Issue 4

Transcription

Issue 4

Angle – Autumn/Winter 2013
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Cover photo by Philip Quinlan
Angle is edited by Ann Drysdale (UK) and Philip Quinlan (UK), and published in the
UK by Philip Quinlan. Consultant editor: Janet Kenny (Australia).
angleeditor@virginmedia.com
www.anglepoetry.co.uk
ISSN 2050-4020
Copyright © 2013 Ann Drysdale, Janet Kenny, Philip Quinlan, and authors as
indicated. All rights reserved. This electronic journal may be freely circulated only in
its entirety. No part of this journal may be copied, stored, retrieved or republished by
any means.
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Contents
Editorials
6
Poetry
Lesley Ingram
Chris McCully
Derek Adams
Annie Fisher
Julie-ann Rowell
Martin Malone
Chris O’Carroll
John Whitworth
Basil Ransome-Davies
Holly Martins
Peter Wyton
Peter Richards
Terry Jones
Cuttlebone
Fading Away
Schiermonnikoog, Winter
Magpie on Waste Ground
The Darkroom
Live Art
September
October Night
Fledgling
Elegy for a Garden
Eden
The Tasting
Spoil
Egging
Water Tree
Habitat
A Boy’s Life
Daisy Chain
Procedure
Monday Morning
Null Imperatives
Chimaeras
Still Clinging to the Broken Horse
Chagall in Tudeley
View from the Lucam
A Transport of Delight
William Walking out of the Woods
Odysseus Dreams
September’s Widow
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Ernest Hilbert, All of You on the
Good Earth
Anna M. Evans, The Stolen From
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Introduction: Mr Flotsam and Mr Jetsam
The Old Cure
Friends
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Reviews
Maryann Corbett
Janet Kenny
Poetry
Peter Bloxsom
Paul Christian Stevens
Janet Kenny
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Stephen Edgar
Mark Allinson
Jan Iwaskiewicz
Cally Conan-Davies
Henry Quince
Julie MacLean
Peter Coghill
Peter Moltoni
Alan Gould
Kathleen Earsman
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin
Michael R. Burch
Scatter Pattern
Order of Service
Elemental
Flying Foxes Get Religion
Whales in Moruya Bay
The Whitsunday Islands
Obsolescence
Green and Blue
Orchestra
Someone Else in Hyde Park
Mist on the Newnes Plateau
Christopher Who?
On Visiting Lasseter’s Cave
If You’re the Whim
Starting Work on an Autumn Morning
The Gap
Cock-crow III
Safe Harbour
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Maryann Corbett, Credo for the
Checkout Line in Winter
Rose Kelleher, Native Species
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Where Maurice Is
A Deafness
The Laundromat in Sunlight
Miter
Elegy
The Scrimshaw Man
Through a Looking Glass, Brightly
On the Way to the V. A.
Self-help: Step One with Example
And Then
For Kathy
Amsterdam Was a Quiet City
When Death Is Prodigal
Those without Imagination
To the Story of My Life
He Who Has Ears to Hear
Rainbow
Rahab’s Mother
Suzanne and the Elders
Autumn
Moonlight
The Bible Dream
Mrs. Sisyphus
Ars Poetica
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Reviews
Janet Kenny
Philip Quinlan
Poetry
Rowena Silver
David Mason
W. F. Lantry
Alicia Stallings
Siham Karami
C. B. Anderson
Charles Hughes
Charlotte Innes
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
David Landrum
Joseph Stern
Seth Braver
Karen Kelsay
Mark J. Mitchell
Tim Murphy
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Richard Epstein
Ron Singer
Terese Coe
Richard Meyer
Mario A. Pita
Ed Shacklee
J. D. Smith
Norman Ball
Jeff Holt
Uche Ogbuji
Lance Levens
Pui Ying Wong
Jennifer Reeser
Jim Burrows
Morgan Bazilian
Steven Shields
Rose Kelleher
Marly Youmans
Tim Suermondt
Peleg Held
Seree Cohen Zohar
The Age of Gold
Worms Have Died
Untitled
Film Noir
Adrift
The Great Builders
Singularity
Time’s Arrow
Regarding ‘Time’s Arrow’
The Snub
The Snipe
The Rabbit in the Hat
Drunkard Watched from an
Upper Floor
Beautiful Loser
Spare the Rod
Ad Astra per Tacta
Satura Lanx
The Battle
Shadow
Starlings over a Town
Elegy for the Snow Country
Dissociative
The Ballerina Wants a Silver Crown
Executive Identity
Mambo Madam
A Beginning
Children
Pandaemonium
The Ancient Irish Princes
Notes From Warrior Girl
Z
The Breakfast before Leaving
Inlet
For Rest
Contributor Biographies and Previous Publications
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Editorial
This is my first Editorial for Angle. It feels strange. Like a shrub, I am transplanted.
Like Bottom, I am translated. Ooer …
One of the hardest things about joining the staff of Angle was accepting the fact that
my poetry can no longer appear in it. This is how it must be if the journal I love and
respect is to maintain its integrity. I learned that from Paul Stevens, the man to whose
memory this issue is dedicated, who said in an interview on the blog Very Like a Whale:
‘I once published a poem by myself in Shit Creek Review but later regretted it
and have since removed it. I’m not against other editors publishing their own
work, but I’m not comfortable with it for my work.’
So, with his implied permission, and just this once, this ‘other editor’ will presume to
include this.
For Paul
after Catullus
Flipped (by a click) across nations and oceans
Here I am, brother, going through the motions,
Offering the expected elegy,
Speaking unheard to what cannot reply.
Since Fate deleted your reality,
The bummer that took you away from me,
I will observe the time-defined tradition
And sadly fadge a maudlin composition—
This tearful tribute that I’ve cribbed for you:
Once and for all, mate, g’day and ’ooroo.
For Paul was indeed my brother-in-poetry, a good friend, easing me gently into the
virtual world where I stood gawping like stout Cortez at the sheer size of the
community and the limitless opportunities for contact with it. So many true minds,
marrying and remarrying across continents. He gave me my first taste of editorial
responsibility when he took me onto the team of Shit Creek Review for the last ‘End of
Days’ issue. He handed me a flag then. Look, Paul—see me, waving it!
Those intending to submit to Angle need only to know one thing about me—what will
inform my choices. Decorously now, I revert to the words of others; this time those of
Kit Wright:
I like what vamped me
In my youth:
Tune, argument,
Colour, truth.
Ann Drysdale
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Editorial
In my last editorial, I said something about emotional sense in poetry which I have had
occasion to ponder ever since. How does one capture—not merely describe—emotions
in words? And is it really best to recollect them later, in tranquillity? or is it preferable
to take them at the flood, as it were, and let them have their way with you? I think, on
balance, the latter since it seems to me that strong emotions give us, for a time, access
to areas of the subconscious which are otherwise closed to us. That is how it is for me,
at least. Of course, there is always the danger of gushing if one is in a heightened state,
whereas I would say that, paradoxically, the most emotionally affecting poetry often
speaks in a quiet, restrained voice, and gets to the heart of the matter obliquely, rather
than directly.
All of which preamble is to excuse what is to be a one-time departure from editorial
policy re: self-publication. Not long after I wrote my last editorial, and a week before
Good Friday, we learned of the death of Paul Stevens. If I say he was a friend of mine, I
do so in the modern context within which technology shortens distances and blurs
boundaries, since we never actually met. But he was certainly a friend to me, in terms
of publishing my poems, and equally a friend to Angle, which he once kindly
described (in a wonderful Australian idiom) as ‘grouse’. Others have far better, and
longer-standing claims to personal friendship with Paul than I. Nonetheless, it was a
strange, emotional time. If I tried now (in what I suppose passes for tranquillity) to
recall that emotion directly, I would be unable to do so. But I was fortunate enough to
capture something of it at the time (for myself at least) in the following poem:
Say, Shantih
for Paul Christian Stevens
These latitudes are falsified;
wrecked deadening has done for us.
We compass the meridian,
but who will stop the sun for us?
Our sextant-blinded eyes bleed brine;
no times or tides still stay for us.
All sheets, all shrouds are cut and dried;
our cleats cannot belay for us.
In sympathy at distances:
we navigate by hunger, thirst.
Noon shadows say our will be last.
Shall stern or bow go under first?
We cross the line with rituals:
traversal which will be reversed.
We’ll Easter home at empty sail,
our mark be missed. We fare the worst.
Good Friday, 2013
First published at The HyperTexts. Thanks to Mike Burch.
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Quiet and restrained? Hopefully. Oblique? Most definitely. Of any value to anyone
else? Pass. But, since any other words I might choose now would sound false after the
passage of even so little time, I hope readers will forgive my offering this as the most
genuine thing I have to say on the subject.
Another matter which I can only now formally address is that of the changes in our
editorial lineup. My heartfelt thanks go to Janet Kenny for her tireless efforts in helping
to get Angle off the ground and up to issue 3, as well as for putting up with my many
quirks and foibles. Janet remains very much a presence at Angle, albeit in a more
consultative role. The delightful Ann Drysdale joins us from this issue to help keep us
aloft, and I am very grateful for her wisdom and perspective. Blessings upon both.
Once again, I would like to thank our contributors (both those who are familiar and
those new to these pages, including our reviewers). I hope that readers will feel we
have struck a reasonable balance between fulfilment of expectation and surprise. (In
poetry, as in life, one can just as easily have too little as too much surprise, after all.)
Philip Quinlan
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Cuttlebone
I didn’t ask to be spawned like this
pearls in my mouth
salt in my eyes
hair that can whip up wind
I know about the waters
and they are breaking me
I find myself with shells
sharpened razor thin
hunting the musk of men
and while they sleep
I see myself
slicing
with a surf-white cuttlebone
watch them froth
There are furies beating my head
blood-born
I recognise kin
Fading Away
is what happens when you sit too long
waiting,
waiting, when even the sun is so used to you
it shines right though,
is his voice in retreat, a doppler shift
over your horizon,
is your dress turned from green to brown,
his rolling ‘rrrr’s
spiralling into letters,
is the ink of his promises,
their meaning.
Lesley Ingram
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Schiermonnikoog, Winter
The sand’s memory: a contour,
A slope, a diphthong: mui—
Treacherous glide of the tongue
Where the brindled turnstones
Litter the edge of the tide
As the world cracks open.
The wave swallows birds,
Yellow light of winter.
Mui. Muien.
Spin-drift. The hiss of silence.
I’m five hundred miles from home
And can’t speak the new language.
The sand’s forgotten the time
When its voice was the undoing of stones.
A seam opens which denies
All attempts to pronounce it.
Magpie on Waste Ground
Patchy now, the snow. Dead reed
tricks out in green, the rivers shift
in their new beds, the westering stars
fret in altering courses, flaw
succeeding flaw. Scrub willow’s core
is burst by winds that bleed
towns run to seed, each
like the last. And while lost faces lift,
a magpie wipes its beak
against the fence-post, and the lies
rock back on the poet’s tongue.
Too much to be borne. When
light cracks open at dawn
and blue admits Persephone
they number ruin and frost,
mottled snow, blood-throated birds
and alders walking out of the sea.
Chris McCully
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The Darkroom
Is it something primal
that still excites me
after all these years
when at the flick of a switch
this clinical white room
is dressed in red
becoming something else
like a naked woman
slipping into a satin corset
or some latent memory
from the womb that envelops me
while on blank sheets
in shallow trays of liquid
eyes and lips form first
or simply the alchemy
of silver halide and metol
browning my fingernails
as it recreates the world
in this let-there-be-light act?
Live Art
Tate, St Ives
Picture this, through a window:
gulls, white-bellied and grey-backed; kite air;
worn-slate tones of stratocumuli
separated from the mussel-grey sea
by the horizon’s board-straight curve.
In that view, where the sea breaks white
shape-shifting Selkie bob, waves lift them
board-walkers hurled toward Porthmeor beach,
where the sand waits, its splash-and-trickle patterns
glazed with reflected sky and sgraffitoed with
the tracks of the lifeguard’s Land Rover.
Between all that and the window:
super-sized herring gulls adorn black chimneys,
a slate roof foxed with yellow lichen cuts
awkwardly across the frame at an angle
Alfred Wallis could have captured perfectly.
Derek Adams
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September
Month of a certain age, your days are numbered;
I’ve heard warnings on the apple-scented wind,
Rumours spread by bonfire smoke and pipe smoke,
Eulogies rehearsed in harvest hymns.
But come and sit beside me, let your light
Sift golden and refined, through leaded panes,
To fall on school desks, polished conker-bright,
And jotters freshly inked with dreaming names.
Then we’ll truant on two borrowed bicycles,
Free-wheel down lanes of blackberry and sloe,
Past shimmering ponds of purple damselflies
To fields where parasols and ink-caps grow.
We’ll kick our shoes off on the grass, and run,
Feel how the earth still holds the summer sun.
October Night
Past Kilve the road climbs through an arch of trees;
an owl appears, drawn to my light.
I track its milky flight above the car.
Its feathers are so perfect: moonlight lace
with flecks of forest – earth and ash and bark.
Owls often fly with cars – it’s not an omen.
It doesn’t presage tragedy or death.
This bird’s not here to damn or curse, or even bless me;
it’s more intent on trembling leaves , black beady eyes,
warm throbbing fur; small bones.
It’s Halloween and I’m alone. I call to mind
a childhood rhyme; a still-not-quite-forgotten
bedtime prayer. The creamy wings pulse on,
and then it’s gone to strange, sharp-shadowed dreams,
the thrill of dangling tail in crunching beak.
Annie Fisher
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Fledgling
Child-rearing: birds know all about it.
The blackbirds in the back yard
are frazzled from feeding
the fat, brown, idle fledgling
that squats, brazen, on a stump of wall
between the dustbins and the garage.
I can’t stay here all night watching for next door’s cat …
That’s when I catch myself praying,
atheist at the kitchen window,
impotent as God.
Annie Fisher
Elegy for a Garden
Sorry for those leaves gone astray,
the wanton bush outgrown itself again;
the palm producing seed might stay
and yet become renowned, but the plain
old grass is dying, scratched-out, pale:
it never was that green, never tended—
it was trodden down or scalped, far too frail
for suburbia. It could not blend
with the fertilised stripes of our
neighbours’ perfect expanse, or match their pots
of petunias and crocuses; mine’s a scar
of wizened branch and various knots
of something unrecognized. Its Latin means
nothing to me with my tainted fingers,
my flawed gaze. I pity the bronze-cast figurine,
all verdigris where it shouldn’t be: moss hinders
any colour or design. The weeds vie to lead
and choke. I gaze out on the tame gone wild,
any art I ever had overtaken, gone to seed,
but perhaps not lost entirely like a curious child.
Julie-ann Rowell
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Eden
It was in her garden it happened—the old woman
who tamed so little, left doors ajar, and gates,
heavy with ivy and laburnum garlands.
Deep green the pond at the end of her lawn,
stitched with weed. I know because I looked
one day like the fox, the cat, the stray dog.
I found myself amongst her dandelion seeds,
toadflax, ramsons and bittercress, like a thief
invited by shades of colour. I chose her path,
and the beaten greenhouse to play hideout in,
a prickly sprawl at my shins. The smell
of growing, the inch-thick stalks,
feverfew, the borage and the blood
between my legs, the sticky beginning amongst
the vetch, where I lay facing sky.
The Tasting
She tipped the blackberries into the pot
of hissing water. I watched the blue-black clot
melt, disperse, the plump flesh my fingers found
in our backyard, taken now, squashed and drowned.
Sugar next to sweeten their pulp and turn
the mess into her ‘something tasty’. I’ll burn
myself if I get too close. She doesn’t tell
me this, but I know, I must love the smell
and spectacle, but practise my distance as she
does. Stand here and watch, and be pleased is the key,
listen, but don’t comment, just learn and smile.
Later, I’ll taste her sweetened stew and for a while,
dedicated to each other, our lips stained,
it will be quiet in the kitchen, nothing feigned,
just her and me at the table. I draw out
this time, relish the taste, forget the drought.
Julie-ann Rowell
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Spoil
Scrabbling around in trenches, trying to find
the Great Seal you tossed into that now dried-up
river bed, some days—a glimpse maybe—I think
I see it half-sticking out of the render
of a parapet’s ghost or some midden’s
pick-up stick of bones and cuttlefish.
Your one true love; that great affair
from the Second Dynasty of your twenties,
the one I sometimes struggle to match.
There was rumour of a trove, a hoard
of lightning struck into coin and relics
of your one true god; though it yielded
little, the enigma of your sands safe
among the pottery and biofacts,
looted, perhaps, by that guy who hit you.
I watch you sleep, toy with calling in
the experts—perhaps some diviner
of your heart—though none, of course, exist.
Likely, I’ve been looking in the wrong place;
nothing for it, then, but to trust my eyes,
take my time and slowly, gently dig.
Egging
The hedgerow was Dad’s cashpoint; from it
he’d casually withdraw the small currencies
of wonder: my first finch egg, sheep skulls,
an old wren’s nest, the dunnock’s four-way
clutch of blue.
clutch of blue. Slum-cleared city kid,
he had ranged the estate margins into edgelands
to forage new-found greenery; suck marrow
from deciduous bones, lap time like stolen cream.
What he really handed me was some final flourish
of golden-summer cliché, out-of-step with these times.
No point, then, but the passing-on of breakable things.
Martin Malone
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Water Tree
for JT and AB
We call this tree the ‘cottonwood,’ a name
Derived from the white fluff around its seeds.
To tribes before the English language came,
It was the ‘water tree.’ Because it needs
A hundred gallons plus per summer day,
Its presence means that some source can be found
Nearby—if not a surface waterway,
Perhaps a secret spring deep underground.
This elemental fact about the tree’s
Identity is something it must wish
To tell the world, for every time a breeze
Approaches it, green wavelets surge and swish.
The air turns liquid current as it blows,
And through the leaves the sound of water flows.
Habitat
In an expanse of reeds, two blackbirds nest.
One wears on either wing a scarlet patch;
One sports gold plumage on its head and breast.
Their voices, like those markings, do not match,
The yellow-head’s unmusical and harsh.
