will be needed. In “Remember the Moose” the speaker confides: “A moose grazing among the graves on Sunset Hill is an image one might hold / for years, turning it over and over, working it into a story or finding it, / strangely lit, inverted in a dream.”

Those lines also show Greg Pape’s interest in poetry that tells “a story.” Among the more powerful poems of this collection that come to mind, narratives designed with plot and characters seem to fit easily with the poet’s informal voice or, at times, his desire to deliver a dramatic closing to the poem, even when he borrows content from others. In “Unfinished Story” Pape reveals: “I am trying to put / together the story my mother never finished telling me.” Gradually, scene after scene, as if slipping through pages of a film script, Pape uncovers dark parts of an uncle’s biography, eventually discovering an apparent explanation for the uncle’s lifetime slide toward a tragic demise: “I knew my uncle Laurence as a kind man who drank / and smiled and drank and went away . . . he ended up / in Bellevue with delirium tremens.”

Pape embraces his mother’s manner of telling the tale, “always / in fragments, always arising from some other context.” However, he allows the story to unfold slowly until those fragments become a whole, as readers are alerted to an accidental shooting when the uncle and his brother were quite young and playing with a rifle they thought unloaded, imitating a scene from the movie they’d just seen: “The boys sat at the foot of the bed passing the gun back / and forth, showing off, talking about the movie. Laurence / aimed the shotgun at Ralph’s face and pulled the trigger.” By the poem’s final lines, the incident perhaps also explains a distancing between the speaker’s mother and her mother (who never could recover from the shock), as well as the closeness between the poet and his mother, as the poem ends during a chance meeting with Albert Einstein “aboard a ship docked / in Miami. She was holding me in her arms, and, according / to my mother, Einstein patted my head and said, ‘What / a beautiful baby.’”

Evidence of a connection between mother and son can be seen in a few pieces from this volume. (In addition, the cover photograph from 1948 displays Pape with his mother in Miami.) In “Practice,” another poem identified with “Miami Beach, Florida,” the poet also alludes to a sense of connection with his mother: “There is a photo of my mother, a young woman / lying on a beach towel looking up / with such a radiant loving smile, just to recall it / I am fortified.” A tender attachment of parent toward child again shows in “Album,” a ten-page poem now depicting the poet performing his role as father, although in this work Pape skates on a thin edge when exploring personal emotions. In fact, though one wants to encourage the speaker to accept risks at times by revealing his feelings, and Pape usually chooses well when dealing with sentiments, some of the lines about his children briefly breach the wall bordering between sentiment and sentimentality.

On the other hand, Pape recognizes the high regard he holds for using language in physical representation of objects, animals, people, and places from memories rather than offering abstractions attached to emotion: “Then the names of things become more important. / With a name one could hold on, not lose so much. Anger, fear, love / can twist the tongue silly or clamp it tight. / But say a name and it rings” (“Animals”). In this piece Greg Pape references fellow poets who have died young—among them, Larry Levis. When poems, like this one, in American Flamingo approach their best level, stretching into comprehensive and conversational meditations on life, love, and death while managing to avoid prosiness—at times somewhat resembling Levis’s poetic monologues, but with Pape’s individual voice—the speakers create opportunities for an even greater depth of understanding by readers.

Pape knows one prime facet of understanding calibrations measuring life, love, or death derives from the effectiveness of poetry portraying precise items from one’s memory: “What is this memory good for? What does it mean / to hold this scene that keeps its freshness / twenty years or more, though seldom recalled, / and feels, when remembered in detail, like / an awakening still going on—light // of a dead star pulsing and flickering / in space, shining in place on the surface / of moving water.” Readers should cherish his skill at temporarily bringing the glow of old memories into current situations.

In the collection’s title poem, Pape connects episodes from the past and the present, uniting scenes from differing times while contrasting Romantic renderings of nature with concerns of contemporary culture. He recalls Audubon’s passionate pictures of birds, including the flamingo, although he accepts the conflict evident in the artist’s necessity to kill: “I know he shot them to know them.” The speaker echoes Robert Penn Warren, whose great “Audubon” poem certainly would come to mind: “what / Is man but his passion.” However, the poet then shifts his attention to the famous flamingos he sees in the infield at the Hialeah race track: “the loud flat // metallic voice of the announcer fading / as the flamingos, grazing the pond water / at the far end of the infield rose // in a feathery blush.” The lively movement of the flamingos startles ticket holders and momentarily halts everything as the birds fly a “clipped-wing ritual lap // in the heavy Miami light, a great / slow swirl of grace from the old world.”

Similarly, the poetry in American Flamingo displays an array of bright pieces, often startling us with their generous spirit and frequently linking colorful memories of the past with present moments of subtle understanding or even slightly higher instances of enlightenment. Each piece increases readers’ awareness of relationships between nature and humans or between ourselves and others, especially those close to us. As well, readers attain an acute appreciation for the impact of the past on the present or the way fragments of stored memories may influence our lives every day.

