Archive for: Review

Bryan R. Monte
AQ30 Spring 2021 Book Reviews

Kim Addonizio. Now We’re Getting Somewhere, W. W. Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-54089-5, 96 pages.
Colin Bancroft. Impermanence, Maytree Press, 978-1-913508-09-8, 29 pages.

As editor of Amsterdam Quarterly I have the privilege of reviewing poets’ books whether they are just starting out, in mid-career, or have had decades of acclaim. Two poets, one each in the first and last categories are Colin Bancroft and Kim Addonizio respectively. Addonizio’s new book Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is scheduled to be released in March 2021 by W. W. Norton, a well-known, independent, American publisher, whilst Colin Bancroft’s pamphlet (Amer. English: chapbook), Impermanence, was released in October 2020 by Maytree Press, a small British publisher. Both, in my opinion, are well worth AQ’s readers’ attention.
      Now We’re Getting Somewhere is Addonizio’s fourth poetry book from W. W. Norton and her eighth poetry book in total. It is divided into four sections: ‘Night in the Castle’, ‘Songs for Sad Girls’, ‘Confessional Poetry’, and ‘Archive for Recent Uncomfortable Emotions’, the third section being the most minimal, experimental, and incongruous, which immediately drew my interest due to my graduate school immersion in post-Modernism criticism which places the most emphasis on focussing on erasures, gaps, holes, or inconsistencies in the narrative style to identify the most significant parts.
      Now We’re Getting Somewhere is dedicated ‘To the Makers’ who Addonizio informed me in her interview in this issue, are the poets (from the Greek word poësis) or ‘those who make rather than break things’. It has two epigraphs—the first from Leonard Cohen song referencing a leader’s untrustworthiness and the second by Elizabeth Taylor referring to alcohol, beauty, and sex.
      The first section starts with a bang with the section’s title poem, ‘Night in the Castle’. Danger is present from the very first line with a ‘scorpion twitching on the wall’. The speaker, who is ‘on an artist’s grant’ to write in a medieval, Umbrian castle, wonders if she ‘should slam it with this book of terrible poetry’ (the one she’s writing or reading?) or ‘murder it with my sandal’ since ‘I gave up on mercy a while ago’.
      However, in the sixth through eighth stanzas, the focus changes to the poet’s fantasy of what would do if she had the power. She imagines herself as ‘an underage duchess whose husband has finally died / of gout’ … or maybe ‘She might even have poisoned the duke’ to have ‘more secret liaisons with the court musician’. Then she fantasizes about what she would do as ‘a feared & beloved queen ordering up fresh linens & / beheadings’. Her fantasy is re-enforced by further punitive desires of ‘locking up bad poets in their artisanal hair shirts’ and ‘torturing academics with pornographic marionette performances’.
      The poem ends with an imaginative leap in its penultimate and final verses. ‘(T)he scorpion is still there twitching blackly / reciting something about violence and the prison of the ego’ and the speaker imagines ‘the clashing armies on the wide lawn outside / sinking down into history & then standing up again’ as does the castle to this day.
      It’s a good summary of Addonizio’s past themes and concerns, external and internal; her wider awareness of artistic, geo-political, and historical power which is reinforced in other poems in this section. These include the themes of the global travails of people of colour in ‘Black Hour Blues’, ecological, planetary degradation in ‘Fixed and In Flux’ and ‘The Earth Is About Used Up’, migrants working in dangerous conditions in ‘Comfort of the Resurrection’, and gun-toting, religious racists in ‘Grace’. In ‘Animals’, Addonizio explores and destroys Whitman’s naïve trope of the natural world’s beauty and deceptive harmony. However, three poems later she remarks on its surprising comforting in ‘High Desert, New Mexico’ where horses ‘stand outside and wait for you to come / with a single apple’. Moreover, ‘In Bed’ the poet realizes that sex and love aren’t worth as much as lying in a Proustian bed ‘between cork-lined walls / writing very long sentences in French’.
      The second section, ‘Songs for Sad Girls’, contains a series of poems about women’s search for sex and lasting companionship—from the gothic and exotic narratives in ‘Wolf Song’, ‘Ghosted’, ‘All Hallows’, and ‘AlienMatch.Com’ and highly imagistic on-liners in ‘Ways of Being Lonely’, (which I consider one of this book’s best poems), to the more realistic ‘August’, ‘Winter Solstice’ and ‘Small Talk’, the terminal line from which gives this book its title. ‘Songs for Sad Girls’ also contains one of Addonizio’s most well-known poems, the sonnet ‘To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall’, which is one of Addonizio’s most quoted poems on social media. ‘Résumé, is a tribute to Dorothy Parker’s poem of the same title about suicide. However, instead of listing the disadvantages of using razors, rivers, guns, etc., to kill oneself, this poem discusses the failings of rehab, lovers, and friends to help one stay sober, the poem ending with the couplet:

                  You’ll soon be subtracted;
                  You might as well drink.

      As mentioned previously, the third section’s, ‘Confessional Poetry’ is the most minimalistic and experimental. This poem, with a few lines spread over 13 pages, is a meditation on various subjects such as the real power of writing, the importance the poem’s space to the poet, self-pity, dealing with traumas, public bathroom sex at a conference on pornography, censorship and men’s criticisms, rape, pollution, drinking, and inspiration. Some of my favourite lines in this section are: ‘Writing is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror’,… /‘or beating a piñata selfie… so you can pet the demons that fall out’, and five pages later… ‘Not wearing waterproof mascara while you’re being tasered’, as well as two lines, three pages later I quote in their entirety because of their resonance with most poets:

                  I really like feeling something when I stagger into a poem
                  & having a place to lie down & cry.

      Some lines in this section are more compelling than others, but that’s what one would expect in this rather experimental section. These poems are perhaps not as taut and strong as the surrealist, one-liners in ‘Ways of Being Lonely’ in the second section, but they are more urgent, naked, raw, and personal.
      The general themes of desire, decay, disease and death are interwoven in several poems in the fourth section. More specifically, this section addresses the themes of ageing, alcoholism, the impermanence of love, and the poet’s musings and concerns about her legacy. The poet repeats thrice in ‘People You Don’t Know’ the phrase ‘the early delusional phase of love,’ yet that does not keep the speaker from entertaining the thought of going with a ‘stranger’ at the bar to a room ‘with a creeping mold … with a parking lot view.’ In ‘Ex’ the poet says when she was younger she thought:

                  …nothing could ruin our love which is what everyone /
                        thinks at first
                  but it turns out everyone is wrong

In this section’s title poem, ‘Archive of Uncomfortable Emotions’, the poet adds:

                  The I’m sorry I gave you those blow jobs and did you not understand the
                        meaning of “reciprocal” feeling

Here the poet imaginatively catalogues other feelings of loss:

                  The trees are no longer my friends feeling

                  The my friends are no longer my friends feeling

                  The once I was a nineteenth-century Russian novel but now I’m a frozen
                        chicken entrée feeling

      Her poem ‘Still Time’ mentions Keats’ last days, and after his death how ‘they take his body out and burn the wallpaper.’, her own loss as a child of a plush lion, her parents, as an adult, and how she ‘finally stopping sobbing in the bathroom at weddings’ and then circles back to Keats’ again, and rues she ‘can’t go back to 1821 and invent streptomycin / or stop the poet’s kindly doctor from bleeding his patient’. She does however, ‘see the flowers on the ceiling, the same ones Keats held / for weeks in his fevered gaze.’, and realizes ‘That’s as close as you can get’.
      Mortality comes up again in ‘Happiness Report’ where the poet writes: ‘I hate the term bucket list’. She also regrets that ‘it’s too late to drink myself to death at a young age’.
      In ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats’, the legacy theme is especially strong. Here the poet, fantasies she could ‘fall through a wormhole or get knocked on the head or go though / some stones in Scotland… with medicines sewn into my in pantaloons’. She describes how she would make Keats ‘forget about Fanny Brawne & the big difference in our / ages … (and) lie on the grass & drink French wine & you lay your / head on my breast’. Later she says she wants to be ‘a woman from the future changing literary history forever / …while you steer our little boat out of Lethe / & into the lilies / trailing my hand in the canonical water,’… and that she doesn’t ‘want to stay in this world watching Truth bound and gagged on the / railroad tracks’.
      This legacy theme is also mentioned in ‘Art of Poetry’ where the poet imagines her work discovered ‘sometime before the death of the sun’, which will be ‘display(ed) in a luminous floating interdimensional sphere’. Her mortality is reflected upon at the poem’s end:

                  The days & nights keep drunkenly arriving, the guests are all dying
                  & I’m starting to feel pretty sick.