When both birds seek the nesting sites they need,
Their competition subdivides the marsh:
The red-wing, marginally the smaller breed,
Must make do at the margins, while its rival
Conquers the choicer center to hold sway
Where slightly deeper water aids survival
By keeping land-based predators at bay.
Via such nuance is one habitat
Parsed into this distinctive realm and that.
Chris O’Carroll
16
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A Boy’s Life
You’re cherry blossoms; you’re café au lait;
You’re honey, amber, lustrous polished teak.
All your complexions conquer me. No way
My touch could claim the smooth curve of your cheek.
Your eyes are cloudless noon or midnight sky,
Or springtime meadow, or wind-ruffled sea.
On every street, I burn as you swing by.
Your limbs reach everywhere except to me.
Your whispered breath will never warm my ear.
Your voice will never quiver with my name.
My urgency is hostage to my fear;
My blood runs hot and wild, my heart shrinks tame.
O goddess sunlight- flame- or raven-haired,
I yearn for you. I’d say so if I dared.
Chris O’Carroll
Daisychain
Daisychain, daisychain,
Nursling of Spring,
Garland of garden grass,
Shrubbery string.
Gift to your sweetheart or
Ring from your lover,
Recreant daisychain,
Nexus of never.
Rite of the sunshine and
Dew on the meadow,
Wandering wildering
Garland of sorrow,
Westering daisychain,
Necklace of Maying,
Ghost of the garden grass
Sings without saying.
John Whitworth
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Procedure
It goes like this, the doctor said,
You must lie down upon this bed
Erected in a place apart
And we will open up your heart.
I asked, re-buttoning my shirt,
But will I die and will it hurt?
He laughed, don’t even think of it.
It will not hurt one little bit.
And for the other, my oh my,
I guarantee you will not die.
A month or two, you will be fine.
I signed upon the dotted line,
He seemed a pleasant sort of bloke.
It did hurt and I didn’t croak.
John Whitworth
Monday Morning
As I evanesce by inches
in a high street dressing gown
drunken, cruel Comanches
lynch John Wayne upside down.
Numbness at extremities
means I’m extra-stressed.
Doc’s home remedy for that is
Cannabis on toast.
Real-world news is hungry-bad—
messy country matters,
frigid dramas from the Id,
parochial vendettas.
The 20th century promised me
panem et circenses,
lunch at the Café Anglais,
deafening disco dances,
psychotropia by the lid,
Joan Collins in her knickers.
Trouble is I’ve got no bread,
and where’s the bloody circus?
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Null Imperatives
Swell your will to scrape and wrench
the margin to the centre.
Suppose survival is a cinch.
Lick superstition’s window.
Save your soul with General Booth.
Vote for Vlad or Barack.
Train to be a psychopath.
Bank your love in Zurich.
Eat the world and shit the pips.
Play the game but cheating.
When your sentences collapse
blame the bad translating.
Take the ghost train to the wars
where History rapes its mother.
Watch the pain and blood arouse
the torturer’s saliva.
Stifle nightmares—mouldy news,
camply chiaroscuro,
banal Viennese shadow plays,
pale imprints of horror.
Dream of resurrected passion—
cordial, delirious;
wake to daylight inanition—
the good dreams are the killers.
Chimaeras
I dream of objects that do not exist:
cigar box-sized, metallic, gold-embossed—
mechanical/electrical?—I missed
the detailed talk on how they work and lost
the leaflet which explains why they’re such fun,
but Lord, they’re fabulous, and I want one.
On waking up I can’t imagine why
my mind has made these wonders real, and fired
in me an overwhelming urge to buy
without the slightest idea how they’re wired,
what they’re for and where they might be bought.
Can’t buy chimaeras—silly, overwrought,
no use; excepting to a dying mind
where fantasies pretend that death is kind.
Holly Martins
19
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Still Clinging to the Broken Horse
Your average Nietzsche champion maintains
the memory of his anti-God with fitting reverence.
Friedrich as superman adorns the sweep of gallery walls,
gold-framed and kitted out in Grecian splendour.
The professorial bust, flown in from Basle,
sneers from its slender, marble pedestal.
Rare first editions line the shelves. Tasteful cabinets
exhibit suitable testimonials to genius.
Yet I recall him, stateless and sincere,
still clinging to the broken carriage horse,
sobbing his sanity into maltreated hide,
no more than mortal, on a Turin thoroughfare.
Chagall in Tudeley
Memorial window to Sarah Venetia d’Avigdor-Goldsmid,
All Saints Church, Tudeley, Kent.
He fetches the ocean to the orchard,
affords us a vista of hop-fields
glimpsed through blue water.
On his own authority, he works best
with dead architects, seeks to be judged
solely on form and colour.
Age is beginning to shrivel him,
yet his subject, tragically youthful,
impels him to visualise
Christ as cool dude, in whose direction
the girl ascends the ladder,
an energetic bathing-belle,
bright droplets streaming from her.
Peter Wyton
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View from the Lucam
Flatford Mill, 1821
There’s not much light in lucams. What you get
comes mostly when the trap door’s fastened back
to let the winch-chain drop. However, ours
has got a knot hole, eye-height on one board,
widened by some young mill hand with a blade.
I listened to the harness jingling,
pressed my face against some grubby woodwork,
through a cobweb watched the unladen wain
enter the ford, team of three in red felt
wither pads, their waggoner, whip in hand,
flicking them onward, while my pal Jacky
whistled up his spaniel, snuffling
in the shallows. A fisherman waded
through reed beds and the artist-gentleman
sat in his favourite spot on the bank.
Then you came into view on Willie Lott’s
old landing stage. I swiftly made a mess
of Master Spider’s handiwork. You rolled
your left sleeve shoulder high and knelt to fill
the pitcher from the stream. A sunburst turned
your skin to butter-gold. Some grouch below
me yelled out, ‘Are you going to haul these
effin’ and blindin’ grain sacks up or not?’
The stone he flung clanged against metalwork.
I gave you one last glance, got on with it.
Three score of harvests have been reaped since then,
the kids you bore me have got kids themselves
and now I’m squinting through the spy-hole
of an old man’s memories, eager to
claw back the day I first clapped eyes on you.
Peter Wyton
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A Transport of Delight
There goes my stolen metaphor
gliding down the road,
flight-designed by meteor
and leaving old Tom Joad
like a dung beetle in a dust bowl.
I took out all the metal noise,
the jagged edges and the feel
of long-lost factory boys
with shoulders to the real
substance of desire.
Someone else inside her now
pilots intuition,
plucking from behind the brow
an energy of coalition
wishing the mass to move.
The dancer cannot fight the ground
that’s beaten. He
knows no release—is just unbound,
sky-dancing, free
from knowing he’s been born.
The edifices of the age
fall, fumble, fold
to symbols, icons leave the page
of history, bold
hands erase the statue of
the Spirit of the Wind where airs
flow free about the form
of thought—innocent of cares,
a zephyr, cool and warm
in lambswool lines to avarice.
Peter Richards
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William Walking out of the Woods
The forest canopy
divides the light
with leaf-shaped gaps and
gap-shaped leaves.
A screen saver in green and white,
a saving screen,
an armour of mad
mosaic mirrors leaf gap
gap leaf gap leaf leaf gap
armadillo forest can O.P.
can opener serrates the edge.
Soft footing belies weight.
The light is centre.
We are outside the disco ball,
inside the mirror armour.
No space is negative
to light bending on
the curved air.
Weight distorts
the winding sheet of space
it lies on.
Space is not nothing.
Miles have been gone.
This may be sleep.
Peter Richards
Odysseus Dreams
Over the dancing bone-white seas
follow the cold as winter moon:
the sharp wolf sleeps with the sleeping trees
and the dark-eyed wind is calling.
Night has loosed her midnight hair,
the swords of war are dreaming:
from the brave gates steal with care
for the stars of Troy are falling.
On the wine-deep swollen seas,
by the torch-stars smoking light,
the stretching sails receive the breeze
and the soft-skinned night is waiting.
Terry Jones
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September’s Widow
September saw him sheafed, tied in white,
last of his crop; frail bundle for a man
though mortal as hedges, ewes in the field,
flesh limp tenancies of mushrooms.
A branch left uncut stretched like a limb,
gathered a heart to one shoot and bud;
sign enough, then always at the edge of vision
his ghost, transparent, veined as a leaf,
walking the steadings he grew like blood,
so his dog cowered, bristled and whined
for the passing he sensed afoot,
and black and seminal a bull knelt in the field.
Now as it is the distance and the season
I would call out to the last blessed vestige
so it might come, Autumn-shaped,
magnified, hymnal over stagnant water.
Terry Jones
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Review
Ernest Hilbert
‘All of You on the Good Earth’
Red Hen Press, 2013
First step in review: Learn where the book gets its title. In Ernest Hilbert’s second fulllength collection of poems, it seemed at first that I needn’t look far. The book has an
epigraph, a stand-alone first section. Concisely and in prose, that one-paragraph
section summarizes the Boston Globe’s report of the words of Apollo 8 commander
Frank Borman, his moving description of a gorgeous Earthrise, and his words signing
off the mission’s Christmas Eve broadcast with a blessing to ‘all of you on the good
Earth.’
So would the book’s vision be soothingly positive? Apollonian? Not so fast. There’s
also a title poem, which puts the same quotation at the head of a recital of awkward
failures by science fiction authors. They’re all failures to disengage from dying
technologies, failures that result in comically dated visions of the future. At the end of
a list of misapplied punch cards, magnetic tape, typewriters, and milkmen is this
couplet and image:
A lone man emerges from a structure.
He keys a code, and turns from the locked door.
Securing a building with a keypad: It’s a technology still in use right now, in 2013—a
stable technology, but by the pattern set in the poem, a doomed one. Its use here is a
subtle suggestion that all our ways of thinking are likewise becoming obsolete. The
poem puts the book’s opening quotation in a different light. It forces a second look at
the epigraph, during which one is more likely to notice the introductory mention of
‘tragedy and civil unrest’ on that same good Earth.
The point is all-inclusiveness, acceptance of the whole world of subject matter. The
book means to take in the beautiful and the awful, and it does; its publicity tells us that
it ‘continues to explore the bizarre worlds of twentieth-century America.’ The attractive
cover design, purely color and text, avoids any interpretive tilt, neither approving nor
condemning that bizarreness. The index of the book’s cultural references runs from
Alighieri to Zevon, through Nick Cave and Montaigne and Wilde and assorted others
on the way. To get everything here, the reader needs to be able to parse a little Latin
and a little Italian and have a purchase on most of Western history, poetry, movies, and
television. The breadth is consonant with the list of accomplishments in the poet’s bio.
The small, witty touches that enlivened Hilbert’s first book are here too—for example,
the sly statement on the copyright page that resemblances to actual persons are ‘of
course, purely intentional.’
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So the poems assume a sophisticated reader. They’re often subtle, but they’re by no
means difficult, either at the demotic end of their range or at the exalted end. At one
pole are lines like these:
I stayed up two days straight with some old friends
In New York, and was charred, gut sick, still wired,
Stuck on the Northeast Corridor Express,
Suffering quietly as the night descended.
I was pressed to the window, far too tired
To read, cramped by a pimpled giantess
Who nodded to a thump in her headphones.
The wrecked landscape of northern Jersey swung past:
Contrast them with this extravagant description of Stargazer lilies:
Lush petals pour out like surging steam,
Lacquered battle-bent cuirasses, photograph
Of fireworks in humid July skies, racing
Into an umbrella of spark and cream,
Falling as luxurious glittered ash.
The arrogant smudged stamens jet high
And proud like vapor trails, the whole bouquet
Unfastened like a vast nebula,
Long poisonous pour of gas; …
Close observation in all things, low or luxuriant, is the great strength of the poems. In
the book’s first full section, for example, we find a narrator adding stale Saltines to
tomato soup, and we battle nausea with him as he watches while ‘fleeing groups/ of
weevils wriggled up from the soggy squares.’ On the facing page are the gorgeous
sonics and colors of ‘Gravedigger’s Song’:
The white will yield its flaws in ruthless time—
Banks of snow will bead red with bright berries,
Burgundy of buck’s blood dragged by hunters.
Memory bends violet to smoky wine, …
Much of the diction tends more toward conversation than song, but that makes the
sound devices, when they appear, all the more juicy, as in ‘At the Archaeological
Institute of America’s Annual Meeting,’ where in sparking alliteration and assonance
… Archaeologists
Mill through the hotel lobby like jammed cars,
Clogging doorways, aiming all ways, vaguely
Swerving clots of unflappable classicists.
While elsewhere, their counterparts, undertakers,
Are busy burying, they burrow to see
What’s still down there.
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Another piece full of sonic delights is ‘Ie Shima, April 18, 1845’:
Black flak cracked and banged in the blue overhead.
Ernie Pyle pinned papers to his propped desk
As ash-gulled gusts blew and gushed up the beach.
Sound techniques are usually less obvious than this, though—more a matter of
satisfyingly chewy mouth feel, as in ‘Dog Days’:
Sluggish flash at the tail end of August—
The humid air swaddles soft shocks,
Flickers like a light about to blow.
A storm promises to wash streaked rust
From tin siding to soil. It won’t be long.
But are these the techniques a reviewer should be attending to, in a book composed
almost entirely of sonnets? Should I pay attention to the sonnet-ness of the poems at
all? On the one hand, the book’s title calls no attention to the form the book almost
exclusively uses, unlike the forthrightly titled Sixty Sonnets. The chapbook Aim Your
Arrows at the Sun, which followed the first full collection and preceded the second, was
largely in free verse. It’s as if the poet were soft-pedaling a formal-poet stance here.
On the other hand, the book has been referred to as a companion volume to Sixty
Sonnets; it contains (surprise) exactly sixty more. And the interested reader might
already know that this is the sonnet form that Hilbert invented. Its rhyme scheme is
usually abc abc def def gg. It’s a pattern that tends to soften rhymes because the tercets
put the rhymes a bit farther apart than the usual quatrains. But the rhymes are also
muted because Hilbert freely mixes full rhymes with slant, half-, approximate, and
barely-there rhymes, sometimes burying them even further with enjambments. The
poems almost seem to be challenging—successfully—the principle voiced by A.E.
Stallings, ‘If rhyme is in the car, I want her stepping on the gas, minding the wheel,
shifting the gears.’ Instead, the poems accept even the very soft chime of pairs like
learn/unearned, structure/door, universe/spears. They understate. That this is by choice is
made clear by the poems—just a few—that crack with exact rhymes (‘PAST PRESENT
FUTURE,’ for example).
Hilbert’s meter understates too. His unstrict pentameters are fluid and flexible; contrast
them with, say, those of Adam Kirsch or Joshua Mehigan, which are similar in attitude
but of a different music. They’re not an unbroken iambic wave. They need oral
stretching and nudging in performance to fit into pentameter-length music. Listening
to Hilbert read clarifies much about about how the lines are meant to be shaped.
I confess I haven’t yet listened to Elegies and Laments, the companion recording to Sixty
Sonnets, which feels like negligence on my part. It also feels like missing out on great
entertainment, because some of the poems in All of You … are sheer comedy even on
the page, and more are probably a giggle in performance. This is especially true of
persona poems, like ‘Soprano’s Lament,’ or the gleefully supercilious ‘Good Taste is
the Excuse I’ve Always Given,’ in which we look down our noses at the preferences of
the connoisseur. Here’s a taste, from ‘The Envelope, Please’:
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Thank you, oh, thank you (hold up statuette)
Thank you (breathe) so much. This is just too much.
I couldn’t have done it without the drugs.
And the booze. It took a whole lot of sweat
And tears. Mostly sweat. It’s such
A huge, huge honor to be here. It sort of bugs
Me that it took so long, but here I am.
I’d also like to thank the drugs. Wait, did
I say that already? Okay. The booze?
The boundary between the persona and the narrator-who-might-be-the-poet isn’t
always this clear, and the book is full of contrasting voices. Besides the poems spoken
in the voice of a historical figure, or a specific author, or a friend, there are poems that
describe scenes from wildly different walks of life. How many of them are the poet? I
won’t guess, but Hilbert, in a recorded interview on the first book, does emphasize his
use of assorted characters. All the scenes are vividly realized, though vividness is one
thing in a quiet cemetery stroll and quite another in a bout of recreational drug use.
Observing how the vividness and variety become a whole is part of the intellectual
pleasure of reading a collection like this: examining how the titles, epigraphs, and
groupings shape themselves into a book. All six of the book’s major sections are solidly
cohesive, whether they gather poems about life’s sieges and sufferings, its odd ducks
and monsters, its light moments, its workaday struggles, its local beauty and ugliness,
or the horror of its wars. The sections are tasty as self-contained chunks, a plus in a
book so intensely concentrated on a single form. My sole quibble is a slight confusion
about the order of the sections. The final section of war poems seems too short for
balance and not a shapely ending for the book.
But readers are often fond of individual poems without regard to their placement in
books, and in this book I have a number of favorites. These sometimes depend on
overlap between my experience and the poem’s subject—for example, the image in
‘Cover to Cover’ of the collector’s piles of books ‘Climbing weirdly like crystal
formations/Or pillars of coral’ is all too familiar in my house. Several of these favorite
poems, including some I’ve excerpted, appear in the division entitled ‘To the Dark
Suburbs and Home Again.’
In that section, and really in most of the book, the dominant voice and note is a closely
observant, melancholy lyric I. When the poems do more than observe, when they click
shut on an opinion or a summation, it’s often resigned or wistful. From the prelude
spoken by a lone tourist at the ruins of Etruscan tombs, through the minor horrors of
crowded train rides in the landscapes of New Jersey and the routine squalors of offBroadway, to the hopeless hope of the suburban remodeling job, the voice in the
poems tells us that the world’s flawed strangeness has to be borne as it is:
… A washing machine,
Rusted at the seams, glistens in thin light.
Beyond the train tracks, a radio tower’s long
Sliver splits the mist, and its single clean
Beacon pulses white. Late day sags with night.
I watch the bare lot beyond the phone wire.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here.
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The best we can do with the sad strangeness is to look carefully and take the marvels
where we find them, admitting that they never finally wipe away the tears of things.