Pape, Greg. American Flamingo. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Joan Houlihan: THE MENDING WORM

Joan Houlihan starts “From the Empire of Missing Uncles,” a poem midway through The Mending Worm, with an opening line as typical as any one might find in her collection: “I want to tell something as simple as sky.” Throughout the volume Houlihan consistently shapes her messages within an elegant and lyrical language of landscape or other aspects of nature. She frequently forms eloquent statements with descriptive words one could say approach painterly patterns containing attributes with vivid scenery and careful attention to tone or texture. In addition, Houlihan’s exact and intricate sentences are written using a technique filled with various tactics of lyricism—alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, deliberate rhythm, and delicate echoes of sound from line to line. Consequently, though Houlihan mostly avoids any end rhyme, her pieces are subtly just as musical.

Despite Houlihan’s desire to “tell something as simple as sky,” readers soon discover in this book that the poet’s skillful use of language creates evocative imagery comprised of associations to abstractions and allusions to emotions, often through metaphor or simile, that are far more complicated than expected. Indeed, the usually brief poems with clear connections indicated by the direction of each speaker’s observations seem designed to disguise their complexity. For instance, Houlihan begins “Hydrangeas” with the following alluring and allusive language: “Salt air flutters them, cradles / their heads, lolling and solemn // as babies born slow. The heft / and bend is determined by stem, // by water, genetics, and sleight of wind. / We left what unsettles us to come here . . ..”

Part of the peculiar pleasure derived by reading these poems arises from a sudden understanding that their engaging and graceful surfaces sometimes camouflage less than pleasant circumstances or a presence of darker conditions, including disease and death, longing and loss. In the book’s initial poem, “Squall Line,” as rain falls, the speaker states: “The smell is nickel. I long to replenish, // lean out like a dog, mouth sprung, tongue / loose, lapping the mineral air.” However, this lithesome language leads directly to a more unsettling image: ”In the quick theater of highway, / a low bird sidles to his bleed of meat.” Soon, the speaker discusses having been “struck solemn, as in a parlor // where the hands lie crossed. Clouds bloat / the horizon.”

We admire the speakers in these poems for their ability to recognize natural beauty and depict its rich details even in the midst of difficult or disconsolate situations. Houlihan’s ambiguous poetry often reflects ambivalent feelings and promotes a sense of unease or tension. As the speaker reveals in “Preservation”: “What the snow tells with its first and dirty melt / is leftover gristle, scat. Winter sticks / show through, skinned, almost metal / with an ice we remember.” However, the description continues further toward more specifics: “Night torsion // and a slick force harden our prints / prematurely. The surprise of breaking through, / the crackle—the sound of damage / stays on like a fact.” After its slowly developing tone moves forward, in the poem’s final lines the poet discloses: “There are more dead than living down here— / iced, inside, where the shock is.”

One of the more effectively ambiguous and moving poems in the volume, “In Cancer,” presents a speaker who apparently reports during the early summer days of that zodiac sign, although the ominous presence of the disease lurks as well: “You told me: All dies. / For this, we’re intended.” Quickly, the poem switches to evocative description of nature and the effects caused by summer heat: “Stung then by peonies’ / heft and lush waste / bent-headed / I hid from the day.” Readers are even given an image of a kitchen where “flies pock the table / black as dropped seeds.” The people in the poem are too overwhelmed by the season, if not the disease: “A simple swat exhausts us.” Therefore, the speaker recommends forgetting the flies so that at least they might “flee death.” When the end of the poem comes, readers see additional progression toward the connection between an uneasiness from damage done by heat in the season suggested with the title’s sign and the illness brought about by the disease also implied in the title: “Our summer’s begun / as the iris rises from sword- / shaped leaves, its veiny sac / a purse of grief.” The sound of the language, once again lyrical, nearly screens readers from a darkness hinted by the line-break isolation of “sword” or the mere mention of “veiny,” as well as that last grasp at the reader with “grief.”

Similarly, “The Exhalation of Matty” chronicles a tragic circumstance brought about by dark conduct: “This is what stopped life looks like.” However, in this piece the speaker contributes little ambiguity through the use of natural imagery. In fact, minor criticisms one might level against the body of work in this collection might be for what one may consider its similarity in tone throughout most of the poems and its oftentimes-distanced speakers who do not permit personal identification through private details, since Houlihan is certainly not even close to a confessional poet; therefore, readers may welcome this slight shift in voice. Here, the poet engages in a more direct address that creates an emotional tone, though perhaps harshly colder and more condemning, because Houlihan’s words are obviously straightforward and blunt, even to the point of serving as mere summary, consequently possibly more compelling considering the topic: “When they hoisted him up, / the belt went slack. That was all to be done. / They locked him up in a man-sized box. / We all felt for that, and went home.”

Routinely, this poet displays a Romantic preference for situations that include crafty transitions from scenic nature to personal commentary, almost as though one validates the other. Houlihan’s gift for natural description contributes to the effectiveness of such a tactic. In “Preparing Migration” readers witness this technique at play: “Inched into moth-hammered sleeves, / autumn feeds its hundred / as they mince along the branch / unstable in their need to lift, then // all wing and hinge, they rise.” The specifics in this description allow the poet some freedom of analysis or observation, and readers see how the speaker seems to earn her closing comment: “This is the way I want you— / as long-awaited, as sudden.”