Yet another poem, ‘Little Old Ladies’ begins with:

                  We know we’re supposed to shut up now and tremble off
                  into the wilderness of a golf course on the edge of a retirement community’

      She describes the sight, sounds, and smells of the aged delinquents ‘pissing vodka in our bedpans / Pulling the fire alarm, wandering out into traffic’… no one ‘wanting to breathe us in.’ This fourth section contains poems attempting to imagine and perhaps negotiate the end before it comes.
      On a final note, two aspects of this new volume, of which I personally wanted more, were Addonizio’s inventive sonnets and more poems about Italy. Perhaps her investigation of the strictures of the sonnet and her Italian ancestry might help expand and define her sense of her past, present, and future, and help give the book’s last section a more positive or at least a more balanced perspective.
      A poet who first came to my attention when he submitted two poems, ‘Marsden’ and ‘Atmosphere’ to AQ27 is Colin Bancroft. As I read these two poems, the whole room and my usually whirring mind stopped as they captured my attention—which is my test of whether I want to publish someone’s poetry. The bio he sent noted an upcoming pamphlet, Impermanence,, which I requested from his publisher, Maytree Press in Scotland.
      I must say I am very impressed with this collection. Its Turneresque cover, by Kevin Threfall, depicts an autumnal landscape ablaze with soft focus swaths of green, yellow, orange, and red, and a long white house or barn at its centre, reminiscent of Turner’s lone ship in fog. This cover is definitely an attention grabber.
      And Bancroft’s twenty-three poems inside are just as arresting. Though many are composed in rhyming verse, the range of subjects they cover and the voices they include are far from the usual fare. ‘Tethered’, the first poem, describes, on one level, a channel storm about to blow a couple’s tent down. On another level, it addresses the couple’s relational tension. In the next poem, ‘Pheasant’, the speaker is parked in a layby to clear his head. He hears a pheasants call, thinks it’s a bit ‘mechanical’ and likens it to an instrument recording of a ‘Your broken heartbeat.’ The poem ‘Absence’ almost seems to describe the Impermanence’s cover. ‘Just the blank canvas / Of fog, primed with rain…Trees loom as ragged patterns cut / From this fine cloth of mist.’
      ‘Mis-en-scène’ contains the thoughts of a young man waiting to enter an amusement park or museum he visited as a child, with his partner, who is a few weeks pregnant, planning his future family. He imagines ‘The cot, the pram, the bike, the toys, the pets, / And all the untold stories that would unfold’. Unfortunately, ‘Three days later / there was a change to the script and we were left / With our plotlines torn,’. ‘Snapshot’ makes an interesting if not uncommon comment on marriage. Set at a café reception in the Borderlands, the speaker comments how ‘that it’s all downhill from here.’ In the next poem, ‘Fallen’, Bancroft’s poetic language becomes more inventive, where he compares a dead tree in a hedge to a skeleton ‘which we let it lie there for days in state upon its ground / Touching the earth at last, where its shadow once reached.’—a fitting elegy.
      His poems ‘Marsden’ and ‘Atmosphere,’ both at the centre of this pamphlet, are about gradual and sudden change. The former is about an abandoned village on ‘a windswept headland’. The latter is about the discovery of an overnight snowfall and its effect on the speaker. These poems were originally published by Amsterdam Quarterly at https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq27-beginnings-endings/colin-bancroft-marsden/ and at https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq27-beginnings-endings/colin-bancroft-atmosphere/. They still have the ability to stop me in my tracks, which is why I decided to publish both in AQ27’s Beginnings and Endings issue. Other poems, such as ‘Overgrowth’, ‘Ambleside’, ‘The Clearing’ and ‘Criccieth’, all succinctly describe the feeling of the English country-, lake-, or seaside.
      Next however, come three poems, which were real surprises: ‘The Broken Tower’, ‘After Frankenstein’, and ‘Census’. In the first, the speaker steps out of himself and imagines the life of Hart Crane just before he committed suicide. In the second is in the voice of a young woman who goes to bars, bringing various men with different physical attributes home to try to reconstruct a past, lost lover. The last describes the squalid scene a census taker noted a century or so before. It this ability to step outside of himself into different personae and eras, in addition to his description of natural scenery and relations closer to home, which set Bancroft apart as a true poet.             AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ27 Spring 2020 Book Reviews

Claudia Gary. Genetic Revisionism. Loudoun Scribe, 24 pages.
Erin Wilson. At Home with Disquiet. Circling Rivers, ISBN 978-1-939530-10-3, 127 pages.
Margaret DeRitter. Singing Back to the Sirens. Unsolicited Press. ISBN 978-1-950730-28-5, 100 pages.