It’s a poetic stance we can believe in the twenty-first century. It’s a significant one, in a
poetic world that has become, in David Yezzi’s phrase, ‘like a spayed housecat lolling
in a warm patch of sun.’ Hilbert’s is a voice we can trust and be grateful for as a way of
making sense of this bizarre, and sad, and laughable—and good—Earth.
Maryann Corbett
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Review
Anna M. Evans
‘The Stolen From’
Barefoot Muse Press, 2013
The topic of these impressive poems by Anna Evans is not an easy one for me to
confront. I am in the age group for whom Alzheimer’s is a constant possibility. I have
already lost two loved friends to its unkind fog. One friend, a research scientist, is dead
and the other, a brilliant film director, is tragically still alive. Both men were
intellectually and physically active. In their cases the cliché ‘use it or lose it’ was
meaningless.
The wife of an Australian prime minister decided to let the world watch her decline in
order to educate the public about the condition. Hazel Hawke was applauded and
loved for her brave decision and she has left a priceless record of her gradual retreat
into oblivion and death.
The opening poem in this sensitive collection of poems about Alzheimer’s is a cento,
‘The Stolen From’. A cento is a poem made from a patchwork of collected lines from
other poems. Nothing could be more apt for this heart-rending theme of disintegrating
memories.
The next poem, ‘The Memory Thief’, is powerful and rather frightening as it traces the
first insidious, easily dismissed signs of memory loss.
‘Elizabeth Unmoored’ poignantly shares the anxiety of a disoriented woman who
knows she is in the wrong place. ‘I have to be going home’ she insists. ‘… I shouldn’t
be here …’
‘Iris Transplanted’ opens with a well-known quotation of Robert Burns:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear…
Iris’s accent is from London. She says that a sailor whom she followed to America, read
that poem to her.
… I don’t belong here …
… Her lies are a truth she’s at home with …
‘The Facilities’ cleverly uses sapphic verse, a form which, in the English tongue can
seem mechanical, to list the falsely bright amenities of the institution:
… Picture bingo or large-print, word search puzzles
take up the time that once was filled with talking,
thinking, doing—nobody ever asks them
for an opinion …
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In ‘Deep Sea Fishing’, Elinor, an Honors English teacher accustomed to ‘… hauling nets
of language from the depths, …’ is now a ‘… small, mute minnow …’. She is read a
poem by Emily Dickinson:
The loneliness one dare not sound.
‘Mnemonic Device’ is a surprising defence of meter. The reason for the inclusion of this
poem may be found in the last couplet:
… And I’m a woman writing in her head
who finds it takes less effort to retrieve meter.
‘A Difficult Job’ observes the aides who direct the movements of the lost souls in the
institution. Subtle rhyme achieves a powerful effect:
… They aren’t brutal, but stern
like pre-school teachers, raising tired voices
and talking down to their reluctant classes,
who are denied autonomy and choices,
and given pulp-free juice in plastic glasses …
‘Absolutely’ is about a woman who endlessly repeats that one word.
… Somebody shut her up! …
… Aaaaaaaabsolutely.
‘Zeitgeber’ is a sonnet chain based on some words of John Zeisel’s which describe
gardens used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, to aid ‘way-finding and place
awareness’. Iris, from the earlier poem, ‘Iris Transplanted’, is placed in such a garden.
… I think I’m lost …
‘The Model Resident’, Gloria would have been the all A student when at school.
… We encourage the residents
to maintain their individuality …
Gloria, with a hot-glue gun constructs centrepieces from paper plates, buttons and
ribbons.
Leaving her, the middle-aged sons and daughters
dab at their eyes with tissues that stay dry.
‘Déjà Vu’ is a pantoum, which form is particularly apt for this collection, involving as it
does a layered repetition of lines. Generational confusion is compounded by more
confusion.
‘What to Say’ is about the regular visitor’s pretence of first meetings with the residents,
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and the residents’ ritual reponses from old workplaces and dinner parties.
… Angie, being the person
she once was, and me,
choosing to let her be.
In ‘Careless’ the poet quotes Vladimir Nabokov who describes Mnemosyne as ‘a very
careless girl’. The poet goes on to say that, despite warnings from her own mother,
women like herself who share Mnemosyne’s qualities are the ideals of some and she
has a date with Zeus.
‘Hillary Misfiled’ portrays an ancient man, bald (‘like a lump of quartz’) with delicate
long shaking fingers.
He touches my arm in an ancient gesture,
and in return I look at him
as a girl might look at her father,
seeing him properly for the first time
surrounded by women.
‘Invisible Absentees’ uses the repeated Villanelle form to great effect as the poet flails
about after the names of those who have died without comment from the other blankeyed residents.
… Since if a person’s death can be denied,
so can their life, a frightening paradigm …
‘Questions of Travel’ is a moving poem of a loving wife whose visit to her husband
restores common memories of shared travel. The poet realises that the wife has early
symptoms of the same condition and that
… husband and wife were still moving
down the same road …
‘Dementia’s Diamonds’ is in that most insistent of forms, a sestina. Knots of tangled
memories connect through the repeated words at the ends of lines.
The final poem, ‘Welcome Visitors’, is a Christmas story. As the poet is reading a wellworn Christmas poem to the residents, one of the residents joins in and recites it with
her:
… just for a minute, everything is working.
Janet Kenny
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In memory of Paul Christian Stevens, departed 22/03/13
‘Now I am sure that if a man would have
Good company, his entry is a grave.’
—John Donne, Obsequies to Lord Harington
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Artwork by Pat Jones, from a family photograph
Mr Flotsam and Mr Jetsam
‘Oh well, back to marking assessment tasks on the Minoans. Most of Crete’s coastline
lies near the sea, I learnt from one student’s essay. Cunning chaps, those Minoans.’
—Paul Stevens, in an email exchange, 2012
Paul Stevens and I lived 800km apart, and it still troubles me that, in the six years or so
during which we were in regular contact, I never actually met him. But we did have a
certain rapport and we worked well together as online collaborators. A substantial
element in that, I believe, was the similar, or complementary, arcs of our ‘expatriate’
histories.
Two periods in life—early childhood and early adulthood—seem to be the most
formative for many of us. Where we live during those years can shape our sense of
identity and of where we ‘belong’ for the rest of our days. At some point early on, it
dawned on me that Paul’s and my respective histories in that sense were almost mirror
images of each other. He was born in England of an Australian father, came to
Australia at about 3 years of age, and after that lived mainly here. I was born in
Australia of an English father, moved to England at age 3, and (though I did spend
some of my schooldays in Australia and a third country) afterwards lived mainly in
England. So Paul spent his infancy in England and most of his adulthood in Australia,
whereas I spent my infancy in Australia and much of my adulthood in England (before
moving back here over 20 years ago).
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So much begins with chance, the accident of where you’re born and on what shore you
ultimately wash up. Some of us wash up on more than one shore, and that can make
for identity confusion or doubt. As I see it in more fanciful moments, there we were,
Mr Flotsam and Mr Jetsam—the self-referring subjects as well as perhaps the singers of
the old music-hall song, ‘Is ’e an Aussie, Lizzie, is ’e?’
I wrote the poem ‘By Another Shore’ not long into our association. At the time, we
were discussing ‘the expatriate experience’ as a special feature theme for Issue 1 of The
Chimaera. It’s a persona poem (the authorial ‘I’ tells a story that is not exactly my story)
and I was tempted to attach a good Welsh pseudonym, something like Huw Jenkins.
(Later when The Flea came along I would sometimes yield to that sort of temptation, as
its editor was well aware.) Anyway, Paul professed himself taken with the poem and
declared that it should go into the Expat. Feature ... then I reminded him of our
agreement that we would not publish our own work in The Chimaera.
By Another Shore
Mrs Harries of Haverfordwest, who once
put her hand in my school shorts with a horrible wink—
she’s still alive, so Cousin Mavis tells me,
but old as hell. I’m nearly old myself
and wonder will I ever set foot again
in Tenby, St David’s or Pembroke Dock, or tread
the vast and flat expanse of Pendine Sands.
As a youngster there, oh donkey’s years ago,
gazing too long at the cold grey Bristol Channel,
I heard the call of antipodean shores
and sighed for a place like this: a younger place,
a place more raw, less misted, a warmer sea,
a bluer sky, a land less hedged about,
peopled with pioneer stock and seared with sun.
I found suburbia. Numberless red-faced men,
sandalled, with beer-bellies hanging over their shorts,
watching the footy game on a Saturday night.
Relentless barbecues—the woman making the salad,
the bloke doing his blokey thing at the hotplates,
changing the gas cylinder, flipping the onions,
overcooking the leathery steak and the snags.
But here’s the promised sky, so seldom grey.
Christmas in summer: flame trees and frangipani
under the sun which is now our principal threat—
sharks and snakes and rays being hardly an issue.
The local living’s easy, the traffic sparse
once you’re out of the city; friends come and go,
and the rest of the world is an Internet link away.
And here’s that Pacific shore, blue as the dream,
as the fantasy left behind on Pendine Sands.
One sea or another, what’s the difference?
None, really. Wherever you go, the self
will tag along; there’s no shaking the shadow
of past or future. Still I gaze at this water
today, and sigh for a cooler, mistier sea.
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Childhood expatriate experiences can haunt one’s life, and not only in obvious ways.
I’m neither definitely and wholeheartedly Australian, nor definitely and
wholeheartedly British. I lived and worked in Switzerland for a time and seriously
considered settling there, where I was more of a clear-cut expatriate. From what he told
me, I believe Paul felt a similar tension at least some of the time, and I suspect that in
his late-found love of Spain he saw a kind of respite from being the rope in an
England-Australia tug of war.
What I (like many others) enjoyed most about Paul was his sense of humour. We had
so many fun exchanges over the six years. In these last few months it has been hard to
reconcile to the dismal fact that they’ve come to a full and final stop.
Vale Caratacus; vale Paul Stevens of Yorkshire, the Colonies and the 17th Century; vale
Pablo Estévez y Blanco!
Peter Bloxsom
Brisbane, August 2013
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The Old Cure
Arrogance of ignorance
is argument unanswerable.
No subtlety can stand against
apostasy to diligence
or purposed play of negligence:
such disavowal of literal fact,
such treason to the intellect,
that nescience still triumphs where
necessity lays history bare.
So disengaged from thought, so pure
in freedom from fine points, so sure,
so simplified: the old cure
for ignorance—is a life of ignorance.
Paul Christian Stevens
Friends
They up and disappear and we forget
how present they were here before they went.
Our echo chamber emptinesses fret,
and distant voices whisper our lament.
We lose a little focus as they go
and leave us untranslated in a land
where currency is not the one we know,
and meaning nothing we can understand.
No gentle anaesthetic helps us find
oblivion. Incomprehension ends
our journey. Inarticulate and blind
we stumble through a city without friends.
We are the sum of parts which made our play
and as they leave the plot we fade away.
Janet Kenny
I break the editorial ‘no personal poems’ rule just this once with Ann and Philip.
I wanted to send one last poem to Paul. I somehow can’t write him a poem but
this is one which I might have sent to The Flea. JK
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Scatter Pattern
It burns a hole
Of numbness in the very mind you use
To hold them safe, to know that those you love
Will be erased from time without a trace.
Of course, you muse,
Clutching whatever fancy may console
Foretasted grief, it’s true
That all of history’s monsters have to face
Annihilation too,
With all the horrors they were guilty of.
Each cell, they say,
Of tissue, every earthly speck was sent,
And ultimately dust of some dead star,
Intergalactic scatterings which earn us
Embodiment.
There in the glove box of your car today
An atom lies, once flung
From out of a supernova’s bursting furnace,
Or fastens on your tongue,
Exchanged in one French kiss, from just as far.
Maybe some flecks
Of mind, no less than matter, do survive,
Some psychic smatterings of fear and danger
Flung from the murderous will of Tamerlane,
And still alive
In your most idle musings. And effects,
The merest motes of grace
Of one it numbs your heart to lose, remain,
In you, yes, but their trace
Dispersed to some unborn and distant stranger.
Stephen Edgar
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Order of Service
An excerpt from a colour catalogue,
The backdrop of the photograph
In which the happy family—blonde wife,
Tanned husband, children playing with the dog—
In order to maintain
These promises need only sit and laugh;
This is the view beyond the windowpane,
Moving and come to life:
A sky suspended on the rising air,
The river’s stationary flux
On which the sunlight drifts like melted treasure
That nothing would disturb from floating there,
Except a passing yacht,
Or an ibis in the shallows, a few ducks.
And certainly these strollers-by would not,
Already rich in pleasure,
And this a weekday too. It seems a pity
That anyone should be confined
From so gratuitous a gap in time.
Far off, the sleepless towers of the city,
Where real time indeed
Goes on, like faint projections of a mind
The laws of work and gravity have freed,
Hang shining and sublime.
Closer, across the footpath by the shore,
Another squatter building looms,
Which seems, as though it were an axiom
Of gloom, to cast a shadow out before
The players in the sun.
The windows turn a blind eye on its rooms,
Where any inmates will be bound to shun
The view they’re warded from,
The graded pains and sufferings they bear
Exchanged in payment of a kind
For these outside, spendthrifts of joy and verve,
The way closed orders ransom us with prayer.
And in those ranks one day
Each one of these may have a place assigned,
Briefly perhaps, or finally, and may
Be called upon to serve.
Stephen Edgar
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Elemental
The sea in the night calls my bones and tells
Of the debt they owe to its elements:
Of calcium soaked from its crush of shells;
Of sodium distilled in filaments
Of swaying kelp, churning nutrients
From oxygen, hydrogen and carbon
Atoms that bond and crack in the solvents
Of time and life; recycling silicon
In shifts of sand, and the nitrogen
Falling with the sulphur of tropic skies;
It tells of the blood-debt owed to iron
And of phosphorus sparked in fish-cold eyes.
Your bones are mine, calls the sea in the black
Depths of the night, and I will have them back.
Mark Allinson
Flying Foxes Get Religion
We, the thirty thieves
are espaliered in dew silver
upon a windsong fence.
Later, the sun will rise.
Later, our shadows will fall
and we will desiccate to death.
Cold burns along the wire
and false dawn shows
through the rips in our wings.
We watch for the sun to rise.
Cold turns our thirst to fire.
Our chatter will soon be stilled.
Jan Iwaszkiewicz
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Whales in Moruya Bay
The whales are blowing behind the breakers,
pressed against the breakwall,
flailing their flippers like deep grey sails,
gathering force from currents where free is
unfathomable.
The whales in the bay raise fluked tails,
flaunting their love, arcing the sea.
The whales are salt-drunk, rolling
over on the swell; reeling, they gel
with water, rock and cloud, and when
day falls and sky is pink on the hills
the whales roll over and sink
making the water
darker than ever
I dare to think.
The Whitsunday Islands
White-bellied eagles swoop the golden rain tree.
Onshore, a man holds out a silver net
against the tide, his sea-blue eyes salt-wet,
his face as clear as soon the moon will be.
He guides me past the weaver at the heart
of a golden web, its body dipping earthward,
to oranges our men in war-time dreamed of,
for men like him make lightness out of weight.
I fish with him at night, and when we anchor,
before we’ve caught a haul and let it go
but for two we’ll cook on gold, raked coal,
the long rope drifts in phosphorescent water.
By salt and shell and rock, these islands hold
each sunset when the sea runs red and gold.
Cally Conan-Davies
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Obsolescence
In time’s ceaseless collection
the gone for good and the gone for now
dwindle together in history’s rear-view mirror,
to biodegrade down the long years
or one day be reborn.
We never know what might return—
Van Dyke beards, suspender belts,
flared jeans, or winging back on a whistle of white noise
after half a century’s circumnavigation
the word wireless.
Who knows but they’ll be joined
some day by dark-brown suits for men,
handlebar moustaches, muttonchops and majolica,
musical evenings with recitations,
swing and Swinburne.
But so much more is gone
or going than ever comes back.
What future now for cigarette cases, shag tobacco,
cassette tapes and courtesy, rhubarb tart,
or the game of royal tennis?
Or what for Sunday-school,
Concorde and Fair Isle jumpers
or innocence in the streets, as they slip away
towards the black boneyard
of the dead and done?
Green and Blue
I may profess a keen artistic eye
to judge a painted scene
or know Sérousier from Soutine;
but shame on me if I should miss, pass by,
the green of trees against the blue of sky.
I may appreciate the how, the why,
of where the Fauvists went,
or think Van Gogh was heaven-sent;
yet let me not forget to stop and sigh
at green of trees against the blue of sky.
If I might keep one picture when I die—
one image to live on
when all else that I knew is gone—
let me still see, in recollection’s eye,
this green of trees against this blue of sky.
Henry Quince
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Orchestra
from the Greek: 'dancing place'
Where I live there is no sharp flint to slice
the hide from a kangaroo for a winter coat.
No round bowl, ceramic smooth for cereal
with flavonoids, added iron. No copper coin
buried a metre down with the greening
face of a Roman Emperor.
Topsoil is shaved off like dead skin,
sold to garden supplies for clean fill, a margin.
Three generations failed in drought
then flood buy a raffle ticket for a meat tray
Tuesday; Chicken Parma and a pot.
Beef cattle grazed this dry river bed.
The slater in my kitchen nibbled
a Cambrian leaf. An Otway snail turned
a sliver of Devonian humus.
We planted a river red
where a giant wombat dug
for a root then left the Jurassic way.
A swamp gum hosts a family of lorikeets.
It shades a baited hare.
A fox sniffs opportunity.
The more we bury,
the more he digs it up,
or she.
Fur in dewy swirls
and damp patches,
cells that growl
or scream
leech into thin soil,
busy with pill beetle
and fly
sucking the last juice.
I leave it fizzing above ground.
It takes on the look
of a mummified baby
before the bones bleach.
The wind plays it like strings of a harp.
Julie MacLean
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Someone Else in Hyde Park
In the night, search for her in open spaces:
against the city’s steel, backscatter sky
where clouds slink down and warm their bellies by
the lights. Search where the dark conceals all faces:
beneath cathedral spires—in their black graces
she might linger, and hear a student try
his fumbled, first toccata. Search nearby,
down any path that leads to empty places.