“Rationing, 1945” could be regarded as a historical poem of recollection that appears nearly out of character for Houlihan. Although it contains elements exhibited elsewhere in her poems, particularly the expected distinctive imagery written in lyrical lines, this piece seems a bit more narrative and appropriately plain in its presentation: “We went together at midday, at dusk, / to seize the fuel, the flour.” Nevertheless, Houlihan’s approach remains spare and suggestive rather than slipping into a strict chronicling with more expansive language or intimate detail, still more Emily Dickinson than Walt Whitman. As a result, readers may respond with empathy even while the emotional attachment is indirect, narrated by the speaker about another: “as some mother went weeping / against the wall.”

Throughout the collection Houlihan’s references to nature and her links with landscape imply an interconnection between our environment and everything we experience, including events eliciting suffering or sorrow: “every day will be stilled by sorrow” (“Held”). Despite her recurring descriptions of harsh winter weather, we’re aware spring will bring renewal and life, a thought that supplies some solace. Even when “we revel in what’s gone,” as the speaker reports her memories in “Easter,” with its own associations of rebirth, we must face the future with hope. The title poem offers the following during its mentioning of a new morning and seasonal revival, perhaps in ceremonial or celebratory mood: “Morning breathes steamy shapes on the car. / Magnolia skins litter the yard. // Easter comes early— / cups and cutouts, pinwheels and horns— // toy beauty so long in the ground. / This is what I want: to return / the same way I came.”

Thus, Joan Houlihan’s The Mending Worm seems to complete its circle. As the poet declared in the opening poem: “I long to replenish.” By the final poems in this collection, speakers appear to discover a bit of hope, ways to restore their desire for faith in a fresh existence, or find a type of restitution in an act of reconciliation: “A downing of air, then finger to lip pronounced you // gone. What’s best kept close is this you, tiny— / your bed a fold, a night-shell. Your modest need // for rest and food. Your school of injury and song. / Now we can talk anywhere” (“Incarnate”).

Still, despite its delicate descriptive language, Houlihan’s poetry shows toughness and courage throughout. She knows she needs to first face pain or adversity, that place “where our fears are privately boxed” (“The Mending Worm”), in order to move beyond. As she states in the powerful poem, “The Way I Give It To You”: “Spotted with shade, daylilies lean / close at the roadside, deep in their fret / of weed. Let go, they will prosper. // Anything not stopped does that.” Again relating natural terrain to the inner physical and emotional landscape of humans, Houlihan reports that “in twenty-four years, fetal cells flush / from the mother’s blood. As in purge. / As in waste. As in water from a ditch.” The speaker regards her information to be so difficult it compares to “a death / of something not loved”; nevertheless, she wants it “stark,” concludes the news must be given that way, so that the upsetting feelings and the coping with them can be shared: “Something we can do together.” Perhaps this provides a manner of managing one’s emotions, a way of mending as well.

Those who know Joan Houlihan only for her honestly stated and thought provoking critical commentary filled with opinions some might consider controversial and contentious, will not be surprised by the characteristics of diligent description and expressive lyricism in her poetry, qualities she esteems in her essays. Human nature urges us sometimes that we seek to conceal unpleasant aspects of existence. As Houlihan demonstrates in “Enter the Time of Toil,” where the white layering of snow cover offers a “cloak / of not knowing,” we might wish to smooth over the darker and troubled parts of our lives as well: “We hide this / the way snow hides the world— / with deliberate cold, built slow.” In her poetry Joan Houlihan examines efforts to conceal hurtful happenings, then she reveals the need to confront our fears and, if we are able, to handle our most painful moments with grace and dignity.

In “Somnambulist” Houlihan’s speaker concludes: “I was so charmed / by the damaged. So difficult to reach. / Whatever it was that struck me came from beneath.” Certainly, throughout the frank language of The Mending Worm, the poet gives readers a forthright glimpse beneath the surface, linking external and internal evidence of damage. Joan Houlihan conveys images and acts that evoke profound emotions, and she does so with an obvious flourish of fine poetic skill readers will admire, frequently seeking a steadying of self with an uneasy sense of resolution or at least a temporary settlement between those keen observations of the outer landscape and the perceived sentiments of one’s inner spirit we all may want to see united for better understanding of our own positions in the difficult world around us.

Houlihan, Joan. The Mending Worm. New Issues, 2006.

Jeffrey Franklin: FOR THE LOST BOYS

Only seven poems into For the Lost Boys—one-seventh of the way through the forty-nine pieces in this first collection of poetry by Jeffrey Franklin—readers are alerted to the importance of our capacity to discern what we observe around us. “Boundaries of Seeing” describes a scene sometime ago when explorers once decided to show Eskimos a silent-film comedy and “splashed a movie across / the igloo’s breath-sheened wall.” The visitors seem to believe they are benefiting the natives by exposing them to such sophisticated humor of a more advanced culture. However, while the white men are entertained, and the Eskimos are “polite enough to feign a chuckle,” Franklin focuses on a compelling comparison, perhaps more of a contrast, between the figures in the film and the visual wonders available regularly in this natural landscape, as he depicts “the shifting abstract patterns, how / with such slow grace they swam / across the igloo’s starry dome, // like the breath of the Aurora, / they said, in the cupped / hands of the night sky.”