After my Augean task of compiling, editing, and posting the AQ 2019 Yearbooks to contributors, libraries, and friends, I finally had some time at the beginning of February to do a bit of reading, between selecting pieces for AQ27. Three poetry collections (two books and one chapbook), which really stood out were Claudia Gary’s Genetic Revisionism, Erin Wilson’s At Home with Disquiet and Margaret DeRitter’s Singing Back to the Sirens. Two are by previous AQ contributors and one was so interesting, due to its cover, subject matter, and author’s bio, I felt compelled to explore it.
      The first is Claudia Gary’s (AQ7, 11, 15, 26, & 27) chapbook, Genetic Revisionism, subtitled: Poems Inspired by the Sciences and Mathematics. True to its title, this is a brief collection of 24 pages with poems about intellectually engaging subjects such as medicine, maths, physics, acoustics, intrusive new communications technology, and humanity’s nascent ability to design its own future through genetic manipulation. The first seven pages are concerned primarily with medicine. The collections first poem, ‘Antiseptic’ is very engaging because it presents how the speaker first learned about the subject from her Air Force veteran father. ‘“…You will never be without / an antiseptic, if you use your urine.”’ Her mother, who wants her to be ‘pretty’ quickly objects with ‘“Hey! / Don’t tell her things like that!”’ as her father ‘dabbed peroxide on her foot’ to disinfect a wound. This juxtaposition of prettiness with science also makes the prescient, young speaker wonder what’s buried under the ‘bumpy-textured’ paintings by an alcoholic aunt, ‘what’s wedged below the prettiness’ and whether it was ‘buried too deep to tweeze it out and cleanse the wound?’
      The poems ‘Kidney Stone’, ‘Aloe Barbadensis Speaks’, ‘Toxoplasmosis’ and ‘Transcribing an ER Report’ continue this medical theme, but unfortunately, not with the same personal attachment. For example, in the last poem, when the transcriptionist hears the doctor say the patient ‘has a real bad cold’, she wonders if he’s being ironic or maybe just suffering from ‘long hours of work’. However, the poem ends with a note of detachment. ‘She never learns the end, which seems a shame. / But he’s the one who has to sign his name.’
      The maths section, pages 10-11, includes a long poem ‘In Binary’ about a couple attracted to each other because they can count in binary and a very short two line poem which mentions thinking about imaginary numbers to fall asleep called ‘A Cure for Insomnia?’ Other scientific poems include ‘One Small Step’ and ‘Music of the Missing Sphere’ about the 1969 moon landing and the NASA January 2018 video of the ‘Super Blue Moon Eclipse’. ‘Higgs-Boson Moments’ is about the observable six stages of this particle. Gary’s truncated villanelle, ‘Ripples in the Fabric’ compares waves in space-time to poetry: ‘they spring from meter and inherit rhyme.’ She compares ‘our galactic spiral’ to a ‘growing nautilus’s climb’. In ‘Ex Nihilo’ she uses Frederick Hart’s stone carving in the Washington DC National Cathedral of ‘”half-formed figures of men and women / appearing from the void”’ as an image of how the universe and human consciousness came into being. She uses a similar technique in ‘An Illumination’, where also in the epigraph, she compares Jan Beerstaten’s ‘The Castle of Muiden in Winter’ scene with skaters, a moat and a great castle to the cosmos and mentions ‘the Muiderkring, which was this heaven’s source.’ Her poems address the positive as well as the negative sides of technology: NSA surveillance, video calls, CRISPR (in the chapbook’s title poem), and the upcoming Singularity, when human and machine/computer consciousness shall merge. It is a short chapbook, which addresses a number of subjects in science, mathematics and being human.
      Although most of these poems present a somewhat detached, objective, philosophical or scientific perspective, some also relate back directly to the poet’s experience as in ‘Antiseptic’ and ‘Aloe Barbaensis Speaks’. These along with her poem ‘Guidance’ in this issue (AQ27), represent Gary’s work at her best: when theory and scientific observation are united with personal experience. I hope that Gary continues to write more poems in this vein.
      All in all, Gary’s Genetic Revisionism is an impressive, short collection of formal poems, (rhyming couplets and quatrains, sonnets, villanelles, etc.), about the sciences and maths, remarkable in its scope and artistry.
      At Home with Disquiet is a poetry book by Erin Wilson published by Circling Rivers Press. The collection’s setting is primarily the speaker’s rural Canadian home and it is divided into seven sections, the first six of which are introduced with a explanatory phrase about the activities of a jackdaw, which seem to intersect philosophically with Wilson’s own life. Many of these poems contain Wilson’s close observation of the natural and domestic worlds related to the weather, tending her garden, and her ancestry. Her revelations come not only from her observing the natural world, but also through raising her children. In ‘It’s Late’ her son records his sudden growth by saying: ‘remember when your moccasins were too big // for my feet? Playfully he demonstrates he can’t even / squish the width of his toes inside them.’ In ‘Lines from Movies—II. Spit from the Top of the Stairs,’ her daughter, who hadn’t been good before Christmas even though her mother had threatened to withdraw her presents, is surprised by the abundance of those she still receives repeating the phrase: ‘More than enough’.
      In the fifth section, Wilson also includes two poems called the ‘Cancer (Suite)’. The first one ‘Healthcare’ is about the experience of undergoing an MRI, a scan this reviewer has experienced many times over. In order to release herself mentally from the confining, narrow, noisy, hot space, (my words, not hers), ‘I visualize the swamp / I was in front of yesterday…visualize some / stable ice for those / starving polar bears…do what seems impossible, imagine a future for our kids.’ The next poem ‘RADIANCE’ innovatively narrates an internal medical examination in reverse order: first with the results, then the examination and lastly the symptoms that brought the speaker to her GP’s surgery.
      However, Wilson’s book is more than the usual combination of genealogy, cultural heritage, the creation of the self and a family, and mid-life retrospection. Reflections on her rural Canadian surroundings include also narrative forays into the art world such as ‘Lines from Movies (A Letter to Van Gogh)’, a shop in which a copy of Georgia O’Keefe’s Black Iris, 1926 in ‘Jacquard’ is being framed, in ‘An Untitled Rothko’ from the ‘Fishing Suite’ in which a river bank is compared to one of Rothko’s paintings, or the book’s penultimate poem, ‘Almost’ in which the speakers ‘reminiscing about the Chicago Art Institute’ as ‘Whistler’s muted Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southhampton Water, / still washes up at our feet),’ at ‘Misery Bay in May,’. Her poetry is also replete with epigraphs and references to well-known, maverick poets such as Constantine P. Cavafy, Bashō, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Gilbert, William Everson, Charles Wright, or even Galway Kinnel’s little boy Fergus in ‘Statistics, 2012’.
      Her poem, ‘Gentrification’ about an old downtown, with its derelict shops boarded up windows next to hip, ‘Vegetarian fare and fair trade coffee shops, / a stripper’s club’ brings her poetry right into the present, now decade-long, economic malaise. The book’s final poem,‘Agrarian Landscape with Fanbrush’ in the eighth, and last untitled section, is set in a windy, March scene, with the poet: ‘Walking along between / the parcelled farm fields, / the windows of heaven / keep passing over me,’. The poem includes images of birches, a crow, and quote from Mahler, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, which close this book masterfully. It proves that Wilson is not just a poet of the Canadian countryside, but one deeply rooted in many poetic and artistic traditions. At Home with Disquiet is an excellent addition to Circling Rivers’ growing collection.
      Singing Back to the Sirens is a poetry book by Margaret DeRitter (AQ24), published by Unsolicited Press. The book is divided into three parts: Part I, ‘So Many Sang to Me’; Part II, ‘Singing Back to Her’ and an ‘Epilogue’, one poem entitled ‘Funeral Directive From a Serial Monogamist Who Never Stopped Looking for the One Who Would Last’. The first section begins with an epigraph by Walter Copland Perry about Homer’s Sirens, whose songs ‘though irresistibly sweet / were no less sad than sweet’. The poems in this first section are about family, her mother’s illness, childhood friends, mistaken gender identity based how she dressed and what she did with friends, and her introduction to a gay support group via a college newspaper—a lesbian Bildungsroman. These include the momentous experiences of her first entrance to a gay bar, her first girlfriend, and sexual experiences—one hot and sweaty and another with a woman who keeps saying she ‘likes boys’. The Siren motif is mentioned again in ‘Singing Back to the “Straight Girl”’, about ‘girls who fall for girls who / never look their way when it’s time for love, who keep on chasing them / anyway’, a common, LGBTQI experience of unrequited love.
      The form of DeRitter’s poetry varies from short to long lines, and includes prose poems such ‘Susie and Me and the Line in the Road’, and ‘Dream Sequence: The Roof Leaked When You Moved Back In’ and ‘After the Confederate Flag Came Down’ (the latter two poems both in Part II) and also a poem arranged around one colour, ‘Blue’, referring to the colour of ice cubes rolling down her belly, the colour of her girlfriend’s dress, and the azure skies of Arizona.
      In ‘Paddling the Wilderness’, she uses geographic and meteorological metaphors to describe her strained relationships. At the end of a summer holiday after enjoying a canoeing trip together, their close relationship falls apart. One ‘locked… (the other) ‘out of a hotel room’ and the other ‘threw a telephone at the floor’…‘like Michigan’s winters, your moods / turned gray and I drew stormy.’ In ‘Gone’ DeRitter describes her feeling of being deserted by a partner she’d kissed that morning before leaving for work and then coming home to find her partner’s belongings gone. The poem is most effective because instead of describing the speaker’s emotions at being abandoned, it is a catalogue of the missing possessions and the signs of their removal, such as the poem’s last lines: ‘The scratches on the wooden floor/ the only sign of your tall oak dresser.’ In fact powerful closing lines are one of the best aspects of DeRitter’s poetry. In ‘Shooting Angels: Mendon, Michigan’, the poet writes about her frustration at not finding someone with whom she can settle down.