Her seeking figure’s like a rock that braces
against the suck of waves. One night, perhaps,
if night fulfils its promise and erases,
she’ll find that home for all her dreams. Perhaps—
meanwhile she searches all the hotel floors
along the long sorrow of corridors.
Mist on the Newnes Plateau
The footpad wandered out a wide and timbered ridge
like a crooked stick into a popsicle of mist.
We emptied our thoughts into its muffle; we emptied our steps
into the track, tramping them into the eucalypt leaves.
Every so often, a sandstone pagoda would row
out of and back into the grey—like a house asleep,
and full of strangers’ lives, passing through the headlights.
The swinging watches of our walking legs became
as hypnotising as driving in that empty night.
At midday the mist persisted, working down our backs,
under the jacket and pack straps. At midnight the headlights
swept over the plain, like our legs through the underbrush,
and outside the universe focussed its light to the point of stars
as how millions of atoms of moisture, gathering on each twig,
are distilled on all sides to a terminal drop of clarity.
Peter Coghill
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Christopher Who?
And now the seas in frenzy circled round.
Near spent, the Niña shuddered, plunged, and rose,
her timber-shriek re-echoing the sound
of seamen screeching in their final throes.
Her crew swept with the mizzen from the deck
and left as bloated flotsam in her wake,
wave-scoured, commandless, now the gallant wreck,
her main and foremast burdening the strake,
exhausted of all fight, begins to slip
inexorably beneath the manic waves
to join her company and sister ship
in fathomless unmarked and unknown graves.
‘Madre de Dios!’ the Admiral, frantic, cries,
his supplication rended by the gale,
‘Shall Isabella never know?’ and dies,
the sea his sepulchre, his shroud a sail.
And Destiny, bewildered, groans.
Mad Chaos laughs.
On Visiting Lasseter’s Cave
Here lay a man who chanced upon and lost
the way to paradise. A driven man,
he sought the way again, but somewhere crossed
the line that marked where fantasy began
and reason ended. He would leave no stone
unturned or track untravelled till the day
he rediscovered paradise. Alone,
he haunted wildernesses far away.
And down the years he wandered by unbeaten
paths, and traversed gibbered plains to grope
among the hieroglyphs and cuneiforms
of desert lore, seeking and seeking till, eaten
hollow in mind and soul by rabid hope,
he grasped his dream and perished in its arms.
Peter Moltoni
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If You’re the Whim
She
If you’re the whim
can thrill my whiskers,
the lad who’ll swim
on my meniscus,
whose fingertips
can start a rumour
this ladyship’s
in lively humour
to bring her love
of showing-off
(like all who live
at Cape What-if)
her often giddy
nerve for chance
where your untidy
selves might dance,
then you have visa
for my country,
where ‘Yes’ will ease a
port of entry
to dock a cock
inside a cunt,
that two might brook
such fond affront.
He and She
When cunt was ‘quaint’
and cunt was ‘cunny’
we scorned the taint
upon that honey.
When cock was ‘god’
and ‘meat’ and ‘shaft’
stiffening to nod,
we laughed and laughed,
then brought our rapture
here to salve it
blissed by capture
in fine velvet.
Alan Gould
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Starting Work on an Autumn Morning
Our liquidambar lumes to harlequin
and Duffy Street holds traffic with the world.
Our tree’s a furnace as its sugars thin,
our hemisphere now slanted for the cold.
And I’m adrift among the lovely wives,
their dailiness unlocking morning’s hush,
where Leslie rakes a pool of yellow leaves,
Jill feeds her rabbits, Janet hangs her wash.
My forbears in this trade scratched marks on clay
and now I patter marks upon a screen.
The pixels of this liquidambar spray,
I make thin living from the things I’ve seen.
So what’s my deepest urge now? Lie a-bed,
locate anew how dear my truelove is?
Yet here’s my job, to turn up the unsaid
and marry music with analysis.
Our planet tilts, our tree’s diaphanous
and light is glittery with red and gold,
and work is nonchalant with me, with us,
as Duffy Street holds traffic with the world.
Alan Gould
The Gap
This still familiar road I drive again,
though years have passed and time has trimmed my mind,
reminders of the life we left behind
are sleeping here in landmarks that remain.
I park and walk the path my children ran,
beside the rocky creek that looks the same
as when we lived across the road, reclaim
the special feeling of this place. I scan
the land and find the hollow where we found
a broken nest of native mice, and here
we let them go when they were grown. Do you,
my sons, recall our happy days around
this creek? The water is still bright and clear,
but you have gone like mice, as children do.
Kathleen Earsman
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Cock-crow III
in memoriam Paul Christian Stevens
It’s no surprise, yet still a shock
that you, my friend, have passed away.
You taught me how to turn the clock
around: each night it’s someone’s day.
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin
Safe Harbor
for Paul Christian Stevens
The sea at night seems
an alembic of dreams—
the moans of the gulls,
the foghorns’ bawlings.
A century late
to be melancholy,
I watch the last shrimp boat as it steams
to safe harbor again.
In the twilight she gleams
with a festive light,
done with her trawlings,
ready to sleep …
Deep, deep, in delight
glide the creatures of night,
elusive and bright
as the poet’s dreams.
Michael R. Burch
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Review
Maryann Corbett
‘Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter’
Able Muse Press, 2013
I have decided never to review a book I don’t admire. This is not an impartial review. It
is an attempt to explain why I loved every minute spent with the poems in this
collection. One of the first pleasures I found in Maryann Corbett’s poetry was the unity
of sound and meaning. Her poems feel as they speak. Classical meter is never too stiff
to accomodate the emotional flow of a poem. The form is always a voice and never a
corset. Often there is a blend of anxiety, fatalism and wonder. Austere metaphysics is
tempered by irony.
She divides the poems in this book into four parts. At first I had to search for the
reasons driving these divisions. I decided that the first part addresses youth’s
adjustment to life’s unalterable forces. The second part of the book dwells on the
painful, practical and pleasurable aspects of relationships and nature. The third part of
the book grasps the nettle of death and loss and the business of living. Part four deals
with cruelty, pain and the struggle towards meaning and belief.
I won’t attempt to cram my impressions of this wide-ranging collection into a neat
summary.
Part one opens with ‘Terzenelle for the Pilgrimage to Rosedale’ in which the mystery of
existence is experienced within the cathedral spaces of a shopping mall. Menace,
Mozart and optimism engulf poet and reader.
In ‘Confessional Work: Late Advent’, standing in line is a metaphor for responsibility
and the search for ‘… an impossible absolution …’.
‘Holiday Concert’ is tragi-comic as parents inflict ritual humiliations on their
performing children:
Forgive us. We will hear the seventh-grade boy
as his voice finally loses its innocence
forever, at the unbearable solo moment …
Innocence and discovery underlie ‘The Videographer’s Beethoven’. It has a palimpsest
quality as the poet contemplates a videoed student performance of Beethoven’s
‘Choral’ Symphony through the wandering eye of the television camera. The poem
opens with a familiar quotation from Wordsworth:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven …
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The innocent young performers unite with Schiller’s idealistic poem:
‘Brüder!’ they sing, as the camera
pans the perfect faith of their major chord …
The poet observes in the softer repetition of that word:
… resignation the screen reveals in their eyes,
Already learning, I think, to temper their hopes,
knowing how history goes—
these new Romantics, beginning their long decline.
In ‘Northeast Digs Out from Record Snowfall’ the poet laughs at the ‘poetic’ language
adopted by the media as it reports a heavy snowfall:
Those few lost souls with no poetic spark
wander the parks and murmur, staring upward,
‘so quiet’ and ‘so lovely’ …
‘Rose Catalogue in January’ longingly evokes the persistent perfume of roses ‘… when
nothing’s left but fragments in a jar …’.
I particularly loved the next poem, ‘Express’. It is an intensely visual observation of a
bus journey made by winter commuters through morning darkness. The reader is
outside the bus to see its progress and inside to experience its view from the windows:
… Outside, blackness;
inside, eerily bright, like Hopper’s diner …
The bus is loaded with passengers:
… like
the crews on submarines in old war movies …
They surface and stop and go one block at a time.
Nothing here bears witness to the light
but a stain bleeding into the eastern sky.
‘Cold Case’ self-interrogates with divided four-stress Old English lines. If it were music
I would think of consecutive fifths with its crunching alliteration and austere message.
‘After Epiphany: Side Street’ confronts the new year. Phrases like ‘… the hard
machinery of snow removal’, and ‘I drag the stripped tree to the trash …’ end with:
I hunker down, not ready yet to pay
the debt of penance for another spring.
The title poem ‘Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter’ actually brought tears to my
eyes. I read this poem in a mild Queensland winter but remembered the European and
American winters I have known, though none were as harsh as the winters of St Paul.
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At a supermarket checkout, served by ‘… a bored girl with a tongue stud and fuschia
hair …’ she contemplates symbols of suspended life ‘… these tasteless, stone-hard,
gassed tomatoes …’ and believes utterly in the promise of heirloom tomatoes and
pansies. This leads her to relive the three-day pilgrimage made by her younger self and
husband to their new home, only to find the road dug up:
… A stony hole in the ground
gaped where a street should go …
and she continues:
… And forty years
of falling on stony ground still see us springing
for Aprils …
She believes in and wants a full life ahead for the ‘… geeky bagger who never meets
my eyes …’ and the ‘… pink-haired cashier …’ and:
… In Elvis, who will return in a blaze of sequins
to burn away all sorrow, yea though he tarry.
So I left the poem with a smile and a lump in my throat.
Part two opens with a quotation from Hopkins : ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring’ and
splashes straight into a lively tetrameter poem that somehow makes me think of
Shakespeare’s cheerful ‘When icicles hang by the wall …’ in ‘Love’s Labours Lost’:
The mud sucks up the filthy snow …
The next poem, ‘Cuttings’ is dedicated to the poet’s daughter. It begins with the
‘cutting’ of the Caesarean section of her birth; then a planted birth-gift from that very
time of a ‘cutting’ of asthma-inducing pussywillow. It has grown too tall and ought to
be ‘cut’ down but is always spared for the jays and cardinals : ‘… and the heart cuts
back to where we started.’
There is a different kind of cutting in ‘A Theory of Gardens in the Second Generation’:
‘Like cutting out my tongue’. The immigrant mother’s lost birth-language links of
image and word. Just two unchanged links survived:
… Only il pomodoro and la rosa …
Her child, who spent his life
posing, bluffing, unsure of what he knew,
rooted himself in two
brilliant specific facts: Tomato. Rose.
The child of the preceding poem is, in this next poem, the adult subject of ‘Pea
Planting, Good Friday’. His daughter’s seasonal doubts are repressed after he dies, as
she continues his ritual Good Friday planting of peas in frozen ground.
‘The Art Student’s Mother Thinks Out Loud’ expresses tragi-comical shock at the artstudent daughter’s uncaring erasure of a past work in order to make a new work. This
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extends to material things in general. The conditioned frugality of the poet-mother
grapples with the undeniable profligacy of nature.
‘Institute of Art, Spring Break’ is, to my astonishment, a prescribed bouts-rimés. It
seems so spontaneous. The Bohemian and slightly patronising art-student daughter
briefly visits her parents.
In ‘Paint Store’, the sapphic verse form is used to rueful-comical effect. Whilst relishing
the vivid colours available in a paint shop, the poet remembers social responses to
interior decor and settles for ‘Beige and cream serenity.’
I delight in the airy nature-lyricism of ‘Reservations’, which explores trust versus
experience.
‘Airheads’ speaks of floating cottonwood seed and the value of lightness:
… so I take comfort when I see
white seed fuzz piling up in grass,
brought down to earth by modest mass,
a ratio that pleases me:
some gravitas, much levity.
‘Vintage Pattern’ is as finely constructed as the old-fashioned dressmaker pattern
described in the poem:
… six yards. Silk velvet. Think of its perfection.
How it could still be anything. And now
taking a breath, begin its vivisection.
‘Seeing Women in Hijab, the Businesswoman Thinks about Fabric’. Anyone who has
regarded the hijab as a badge of servitude (and I am often guilty of this) must think
again as they read this poem. The unsensuous and inflexible working clothes that
convention obliges ‘liberated’ western businesswomen to wear are contrasted with:
… Fluidly draped, rich textured, and in colours
too sumptuous for buttoned business wear,
they smooth all movement, turning simple acts,
like walking, sitting, lifting an arm, to art …
In ‘Mayday’ a pair of ducks daffily cross a four-lane highway in rush hour. Heart in
mouth, the poet, conditioned by hopeful children’s stories, watches hurtling traffic
which somehow seems to spare them, as far as she can tell.
‘Life Bird’, another bird poem, well suited to its controlled classical structure, speaks of
competitive twitchers who compulsively compile lists. The poet remains apart:
… I keep my silence
knowing legend starts with uncertain visions …
The third part opens uncompromisingly. In ‘Front-Page Photograph: Memorial Day’
the poet is affronted by an intrusive newspaper photograph of a woman prostrated
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with grief on the grave of her dead fiancé:
… Should I be seeing
this act of intimacy thwarted …
‘Ballade for the Last Move’ elegantly exposes the dismantling of personality and
purpose as an old woman is prepared for an institution.
‘Finding the Lego’ disinters not just a childhood possession, but also painful memories
better left undisturbed.
The pentameter rhyming couplets of ‘Saving the Appearances’ contemplate the
cosmology of intimacy. Ptolemy’s earth-based universe versus a Copernican solar
system:
… She sees, therefore, no method of attaining
unification of these fields of heart.
Once more the strings of theory fray apart.
Back to the data. Sort the facts afresh.
Neutrinos whistle through her naked flesh.
Sapphic stanzas assume a progressively ironical tone in ‘Weather Radio’ as the
transmission of official weather warnings becomes less human and more alarming.
In ‘After the Divorce’ the poet imagines a public sale of personal possessions which,
like the past lives, are devalued and exposed to uncaring view:
…What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?…
Counter-intuitively, sapphic stanzas in ‘Light Motif’ conjure lingering melancholy as
saxophone music from the open window of a passing truck trails a hypnotic ambience
in its wake.
‘Maintenance Work’ is a tantalising virtuoso terza-rima stream of consciousness as the
poet tries, unsuccessfully, to concentrate on the mundane task of puttying windowframes.
‘Dutch Elm’ speaks of inevitable loss and renewal and ‘Preservation’ in turn is about
loss, change and forgetfulness.
‘Feast of Corpus Christi’ is a beautiful and terrifying poem in which God is all
powerful, and to my alien culture ‘awful’ in every sense of that word. It somehow
makes me think of the landscape paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.
We leave part three with ‘Swing’, a lilting poem which rocks back and forth to
associated family memories on a porch swing.
Part four opens shockingly with ‘Incident Report’, a poem which slaps the reader as
sharply as its sudden female assault on a girl passenger in a crowded bus. Convention
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and inhibition rule, then later the poem itself is a ‘report’. The diction is plosive and
alliterative.
Another bus poem ‘Viva Voce’ follows ‘Incident Report’. But this poem is a joyful
celebration of the fine voices of women who make public announcements. The
informative calls of a gifted bus-driver are the trigger for this meditation. A touching
tribute to the unacknowledged talents that lighten our days.
In ‘Two Funerals’ a cathedral chorister performs in a funeral service for a policeman
killed in action, aware of the silent diapason of the unpredictable deaths awaiting the
mourners. The subtle rhymes and the contrasting italicised lines of the rhyming
couplets intensify the tragedy.
The poet stands waiting for a bus to take her to work while others suffer the stress of
long vacation car-journeys in ‘Late Season Day Trip’. She remembers when she too was
part of the stressful ritual:
… all this is why I can bear to stand in a corner
a thousand miles from the shore, in a second-hand suit …
‘Chiller’ is a lightly satirical, brief film-noir view of the poet’s daily life.
Human tragedy is observed in ‘Soundtrack’, which rejects the theatrics of movies until:
One crack. Then in a rush of twigs and leaves,
one cry. The white noise roaring after that.
‘Layover’ is about the tension and boredom of a cancelled flight in the dehumanised,
colourless, plastic no-man’s-land of an airport.
‘Epistle to the Pumpkin Field’ is an impish epigram to a doomed pumpkin. It is not
only funny but also possibly the cruellest poem in the collection.
‘A Choral Service for All Souls’ is a beautiful ekphrastic poem which captures the
layered fragility of a Requiem by the 16th-century Spanish composer Tomás Luis de
Victoria.
‘Portent’ is as taut and architectural as the Balanchine choreography evoked by the
poem.
The final poem in the collection is a plea for faith at a time of personal loss. ‘Phone Call,
6:00 A.M’ begins with a quotation from J. M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ when the audience is
urged to clap its hands to keep Tinkerbell alive by believing in her. An adrenalinestimulating telephone call from the poet’s dead sister’s number turns out to be the
sister’s husband needing to confer about last arrangements. This poem stays with me
as I close the book.
Janet Kenny
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Review
Rose Kelleher
‘Native Species’
Self-published—2013
To judge by both this, Rose Kelleher’s second collection, and her first, Bundle o’ Tinder
(Waywiser Press, 2008), she is a poet capable of many moods and modes. Her poems
come at you from different, unexpected angles, and you need to keep your feet dancing
to avoid the sucker punch. Unfortunately, with Native Species, she comes out of her
corner immediately the bell rings and lands a left-right combination which leaves you
thinking (once the birds have finished singing): Where did that come from? Your tactics
are in tatters, and you never got a chance to dance.
I have said elsewhere that Rose Kelleher ‘has a way of having her way with words so
that the words like her having her way with them’. In saying that, I was thinking
specifically of the first of her modes, which, for want of a name, I shall call ‘Mythical’.
The opening poem, ‘White Monkey’ (which gives its name to the first section of the
book), is very much in that mode:
I’m from the tribe that traveled
upriver, hungering mossward
into cloud country.
Past bird tangle and sundust hours,
past the peaks that guard the end of Here
my brothers trooped, the old old family
sawgrass-eaten many bones ago.