A number of the works in this book concern various perceptions and one’s learning to see from another’s point-of-view. Occasionally, the speaker in a poem encounters, observes, or receives advice from someone with a different background because of contrasting cultural, economic, or social circumstances. Perhaps a simple gap in chronological age or maturing experiences at times accounts for varying visions of the world. Even in the volume’s opening epigraph, from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Franklin hints at such dissimilarities: “The differences between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing.”

The opening poem of For the Lost Boys quickly displays Franklin’s approach. The initial lines appear to recount one moment in a military engagement: “My first shot caught him cleanly / in the crease of his hip / as he lay on his side in a sniper’s pose” (“The Gun in the Chair”). However, readers clearly discern the poet as the speaker when he comments with detailed description: “I would like to say / I noted the Ming blue of the sky, / admiring the patterning of the aspens, / their bark a creamy green khaki.” The poet then concedes his feelings of “quietly murderous joy” and confesses the target of his shooting “was, is, my son.” Persuaded to join the son and his friends in a paintball battle, the speaker slips easily into the spirit of combat, so much so that he revels in the heat of battle and chooses “to shoot him again / this time on the skin of his arm, / the welt a red-rimmed crater days later.” Remembering his own childhood days when he would imagine a broken chair leg to be a machine gun, the speaker addresses any confusion between fantasy and reality, the easy transition from such playful activity to actual warfare: “If I could understand why I did that / we might do without war.”

“Black Pattern on a Mocha Ground” provides another poem that indirectly references war when a Vietnam veteran reports to the poet that what he feared the most in the jungle was not “‘gooks or bombs’ but a cobra, / Hood flared, reared belt-high.” The poem’s speaker starts this piece by explaining how he killed a snake: “I bring the brick’s end down / On his head in one tamping motion.” However, by the close of the poem, we learn the action was not one of courage, but it was some sort of act of mercy, since the speaker was killing a snake that had been deliberately run down in the road by a neighbor. The poet offers effective description of the damaged snake, painted as colorfully as if it were a destroyed work of art: “His perfect tube is ruptured: a yellow / Loop of intestine hangs out // A staggered pattern of obsidian chips / Floats the mocha ripples on his back.” Consequently, readers share the speaker’s revulsion at the “failed perception” exhibited by his fellow human.

Frequently, Franklin faces situations in which he feels out of place and finds himself involved with interesting individuals who enrich his life, by showing their wise insights, or awaken his emotions, particularly those of concern and compassion for others. In “Hillbilly Zen” the speaker recalls an instance when he was fifteen and working for a summer at a job surveying in the mountains with a local backwoods character, Tom, whose memory and influence, a “hillbilly Zen of wiliness,” persist in a moment of recollection more than three decades later. Another poem, “Facing the Elk,” which involves facing one’s fear, begins: “Rex, the cowboy campground host, told us / it was a bear ate the guts of that elk.”

The poet also profiles a poor old woman caring for her granddaughter after the death of her son and abandonment by the mother at the time of the child’s birth in “Breanna’a Grandmother.” The speaker and grandmother sit by an apartment pool to watch their girls swim together, as they do often: “Her in her shift and stockings rolled / To smooth tourniquets beneath her knee wattles. // Me having leaped from a Land’s End catalog / But with a plastic cup of San Miguel tequila.” The woman, uncertain of her future, worries she may even be evicted, exhibits anxiety as she tenses each time her granddaughter swims underwater. Unable to swim herself, she has a “recurring dream” in which Breanna drowns. By the final lines of the poem, the poet wonders about the grandmother’s difficult situation: “What did I know, / What do I know, of the medium in which / She has no choice each day but swim?”

Franklin often offers gratifying poems about family relations and the sense of home. In a lovely work reminiscing about how his father would prepare Saturday morning breakfast for the family, “looping the fat yolks // into a pinwheel of yellows” (“Cookin’ with the David Jones Trio”), Franklin delightfully describes connections to a jazz trio’s performance witnessed the night before, the pianist “startling / a flung fist of starlings / from beneath the eaves of // the baby grand.” Elsewhere, “Beneath the House Foundations Lie” presents evidence of the speaker’s own sense of responsibility as a father when he crawls under his house: “Here, the residue of our lives have settled, / sifted down through the cracks of years.” He would like to “let it lie” and avoid the adventure, “heed the warning / of the taut web suddenly met”; however, he is aware of another nearby house undercut by “the unrelenting rain” that had “toppled down the escarpment, / bedding mother and child under blankets / of mud, the father come home late.” In a lighter domestic piece, the poet finally finds pride with the title “I Painted the House Myself”: “I have come in the end to a kind of surrender, / the sheer repetition like the mother’s heartbeat / heard from within, so that even in sleep / I keep on painting.”