      Nesting was her specialty, her safety net,
      her terror. She flew back from California once.
      We sat in a car outside my house.

Other geographic and outdoor images include Lake Michigan, its dunes, winter snow, rivers, and hiking. Like many later-in-life poetry collections, this first section is a list of regrets, a list of loss about those who died, and those who disappeared, but also the maturity that comes with surviving these losses.
      The second section begins with an ode to a former partner in ‘The Alchemists Had Nothing On You’. It’s one of only a few outtakes from the speaker’s primarily North American and specifically Michigan settings. ‘Novices at Sacré-Coeur’ describes a happy visit to a prominent Parisian landmark and ‘We Left our Love in Lourmarin’ is about being haunted by her ex- and her memories of their holidays. In ‘Wedding Cathedral’ the speaker describes her outdoor wedding under arching trees, with a flower in her partner’s hair, just like ‘that San Francisco song’. ‘Avalanche’ is about personal tragedies coming in threes: the deaths of her mother and her dog, and the loss of her job, all in quick succession. ‘Dateline: Kalamazoo’, (I assume about the job she lost), was first published in AQ21 in its Media issue. It’s about the struggle to keep a local newspaper alive, an issue common to most towns in the early 21st century, as younger readers turn more to digital instead of print media. In ‘Thanksgiving Explosion’ the speaker describes her emotional outburst after she asks her partner to call her family, who had not attended their wedding. The speaker becomes angry and vents in front of her partner’s family, all present for the Thanksgiving dinner. The speaker imagines ‘every grievance splattered on the kitchen’s walls / the stove, the floor, the cupboards’.
      In the next poems, the speaker relates her feelings of loss due to their breakup. In ‘That Day In January’ she describes the feeling of waves crashing against her chest, when her partner told her, ‘I have to leave’. In ‘Uncoupling’ the strangeness of her partner ‘coming in through the front door,’ when they’re no longer together, and in ‘I Had a Granddaughter for Seven Months’ the loss of a briefly shared feeling of progeny through caring for her partner’s granddaughter—the physical contact, photobook, and FaceTime, which ended when her partner broke up with her. And finally, the tears in ‘Closing Our Account’, when she and her ex- went to the bank to close their joint account—‘the paper all wet / and see-through’. It is this attention to detail, the use of just the right metaphor to translate her feelings, which makes DeRitter’s poetry so striking and arresting.
      Stylistically, DeRitter’s poetry takes a turn when her poems talk about digital media. In the Whitmanesque long lines of ‘If Friend Had as Many Variations as Arctic Snow,’ she takes exception to Facebook’s ‘Friend’ designation. The poet writes: ‘I’d have a word for the friend who shows up on my Facebook list / but never on party invitations…(who) tells me Happy Birthday online, but never in person.’ A few poems later, in ‘Awaiting Word at Mission Control’, her thoughts are separated structurally by days and smartphone ‘dings’. On the first day, there’s a text to her ex- about a movie she’s just seen, the next day, another saying she ‘heard you were having surgery / at Mayo’. On day three there’s a report on millions of ‘women marching / all over the world’ and a photo of the ‘ex-granddaughter’ she hasn’t seen in four years’. On day 5, a message from an old friend, who watched the moon landing with her in her living room 48-years ago, and then disappeared, and on day 6, the poet wondering when her ex- will stop resenting her and get in touch again.
      The epilogue poem, the book’s summation, ‘Funeral Directive from a Serial Monogamist Who Never Stopped Looking For the One Who Would Last’ reminds me of the ninth of W.H. Auden’s ‘Twelve Songs’, at least in its refreshing combination of details. Mourners are instructed to bring their ‘boxed-up / photos, useless house keys, sad CDs’ and lay them at her feet, to place their ‘grievances on pure white / paper, fold them into mourning doves / or cut them into snowflakes and let / a blizzard fly’ and to pile a column of rocks to express their sorrow. The speaker also asks for ‘a preacher who’s heard of Meg Christian / or at least the Dixie Chicks’. Lastly, she asks the mourners to ‘take off my glasses and lay them on the casket’ as they sing her to sleep. Such a moving poem, such a moving collection from birth to death, such an ending.
      There is much to praise and recommend here. Singing Back to the Sirens is an excellent poetic compendium of the joys, sorrows, and wisdom gained through this lesbian poet’s experience in the post-Stonewall/pre-Marriage Equality Act generation.         AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ26 Autumn 2019 Book Reviews

Lee, Donna J. Gelagotis, Intersection on Neptune, The Poetry Press, ISBN 978-0-9967779-9-5, 106 pages.
Goswami, Amlanjyoti, River Wedding, Paperwall Media & Publishing, ISBN 978-93-82749-86-8, 106 pages.
Cutler, Juliet, Among the Maasai, She Writes Press, ISBN 978-1-63152-672-5, 289 pages.

This summer I received an unusual and interesting combination of books describing life in three different countries and continents — the US, India and Tanzania. Two are poetry books; one, a memoir. Two are by previously published AQ writers; one by a new writer with a book blurb written by another AQ contributor.

With such an interesting combination, I couldn’t wait to dive in and explore these books especially during the (again) record-breaking temperatures this last summer. I am happy to report these books all ‘transported (me) to a better world’ as Franz von Schrober wrote in his lyrics to Franz Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s poetry book Intersection on Neptune, won the Prize Americana in 2018. It is a collection of poems based on the experiences of three generations living in Coney Island, New York and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Lee’s poems describe her great-parents emigration and difficulty of setting up businesses in their new country, their experience of xenophobia and the push to assimilate, and also the natural beauty and cultural hegemony of both these landmark locations important to America’s history.

Lee’s book is divided into two parts: New York and a second, three-times-as-long section, about New Jersey. The New York section is set in Manhattan, Brooklyn (mostly Coney Island), and in New York State. The New Jersey section is set in Elizabeth, Central New Jersey including Trenton, Hamilton, and the suburbs, rural New Jersey, along the Northeast Corridor, near the Pine Barrens, and at the shore. Intersection on Neptune describes the lives of three generations in these places.

The Brooklyn section includes poems about geography ‘On the Edge of a City’, sociology ‘Kings Highway, Brooklyn’, ‘Solly Salamander, or Life in a Fishbowl on Avenue U’, and ‘Intersection on Neptune’, culture ‘Visit’, ‘Sylvia’, ‘Tea at The Plaza’, ‘Dinner at the Club’, and ‘T.S. On Stage,’ religion ‘Prayer for Gil Hodges’ and ‘The Fast’, national holidays ‘Coney Island, Thanksgiving, 1996’, family ‘Your Father’ and ‘Sylvia’. One of the best poems in this section and one of its shortest and thinnest is ‘21’ in which the poem’s speaker revels on the day of securing a ‘First // job, / best job // I could ever / want.’ This short, light lines dance on the page. I would hope that Lee would experiment more with this short line, which is quite different from the longer lines and stanzas in her other poems, ‘Tea at the Plaza’ excepted. The short two to five stress lines in ‘Your Father’, which describe the speaker’s father in a row boat, also mimic the oars’ motion and rhythm and the calmness of the setting.