See what I mean? In other, less experienced, less sure hands, that kind of manipulation
of language could get a poet into trouble and turn to mush. This poet, however, takes
the words by the neck and gives them just enough of a twist to let them (and us) know
what she could do to them, if she so chose. And, as I say, they (and I) like her for it. I
make no bones (see what I did there?) about the fact that her ‘Mythical’ mode is the
one which hits home with me every time. So, having been checked by the left jab of
White Monkey, I’m now wide open for the right-to-the-eye which is, ‘The Lost
Continent’ (published in full in Angle issue 1):
As to the year it sank we can’t be certain;
the historian was vague, the ink is blurred,
and where he named the overbrimming ocean,
the scroll is torn, obscuring that one word—
something ic. …
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We’re still in the same mode here, though the effects are not so concentrated and
localised, but rather achieved by cumulative means (which are difficult to demonstrate
with a short extract, so you must just take my word for it, or pause, seek out, and read
the poem in full). So far as this mode is concerned, however, the knockout punch is to
come, in the second section of the book (called: ‘Blue Hydrangea’). So let’s skip
forward to the masterpiece of language manipulation that is, ‘The Ancient Irish
Princes‘ (republished in full in this issue). Here the language is unpicked and rewoven
for you, before your very eyes:
They drape themselves in cloaks of saffron yellow
and crimson wool, embroidered by their mothers,
fastened with exquisite silver brooches.
…
The ancient Irish princes wash their hair
in slaves. They drape themselves in centuries,
embroidered with exquisite herds of cattle.
…
They are muscling the rose,
unraveling their hands. They can’t remember
the river. They are light blue heron feathers.
Even having seen that trick performed close up, I’m still very sure I couldn’t emulate it.
The princes are at first present in the flesh, but gradually evaporate, to be swallowed
up by the mists of time. This is, for sure, sound conception working in harmony with
sound execution. I’m going to love, and come back to this poem for a very long time.
And if this was all there was to Rose Kelleher, I could live with that; in the words of
Joni Mitchell, ‘I could drink a case of [it], and still be on my feet’. Just. But it surely isn’t
all there is.
So, let’s turn to another mode, which, in my taxonomy, is called: ‘American Graffiti’.
The language in these poems is very much of the urban US present, and never more so
than in ‘The South Shaw’:
Yaw from heah? Ya don’t sound like yaw from heah.
Ya brotha’s fuckin retahded. Ya brotha’s queea.
is enough to give you the idea. I’ve never been to the South Shore of Massachusetts,
and yet I can mentally hear this jive talk, and it sounds authentic to my English ears.
But the heat isn’t turned up quite so high in all the poems which I place in this
category. ‘Buttheads’ is a rap, sure, but one this middle-aged Essex boy can dig:
Big brothers leave the seat up. They get beat up,
their black eyes bloated, tender as live toads.
Their elbows hit the roads. They stuff their guts
with Dagwood sandwiches, and belch and fart
with pride …
Now, while I’m certain, from other poetical evidence, that this poet is ‘all woman’ at
heart, I can’t help picking up a vibe from the above (and elsewhere) that she has a kind
of sneaking regard for these boys. But here is Rose Kelleher in ‘All Woman’ mode
(from the poem, ‘Erotica’):
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Spare me the cool blue, the sultry silk.
Forget what women tell you women like.
I know, their lips were longing and all that.
But if you want to please me, hunker down
and dig deep. Write me a raw red onion,
tugged up from its dirty hiding place.
If you want to go some rounds with her, even verbally, you’d better ‘man up’!
I suppose if I need to continue to classify these poems, the ‘Schoolgirl Sonnets’
sequence would be a subgroup of ‘All Woman’; possibly, ‘All Girl’. The five wellturned sonnets playfully look at girlish fantasies about various male characters:
Jesus
The Devil
Prince Valiant
Snidely Whiplash
Tarzan
‘Lean as a whippet was the Lord, and long;’
‘His legs are strong, his lap, angora-lined;’
‘vulnerable, perhaps, to girlish wiles―’
‘Oh, Snidely Whiplash! lash me at your leisure’
‘The speechless creature / emerging from the dark uncloaked …’
Naughty of me, perhaps, to quote those one-liners out of context, but you get the drift.
And they are rather good one-liners, when all is said and done.
Mostly, Rose Kelleher uses form transparently, or at least she fixes your attention on
the language, and/or action, to a degree that you don’t notice the form is there. And
that’s a good thing. With some other poets in the (supposed) ‘formal’ camp, the use of
form is self-conscious to the degree that it almost gets in the way (and more of such
violence has been done to the innocent sonnet than to all the other received forms put
together, in my view). It is difficult, however, to ‘conceal’ dimeter, given its ‘tick-tock’
swing; if you use dimeter, you have to let the words go with and choose your
subject/tone to fit. There are two excellent examples of this in Native Species: ‘Selene’
(published in full in Angle issue 2), and ‘Pacemaker’:
a metronomic
monolog
in analog,
analogous
to rosaries
my mother says
For the second time, all I can say is: see what I mean?
It is worth noting here that she is also capable of confounding expectation and pulling
the reverse trick with form. Another favourite poem of mine, from her first collection,
is ‘Love Sonnet’, in which the words become the vehicle for the form; that is to say,
they exist almost solely to demonstrate a subtle rhythm, cadence and music which
stands as an object lesson in what a (Shakesperian?) sonnet should sound like:
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O fain would I elfing go, and bladeful sleep
amid the winter-bell’s unthroated soft
You are going to get so sick of hearing me say: see what I mean? Of course, this is
being playful too, and achieves the end I outline above naturally, and effortlessly. And
this is a poet who is never more delightful than when being playful. But I think it is a
bit more than playfulness; it is a way of the poet saying: ‘I shall write what and how I
like, because I can’. And it is the ‘because I can’ which is important. Because she can.
For certain subjects, Rose Kelleher reserves another poetic/language mode which,
being a jazz buff, I call, ‘Straight, No Chaser’. Take this shot to the midriff, from
‘Enlightenment’:
… The knowledge of napalm eats
Dostoyevsky for breakfast and keeps on eating,
burns every cross there is and keeps on burning,
Questions, anybody? No? OK, let’s have some more of that straight talk, from ‘Dirty
White Boys’:
Dirty white boys I loved you,
as Catholic schoolgirls do,
almost on an inter-species basis:
for your unreadable, immobile faces
locked behind the junkyard fence all day,
and for their ways of giving you away,
For homework, also read ‘Demeter’, published in full in Angle issue 1, and ‘Zero
Tolerance’, published in full in Angle issue 2. A snippet or so quoted here would do
full justice to neither.
Now, I’m no expert on religion, but I can’t ignore the thread of references to
Catholicism in some of these poems; nor can I resist a conclusion that there is some
ambivalence on the part of the poet. Reluctant apostasy? A sentimental attachment to
things which one formerly believed in? I can get that, in a way. Or maybe the affection
for certain aspects of the faith is simply seen through a child’s eyes? Perhaps just good
old-fashioned doubt? In which case I can only say that I feel comforted by that doubt;
nothing is quite so disturbing as a person who is ‘certain’ about everything. I don’t
know, and I’m not sure it matters, but I felt I ought to mention it. In any case, I’ve
always taken the view that the best poetry is written from experience, rather than about
it, so one should always be wary of jumping to conclusions.
Here I issue a disclaimer. There are many more mood arrows and mode arrows in Rose
Kelleher’s quiver than I have outlined here. But I think the argument is made by this
point. And in any case, all this talk of pigeon-holing poems is, in reality, only an
amusing parlour game, because there is something going on in these poems which
binds them together and which transcends any notions of sub-classification. They are,
regardless of anything else, poems with heart. Of course, if you hang out your heart
there is always the danger of daws pecking at it, but poems without heart aren’t worth
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much, in my opinion. But, where necessary, they are poems with muscle, too. That,
above all, is what underpins the unity of this collection of disparate verses.
The last section of the collection is devoted to a long poem (in excess of 200 lines),
which gives the section its name: ‘Trumpet Vine’. This is a poem which deserves
extended attention, and requires jazzier chops than I have, but I will try. For starters,
let’s say that having toyed with us through four ‘rounds’ (the previous sections: ‘White
Monkey’, ‘Blue Hydrangea’, ‘Platypus’ and ‘Maggot’), the poet is now limbered up,
loosened and ready to take us through some of the lessons again (just in case we
missed them the first time, what with things moving so fast and all) in one last,
sustained flurry of moves which encompasses many (not all: there is nothing of ‘The
South Shaw’ here, for instance) of the moods and modes we have seen demonstrated
above.
Now, a trumpet vine to me means Campsis radicans or one of its sisters, and it is (when
happily situated): a vigorous, wanton, flamboyant and floriferous scrambler; a bit of an
opportunist; a ducker-and-diver; a survivor. Is that relevant, I wonder? This poem
probably deserves a review to itself, so what follows can only be a brief, rough guide.
The first six stanzas say more or less what I said above about this plant, only much
more eloquently and with just a dash of that ‘Mythical’ voice. Then there is a
summatory sentence (or ‘waymarker’), repeated in italics for emphasis:
All life remembers where it’s been
… by virtue of some sort of racial memory, does one assume? In any case this sentence
signals a shift in tone to something more personal:
Last night I had that high school dream again.
You know the one: important test today,
you’re unprepared, you’re late, you’ve lost your way,
way back when.
Well, who hasn’t had that dream, or something like it? Does that count as a racial
memory? In any case, this dream sequence takes us on for three metrically fluid
stanzas until we reach the next ‘waymarker’:
Maybe to succeed he had to fail.
which signals a switch of focus to a ‘he’ who, physically punished as a child, as an
adult seeks masochistic sexual release. But there is no negative judgement here, since:
People are normal
as poems are formal:
our wants
are nonce.
Succinctly put, I think you’d agree?
And we go on: exploratory passage, followed by some sort of summation which cues a
change of direction and a new exploration. So, like many such poems, this achieves its
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epic scale by being episodic. And the exploratory passages here are like wandering
reveries of free-association, the cumulative effect of which is to make the poem as a
whole sound like a summation in itself. It would be wrong to continue the
deconstruction, because the poem has to be appreciated as a whole (or as a ‘glorious
ribbon of words’, as I called it elsewhere), even if it is tempting to see this poem as an
attempt to say in one go all the things the poet feels she has left to say, poetically. But,
as I said above, I think the best poems are written from life, not about it, so it is wrong to
leap to conclusions. And I am sure Rose Kelleher has a lot more to say yet, given time.*
Native Species is a substantial collection from a poet at the top of her game. It is also a
handsome and well-designed volume, with a singularly attractive cover. This is one
you will want to own. Nuff said.
Philip Quinlan
*Sources close to the edge (though far from unreliable) have disclosed to me, secretly, that this
poem was, in fact, the response to a challenge thrown down (as the catechism of clichés has it)
by another writer of longer verses, Quincy R. Lehr. And who am I to say such sources nay?
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Where Maurice Is
Maurice returned to the sea
Friday (just before dawn)
he settled onto foam
and scattered along waves
quickly
faster than his usual ambling pace
vessel-less
Maurice flew circles around dolphins
choked in the throats of gulls
dusted a grotto
rested at last
among coral and caverns
of phosphorus stars
making his own light
Rowena Silver
A Deafness
For days now at the mouth of the stream,
at the gray seam of gravel and sky,
a bald eagle has watched from pilings
kokanee moving inland to spawn.
The landlocked salmon dart past shallows
where he can feed, a lord at leisure.
They fan in alder-shadowed pools
until they die without a fight.
For we who cannot hear, this happens
with a more impartial love,
unruffled motion, like wet leaves
already fallen. No regret,
no whining need, no infant hurt,
nothing to say we’re sorry for,
no chance to try again. A sinking,
used and belly-up in the stream.
And we keep going back to listen
through the moving shadows, the glide
and turn of bodies we have known,
to the deep evaders of desire.
David Mason
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The Laundromat in Sunlight
These our hymns
to changing, heads
of launderers bent
over their readings, faces
turned to think of remarking
What a marvel it is
to soften fabric, to make
a warm skin next
to the skin you live in—
a passing intercourse the sun
dissolves, solution of time
for the great unwashed,
the wishful tuned to the hum
of the tumbling dryers.
Come, join our number.
You need not speak a word.
David Mason
Miter
If you must rip dimensionals, resquare
your fence, lower the blade until it peaks
just barely past the surface, and attach
two kickback pawls. Determine whether knots
obstruct the kerfline: they can cause a catch,
explode, or scratch the blade until it shrieks,
until grain smokes and burns. Now gently slide
your stock along the waxed, consistent guide
with firm, smooth motions. There’s no second chance,
no do-overs if you cut short. No trim
will ever lead to perfect-fitting slots:
the joint will rattle, and you’ll have to shim
tenon or mortise sound. A single glance
from any slant reveals even slight
offsets if you don’t get the angles right.
Prefit and sand. For glueup, firmly clamp,
measure again: diagonals must rhyme—
persuade them square, and banish any thoughts
of perfect finished form: wood moves with time,
with moisture, and the warmth of just one lamp
can force straight grain to spiral everywhere.
W. F. Lantry
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Elegy
The finery of childhood—let them wear
It every day, in rain or shine. Don’t lose
Your temper over patent leather shoes,
Mud-puddle deep, or fret for Easter frocks,
Hand-smocked, that meet with chocolate or paint,
Let Sunday-best be mussed, new trousers tear,
Elbows of pure wool cardigans be rent,
Let silken ribbons stray, mismatch lace socks,
Let grape juice stain. For Someday comes to call
And finds the garment now too tight, too small,
Outmoded, out of season, itchy, quaint,
Stored up in lavender and mothballs. Let
Joy sport its raiment while still bright and loose,
Let what cannot be saved or spared be spent.
It’s fitting: what is theirs is not your own,
The finery they did not spoil with use
That lies in drawers, unblemished and outgrown.
Alicia Stallings
The Scrimshaw Man
Alone, he sits for hours at Enrico’s
carving splendid eagles into bone,
haunted by the wait-girl’s sad-soft smiling,
sliding off her clothes, the room aglow.
Carving splendid eagles into bone,
he’d laugh and think of her, the curve of moonlight
sliding off her clothes, the room aglow.
They never called each other by their names.
He’d laugh and think of her. The curve of moonlight
over coffee tongues between their lips.
They never called each other by their names.
He kept her number, but his girlfriend called it―
over coffee: tongues between their lips.
Haunted by the wait-girl’s sad-soft smiling,
he kept her number. But his girlfriend called it.
Alone, he kills the hours at Enrico’s.
Siham Karami
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Through a Looking Glass, Brightly
In Carroll’s over-underrated wabe,
Beside myself I gimble and I frolic
Upon the stretch marks of a buxom babe
Whose childhood was so Iowa-bucolic
She thought the whole wide world was paved with corn.
Her father was a decent alcoholic
Who never heaped his womenfolk with scorn
And said that, though he’d never struck it rich,
Some years ago he’d scaled the Matterhorn.
Her mother was a fine old-fashioned bitch
Who always gave as good as she received—
Until her restless feet began to itch
And she ran off with someone she believed
Would lead her to a better promised land.
The husband and the daughter were aggrieved
And helped each other try to understand
How Mama could’ve up and gone away
Before the ripe tomatoes had been canned.
My old sedan broke down the very day
I met that needy girl, and I was struck
By her unwillingness to let me stay
Alone beside the road until the truck
From town could come and tow me. Who was I
To argue? All we did that night was fuck.
What made her stop behind a hapless guy
Whose car was stalled along the interstate
She still won’t tell me, but I can’t deny
That I have learned to love what fickle fate
Has sent my way: warm lodging for my phallus;
A lonesome dove whose mission is to sate
My least desire. Inside our furbished palace,
A double-wide where every wall’s a mirror,
‘Tis brillig as can be. Her name is Alice,
And all the livelong day she waxes dearer.
C. B. Anderson
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On the Way to the V. A.
His face dips down in his fatigues. He smiles:
‘This bus’ll drop us almost at the door.
My wife, she’s got her hands full of my files.’
‘She was gung ho, but we’ve put on some miles.
She says P.T.S.D.’s more goddam war.’
‘This bus’ll drop us almost at the door.’
Self-help: Step One with Example
Night, and the day uncoils, unending.
When every avenue of thought
Loops like spaghetti, try pretending.
Say … you’re a bird who’s somehow caught
In someone’s screened-in porch. You’re still
A bird, however overwrought.
You rest five seconds on a sill,
Take off again, and bounce—some bird!—
To the floor. It’s not for lack of will
You can’t get out. It’s the absurd
Escaping you that keeps you trapped—
The same as ever, only blurred.
The door’s propped open now. Your rapt
Attention shunts: an enemy
(You think), his broom in hand, unflapped,
Attacks. You’re at his mercy. He
Swings, misses, swings, and up you glide
Back to the trees, where you’ll be free,
At home—yourself, but clarified.
Charles Hughes
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And Then
And then there is
this sunlit scribble
of dust on glass,
the ripple and shadow
of rain from months
before, unwilled
by faith, unwrought
by powers’ accord,
nor written to fit
this muck-and-tumble
life, a dust
that holds both sun
and rain, that stays
as darkness falls,
whose shine, in morning
light, returns
Charlotte Innes
For Kathy
There was a girl, who loved me once,
from piano keys and fiddle-back
chairs with gardenias pinned on strands
of hair, who sang her songs in longneck
pearls she knotted twice in kimono robes─
and gorgeous curls, so naughty-nice
she lit up rooms and drank her drink
on afternoons in china cups of rosehip
tea with a dose of honey or maybe three.
There was a girl who loved me then,
with initials tattooed on her skin, who
danced the samba and roped the moon.