Whether shopping to get a gift for his wife (“Buying Lipstick for My Wife”) or observing the clown at a kids’ birthday party (“Captain Seaweed, AKA Checkers the Clown”), Franklin interjects instinctive humor with imagery and intuition. Indeed, one of the reasons readers are entertained by these poems seems to be because the poet also appears amused by the process itself. “Spice” serves as an excellent example, as Franklin displays a playful use of language, focusing on the alphabet: “especially / the Cs: caraway, / cardamome, cassia, / modest chervil, immodest / chili, cinnamon’s / exotic coziness, / the cloven hooves / of cloves . . ..”

Although most of the poems in For the Lost Boys rely primarily on narrative to carry their load—sometimes resembling the works of contemporary Southern poets like David Bottoms, B.H. Fairchild, Andrew Hudgins, Rodney Jones, or Dave Smith, another Southern poet who also has written about his time as a transplant in the mountainous West—Franklin usually complements his story skills with a sharp lyrical ability. In fact, in those poems where Franklin opens up the lines and stanzas a bit—as in “Cookin’ with the David Jones Trio” or “In Jenny-Lynn’s Garden”—rather than writing long and wide block stanzas, the tone and pace of the pieces seem even more poetic and more engaging, the brisk rhythm and mellifluous sound come across as more musical.

Despite his occasional rhyming poems, Franklin’s works are almost always free verse; yet, he maintains a sense of pleasantly paced phrasing. In “Watermelon” the poet shows his subtle lyrical technique: “The sun’s plumb bob / wobbles beneath me, sends me / stumbling over clods, tipsy partner / to the scarecrow in the Jackson’s garden. / There, in seaweed-fingered camouflage, / prehistoric eggs line the furrows.” The poet’s insistence on revisiting the scenes in his pieces through the use of precisely detailed imagery appealing to each of the readers’ senses increases the likelihood we will be absorbed by the actions and emotions of the poems’ personae. For instance, readers feel as if they are hiking alongside the poet in “Facing the Elk,” moving “through a meadow where grasshoppers crackled / suddenly into the heat-stilled air, / snapping their cellophane wings like party favors.”

Indeed, involving readers in the stories is essential for the poems’ effectiveness. However, the accurate narrating of these pieces with exacting details also assists the speakers in understanding themselves more fully. As Franklin suggests in “Stories That Become Us,” we are shaped by our histories, especially as we identify ourselves in our versions of what has happened. What we remember and how we communicate our memories to others matter: we shape ourselves in our sharing of ourselves.

Just as the narrator relates his belief we are at least partially identified by “stories / that become us in the retelling,” Jeffrey Franklin’s apparently winsome personality appears clearly represented through his portrayal of the speakers in these poems. In fact, part of the satisfaction derived from For the Lost Boys seems due to readers becoming acquainted with the likable character who is the poet in this volume, though seen in various roles—as son, husband, father, friend, outdoorsman, teacher, scholar, etc.—including the varying perceptions and viewpoints or duties and responsibilities each position brings with it.

In the book’s last lines from “Judy as Pinãta” the speaker leaves us with an appropriate closing image after “a boy with a stick” splits open the crepe-paper figure swinging above him to get at the little treasures hidden inside: “I stand with a baby in my arms, / our family gathered round, those / living and, behind them, // all our dead, and you / are floating, floating above us, / rosy, empty, and whole.” Many of the stronger works in Jeffrey Franklin’s For the Lost Boys similarly strike at their subjects with enough force to uncover tiny treasures, nuggets of truth about how the personae—perhaps sometimes speaking for readers as well—might define their world, especially the intimate relationships with family members and friends of the present or the past. In turn, the speaker of each poem, usually recognizable as the poet, finds himself to be defined by his responses and the way he relates his narratives, as the stories become him (in both the transitive and intransitive uses of “become”) in their retelling, and the poems frequently enrich readers as they open up, revealing little treats, emotional tokens or gifts of wisdom hidden inside each one.

Franklin, Jeffrey. For the Lost Boys. Ghost Road Press, 2006.

Margot Schilpp: LAWS OF MY NATURE

The speaker of a poem midway through Laws of My Nature, Margot Schilpp’s second collection of poetry, reveals herself to readers as “a master of contradiction” (“Of Stars and Water and Instructions for Observing Both”). The persona in the book’s title poem makes a claim that she is “indigent, // which means to be in want, yet I want / for nothing.” Elsewhere in the volume, the poet poses a number of unsettling questions and gives various unique observations, about the self or the world around one, that continually surprise—sometimes by suggesting an atmosphere of unease or discomfort, but often by offering delightfully fresh perspectives, at times even humorous, in the midst of ordinary and everyday events.

Margot Schilpp’s poems seem to display an instinctively acute knowledge—of the differences between one’s inner personality and one’s social identity, between expectations and realizations, or between mere want and deep desire—that results in readers also obtaining an intuitive understanding about ourselves and how we fit into our own surroundings. In “Ghost Ships” the poet wonders: “why not / the beautiful words of desire to accompany / forgiveness and grief, or the everyday sounds / of dishes in the sink, the turnstile, the jet engine?” Repeatedly, Schilpp attempts to elevate consideration of the mundane or monotonous with interesting insights and exciting language. “I can’t see the harm in imagining,” she writes when fantasizing about being with an attractive jogger she sights, “tracing my tongue slowly up / the side of your neck.” The poem, “Taking Leave of My Senses” (paradoxically, one of a number of poems involving sensuality), concerns want and thought (“I want that, I think”), the conflict of conscience, deliberating between imagination’s desire and the intellect’s control. Yet, it ends with a witty recollection of familiar advice heard since childhood, “the harsh whispers // of all our mothers saying, / You can look, just don’t touch anything.”