One of the best qualities of Intersection on Neptune is Lee’s descriptions of her neighbourhood, the New Jersey countryside, and the pressure to assimilate. In the first poem in the second New Jersey section, ‘What’s American?’, Lee describes that after her grandfather’s shop window with a Russian name is broken, it’s replaced by one with an Americanized name. (Although the poem suggests a later softening of neighbour’s feelings during the Depression when her grandfather delivered the day’s unsold fruit and veg to needy families). ‘Hunger and Money’ also explores the equivalence of food security with money. The poem’s speaker imagines how her mother ‘saw how hunger / and hope intertwined.’ This second section includes poems about the old and new world related to home births, ‘Between Two Women’, the post-WWII boom, ‘At the military institute, c. 1945’, and the haste at which new highways were built in ‘He Built the Turnpike’: ‘The future had no patience. There were cars waiting / on side streets. Hurry. Build quickly.’

A significant number of poems in this section are devoted to the speaker’s home, school, and religious upbringing. Her love for learning and intellect can be seen both in ‘In First Grade’ for about penmanship and in ‘In Sixth Grade’. In the second poem, the speaker daydreams during class because she already knows the answers to her teacher’s questions having worked ahead on her assignments. ‘What We Knew Then’ and ‘Record Player’ are about the speaker’s socialization and awareness of the value of popular culture ‘Albums made money — sometimes / lots of money.’ On the other hand, ‘The Earth’s Provision’ is a poem about the wealth of suburban insect life before the neighbourhood-wide spraying with insecticides and light pollution in the ’50s and ’60s. ‘we believed in heaven — no wonder/ we could see the stars at night // as the smell of the earth filled our lungs and no one would question// how far we had come.

As always, two of my favourite of Lee’s poems, ‘Circa 1968 Auction’ and ‘My Horse had the On-screen Persona of James Dean’ have equestrian subjects. The speaker’s love for these animals and riding shows through in details such as ‘The chestnut had a slight limp. / The Appaloosa, a sway back. The bay / was handsome but wiry’ in the former and ‘Young riders on frisky ponies / preteens on lumbering horses / … Too close, and a kick could fly out’ in the latter. It was a poem about a riding a horse in a ring for AQ’s Education issue (AQ20), which first brought Ms Lee’s writing to my attention. The speaker goes on to mention disco of the ’70s in short-lined, columnar-shaped poem entitled ‘Remote’ and her adult awareness of the world in ‘Condo Morning in the Suburbs’ and ‘At the Shore’, where she compares the seaside of her youth to that of the present: ‘The ocean smells of landfill. / I sense erosion.’

The poems in Intersection on Neptune have the sweep of almost a century of American culture and history. It is a splendid book which captures the kinetic vibrancy of New York, Coney Island and New Jersey. In addition, it is an honest book that is not always positive about the post-WWI & II goals of assimilation and financial progress in the suburbs.

Amlanjyoti Goswami’s River Wedding is an interesting mix of East and West with the border between the two sometimes vague or missing entirely. This book’s colourful orange, green, and yellow cover, with a blue round quarter sphere, reinforces its global perspective. River Wedding’s poems have a millennial sweep of history from ancient Indian myths, to the British Romantic poets to last year’s KKK torch-lit march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other locations visited and depicted by this world-traveller poet include India (‘Looking for Matthew Arnold in Chandni Chowk’, ‘Basanagar’ ‘Landour’ and ‘The Weather in Benares’), London (‘Reading Tibetan on the London Tube’, ‘Terminal 3’, ‘Whitechapel Dreaming’, ‘Bethnal Green’, and ‘Mind the Gap’), Washington D.C. (‘D.C.’) the Caribbean (‘A Caribbean Summer’). In addition the book has about a half dozen typographically unconventional poems including one concrete poem. In these poems about East and West are various heroes, writers and gods from each such as Ulysses, Derek Walcott, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Leonard Cohen, Krishna and Karna, as well as family members, ancestors and neighbours. It is a busy, fully populated world Goswami explores physically and metaphysically.

Although the book is not physically divided into sections (something perhaps against-the-grain of a collection that wants to be all-inclusive), I feel the first 34 pages are primarily set in the poet’s homeland and among family. Most appropriately and perhaps as a sort of prologue, the first poem is entitled ‘Bard’. It depicts an older relative’s ‘ferocious bitter shout, … no soothing tongue for melting,’ and how in it the poet ‘search(es) for heart/(to) Find tender feeling.’ The poem ends, however, with this relative, in her wishes, ‘sending her daughter/ Pistols for dowry’. Weapons are present again in ‘Places’ two pages later, where the poem mentions ‘Arrivals’ and ‘Departures’ in ‘This play, / ‘Human amidst the guns,’. Gun violence appears later in ‘Re-member-ing’ in which ‘our teacher’s husband’ was killed when ‘Bullets (were) ringing the street next door’.

In ‘City Smoke’, Goswami describes a death with the metaphor: ‘You left by the window one morning’. In ‘Grandmother’ he likens this relative to a renovated house ‘of new paint / shakes in vain while stripped bare / for ceremony of coat and plaster’. In the book’s title poem, the speaker describes his mother’s antlophobia ‘afraid of water after dark’ because of a story about the rivers coming together across the village huts for a marriage. In ‘A Strange Man’, Goswami describes a neighbourhood man who Speaks to trees, scribbles / On newspapers, sells them cheap.’

The poet reveals perhaps a bit of his own personality in ‘The Blind Flautist of Panbazar’ when he writes in the title character’s voice: ‘But I like / Silent afternoons best. / When it is all /quiet around me.’ The desire for quiet and attention to light is also mentioned in other poems such as ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Away’.

The scene changes with ‘Reading Tibetan on the London Tube’. Here is a second ‘section’ with poems about London, Charlottesville, New York and Washington D.C. interspersed between religious, mythological, and philosophical poems such ‘Landour’ and ‘Rain Shelter’, ‘Diwali’, ‘A God Grieving’, ‘Abhimanyu’ and ‘The Face of Evil’ and ‘Of Goodness’, ‘The Philosopher Meets His Match’. Here, Goswami is out in the wider world, but also, as in the poems ‘Landour’ and ‘Rain Shelter’, on a pilgrimage for wider meaning as he describes his literal ascent, the ‘monkeys for company’. The next day ‘on the way home’ he sees a vista ‘green deep inside the jungle’/Not a soul in sight / And I, a traveller on the / edge of nowhere.’ The next poem, ‘Rain Shelter’ is also in this vein.

The third ‘section’ of Goswami’s book includes poems, which are certainly typographically more experimental. The first certainly would be ‘Injured Bark’, a poem in the shape of a tree. Goswami tells the tree, whose limbs have grown ‘spine-broken’ to ‘Keep going, one day, they will find in your tender bark / A home for the birds.’ Some of the poems I would include in this section have very short lines such as ‘GPS’, ‘Outsider’, ‘Canvas’ and ‘The Weather in Benares’. ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Witness are poems with two parallel columns of description which in the case of the former, readers can put together lines from the left and right columns to construct his/her narrative of a neighbour. In the case of the latter, the left hand column is composed only the repeated word ‘We’ and paired with the description of waiting out a riot because the speaker and his companions wouldn’t run and leave their grandfather behind. The last of these poems would be ‘End notes’, itself River Weddings’ ultimate poem. This is Goswami’s Ars poetica. In six notes he describes the source of his inspiration ‘that little / light that comes peering from a hole near the window.’, his ‘quiet joy’, the familiar and economic place ‘being middle born’, his awareness of signs ‘in remembrance of Priam’, his regard for poetic and philosophical traditions ‘Eliot’ and ‘Heidegger’, and lastly his respect for a ‘sixth sense’. River Wedding describes an Asian poet’s embrace of the world through the lenses of both Eastern and Western cultures.