I miss that girl, who died too soon.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
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Amsterdam Was a Quiet City
the drug-dealers and whores
did business in measured tones
and the red bricks of the squared-off houses
were mute just like the citizens
canals flowed quietly
the draw-bridges that opened for boats
did not creak nor did their chains rattle
taxi-drivers went soft-spoken
to their destinations
and the Central Station stood
mute as a mausoleum
like the market street
where dickering
went on but it was not vociferous
When Death Is Prodigal
on the death of my mother, two aunts,
and two cousins in a space of one month
When death is prodigal, a King who flings
coins out to the peasant crowds, a mother bird
who has left a nest of spawn so you don’t know
which open mouth to feed, the pipes clog up
with memory. Old stories glut and jam
the sink—a wad of hair you can dissolve
only with the scalding caustic lye
of your indifference. What else when there
are too many to sort and to go through—
too many anecdotes to valorize,
too many eccentricities to file?
Death should not buy in bulk. Death should discern
the best investment for wringing a heart,
best bargain, the most succulent of fruit;
out of the heap, the most poisonous plant.
David Landrum
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Those without Imagination
Those without imagination
rise fiercely to defend what they value,
yet instead of flourishing a sword
they flourish a long braunschweiger
and when they sheathe it in their belt
it looks like a withered cock
sticking out for everyone to see.
Those without imagination
laugh at the lead-up to a joke
then puzzle over the punch line.
They suffer through a spinsterhood of wit.
David Landrum
To the Story of My Life:
Why have you left me?
If you think I misused you, show me how—
Did I confuse your plot, defuse your drama,
Or defect into another genre? No, and now
I am just a single word, alone in an empty book
Even the footnotes have flown away
Even the title has departed
And my single word is no pun at all.
But I tell you, you are not the only story in the world!
I could be in Hamlet!
I could be in King Lear!
I could be in Othello! I’ve had offers!
However, we have already been together
On so many endeavors
And for so many years
That we are almost one.
If you come back, if you accept my repentance,
I will serve my function, your diction and your tone,
I will stick to the script, making your words my sentence,
And your fiction my own.
Joseph Stern
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He Who Has Ears to Hear
Mad for coitus, rushing through the silent
Forest, pouring forth in surges, exploring
Every crevice, every nook, the violent
Urges strain to set the heavens roaring
In a brain, groaning as the proud trunk falls.
In frenzied lust to penetrate its favored
Orifice, the desperate wave breaks and stalls
And quickly dies—too early to have savored
Copulation. Wholly dissipated,
No further propagation of the waves
Will ever come. They lie unconsummated—
Absorbed in silence, pensive, still as graves.
No ear to hear, no consciousness around:
A tree falls in the woods and makes no sound.
Rainbow
‘Thou makest it soft with showers’
—Psalm 65:10
Even Adam, naked in the garden,
Never knew such sweet oblivion. Lost
In parabolic tongues of flame, I pardon
Eve and God, blissful in the pentecost
Relentlessly descending: everfresh
And neverending streams of liquid heat
Enfold, caress me, ease my naked flesh
Along its path from womb to winding sheet.
Divine apologetic tears, waxing
Hot, coursing through the sanctuary
Beg, ‘Forgive!’ How could I not? Too taxing
Here to hold a grudge. Solitary
Dweller in this wantless world, I nod—
And take the warm blood money from my God.
Seth Braver
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Rahab’s Mother
Her mother wailed with guilt at Rahab’s birth.
Rahab wailed in terror. Reproduction
Is the cruelest act. Clangorous construction—
Groans and hammers, songs of hollow mirth
With which the swaggering but fearful men
Fortified themselves—forced her to recall
Why they labored so to reinforce the wall,
Refortifying Jericho again.
She’d heard the tales: barbarians who seethe
In diabolic hordes beyond the river
Await the signal from their god of slaughter
To cross at last and murder all who breathe.
They will not spare a harlot’s infant daughter.
She clutched the girl and begged her to forgive her.
Seth Braver
Suzanne and the Elders
the aftermath
I still undress at sunset like before
when stars decant their hymns of broken light
above the honeyed haze, and orchard lore
lifts pomegranate blooms into the night.
I come to bathe beneath this olive limb,
where oftentimes my prayers are coaxed aloud.
Although this shaded arbor seems a grim
intrusion now, and movements spread a shroud
of thick uneasiness; I enter in
when all the garden gates are closed. My fear
is not recorded like the elders’ sin.
I’ve stoned it, dropped it down to disappear
beneath this pool of water—just like me,
determined not to set my demons free.
Karen Kelsay
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Autumn
I caught a maple leaf
within my palm. Its body
frail as parchment, pressed
with brittle veins—
just a tinge of gold remained,
like some intrinsic breath
garnered from a springtime ray.
I placed it down for sedges
to reclaim. They cradled it,
until the snowflakes came.
Karen Kelsay
Moonlight
An Imitation of Fernando Villalón
You own this evening:
Joining your light with light
Like music of bells
Falling through moonlight.
Roosters never crow here.
The city is too bright
With cars driving fast
Ignorant of moonlight.
So, so and so, it’s past twelve.
The table’s clear, no bite
Is left unless you’re willing
To eat this moonlight.
Clap, slap, clap your tiny hands.
Make a speech out of night,
Give a gift of finger blossoms
Thrown towards moonlight.
Ah and so, see how they look!
Your cloud of a blouse,
Your legs, your breasts so bright
They guide sailors through rocks
On this ocean of moonlight.
Mark J. Mitchell
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The Bible Dream
In the Bible dream you stop
In the Old City, below the temple,
Abandoning your car
Among camels and donkeys. You
Slowly climb a long flight of stairs,
Steep as a ladder, but stone
Cut before you were born. Stone
Walls rise beside, behind, in front. Stop
You until fingers find a door, stair,
Running down this time. The temple
Pillars beside you have sacred names you
Know but don’t remember. You’d look for the car
But you’re afraid. Not for the car
But that you might become salt or stone.
Shoes echo on marble floors, you
Try to raise your eyes. Steps stop.
Your head hurts, your temples
Throb. Finally, you look up, stare
At an altar perched on three stairs.
You haven’t seen another car
All day. You are wearing robes, temple
Vestments, holding a round stone
Like a baseball. You’d throw it, something stops
You. Not an angel, but a feeling you’d
Toss it like a girl. You
Run forwards, lifting your hem, up stairs
Two at a time, faster. So fast you can’t stop,
Climbing upward, out of control like a cheap car
On a downgrade or a tombstone
On Easter. And now the temple
Has grown larger, altar vanished. This temple
Isn’t real, isn’t holy, scriptural. You
Are certain that you’re lost. Turn back to stone
Streets, mud houses. There are no stairs.
The camels are gone and so’s your car.
The man next to you is a shortstop
Who says, ‘The temple of Baseball has no stairs,
Just base paths.’ He’s gone. You give up on your car,
Remove your shoes. Kneel on stone. Pray like you’ll never stop.
Mark J. Mitchell
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Mrs. Sisyphus
Mrs. Sisyphus sighs,
shaking her hoary, harried head.
‘Men,’ she mourns,
‘never look around.’
She sweeps away the pebbles
broken by the boulder,
just to keep the pathway clear
behind her heaving husband.
It’s important that
the rock roll straight.
‘This all could have been avoided
if he’d stayed dead the first time.
But I had to be a good wife
and cancel all the funeral fuss.
I only did what I was told.’
She looks at the long way
up the hill and the long way back.
‘Well,’ she says to no one, ‘someone
must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Mark J. Mitchell
Ars Poetica
Give it all up for anonymity?
I always burned for fame,
torched by a red-haired flame,
ambition bounded by infinity,
a secondary motive to be sure.
I wanted to record
the sights I saw and stored,
the trials that every creature must endure.
I was in love with meter and with rhyme.
Though centuries had passed
I clasped my forebears fast,
rebels all to the tyranny of time.
A tablet blotted by our secret tears,
the future is a cage
in which we swiftly age.
Withhold your judgments for a thousand years.
Tim Murphy
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The Age of Gold
And then, when the obliging sheep
In colors grow their ready wool,
And knickers fall like ripened fruit
Upon the shaven grass, and crêpes
Suzettes extend until we’re full
From bramble bushes, and the flute
Sonatas of the shepherds toot
The flocks in file, the wolves will cull
The weakest for unconstructed suits
And long-johns knitted with extra legs.
Welcome the Age of Martial Bands
And Paperclips and Glitzy Digs
And Varnish on Arthritic Hands.
Mores and mores. Rustic now
Invites the wolf to buy his plow
For peanuts, and the Opus Coots
Disperse small crowds from roadside stands.
Worms Have Died
Like chimney-sweepers. Yes, I do,
I guess. Oliver Twist, at least.
They come to dust. And not so well.
If not for footprints, who could tell?
The golden lads. They can come, too,
Although they’re almost all deceased.
Who is, then? Chimney-sweepers, lasses,
Dusty boys, tots in their shrouds,
The skeletal, angelic crowds,
Rag-pickers in graduate classes.
You miss the point. Not much, perhaps.
Begone. We’ll drink to golden chaps.
Richard Epstein
Untitled
Must all poems be
about mortality?
Must they all send
us out from the end?
Why build word dams
against drifting sands?
Ron Singer
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Film Noir
The phony blind man’s tip,
the leather glove and grip,
the pistol at the head:
when existential dread
and a dirty glass syringe
seem ready to unhinge
the lady and the hero
(their cash is down to zero),
there’s hope as they are led
to lust inflamed and fed—
but even a .45
won’t get them out alive.
Terese Coe
Adrift
The Milky Way’s a turning wheel
Of blazing spheres of light,
Thick nested suns that gleam and reel
And spiral through the night.
When seen from far away by God,
If there’s a God to look,
It’s just a faint and hazy pod,
A bubble in a brook.
It’s just a microscopic spot
Far off the cosmic shore,
A commonplace galactic dot
Amid a billion more.
And lost in all this boundless hive
Of misty galaxies
That sometimes perish, sometimes thrive
Across the cosmic seas
We ride this rock that tags behind
A mediocre star
And use what passes for a mind
To wonder what we are.
Richard Meyer
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The Great Builders
The Pyramids were built on bread and beer
and China’s Wall on bowls of rationed rice.
The human cost was markedly severe,
but mighty rulers shrugged and paid the price.
Singularity
Before the beginning, prior to God,
The nothing that wasn’t isn’t so odd
As all of the something suddenly here,
No matter whatever made it appear.
Time’s Arrow
The law of entropy
says all things fall apart:
so goes a galaxy,
a nation-state, the heart.
Richard Meyer
Regarding ‘Time’s Arrow’
You’re right, the law of entropy applies
to us no less than galaxies, however,
though everything disintegrates or dies,
some bonds may be impossible to sever:
transformed but not destroyed, like energy,
love may overrule time’s entropy.
Time’s arrow flies in one direction and
pierces us no matter how we sprint,
and no one knows about the bow, the hand,
that fired it, though laws of physics hint.
Love’s arrows strike us too, but not the same:
they give our life in time a point, an aim.
Mario A. Pita
78
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The Snub
Aimed at those it doesn’t know but has no cause to fear,
its nose is hypersensitive to things as they appear,
elongated and sloping down at angles most severe.
Ascending on the social ladder it’s hell-bent to climb,
the Snub will cut you to the quick—it picks the proper time,
then if you’re unimportant will invent or find a crime.
A slippery creature made of frost, descended from the Slink,
it skims along the surface, but it won’t go near the brink,
equating what’s appropriate with what the neighbors think.
The Snipe
The Snipe is quicker than the Snub and fiercer than the Snide.
its needle nose is cold as ice and millimeters wide,
yet thicker than the thinnest skin and sure to prick your pride.
A kind of Grump, beside itself when lovebirds start to pair,
it finds the pleasant rather plump, the hipster rather square,
reunions rather boring and rejoinders most unfair.
It snips at kinfolk, skewers foes; in line with its gestalt,
it aims its pique at blameless backs, proclaiming it’s their fault.
Its young are nursed in Punic fields the Romans sowed with salt.
The Rabbit in the Hat
There is no rabbit there—
I’ve reached inside for years
and just come up with air:
but I ignore my fears
and those whose wits are thick,
for reaching is the trick.
Ed Shacklee
79
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Drunkard Watched from an Upper Floor
His weaving adds up to a hapless cloth
on both sides of the street: just short of falling,
he staggers, with a stop to vomit froth.
He’d go far safer if he took to crawling.
A brace of cans, though, and a paper sack
are taking up the hands his legs could use,
as gales inside his head tell him to tack
and sway but hold his cargo fast, to choose
the service of his thirst above all pride
or fear that he might offer easy prey.
The spirits he has taken as his guide
make him loop back to take another way.
Ten minutes pass. He’s near where he began,
Reminding me of when I’ve been that man.
J. D. Smith
Beautiful Loser
Skirt-chasing stanzas court the unkempt force
of circumstance. (She offers tempting grist
until all layers come off.) A third divorce?
Such fodder frisky poets can’t resist.
Attention trained upon blue-wastrel eyes
gives rise to periphrasis of the soul.
Confessionalists know the whitest lies
can mock unblinking snow. She’ll eat him whole—
but not with malice. Mishap is her trap.
Cascading error knits her ragged nest.
Why tempt a sleeping beauty from her nap?
Key West is Poet South. Young man, go West!
No metaphor can save her from her fate.
He tarries. Error often marries late.
Norman Ball
80
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Spare the Rod
It’s just absurd. Why would she cry your name?
I love the girl. How dare you interfere!
Your drab, dry wit and your hyena laugh—
what can she see in you? Bald, bespectacled,
your stomach pushing out beneath your shirt
as if you’re smuggling someone’s volleyball—
you’re quite the opposite of what she needs!
You grope her with your awkward, branch-like hand
the way a bum will root around for change
beneath a Coke machine. So unlike me.
I’m made for her. My sleek and perfect frame
fufills her fantasies. Dear enemy,
I am the lover whom she hides from you.
When you are gone, she pulls me to her thighs,
and I can always find her secret spot
without the fumbling that you put her through …
Last night, purring against her, I was sure
she loved me. What had been mechanical
turned rapturous, and I believed she’d come
to understand that I could satisfy
her every need. Our once forbidden love
would be our pride. We’d snuggle on the couch,
laughing at Sleeper, and when it was done
she’d whisper ‘You are my orgasmatron,’
pulling me close. Soon I would meet her parents.
While they’d be apprehensive, naturally,
my charms would win at least her mother over.
I have a way with women, young or old.
Our love was perfect; then she cried your name!
I longed to rise, but I could only growl,
continue loving her, simply a toy
she’d be ashamed to walk with down the street.
I lie in darkness, drowsing on a bed
of crumpled Kleenex, though I cannot cry …
You’ve stolen her, and I am paralyzed!
How I would pummel you about the face,
choke you, if I could simply rise and walk!
But I am doomed to lie in silence here
until she reaches for me once again.
Buried alive, I must concede defeat,
and bide my time until you’re old and fat,
when she’s repulsed by you. For I’ll remain
as sleek and shiny as that blessed day
her warm, thin fingers rescued me
and fed me batteries that made me roar.
Oh yes, one day we’ll have a laugh at you.
You’ll be the joke, then, the forgotten tool …
Jeff Holt
81
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Ad Astra per Tacta
The drift of helium and hydrogen,
Not faint in its suggestion of my mind,
Which creeps to your Sargasso Sea for men
Under the birthing glow of humankind.
The cosmos is a monster bent on life
And telescopes from sex beyond all ken;
Prometheus trains the nuclear midwife
Through drift of helium and hydrogen.
These pupils on the umber of your flesh
Are seared into a voluntary blind,
My prize (call me sun-ward Gilgamesh)
Not faint in its suggestion on my mind.
The forces, strong and weak, which work my lips
Upon your nuclei again! again!
Compel my fingers up your thigh like ships
Which creep to your sargasso sea of men.
This vacuum sphere of artificial light
Makes beacons of your swellings, helps me find
The novae, helps us punctuate the night
Under the birthing glow of humankind.
Spilt milk of stardust scries us on the grass
And satisfies its purpose in our heartbeat:
Cigarette-end-glow energy-packed mass,
And from our—Bang!—primordial replete,
The drift-off heat.
Satura Lanx
Not often round these long-forsaken parts
Do strangers stroll in seeking formal fare.
I’ve manned this kitchen, fighting slow despair,
To serve the rare punter with scrumptious arts—
Iambs at playful march for apéritif,
Subtle caesura garnishing end-stops,
A soup of trope reduced from hand-picked crops,
And salad of the choicest rhyming leaf,
The entrée and the main served up with beer.
By fives, by fourteen but in relaxed ranks—
Variety is the sweet even for cranks,
With spice dashed from old salt-shaker’s peer.
But when I greet the patron will he quail
To find chef ain’t the usual dead white male?
Uche Ogbuji
82
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The Battle
Cy gets smashed most every Friday night.
Walks out to yell and walks back in to yell.
Screams at the siren with the big red light.
He’s louder than the loudest drunks who tell
him he’s a loser, his drinking pals at Joe’s—
who rolled him once. He swears he gave ‘em Hell.
He challenges the Amtrak horn that blows
to clear the track. The brake man hides his grin
and doffs his cap. Then, Cy takes off his clothes,
but not for sex or any lustful sin.
He goes down on all fours to fight
the battle that we pray someday he’ll win,
as he weeps, weeps at one lone traffic light.
Cy gets smashed most every Friday night.
Shadow
1825
When master rode into the quarters he
could see there’d been a killing. Cato lay
panting, cut from his thigh down to his knee,
beside his cousin’s body. Now the way
the master worked was shrewd. He refused a grave
for the dead man, then brought a rusty chain
and bound them tight, dead slave to living slave,
then rode off grinning like he’d pardoned Cain.
Cato lugged that body at his feet.
The family shooed him off, the rotting curse
behind, a nightmare that just would not stop.
Animals, too, sniffed at the maggot meat,
Buzzards circling like a demon nurse.
And when they plucked, you heard the sinews pop
Lance Levens
83
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Starlings over a Town
in Kentucky
No one knows why they come but here
they congregate, in shiny black suits
like politicians who have arrived with a plan.
In the midst of winter quiet, more suitable
for contemplation or conducting illicit affairs,
residents hear instead the clashing of wings,
sudden bursts of shrieks as if the seams
of calm days have finally come off.
Neighbors chat up what they observe:
do some flocks favor the grand roof
of the library where the sages live
undisturbed on the shelves,
or above the bus terminal, hotspot
for mosquitoes and men with time?