In “Solving for the Plain Truth” Schilpp regards the relationship between scrutiny and understanding: “The art of observation lies / along the unmarked road to faith.” As the line break implies, when simply seeing, only noticing without more complex perception, what one comprehends may take the shape of “lies,” aspects of our lives might falsely present themselves to us. Similarly, as the poet shows with wonderful imagery, beauty is occasionally hidden in plain sight (“an old couch, which the lace / shadows of the trees cover like doilies”) rather than where it is sought: “you were looking for it / in the contour of a thigh, in the slopes / of many breasts.” By the close of this poem, the speaker seems to seek greater awareness by examining not just laws of personal nature but, as any Romantic might, by inspecting basic elements of nature’s environment: “To understand simplicity, // shouldn’t I know how wind begins? / Shouldn’t there be some answer in the trees?”

Paradox and contrast exist everywhere in Laws of My Nature. If Walt Whitman felt comfortable with contradiction in “Song of Myself” (“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.”), Margot Schilpp seems most content when she displays apparently opposing notions in Laws of My Nature. Throughout Schilpp’s poetry, the beautiful and the bleak, the bountiful and the barren are juxtaposed with one another. Common occurrences come up against unconventional actions. Incidents in these pieces, despite their usually soothing tone, sometimes further confirm and emphasize our insecurities. At first, in one instance readers are assured: “It’s an ordinary day, nothing / to alarm, nothing to frighten or warn” (“If You Agree I’m Telling the Story”). The speaker even reassures us she will supply the necessary information: “Trust me to tell you / what you need to know? I will.” Nevertheless, before the end of this poem, readers encounter unnerving images, including “the tiny wrists of a child. / Talk of stitches. // Talk of scars.” The speaker concludes by conceding to the reader an enormous omission: “I forgot to mention the blood.”

Much of Schilpp’s poetry arises out of the anxiety resulting after a disturbance from one’s proper place or state of mind. Describing various types of “hungers / for knowledge or passion or change or simpler / things,” the poet decides: “all of this reminds me of dislocation. All of this reminds me / how many blank pages are in the book.” The many mentions of “want” within the book indicate a need to fill those pages, a necessity for direction forward. “In the Parlor of Instructions: Want” demonstrates the most obvious example: “The orphan / of desire wings toward / you: and you want and want. You wanted. / Consider want as the noun, but also as the verb, / as the original beauty of having a direction.” Later in the book, Schilpp confides she is led, perhaps as a poet ought to be, by her reliance on sense: “Nothing / on earth directs me more than sense, // the deep signals blinking stop or go. I have / to pay attention to the lilac melody or crown // of sonnets that plays across the keyboard / of my ear” (“What I’ll Know”). By the final poem, the darkly humorous “My Compass Will Not Orient,” the poet confesses her compass has always been stuck; yet, she closes the poem determining that “having a direction is always an accident / a way to decide, when you step / in something, the best way to extricate / yourself to cause the least damage.”

At times, the original instinct of “wanting” for speakers in the poems becomes a longing “to be wanted” as well, to attain a close connection with others. The word “want” appears nearly a dozen times in “Ouija,” and the poem concludes with the speaker shifting from her list of wants to a final request: “To be / wanted exactly so.” In turn, the loss through geographical or emotional distance, as well as death, of those whom the poems’ speakers had once cherished—friends, family, lovers—serves as another expression of dislocation in this collection: “Everyone I love is far away, / beyond image / or conversation, beyond / hearing, but not past / memory, that flower / that blooms inside / and needs almost / nothing to make it last” (“River of Me”). Perhaps the poet finds comfort in the control of memory, where a favorite place is always available or people we once knew remain ever-present and safe: “A door will close / tomorrow, and I already love / its memory” (“Sunday Lyric”).

The disquieting passage of time, one’s aging and the confrontation with death, contributes to the consternation in some of this book’s works: “it’s not true / anymore that time passes / slowly—it’s sped up, on fast forward, / the remote in someone else’s hand” (“How Time Passes in the Middle Age”). However, the dismay caused by time’s changes and an awareness of mortality—others’ as well as one’s own—also supplies the speakers in these poems with greater enlightenment and more of a capacity for empathy or compassion: “it’s a different way of speaking: you can’t / understand loss without losing something, / can’t read a book in the dark” (“Ghost Ships”).

The speaker begins “Coming Apart, Together” with a sobering statement: “We’re all coming home now / for the funerals, saying goodbye.” In some way, one might wonder if the poet’s focus on loss, especially through death, indirectly permits her an opportunity to fulfill one of the desires hinted within this collection, a reconstruction of the people or places that have been missing and have created feelings of dislocation, as well as a unity with those who also share in the grieving: “your / parents and mine will rest here.”