Juliet Cutler’s Among the Maasai, describes her two years as a teacher in a Tanzanian secondary girls school. Although her book is labelled as a memoir, it includes not only about her experience as an American in Tanzania, but an account of the parallel world of new students from the Rift Valley for whom toilets and Swahili at the school are as equally as foreign as the Tanzanian heat and food are to Cutler. I am particularly proud of this memoir as portions of it, the description of the Morogoro Market, was previously discussed in the AQ Writers’ Group and published in AQ8. This market passage is typical of Cutler’s Tanzanian experiences. Cutler nervously leaves the safety of her Range Rover to explore the Morogoro Market alone. She becomes alarmed, however, when she notices she has caught the interest of a group of boys, who follow her. Anticipating perhaps a request for money, she’s startled to find that instead, one of the boys offers her a piece of his orange.

Parallel to her own story, Cutler describes the story of Neng’ida, one of the Rift Valley scholarship students. Her education is endangered at the very beginning when the man, to whom she has been promised in marriage, comes to the school with her mother to take her back home. However, the headmistress and the Neng’ida’s mother convince the man to let Neng’ida stay because they argue an education will make her a better wife and mother. Another student, whose development Cutler tracks, is Miriam. She left her home and travelled to the capital to ask the minister of education to help her escape from her family and attend school. Cutler describes Miriam’s friendly smile in the classroom and mentions how it lifts her spirits. Cutler also describes in detail the challenges she faced being thrown into the deep end as a new teacher with an unfamiliar curricula, replacing the twenty-year veteran, who wrote it.

Some practical household matters she describes include learning how to take a bucket bath and to reuse this water to flush the toilet, and how to purchase and prepare unfamiliar local food for her meals. In addition, there is the adjusting to the outdoor and indoor wildlife; snakes and rats, especially. Cultural issues Cutler wrestled with involved the role of the school as an institution of empowerment versus acculturation, interacting with her Tanzanian colleagues, and the Maasai practice of female genital circumcision. Cutler describes these subjects in an informed, sensitive manner, aware of her privileged, economic, outsider status. This is demonstrated in her thoughts about a visitor’s complaint at a Tanzanian national park:

I’m sorry ma’am, that you don’t like anything on the breakfast buffet, but did you know that just outside the boundaries of this national park, there are children who won’t have enough to eat today?

In her book, Cutler frequently asks her herself and her partner: ‘How could we live responsibly as people of relative wealth in the midst of poverty?’

Cutler’s memoir also describes how she grew as a teacher and how she ardently worked to prepare her students for their yearly and final O-level exams which could make the difference between returning home to their villages or to have the choice to go out into the wider world. She describes the long, song-filled, hour-long graduation ceremony attended by Tanzania’s first lady.

Cutler’s also mentions her generosity towards some street children, for whom she became known as ‘the orange lady’, by giving them oranges occasionally. Cutler also describes navigating the interesting changes in her life with her colleagues and students first, as an unmarried teacher with her boyfriend Mark, and six months later, as a married woman. These included a new house with a guard and being wary of the bats and rats that wanted to call her new home, their home. After living in Tanzania for six months, Cutler also describes the disorientation and sensory overload she experienced upon her return to US during the Christmas season to prepare for her wedding. Even shopping in a US supermarket with all its abundance and food choices in comparison to food scarcity in Tanzania proved to be an unexpected challenge.

Cutler’s memoir continues back in Africa and describes the prospects of students who did or didn’t pass their O-level exams; the former continuing on to the next form and the latter going off to trade schools or returning home, their hopes of continuing their education at the Maasai Girls School ended. Cutler’s narrative of pupils Miriam and Neng’ida continues. Miriam must stop attending school when she becomes pregnant (the law then in Tanzania) even though the pregnancy is due to rape. However, the head of the boys’ school finds a way for Miriam to continue to her education after she gives birth is seclusion. Neng’ida graduates not only from the Maasai school, but also from Concordia University in Minnesota, which Cutler witnesses.

Among the Maasai is certainly a book worth reading for those interested in Maasai culture in general and women’s education in Africa in particular. In addition, while writing her memoir of living in another culture, Cutler was careful to note her cultural biases and limitations while documenting her life Among the Maasai. AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ25 Summer 2019 Art Review

Maria Lassnig — Ways of Being, Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, 6 April to 11 August 2019.

I was pleased but somewhat perturbed to make my first acquaintance with the work of painter, sculpture, and animator Maria Lassnig at the Amsterdam Stedelijk retrospective April last. I was pleased by the depth and artistry of the work on display. I was perturbed that I had not heard of her previously.

Stedelijk curator Beatrice von Bormann helped explain at the press viewing why perhaps I hadn’t previously heard of Lassnig. The Stedelijk only owns two of her works and Lassnig had had only one show there, back in the 1990s. In addition, Bormann put the difficulty of being a female artist in context by quoting the statistics that in the US museums, 87% of the artists are male and 85% are white. Furthermore, according to artist Jacqueline de Jong, quoted in an article entitled: ‘Onsporen en verdraaien’ in the VPRO Gids #22 (1 to 7 June 2019), only four per cent of the Amsterdam Stedelijk’s collection is by female artists.

Despite this level of discrimination, however, Lassnig during her lifetime produced a large body of work, represented in this retrospective by 250 pieces including 80 works on paper and eight videos/films/animations, many on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Lassnig called her style or technique ‘body awareness’ which to this reviewer appears in her portraits as more of an ‘out of body experience’ as her torso floats above the New York City skyline in Woman Power, (oil on canvas, 1979). Other disembodied images including one of the exhibition’s promotional images, a painting of a woman with a white face with no hair and the back of the head missing such as in Selbst met Mehrschweinchen, Eng: Self with Guinea Pig, (oil on canvas, 2000). These facial images are chillingly reminiscent of the recent Sophia AI interface created by a Hong Kong technology firm.

From these paintings there’s no mistaking Lassnig’s message and her realization of the difficulty of her struggle. If one enters the exhibit at gallery 1.1 at the end of her career, instead of at gallery 1.15, at the beginning, the first image one is confronted with is that of Lassnig with a gun in each hand: one pointed directly at the viewer and the other pointed at her own head entitled Du oder ich, Eng: You or me, (oil on canvas, 2005). According to Bormann, the exhibition has been organized in reverse chronologically, and thematically. One starts here in the 2000s and works one’s way back through time, room by room, to the 1940s, when Lassnig began painting.

However, if one begins at 1.15 with her paintings in the 40s and 50s, it is easier to see Lassnig’s development and what she achieved during her sixty-five year engagement/struggle with painting, sculpture and animation/film. Her work in galleries 1.15 and 1.16 includes paintings with cubist blocks Flachenteilung, klein, Eng: Field Divison, small, (gouache on cardboard, 1953), and abstract strokes of colour next to or on top of each other such as the rectangular white with green centre Body Housing (oil on canvas, 1951) and orange and ochre rectangular brushstrokes of Tachismus 4 (oil on canvas, 1958). These rooms exhibit her exploration of cubism, expressionism, and abstract expressionism.

In the ’60s and ’70s, she would later abandon these non-human styles for her own more realistic, but somewhat disembodied ‘body awareness’ technique in which she would paint her body with a variety of quite realistic but dramatic physical complications, for example, Zelfportrait mit telefon, (oil on canvas, 1973), with her head at table height, the phone off the hook and the cord wrapped around her neck.

In this period Lassnig also created a series of animations and films. These provide some comic relief in this otherwise very serious exhibition. One animation is entitled Self-Portrait (1971). It begins with a woman’s face obscured by dresser drawers, which then fill and drip with foam. Next, her face is obscured briefly by a wooden beam, then a camera, and after that by a device that covers just her mouth, nose and eyes. Finally, her face is freed from these blockages and she begins to imagine herself as a more beautiful and idealized film star, first with her hair up like Audrey Hepburn’s, and then in waves like Marilyn Monroe’s until a Monty Pythonesque fist and a thumb comes down from above and pushes this idealized face back into a more realistic representation of Lassnig.