Even the homebound are curious,
peering through heavy curtains
at a scene they don’t recognize.
Newsmen come with cameras,
theories and anecdotes,
an ornithologist is interviewed
on TV, more experts speak.
Someone mentions Hitchcock, Bodega Bay,
the blond actress in a smart yellow dress.
How everything relates to everything!
Winter lingers. The starlings nest.
Soon, some admit sights of bird droppings
on their windshields, driveways,
make them feel singled out.
The dogs whine.
The mayor chimes in.
Residents form a squad, a timetable is set.
As the first waves of pots and pans
thunder, an ensemble of birds fly away
like a good guest, or a bowing magician
toward the finishing act,
tossing in the sky his smoky black cape.
Pui Ying Wong
84
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Elegy for the Snow Country
Nigata, Japan
That you were never there or even close to it
does not make it less real.
This place in Kawabata’s novel,
which you first read in a cheerless room
at an age when you had few memories
and plenty of time,
is both dormant and palpable.
Like places in recurring dreams
this one has accompanied you
through years of lightness and loss,
found you again this February day
in a winter austere as a puritan’s love.
Outside the sky is pregnant with clouds.
Snow that has been falling for days still falls.
Your mind drifts like snow
to a landscape of dwarf houses and kerosene lamps,
to Komako the heroine, drunk,
calling out her lover in a voice so pure it burns.
You thought of your first snow
in a city you barely knew, remembering
the sting as you stepped out of the dormitory,
barefoot like a pilgrim might upon a new land
and every molecule in your body screamed live.
Your son’s first snow too,
as he watched with astonishment
like a cat catching sight of a spider
climbing in midair,
before language, before naming,
when snow could glisten like clear thought.
What other road if not language
that can take us back to these moments,
to childhood, that first country,
surrounded by savage blue and steep inclines?
What burns cannot be touched but remembered.
What burns in this enigmatic life speeds before you
like a train trundling out of the tunnel
into a valley cold with stars.
Pui Ying Wong
85
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Dissociative
‘an identity that is not in control may nonetheless gain
access to consciousness by producing visual hallucinations’
—American Psychiatric Association.
For pay, these thirteen friends of mine must pull a lever.
At night, each one comes home where a distinctive staircase
awaits, to take both footsteps and first, tired impressions
to someplace fine—a cosmopolitan apartment
beyond the bland magnificence of upper landings
wide to a view from windows baring out on nothing.
I talk, but at this moment, I can tell you nothing,
not even who I am, nor what the workday lever
accomplishes, nor even how we reach the landings
which—like raw revelations on the steep, steep staircase—
were planned, or built, or lead us up to this apartment.
A mess of cloth and buttons clutters my impressions.
If I could just remember … but my best impressions
are mystical in retrospect, absorbed in nothing.
Repetitively, we explore the same apartment.
Obsessively, we all employ an equal lever.
A vague sense of ourselves compels us up the staircase
where lacquer always wants to wet the musty landings.
One of us can only limp along the landings.
His favorite artworks are the finer French impressions.
He tells us that he fell, fell down another staircase.
We listen to his sick defense, believing nothing.
We listen, listen till he goes to pull the lever,
when someone else with us possesses the apartment.
Our host insists the artist get his own apartment,
the one who madly pounds his brushes on the landings,
who—after every shift—leaves us a sticky lever,
never completely rendering his full impressions,
yet leaving to our violated senses nothing
of intrigue to sustain us on this battered staircase.
Our daughter’s second home has its own wooden staircase.
Her eyes are treehouse green, the plants of this apartment,
and she is never battered. In her eyes are nothing
of terror nor despair. She plays jacks on the landings.
She is the ultimate of our condemned impressions,
though none of us, despite, can work for her the lever.
The thermostats are set at nothing on the staircase.
The lever takes a beating, as does this apartment,
the landings our aggression, with each step’s impressions.
Jennifer Reeser
86
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The Ballerina Wants A Silver Crown
You dance, and you dance every day, and on Sundays,
You rest,
Resenting the break, self-berating—a petal
Well-pressed.
Your costumes are beaded and borrowed, the tips
Of each toe
Are wrapped with white tape, and the rips
Of your leotards show
Through your bows and your stretches, the flat line and bow
Of each rib.
The crème des corps see you worn, desperate, ugly
And glib.
And if you attain the main scepter, complaints
Must not come
Overmuch, nor the diet-drink colas you stir in
With rum.
Else this miniscule wallpaper vintage, this pipeCleaner barre
May go—to your shame—enchâssé,
Before nest doll and czar.
Executive Identity
Dine with scarcity, standing up, in quick time.
Dress impeccably: navy, grey, or—best—black.
Lead the cabinet figures, ease transitions
So society sees one body only.
Try, then terminate those who break our brittle.
Play for strength, not for profit and not true love.
Plan communities, run them, coolly well-kept.
Stock the fishery, farmyard, dojo, high school;
No erecting oases near a railroad.
Issue edicts with terseness, laws with short names.
Speak for those that blink at you: silent, blanched, drenched.
Donate synagogues, temples, mosques, cathedrals;
Dragon dancers on platforms, jade pagodas,
Little Italy, brownstone, upscale condos.
Limit laundromat chat inside the system.
Prop and patronize art. Fund French and Russian.
Hold performances to two shows per night.
Send onstage red roses. Throw mints. Don’t cry.
Wave, when laid out in state, a great good-bye.
Jennifer Reeser
87
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Mambo Madam
Madam laugh, take twine and rope.
She melt black wax and make me dance,
Make a voodoo doll of me,
It mope—
Half white, half black,
Zig-zag to crack—
No pants, no smile.
She take those needles, hang
That doll of me with bile,
Say, Bang, girl, bang,
Girl, this ain’t France,
but New Orleans,
And you no Langston Hughes.
You lookin’ whiter by a tad.
Them needles got you pin-upped.
You confused.
Don’t know if they good, or bad.
You work for me,
You work it out.
I know some things.
I know the things
You don’t know nothin’ ‘bout.
She say the men down Bourbon Street
Would set her ears to burn,
Even in the daytime, call
Mulatto ma’am! Earn while you learn!
Come in, come—you too pretty, y’all.
Madam, she so early hurt,
She don’t get over it.
She take my tears and spit.
She mix them with her vengeance herbs,
And graveyard dirt.
She say some Jack, he made her do
Some jive with seven veils.
She clip my hair,
Pull out my nails.
Oh, Madam stick that pin.
She make me spin.
She draw my blood,
She swipe my sweat.
She scrape my skin.
‘Cause Madam don’t forget.
Jennifer Reeser
88
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A Beginning
It all began with parking. There wasn’t enough
to suit enrollment, so the stragglers had to park
about a thousand feet away and cross a field
to get to school, a sort of landscaped pasture where
the real estate developers had planted trees
beside the new-built high school, each surrounded by
a ring of gravel. There we found her simple nest,
a slight depression, nothing more, with four small eggs
like speckled stones you had to strain your eyes to see.
Our daily trudging back and forth had worn a path
beside the place (although the grass was still intact)
and soon the talk began, before the busy rush
between long classes, of the crazy mother bird
that laid her eggs right there in front of everyone,
beneath a sapling with a little spray of leaves,
and spread her wings and shouted at us when we passed.
Or she would leave the eggs in camouflage and run
before us in staccato, luring us away.
We saw the migrant workers spraying down the rocks
with a long nozzle, careful not to break the eggs.
We heard the dark communications of the mate,
comedic in their pointlessness, but touching, too,
a shadowy protector always somewhere near.
And we thought we learned to recognize the warning song
with its fearful resolution, and the call for all-clear.
I never saw the famous broken wing display,
but it would have been unnecessary anyway.
No one ever said ‘killdeer,’ as far as I know.
We didn’t care to get specific. We were just
quietly rooting for life―for what if a stray cat
should come along, or what if there was one among us
angry or mean enough, or just plain dumb enough,
to put the matter to an end and walk away?
No one would ever know. We went to school together,
but mostly we arrived alone and left alone.
All eight wings would have fit beneath a single foot.
But like most fears, it never happened. Twenty-four
to twenty-eight days, as it turns out, came and went
while they were lying helpless there. Then one day, late,
I saw a single chick beside the other eggs,
a ball of tender soot as neat and camouflaged
and silent as the eggs themselves, and the next day
the other three were visible, already up
and running, getting on with life. But now they’d moved
to the next parcel with its taller, wilder grass.
Jim Burrows
89
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Children
The girls watch him
Run around him
See his hair move
(Wispy on the top like a cloud)
He is smiling at them
Picking them up, making faces
He is falling asleep while they yell
Climb over him
They witness time
Unaccompanied or directed
Unaware of gravity
Or its incongruity
They cannot help skipping
Laughing, forgetting
Inadvertently inventing space
Dimensions and worlds
The little girl screams for help
Happily secured
In the branches of a small tree
A kingdom in the sky
She forgets
Looks around accusingly
And then yells again
To no one in particular
She becomes distracted
New buds touch her cheek
Retreating into full leaves
And a caterpillar without wings
Her age
Entirely
Defying
Gravity
Morgan Bazilian
90
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Pandaemonium
the capital city of Hell
Outside you see a million pleasant suns
while we know only strobe-lights made from gunfire.
Dwelling here means that you died for your not-knowing—
that shadows packed your bags and urged you ‘go!’—
unless you were found with stars within your hearts,
born while snowflakes were falling on doorways and rooftops.
Greetings from a shady realm where there are no rooftops,
where contrails vivisect our blackened suns,
where bitter gifts enrage the shaken heart,
where God is nothing more than random gunfire.
Outside where Yeats is laid to rest you go,
and then are left inside, left in your not-knowing.
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Not-knowing,
in your dreams, in your barber-shops, on rooftops.
What do you think of my little town, Sligo?
Passe partout, the master key, unlock the suns.
What must be said in languages of gunfire
can only be discerned by a broken heart.
A crown of villanelles soon cuts to the heart
of sporadic, episodic ignorance, not-knowing.
The broken door, the shattered helmet. Gunfire
now heard all over town across the rooftops,
on shady streets. Your wife and kids, two sons,
your shapely thousand poems—all are ego.
I am the infant born of your milk and your heroin vertigo;
I died in vain just underneath your heart,
like the moon, dead dumpling in a cosmic broth of suns,
an Oracle’s abortion mired in its own not-knowing.
Outside the Musee de Aeronautique, the rooftops
erupt, the successors of Abel are twisting with gunfire.
Dumb with worship as the Muse moves through the gunfire,
sitting shiva with six million syllables, I go
in search of rhyme across the golden rooftops.
Twin walls, twin hemispheres in harmony, my heart
the recreation of the Immortals, I dance not-knowing
in the half-light. I live to claim the fury of your suns.
Doppelganger gunfire, bleeding heart—
now go, not-knowing, to Pandaemonium.
Across the ancient rooftops, Muslim sons.
Steven Shields
91
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The Ancient Irish Princes
The ancient Irish princes wear their hair
in two long pigtails, tipped with golden baubles.
They muscle golden armbands, golden chokers,
and on their thumbs and fingers, rings of gold.
They drape themselves in cloaks of saffron yellow
and crimson wool, embroidered by their mothers,
fastened with exquisite silver brooches.
The ancient Irish princes wash their hands
in rosewater. They curl their mustache-ends,
and trim their spears with light blue heron feathers.
The ancient Irish princes can’t remember
what’s coming. They are marching home from war
victorious, barelegged, with no armor,
following in the footsteps of their fathers.
The ancient Irish princes wash their hair
in slaves. They drape themselves in centuries,
embroidered with exquisite herds of cattle.
They curl their fields of wool, and trim their spears
with golden muscle. Everything they know
is fastened with elaborate crimson rivers.
The ancient Irish princes tell the time
by looking at their fathers. They remember
when stars were boars. They drape themselves in bogwood,
and wash their hands in golden crucifixion.
The herds of princes wear their wounded hair
in two long slaves, embroidered by their mothers,
following in the centuries of spears
and silver. They are muscling the rose,
unraveling their hands. They can’t remember
the river. They are light blue heron feathers.
Rose Kelleher
Notes from Warrior Girl
Ate owls for breakfast. Raked my hair with forks.
Scooped ghost peppers from the jar by fistfuls.
Broke the ivory door and rescued the Queen.
Together we stomped poems into the muck.
Anger gave us lightning for feet and hands.
Marly Youmans
92
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Z
for Louis Zukosky
This is another short poem
and I hope it won’t embarrass you—
it’s my mode, my surplus of labor,
my way of polishing a kernel
to get at the stars and the far side
of the Gowanus Canal. Our fathers
are in it too and always have the last
word, except in this case—the ending
coming from the beginning of a section
of A, a section beautiful on the lips
of every man and woman in Brooklyn,
dreaming under a row of oak trees:
Paris
Paris
The Breakfast before Leaving
I stir the cornflakes and the coffee
with the same spoon—am I actually
leaving this house, never to return?
In minutes I will be out in the world,
armadilloed with memory and the hope
that the future will treat me fairly.
I lift the bowl to my lips, suck up
the last drop of milk and the last stubborn
cornflake—and say hello to my ghost
standing at the bottom of the stairs, younger
than I am, but not by much. He says he’ll
take care of things here, make sure
the new owners comport themselves well,
better than I ever did—I watch him climb
the dusty steps, not halting to say bon voyage.
Tim Suermondt
93
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Inlet
And all the grass laid down
as if beneath some body breathing,
bedding in the hiphold of the mounds;
the land slips its sediments, teasing
into the brack as if one night it will drown
willingly in the salt and the swim—as the sounds
of God’s unwording yaw through the throat of a gull.
Peleg Held
For Rest
I knew those drops of rain, and they knew me
the slinky violent falling
coming, leaving
leaves
came
the leaves
flimsy
wristed
leaves
open
palmed
playing
catch
the path
through the forest slipping
in
slipping
on
my feet slipped deep to hold
and stay
to rest
staying
for rest
forever
or for the eve
for a moment I hear the leaves teaching
but there arose a disparate wind that wound then rose round about
deep to the vert hold
wounded the leaves
wended a way
touching the open the open slipping away
fallen
now into this
sleeping
new to me
Seree Cohen Zohar
94
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Contributor Biographies and Previous Publications
Derek Adams lived in Essex for 28 years; he has recently moved to Stansfield, Suffolk.
When not writing poetry he is a professional photographer. He has been widely
published in the UK & abroad, with poems in Ambit, Magma, Rialto, Smiths Knoll and
many others. He was BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year 2006. He has published three
collections: unconcerned but not indifferent - the life of Man Ray (2006), Everyday Objects,
Chance Remarks (2005) and Postcards to Olympus (2004).
Mark Allinson lives in Australia.
‘Elemental’ is from his collection, Tarn (New Formalist Press, 2009). It was notably the
first poem in the first issue of Shit Creek Review.
C. B. Anderson has, in the past ten years, had hundreds of his poems appear in scores
of print and electronic journals from several continents, including: Trinacria, Umbrella,
Pennine Platform, The Flea, The Chimaera, Soundzine, and Blue Unicorn. A full-length
collection/selection of his poems, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder, was published in
2013 by White Violet Press.
Norman Ball is a poet, playwright, essayist and musician residing in Virginia. A
featured poet on Prairie Home Companion, his poems and essays have appeared in Light
Quarterly, The Raintown Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Epicenter, Oxford Magazine,
The Cumberland Poetry Review, 14 by 14, Rattle, Liberty, The Hypertexts, Main Street Rag,
The New Renaissance, The Scotsman, The London Times among dozens of others. His essay
collections, How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? (2010) and The Frantic Force
(2011), both widely available on the web, are published by Del Sol Press and
Petroglyph Books, respectively. His recent play SIDES: A Civil War Musical (Inspired
by The Red Badge of Courage) is currently being produced for TV by Last Tango
Productions, LLC.
Morgan Bazilian has recently had stories published in: Eclectica, Shadowbox, Glasschord,
Embodied Effigies, and South Loop Review. His poetry has also appeared in: Exercise
Bowler, Pacific Poetry, and Innisfree.
Peter Bloxsom lives in Australia. He has been a freelance writer of articles, poems and
books, as well as a technical writer, editor, publishing manager, IT consultant and
website developer. In recent years he has been active in literary webzine publishing,
working with the late Paul Stevens on The Shit Creek Review, The Chimaera, and The Flea,
and also editing the sonnet zine 14 by 14. He is currently pursuing various freelance
writing projects, including a screenplay.
Seth Braver is proud to share his birthday with Samuel Beckett and HCE from
Finnegans Wake. He has published poems here and there (recently in Angle, Snakeskin,
The Rotary Dial, and Elohi Gadugi), as well as a book on the early history of nonEuclidean geometry. He lives in Olympia, Washington with his wife and two basset
hounds.
Michael R. Burch’s poems, essays, articles and letters have appeared more than 1,700
times in publications around the globe, including TIME, USA Today, Writer’s Digest,
and hundreds of literary journals. His poetry has been translated into Czech, Farsi,
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Gjuha Shqipe, Italian, Macedonian, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese. He also edits
www.thehypertexts.com.
Jim Burrows’ work has appeared in Measure, 32 Poems, The Raintown Review, and other
journals.
Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review,
Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, New Walk, Orbis, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry
Review, Stinging Fly, Tar River Poetry, Threepenny Review, Times Literary Supplement, and
Warwick Review, among others and several anthologies. Her poem, ‘More’, was helidropped in multiples over London as part of the 2012 London Olympics’ Poetry
Parnassus.
‘Film Noir’ was previously published in Italian Americana.
Peter Coghill is a physicist who lives in Sydney. He has published poetry in a wide
variety of online and print magazines and has published one book, Rockclimber's Hands
(Picaro, 2010).
‘Someone Else in Hyde Park’ was first published in The Flea, and is from the collection,
Rockclimber’s Hands.
Cally Conan-Davies studied literature and psychology in Melbourne, Australia. She
taught and practiced bibliotherapy before moving to the United States in 2012. Her
poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Poetry, The New Criterion, The Hudson
Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Raintown Review, Quadrant, The Sewanee
Review and The Southwest Review, among others. She has been nominated for The
Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net. She lives in both Colorado and Oregon with her
husband, David Mason, the current Poet Laureate of Colorado.