With the contrast of life and death, beginnings and endings, apparent in the aptly titled “Spring Burials,” the poet knows time has taken away much with which she once identified herself: “There is nothing left here / of the people who called this home.” However, through the poignant and persuasive words of her poetry, Schilpp’s memories emerge, reviving the voices of those who mattered so much: “Across the ravine between me // and those years are the voices / that called me to dinner, that shrieked / in the spring air. I hear them / make the sound of my name.” Through language and imagery, the poet’s tools, Schilpp constructs a bridge over the gap time’s erosion had opened (“How else can we connect / in what we earn of these brief // and terrible days?”), and she listens to the voices as they speak her name, reaffirm her identity and confirm her purpose as a poet, the person she has become. Consequently, the poet’s skill allows her to relive those most valued moments from her life and share them with us. Ironically, she does so by again phrasing a desire to connect with another, as the line break after “you” suggests: “So I want you / to have this: the yellow of the forsythia / on the hill in my backyard, year / after year, and my mother scrambling // down the hill, the gardening shears / in her right hand.”

Similarly, Schilpp begins this book with a poem questioning direction provided by narrative—that with which “the mind can calculate / change and recognize destiny” (“What Is Narrative For”)—and discussing the nature of time, advising: “All that’s left is to know // we will suffer through almost anything— / make sure to remember well.” Flirting with Romantic characteristics in this collection, the poet occasionally chooses to briefly deem how art—perhaps paintings, films, or poems—can assist by representing an alternative atmosphere into which one may escape or in which one may preserve moments as a way of remembering people and places, while managing to avoid difficult transitions or painful transformations, even seasonal changes, initiated by time. For example, in “Revisiting Gauguin” the speaker asks, “will you sometimes wish / you could paint yourself back into the garden?”

As a follow-up to Schilpp’s first book of poetry, The World’s Last Night (2001), the work in Laws of My Nature shows a poet’s growth toward a sustained and consistent voice filled with surprising twists. The pieces continue to exhibit wit and dark humor, as well as a keen sensibility, sometimes even sensuality, and they reward readers with delight in their unpredictable paths. Her poetic style contains a slick mixture of rich imagery and conversational, at times approaching colloquial, diction that subtly reveals a deceptively confident and insightful speaker readers enjoy hearing, so that after the last page we are the ones left with desire, wanting more of Margot Schilpp’s poems.

Schilpp, Margot. Laws of My Nature. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005.

Charles Wright: SCAR TISSUE

Reading Scar Tissue, Charles Wright’s seventeenth book of poetry, I am reminded how it appears almost impossible to consider any current individual collection of Wright’s poems without immediately placing the recent pieces into context with his past work. As I indicated in a longer previous essay in VPR examining Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000), this poet’s intentions in his writing seem plain and straightforward. He has openly stated the purpose of his poetry: “What do I want my poems to do? I want them to sing and to tell the story of my life.”

The expanded lyrical history of Wright’s life began when he discovered Ezra Pound’s poetry while a member of the army stationed in Italy nearly half a century ago: “Like Dionysus, I was born for a second time. / From the flesh of Italy’s left thigh, I emerged one January / Into a different world,” (“A Short History of My Life”). However, in this poem and continually throughout his career, Wright’s chronicling completely covers the seven decades of his life, traveling back to childhood in his native Tennessee: “I was born on a Sunday morning, untouched by the heavens . . .. The Tennessee River soft shift at my head and feet.”

Since the publication of Negative Blue, a collection that brought to a close Wright’s self-proclaimed decades-long period of work, a trilogy of trilogies termed The Appalachian Book of the Dead, the poet now has produced three new books of exceptional poetry—A Short History of the Shadow (2002), Buffalo Yoga (2004), and Scar Tissue (2006). These three volumes represent a later stage of his poetic life story, what Wright has acknowledged as an ongoing “spiritual autobiography,” one that links landscape, language, and the likelihood of God. The final lines in “A Short History of My Life” extend Wright’s efforts: “No light on leaf, / No wind in the evergreens, no bow in the still-blonde grasses. / The world in its dark grace. I have tried to record it.”

In these collections, perhaps to be regarded as another Wright trilogy, the poet concerns himself with issues of memory and mortality even more intently than before, as he continues to inspect and internalize the external world of nature: “Gazing out of some window, still taking it all in, / Our arms around Memory” (“The Wrong End of the Rainbow”). The opening imagery of “Heraclitean Backwash” presents a speaker’s figure in reflection, as if superimposed upon a view of nature in the landscape which fills his vision: “As though the world were a window and I a faint reflection / Returning my gaze / Wherever I looked, and whatever I looked upon.” Wright’s recurring identification with nature recalls similar connections created by one of his most significant influences, Walt Whitman, who also arranged the whole of his poetic life into a lyric progression of spiritual autobiography.

Nevertheless, in Scar Tissue Charles Wright clarifies the use of landscape in his poetry: “Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, / A method for measure, a scaffold for structuring” (“The Minor Art of Self-defense”). Wright concedes: “Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God.” Ever since his religious upbringing in Tennessee, Wright has grappled with the concept of God. In “Confessions of a Song and Dance Man,” he categorizes himself: “A God-fearing agnostic.” Though doubtful (“Are you there, Lord, I whisper, knowing he’s not around”), the intention of his life-long search for God seems to be an exploration of the possibility some spiritual sense to our lives might explain to us our complex emotional reactions to the world in which we find ourselves.