In the mid to late-1970s, Lassnig also painted partial, disembodied imaginary self-portraits, one with her body entangled by the mythic snake Woman Laocoön, (oil on canvas, 1976) similar in style to the Vatican’s Laocoon and his Sons sculpture. However, unlike the Vatican’s work, Lassnig’s female figure in the painting battles alone with the serpent. Other portraits in this time period include a move into disembodied torsos, including one with a hand covering a vagina and another with a head, with its mouth wide open, shouting, with hands coming from the back of its head covering its eyes Ohne Titel, Schreiende Frau, Eng: Untitled, Screaming Woman, (pencil and watercolours on paper, 1981).

Another method she used to depict her struggle as a woman artist was to paint human forms trapped between different planes such as in With My Head Through the Wall, (oil on canvas, 1985). In the ’80s she would also paint anti-militaristic subjects such as Rocket Base Missiles #2 (oil on canvas, 1987) and Atommütters (oil on canvas, 1984), with two women holding small, dead children wrapped in black shrouds in their arms. In the early 21st century she would continue to create such confrontational paintings such as Profitanski (oil on canvas, 2001) which includes images of green birds laddled into her head and her hand over her vagina and the Du oder ich painting mentioned previously.

Time will tell if Lassnig’s struggle will yield more female artists’ works in the Amsterdam Stedelijk’s collection. If Touria Meliani’s, Amsterdam city councillor for the arts, comments about Reins Wolf, recently appointmented as the Stedelijk’s new director, in a Stedelijk press release from 7 June 2019 are any indication: … heb ik alle vertrouwen in dat met hem de verschillende verhalen die nodig verteld moeten worden, een plek krijgen. (‘I completely trust that with him, the different stories that must be told, will receive a place.’), perhaps an increase in the percentage of women’s works at the Stedelijk is finally on the cards. AQ

Bryan R. Monte
AQ23 Autumn 2018 Book Reviews

Jennifer Clark, Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman, Shabda Press, ISBN 978-81-930523-2-7, 2018, 139 pages.
Jayne Marek, The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling, Finishing Line Press, ISBN 978-1-63534-363-2, 2018, 67 pages.

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is certainly a worthy adage to keep one for being deceived by surface appearances that cover underlying flaws. However, sometimes a good book does have an equally good, appealing cover. This is certainly true of Jennifer’s Clark’s Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman, a poetic history of John Chapman and Jayne Marek’s The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling. Both books’ covers feature trees, but these are depicted in ways perhaps not seen before. Clark’s book’s front cover illustration, ‘Colony Farm Orchard Script’ by Ladislav Hanka, is a ‘drawing over hand-tinted paper’ of tree branches reaching upward on a tan, almost light, leather-coloured background. Marek’s front cover (see her photos in the summer 2018 AQ22 issue) includes darker, dense almost thin, vertical brown blocks on a green and blue background reaching up towards a yellow, pink and white speckled light. Both covers include organic growth reaching upwards. And this is what the poems in their books do. They are poetic journeys toward light and growth.

Clark’s book is an exploration of Chapman’s ancestry, his own history, including his travels through the Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana wilderness to plant apples trees for future settlers and even some details about arboreal husbandry. It begins with a ‘Prologue: come with me into the forest,’ in which describes Clark’s motivation and inspiration for writing her book which began with Clark’s then third-grade son asking her: ‘Was he real?’ Clark’s uncertainty about the answer leads her on her own journey of discovery. Her son’s question was further piqued by Clark’s chance find of a book about American folklore, which she later purchased at her local library. She then sifted through this ‘treasure of both truth and historical inaccuracies.’ After reading it, Clark remarked: ‘Even during Chapman’s lifetime, he was already turning into a walking myth’.

For example, Clark found evidence that contradicts the myth that Chapman was a teetotaller and vegetarian. And while she didn’t find direct evidence that Chapman was an abolitionist, his personality, Swedenborgian beliefs, habit of frequenting pioneer homes (including some, which were Quaker), and the conversations she had with Denver Norman, (descendant of the former slave, Mr “Cajoe” Phillips), all lead her to conclude Chapman was, at the very least, an abolitionist at heart. She ends her prologue hoping her poems will help ‘part the forest of time’ to enter a world that is ‘young and old, terrible and beautiful, bountiful and dying, all at once.’

The uplift of Clark’s poems begins with the first phrase of the first line of her first poem, ‘John Chapman (1774-1845)’ with a poem that could be a prologue for the entire collection. ‘To sow hope,’ and his simplicity of his mythic attire and purpose: ‘slip into a burlap sack….With a tin pot/ on head for hat, set bare feet to soil and go forth/ into the wild frontier.’ The poem further describes Chapman’s travel method, ‘following the rivers’ West in his ‘Search for a clearing in the woods’ and ‘Stoop, then furrow soil with a finger, …pull seeds…and one by one press down. Cover lightly with loam.’ The poem also describes Chapman’s diet of ‘cornmeal mush and coffee’ and how he slept ‘on the forest floor.’ It also mentions how he …‘Return(ed) each year to tend the saplings,’ and continued along the Maumee River, ‘leaving a trail or thirsty pioneers, drunk now/on the sweet juice of sermon.’

The following poem ‘Grafting has always been in fashion’ emphasizes Chapman’s preferred mode of planting apple trees from seed instead of the traditional method of ‘grafted shoots/dragging with them the seeds/of old Empire.’ Clark writes how Chapman’s mother delivered him whilst his father fought in the Revolutionary War and then died a year later delivering her third child, which also died.

Further poems discuss Chapman’s “marriage” ‘John meets a woman’, his abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, including one of its conductors, ‘Micajah “Cajoe” Phillips 1736?-1861’, and the voice of one of its enemies, ‘Ten dollars for my woman Siby’. Chapman’s mistake of planting Stinking Chamomile to ‘keep malaria at bay’ is mentioned in ‘Anathemus cotula aka Stinking Chamomile’, as is the extinction of native birds during his lifetime for food and fashion in ‘Wings, The Breast, The Bird’, and ‘Common Tern, 21. Scarlet Tanger, 2.’ respectively. In her poem ‘Ledgers from dry goods stores’ Clark offers a brief glimpse of the real Chapman found preserved in one of his grocery lists: ‘three pairs of “mockasins,”/brandy, whiskey, chocolate,/ sugar, gunpowder, tobacco,/ and pork.’. Through her research, Clark separates the myth from the man, but she also gives readers a good glimpse of both.

Appropriately for this issue on genealogy, Clark’s poems focus not only on John Chapman, but also his relatives. ‘Summer of 1776’ mentions his mother, Elizabeth, near death and his father, Nathaniel, away fighting in the Revolutionary War. Nathaniel is also mentioned later as a tenant farmer in ‘One Tree Orchard’ and he later moves with the rest of the family from Longmeadow, Massachusetts to Marietta, Ohio. Chapman’s visit to his youngest sister, Sally and her husband, John Whitney to their Washington County, Ohio farm is mentioned in ‘Every Strike We are Hewn’. But it is Chapman’s sister Persis and her husband William Broome mentioned in ‘Persis Waiting’, who provided the most support for Chapman’s apple planting. According to Clark, in her well-researched reader’s notes, the Broome’s ‘probably served as an ever-moving base for her brother’s seed operation’. Clark quotes that ‘Robert Morgan notes…(Chapman) employed his brother-in-law to help with the nurseries…the couple moved to Perrysville and Mansfield, Ohio’ … (and that) When around 1834, John expanded into Indiana, Persis and William Broome followed’.