Maryann Corbett is the author of Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012) and Credo
for the Checkout Line in Winter (Able Muse, 2013). Her poems, essays, and translations
have appeared widely in print and online and in a number of anthologies and have
won the Lyric Memorial Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Recent
work appears in 32 Poems, PN Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), and
Light, and is forthcoming in Barrow Street and Southwest Review. Maryann lives in Saint
Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.
Kathleen Earsman is a babysitting grandmother and wildlife carer who lives up a
biggish hill in subtropical Australia. She’s also a cyberpoet who is almost permanently
fixated to her rotating chair. There, bedazzled by her merciless computer screen, she
practices a kind of modern remote viewing. She hopes you enjoy her verses.
Stephen Edgar has published nine books of poetry, the most recent being Eldershaw
(Black Pepper, 2013). In 2012 The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems was published in the
US by Baskerville Publishers. A new collection, Exhibits of the Sun, is forthcoming from
Black Pepper. His website can be found at http://stephenedgar.com.au. He lives in
Sydney.
Richard Epstein had a contributor’s note in Angle Issue 1. Not much has changed.
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Annie Fisher is a storyteller based in Somerset. She enjoys writing light and ‘lightly
serious’ verse and has had poems published in a number of on-line and print
magazines including Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, Ink Sweat and Tears, South and Other
Poetry.
Alan Gould lives in Canberra and is the author of twenty three books: collections of
poetry, essays, and eight novels. His The Past Completes Me - Selected Poems 1973-2003
won the Grace Leven Award in 2006, and his seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was
shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Award For Fiction in 2010. His most recent titles
are a novel, The Seaglass Spiral (2012), Joinery And Scrollwork - A Writer's Workbench
(2013) and a collection of poems, Tight Dress, Loose Behaviour, (2013).
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net
nominee. She has authored eight chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection
of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press. She is a
recent winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript Before
I Go to Sleep and according to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis
Stevenson. Personal website: www.clgrellaspoetry.com.
Peleg Held was a former member of Voices in the Wilderness as well as several other
failed campaigns for basic human decency. He is a carpenter in Portland, Maine where
he lives with his partner and children (primate and other).
Jeff Holt’s poetry has appeared in the following print anthologies: Able Muse
Anthology, ed. Alexander Pepple, (Able Muse Press, 2010); A Mind Apart: Melancholy,
Madness and Addiction, ed. Mark Bauer, (Oxford UP, 2008); and Sonnets: 150 Sonnets, ed.
William Baer, (Evansville UP, 2005). He has also had poetry published in numerous
online anthologies and journals such as www.thehypertexts.com and 14by14.com, as well
as in numerous print journals, including Raintown Review, Measure and The Formalist.
Charles Hughes is a tutor at St. Leonard’s House in Chicago and a retired lawyer. His
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in America, Angle, the Anglican Theological
Review, the Comstock Review, First Things, the Innisfree Poetry Journal, the Iron Horse
Literary Review, Measure, the Sewanee Theological Review, Verse Wisconsin, and other
publications. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife.
Lesley Ingram was born in Yorkshire, and rediscovered her love of writing poetry
when she abandoned her career in IT to move to France to teach EFL and run a gite.
She now splits her time between France and England. She has recently completed a
Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire where she will begin a
PHD in Autumn 2013. She has been anthologised/published in various places
including Blithe Spirit, ink sweat & tears, Mslexia, Dead Ink, iota, Under the Radar, and The
Flea, and her first collection will be published by Cinnamon Press in 2015. She won the
2013 Ludlow Fringe Poetry competition.
Charlotte Innes has published two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, Reading
Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009) and Licking the Serpent (2011). Her poems have also
appeared in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006 (Houghton Mifflin); and in various
journals, including The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Pinch, Think Journal, The
Raintown Review, and Spillway. She has work forthcoming in Rattle, and Free Inquiry.
She has also written about books and the arts for many publications, including the Los
Angeles Times and The Nation.
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Jan Iwaszkiewicz is a prize-winning Australian poet from the Hunter Valley in New
South Wales who is lightly published. He majored in procrastination.
Terry Jones’ debut short collection, Furious Resistance, was published by Poetry
Salzburg in 2011. That same year he was the winner of the Bridport Prize. His work has
also appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, The New Statesman, Agenda, Ambit,
The London Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Magma, Iota, The North, New Welsh Review
and others. Personal website: TerryJonespoetry.weebly.com.
Siham Karami lives in Florida where she co-owns a technology recycling company.
Her poems have been or will be published in Raintown Review, Amsterdam Arts
Quarterly, Mezzo Cammin, Tilt-a-Whirl, String Poet, Shot Glass Journal, Innisfree Journal,
The Lavender Review, 14 by14, The Road Not Taken, Snakeskin, New Verse News, and Sisters
Magazine, among other venues. Her work will also appear in an upcoming anthology,
Irresistable Sonnets.
Rose Kelleher is the author of two books of poetry, Native Species (self-published, 2013)
and Bundle o' Tinder (Waywiser, 2008). Her poems and essays have been published
here and there, most recently in Italian Americana, Lavender Review, The Raintown
Review, and Measure.
‘The Ancient Irish Princes’ was previously published in Able Muse.
Karen Kelsay, native of Orange County, is the editor of Kelsay Books. Some of her
poems have been published in Mezzo Cammin, The Nervous Breakdown, The Raintown
Review, The Lyric, Lucid Rhythms, and Trinacria. Her recent full length book, Amytis
Leaves Her Garden, is available at Amazon.
David Landrum’s poetry has appeared widely in journals in the US, UK, Australia,
and Europe, most recently in The String Poet, Raintown Review, Shot Glass, Kin. He is
Editor of the online poetry journal, Lucid Rhythms, www.lucidrhythms.com.
W. F. Lantry received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice and PhD in Creative
Writing from University of Houston. His poetry collections are The Structure of Desire
(Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, a chapbook, The
Language of Birds (Finishing Line 2011), and a forthcoming collection The Book of Maps.
Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank
Patricia Goedicke Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize
(Israel), and the 2012 Potomac Review Prize. His work has appeared widely in
publications such as Atlanta Review, Descant, Gulf Coast and Aesthetica. He currently
works in Washington, DC, and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW. More at:
http://wflantry.com.
Lance Levens’ short stories, poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal,
Chimaera, Raintown Review, and other literary journals. Jubilate, a chapbook, (Pudding
House Press) was published in 2007. He has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
His novel, A Kaddish for Inhuman Steadman, is on sale as an e-book at Amazon and his
latest novel, Tietam Cane, will appear in the spring of 2013 with FireshipPress.
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin, descended from the Scottish poet John MacLaurin (1734–
1796), was born in Glasgow in 1962. He studied Classics at Oxford, left without a
degree, and spent two years busking in the streets of Europe. He met a Danish writer,
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Ann Bilde, in Italy in 1986 and went to live in Denmark, where he teaches English and
Latin. His work has been published in 14 by 14, The Barefoot Muse, Candelabrum, The
Chimaera, Concise Delights, The Flea, Lucid Rhythms, The Shit Creek Review and Snakeskin.
His collection of 36 sonnets, I Sing the Sonnet (2011), is online at Snakeskin. In June his
128-poem/song cycle, From Moonrise till Dawn, was published as an e-book by
NordOsten Books. He blogs at http://gists.wordpress.com. His experiences as an expat.
poet are described in The Chimaera.
Julie MacLean is originally from Bristol, UK, but now lives on the Surf Coast,
Australia. She was shortlisted in 2012 for The Crashaw Prize, (Salt, UK). Her debut
collection of poetry, When I saw Jimi, was published in June 2013 by Indigo Dreams
Publishing, UK. Poetry and short fiction features in UK, US and Australian journals
including The Best Australian Poetry (UQP). She blogs at juliemacleanwriter.com.
Martin Malone was born in 1963 in West Hartlepool, and now lives in Warwickshire.
A winner of the 2011 Straid Poetry Award and the 2012 Mirehouse Prize , his first full
collection, The Waiting Hillside, is published by Templar Poetry. Currently studying for
a Ph.D in poetry at Sheffield University, he edits The Interpreter's House poetry journal.
Holly Martins’ first collection of verse, Man in the Long Grass, was published by Iron
Press in 2000. A Poetry Review prize-winning poem was featured on the London
Underground. He is the author of two radio plays which have been broadcast on RTE
and BBC Radio 4.
David Mason has written and edited many books, including Ludlow (Red Hen Press,
2010) and The Scarlet Libretto (Red Hen Press, 2012). He lives in Colorado and Oregon
with his wife, Cally Conan-Davies. And a jolly good thing it is.
Chris McCully was born in Bradford (Yorkshire) in 1958. He published his first poem
(in The Scarborough Mercury, a free newspaper) in 1975. In 1982 he completed a BA at
the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and finished his doctorate at the University of
Manchester in 1988. He worked in full-time academic life (University of Manchester)
from 1985-2003. Since 2003 he has held a variety of part-time academic positions,
combining these with an increasingly busy life as a writer, and recently completed
work as the Managing Director of the Graduate School of Humanities, University of
Groningen (The Netherlands). In autumn 2013 he moves with his wife and two
Labradors to Essex. He has authored, co-authored or edited over twenty books
including six collections of verse for Carcanet Press. Selected Poems appeared from
Carcanet in 2011. Further details on www.chrismccully.co.uk
Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father
built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared
or are forthcoming in various print and online publications, including Able Muse, 14
Magazine, Per Contra, The Flea, Measure, and The Evansville Review. His poem, Fieldstone,
was selected as the winner of the 2012 Frost Farm Prize.
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George
Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the
last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger
Enough, and Line Drives. His chapbook, Three Visitors, has recently been published by
Negative Capability Press. Artifacts and Relics, another chapbook, is forthcoming from
Folded Word and his novel, Knight Prisoner, has been published by Vagabondage
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Press. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan
Juster.
Peter Moltoni currently resides with Lesley, his wife of 47 years, on a semi-rural
property in Gidgegannup, Western Australia where they enjoy a nodding acquaintance
with nomad roos amid a forest of eucalypts. Peter has accumulated over 60 poetry
awards and recognitions at various levels in national poetry competitions. His work
has appeared in Galloping On, The Finishing Post, Free XpresSion, Metverse Muse, Inside
Out, Taking Turns—Sonnets from Eratosphere, the ezines Worm, Ozpoet’s Treasury, 14 by
14, Shot Glass Journal and various other competition-associated publications. His
translation of Heinrich Heine's Der Wind zieht seine Hosen an for Eratosphere's 2012
Translation Bake-off was the runaway first place selection in both the popular and
Distinguished Guest votes. A selection of his poems, Views From My Window, was
published by Access Press in 2000.
‘On Visiting Lasseter’s Cave’ first appeared in The Worm.
Tim Murphy’s latest books, Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder and Hunter’s Log were
published in 2011 by the Fort Mandan Foundation’s Dakota Institute Press
(www.fortmandan.com/news).
Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor. In addition to his previous appearances in
Angle, he has published poems in Antiphon, Lighten Up Online, Literary Review, New
Verse News, Per Contra, and other print and online journals.
Uche Ogbuji, http://uche.ogbuji.net/, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived, among
other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer
engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his collection of poetry, Ndewo, Colorado is
forthcoming in 2014 from Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared widely, most recently
in IthacaLit, String Poet, Featherlit, Outside In Journal, Don't Just Sit There, Qarrtsiluni, and
Leveler. He is editor at Kin Poetry Journal, http://wearekin.org, and The Nervous
Breakdown, http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com, founder and curator at the
@ColoradoPoetry Twitter project.
Mario A. Pita has published poems in The Lyric, Lucid Rhythms, and Lighten Up Online,
and has self-published a collection of poems, Lyrical Emissary, as well as translations of
some of the works of his mother, Juana Rosa Pita, including, recently, Manuscript in
Dreams / a Study of Chopin. He studied art at Florida International University and
marries photography and poetry in his blog, http://snapshotcouplets.wordpress.com/.
Henry Quince has a big, anachronistic moustache and a restless nature. His poems
have popped up now and then in assorted venues. He maintains an address in
Australia, but a business interest often takes him to Himalayan regions.
Basil Ransome-Davies is primarily a prose writer but a regular light-verse
prizewinner in UK weekly and monthly literary competitions (New Statesman,
Spectator, Literary Review, Oldie). Other awards for verse: Lancaster Litfest 1993,
Bridport Prize 1996, Literary Review Annual Grand Poetry Prize (as Iain Colley) 2002,
2010.
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Jennifer Reeser is the author of An Alabaster Flask (winner of the Word Press First Book
Prize, 2003), Winterproof (Word Press, 2005), and Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other
Poems (Saint James Infirmary Books, 2012). She has contributed poems, essays and
translations of French and Russian literature to magazines and journals including
Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Formalist, Light Quarterly, First Things and The National
Review. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Longman’s An
Introduction to Poetry (edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia), and has received the
New England Prize, the Lyric Memorial Prize, numerous nominations for the Pushcart
and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as awards from the World Order of Narrative
and Formalist Poets. She is former assistant editor of Iambs & Trochees, serves as a
poetry consultant on faculty at the West Chester Poetry Conference, and lives amid the
bayous of southern Louisiana with her husband and children.
Peter Richards has been published, almost exclusively on line and it doesn’t get much
less exclusive than that. There is a tendency to avoid ‘the right places’ although it may
be sour grapes or just something that looks like sour grapes or simple confusion with
regard to the directional causality behind this avoidance. He snuck into New Formalist
and Snakeskin anyway, and The Shit Creek Review will take some beating both in name
and nature.
Julie-ann Rowell’s pamphlet collection, Convergence, won a PBS Award in 2003. Her
first full collection, Letters North, was nominated for the Michael Murphy Memorial
Award for best first collection in Britain and Ireland, 2011. She teaches poetry in Bristol
and serves on the ExCite committee for the advancement of poetry in Devon. She won
first prize in the Frogmore Poetry Competition and was a runner-up in the Bridport
Prize, 2005. She has been published in many magazines and journals including Agenda,
The Reader, The Welsh Review, The Stand, The Moth and The SHOp.
Ed Shacklee is a public defender who represents young people in the District of
Columbia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 14 by 14, Able Muse, Light
Quarterly and The Raintown Review, among other places.
Steven Shields is the author of Valentines for Many People (2012) and Daimonion Sonata
(Birch Brook, 2005). His work has appeared in Measure, Umbrella, Deronda Review, Main
Street Rag, Raintown Review, and Sleet. He lives near Atlanta, Georgia.
Rowena Silver, a native of Winnipeg, Canada, now living in Riverside, California, is
an editor of Epicenter Magazine. Her work has been widely published in such journals
as: Ariga, Bridges: A Feminist Journal, European Judaism, Writer's Digest, Standards:
University of Colorado, Pudding House Publications, Guardian Unlimited, Heyday Books, The
San Fernando Journal, and Dissident Editions. Rowena has also written several plays
which have been performed in Los Angeles and San Francisco, including ‘The
Disputation,’ a sonnet series, with Mark Steven Scheffer and ‘The King of Montpelier,’
an operetta.
Ron Singer’s poems (www.ronsinger.net) have appeared in numerous magazines, ezines, and newspapers. Some of these poems have been anthologized and/or set to
music. His four published books are A Voice for My Grandmother, The Second Kingdom,
The Rented Pet and Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (a collection of Singer’s Maine poems
since 1969, publishedAug. 1st, 2013, by River Otter Press). He recently completed three
trips to Africa for Uhuru Revisited, a collection of interviews with pro-democracy
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activists (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press, Nov, 2013). Finally, his serial thriller,
Geistmann, is currently running at jukepopserials.com.
J. D. Smith’s third collection of poetry was published in 2012, and in 2007 he was
awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the
Arts. His individual poems have appeared in publications including The Able Muse, The
Dark Horse, The Formalist, Light Quarterly and Measure.
A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999. She has
published three collections: Archaic Smile (Univ. of Evansville Press, Nov 1999), Hapax
(Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2006), and Olives
(Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2012), and a verse
translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics, 2007).
‘Elegy’ was previously published in 32 Poems.
Joseph Stern has been published or had work accepted in Literary Juice, Poetry Pacific,
Sanskrit and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
stet
Paul Christian Stevens teaches, writes, edits, travels, loves, dodges bullets, &c. Just
recently he seems to have sailed into the mystic. His physical manifestation resides in
Australia. [Biography as originally submitted.]
Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: Trying to Help the Elephant
Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly
Books, 2010). He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able
Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine (U.K.) and
has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket and Zymbol, among others. He lives in
Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
John Whitworth is an English poet who has had ten books published, all out of print,
though he has some for sale. Buy now! But despair not. There is a new book, Girlie
Gangs (Enitharmon, 2012). His poems are published in the UK, in the USA and in
Australia. Les Murray is a fan. Good on him!
Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of
poetry, Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks:
Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press,
2008) and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boiler Journal, Crannog
(Ireland), Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, The New Poet, The Southampton Review, Ucity Review,
and Valparaiso Poetry Review among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the
poet Tim Suermondt.
Peter Wyton is just more than a little chuffed to learn that Jon Stallworthy, editor of
OUP's anthology The Oxford Book of War Poetry, has included his poem ‘Unmentioned
in Dispatches’ in the revised edition which is scheduled for publication in June, 2014 in
hardback and e-book formats, with the paperback to follow in September 2014.
Marly Youmans is the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction. Her recent work
includes: a dramatic story of survival in blank verse, Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenical
Publishing, 2012); two collections of mostly formal poems, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza
Press, 2012) and The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011); and a novel, A
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Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer / The Ferrol Sams Award / Foreword
finalist, 2012.) In 2012, she served as a National Book Award judge.
Seree Cohen Zohar’s art and writing are influenced by Australia’s landscapes, and by
two decades of farming in Israel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in local and
international venues. Recently she collaborated with Alan Sullivan on a new versified
translation of the Psalms of King David, Link. A favourite hobby is foisting flashrecipes on her unsuspecting family.
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