As in past volumes, Wright’s extensive use of religious imagery and holy symbolism or situations with spiritual connotation continues to suggest a sacred element to nature: “Good Friday, then Easter in full drag, / Dogwood blossoms like little crosses / All down the street, lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads” (“Last Supper”). Wright’s fascination with the idea of an afterlife of some sort appears more emphatic in his later poetry: “One knows / There is no end to the other world, no matter where it is.”

When Wright is not projecting into a future beyond the temporal existence of our mortal presence—“Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, and good for a season” (“Transparencies”)—he turns his attention to the past again through memories of younger days, particularly beginning the third of the book’s three sections, where Wright includes a few poems with nostalgic visits to events located in specific years from long ago. “Appalachia Dog” derives its title from the name of a “metallic red” car in the poet’s youth written “in black script on the left front door. / A major ride, dragging the gut in Kingsport in 1952. / A Ford, lowlife and low-down.” In “Get a Job” Wright remembers construction work, the worst of his life, in “Sullivan County, Tennessee, a buck twenty an hour, / 1952.” A recollection of camping with his brother at “Hiwassee Dam, North Carolina” in 1942, during which “incidents flicker like foxfire in the black / Isolate distance of memory,” leads the speaker to suggest a reason we look back so often as we age: “The older we get, the deeper we dig into our childhoods, / Hoping to find the radiant cell / That washed us and caused our lives to glow in the dark like clock hands / Endlessly turning toward the future” (“Archaeology”).

Significantly, the collection’s middle section, from which the book draws its title, focuses more closely on memory and nostalgia: “It is impossible to say goodbye to the past” (“Scar Tissue”). When Wright delivers another of his wonderfully inventive metaphors to intimate the nearing of an end (“The slit wrists of sundown tincture the western sky wall, / The drained body of daylight trumps the Ecclesiast”), he chooses to use language in a way that might provide comfort or understanding. As he has written elsewhere, Wright believes that poetry remains a means toward “contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries.” In this instance, the poet connects time, language, and landscape, each with its need for order, knowing all three supply their own symmetry and organized systems: “The urge toward form is the urge toward God.” Yet, much seems to hinge on the crucial influence of memory: “Names, and the names of things, past places, / Lost loves and the love of loss, / The alphabet and geometry of guilt, regret / For things done and things undone” (“Scar Tissue II”).

Readers of Wright’s poetry over the years expect commentary within the work on the attachment of language to landscape, the coupling of word and image, as well as a necessity for narrative, fragmented as it may be in memory and in Wright’s style, that portrays the past in a manner that explains the present or proposes direction for the future. In the book’s first poem, “Appalachian Farewell,” the poet gives a description: “The country of Narrative, that dark territory / Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and a beginning.” Later, Wright declares at the start of “Scar Tissue II”: “Time, for us, is a straight line, on which we hang our narratives. / For landscape, however, it all is a circling / From season to season, the snake’s tail in the snake’s mouth, no line for a story line.”

Just as scar tissue marks where a wound has happened but not yet fully healed—partially protective and remaining as reminder of a past experience, while also triggering a recall of the emotions felt at the time—the poetry in this collection displays to readers pieced-together evidence of instances that have marked Charles Wright’s life: “memory’s gold-ground mosaics” (“Ghost Days”). Nostalgic revelations in these poems also often serve to shield their speakers somewhat from more unpleasant aspects of memory: “Her full lips telling us just those things she thinks we want to hear” (“The Wrong End of the Rainbow”).

However, as much as anything, the memory poems in Scar Tissue exist as entities exhibiting proof from the past of a life lived well: “Our lives, it seems, are a memory” (“Transparencies”). In “Vespers” the speaker sees, in the glorious visions of nature around him, a place that allows for some sense of spirituality in the present, especially for an agnostic, and permits him to playfully conclude: “Not much of a life, but I’ll take it.” Indeed, with this statement, one might be reminded of Robert Frost’s “Birches,” and his similar declaration: “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Through the use of memory and with his careful consideration of the past, Wright’s appreciation of his life is a bit more enthusiastic elsewhere. Frequently, he seems “like the man who comes to a clearing in the forest, and sees the light spikes, / And suddenly senses how happy his life has been” (“Morning Occurrence at Xanadu”). In the final lines of the book’s closing poem, “Singing Lesson,” Wright advises and directs: “Suffer the darkness to come unto you, suffer its singsong, / And you will abide, / Listen to what the words spell, listen and sing the song.” Thus, in Scar Tissue, as in his other two recent collections, Charles Wright submits persuasive poetry persistently filled with wisdom, aided by a nostalgic filter of memory and an ability to render exquisite descriptions of nature. This contribution to Wright’s latest trilogy contains superb work that continues to convince readers about the value of his rich and lyrical language, which once again enlightens the poet during his contemplation and, in the process, enriches our lives as well.

Wright, Charles. Scar Tissue. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.