As mentioned above, I found Clark’s historical notes and the illustrations she includes just as interesting as her poems. Her book’s illustrations include sketches of John Chapman from 19th century magazines. There are also maps of the US indicating how far one could travel in a day, of the Underground railroad, of Mount Vernon, Ohio near which Chapman owned land and planted trees, and of the spread of the invasive stink week mentioned above. In addition are illustrations on grafting, a women’s hat decorated with with stuffed birds, the Blennerhassett Mansion, as well as historical photos of Deborah and Enoch Harris, Rosella Rice and the 5 cent US first class Johnny Appleseed commemorative stamp issued in 1966 (a treasure in my own boyscout stamp collection). Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman is surely a treasure-trove of information for poets, teachers, historians, etc., and could be used in primary to tertiary schools to teach how history is transformed into folklore and then into art.

Jayne Marek’s The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling, is another outstanding book worthy of mention in these pages. Marek, both a writer and a graphic artist, whose photographic work was featured in the AQ22 this past summer, brings these skills together to create a memorable poetry book. Its fifty-four poems are divided into three sections: ‘Just Out of Reach’, ‘Pacific Rim’, and ‘Of Grace’.

The first section is devoted to grief, loss and regret. The first poem entitled ‘Prognosis’ sets the tone for the rest of the book: ‘Raking and raking/ But the long tines cannot gather up grief/ That waits beyond the fence.’ This physical intervention is not enough to keep the natural world and death at bay. In the next stanza, Marek remarks: ‘Grief is like fear/Seen from another direction. The two hunch over,/ stare like stone monsters guarding a stoop.’ In the next poem, ‘Mistakes’, we see how hard the narrator is on herself regarding loss: ‘I’m unable to do over and find shelter.’ In the prose poem, ‘Drowned Mole’, she describes the discovery and removal of a dead mole from her garden. It is with regret that she moves and discards something so beautiful: ‘your fur sleek as a rich matron’s coat on opening night,…Forgive this stick that lifts at your ribs and hips.’ She meditates further on the meaning of life when she describes a jellyfish in a tank,

as if drifting meant nothing indecision
a turn in darkness toward an inaccessible shape
the purpose of lives mine

In ‘Fable’ Marek declares that her poems are not for those ‘who pine for a story that says life is simple/as this scalped green yard’. This poem describes how she sees two birds attacking a third bird as she drives by and wonders if she should intervene. ‘Clay’ is about a potter who dunks her fired pots in the same creek from which Walter, whom she identifies from a silver burn scar on his neck, … ‘is pulled… in the spring.’ ‘Deepest Snow’ is divided into two sections which takes its title from a line by Naomi Shihab Nye: ‘That was the deepest I ever went into the snow.’ Its first section is about the narrator being unexpectedly buried in snow up to her neck after losing her balance from a Norwegian ski path. The second uses ‘Flying snow’ to describe dementia ‘everything slippery and grayish white—’. There are many poems with malevolent winter scenes in this section in which glass shatters from the cold, ‘Cut Glass’ and snow hides tracks and seeds in ‘Winter Ruins’. In ‘So Late Winter’ it finally relents ‘two weeks into spring’ when a child lies in a closed casket. In ‘Elegiac Unsonnet for My Cat’ the poet writes of her cat “lost in the cold of winter, at the foot of a renewed/ Year, in a collapse of snow”. In ‘Would the Good People Please Stop Dying’ she describes the dangerous drive down a barely-visible, ice-and-mist covered road just before dawn.

The second section, ‘Pacific Rim’, is about the poet’s spiritual journey and observations in Asia, especially in Japan, India and China. The first poem, ‘Hands in Temple Smoke’ begins with a sort of purification ritual in an old wooden temple right ‘tucked between concrete walls’ where urban school children and uniforms and gray bicycle riders pass by. She observes how a woman in the temple: ‘reaches into the bitter wisps / of silver and white, waves them / toward her face, her heart’. In ‘Buddha Touch’, the poet enters seeks spiritural contact in the temple. ‘Panda Mania’ describes the ‘sweet smell’ of panda pancakes at the zoo (and all the surrounding merchandising of panda shoes, bags, etc.), which intrudes into the temple. In ‘The Woodturner’s Shop, Itsukushima’, the poet buys a small bowl from a traditional craftsperson. It is the first in a series of craftsperson poems others being ‘Nishijin Textile Center’ about the making of kimonos, ‘Grass Writing’ about traditional, carved Japanese script and landscapes, and ‘The Art of Teeth’ about traditional masks on display in a Tokyo museum.

With the poem, ‘Postcard from Assam’ the poet continues on her Asian travels in India’s Northeast. Here the poet comments on the ‘heat…in the morning dust,’ the ‘orange clouds in endless scarves/ too long to wrap up.’ She describes herself and her fellow travellers as “pale foreigners’ and as plants ‘who need water’ and who need to be ‘Lift(ed)…over the plains, over the spice plants for which the airliners of our escape are named—’. In ‘Lotus Eaters’ she’s in the Punjab; in ‘Her Feet’ at Mother Theresa’s tomb in India. The last four poems in this section, describe her experience and observations of a Ming section of the Great Wall, a ‘Carp Mobile’, ‘Kite-Flyers’, ‘A Coal Spill, Yunnan’, and looking at the flora and fauna in ‘Blue on Cang Shan’. The poet’s attention to detail helps the reader zoom into unforgettable details in each location. The last poem in this section about the mountain is especially poignant due to its description of details both small and large: the shadows created by butterfly wings and ‘a cable car ride / that swung over green/ windy-pine fingers’ and the ineffable: ‘thin air/ scraped by clouds.’

The last section of Marek’s book, ‘Of Grace’ details her removal to the West Coast after a teaching career in the Midwest. She writes about the island ferry, ocean waves, the emptying out of her former home. In ‘Woods Path’ in the Northwest, far from her former life, the poet asks: ‘what is best, what is death, what matters?’ Then by a ‘fallen trunk,’ the poet sees ‘the hollow under its feet filled with mud.’ — perhaps a meditation on ‘from dust to dust’.

Further poems in this section of special interest to this reviewer include ‘Sweet Spots for Owls’ with its syllabic count which captures the bird’s pauses and bursts of energy and which imitate the flow of the poet’s thoughts. ‘Of Grace’, the third section’s title poem describes the regeneration the poet feels as the natural world reaches out to her. In ‘I Miss My Life in Another Dimension’ the poet is transported back in her imagination to a house and a neighbourhood in the Midwest where she’d lived and taught for years. Here, the speaker talks about the house’s familiar ‘scuff marks at the doorway’, its ‘old oak trees in the yard…Deep-rooted in the black farmland earth.’ It was a house with ‘frequent gatherings…Of artists, friends, professors, students…who read my books, have my art photos mounted.’ ‘Of Grace’s’ intimate details show poet’s painful separation from what’s left behind as she moves forward in a new place, ‘six hundred miles from here.’

The title and final poem of the entire collection brings the book’s themes together. The tree surgeon as the poet, has feet planted: ‘one on a limb’. The natural world has its own character and power with a ‘tree-hand…(and) twigs with five leaf fingers…(that)slap…when I lift / the cutting tool and let it bite.’ These branches force the tree surgeon to hold his chainsaw back as if he were ‘standing / at the line, one arm cocked and heavy/gripping my favorite bowling ball.’ His swaying movement in the tree personifying the poet’s thoughts perhaps about the sometimes dangerous reductive art of poetry ‘going nowhere but cutting away/things I wish I didn’t need.’

I highly recommend both of these books due to their artistry, both poetic and visual, and due to their regenerative themes. I’m sure they will keep your lamp of inspiration burning during the shorter days and longer autumn and winter nights ahead. AQ