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AQ19 Summer 2017 Book Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Gary Beck. Tremors. Winter Goose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-941058-64-0, 108 pages.
Kate Foley. Electric Psalms. Shoestring Press. ISBN 978-1-910323-55-7, 164 pages.
Susan E. Lloy. But When We Look Closer. Now or Never Publishing. ISBN 978-1-988098-25-8, 181 pages.
Scott T. Starbuck. Hawk on Wire. Ecopoems. Fomite Press. ISBN 978-1-944388-05-8, 76 pages.

The books in this review are from mature writers in the latter phases of their careers, who I feel are all involved in restating and/or summing up some of their most important concerns and discoveries. These writers have all done their preparatory and developmental work and have had time to refine their style and approach effectively for maximum impact. Their new books reflect the wisdom of their observations and the effectiveness of their techniques.

Scott T. Starbuck’s Hawk on Wire poetry collection is the type the world needs in order to save the planet from wide-spread, lasting ecological destruction. They are poems by a man who has written about his love of nature and his concerns about climate change, species extinction and our planet’s ecological destruction for years even though these subjects are still not part of every writing programme’s curriculum. (I remember writing instructors in the mid-1980s, who felt they needed to stop me from embarrassing myself writing about the beginning of the AIDS crisis which they told me “might not turn out to be so bad.”)

In “Punch Bowl Hike Meditation,” Starbuck writes “For 30 years / I’ve talked to myself / about climate change / but now most everyone is.” His poems show the effect of this type of prescient solipsism on a man, a type of prophecy that is almost as old as the ancients he mentions in his next poem, “Wind Spirit,” first published in Amsterdam Quarterly in 2016. The Wind Spirit asks a person one question: “How will you save the community of species on earth?” and tells him/her each time she/he answers incorrectly, she/he will lose a finger. So in search of wisdom, this person tries to consult the “smart” coyote, the “king salmon” with “a bright red soul,” an eagle with its “unerring vision” among other majestic, powerful, well-travelled animals. Unfortunately, after ten days this person finds that these animals and their wisdom are all dead and he/she has no fingers left.

In “Conundrum” Starbuck writes about “Martha, the last passenger pigeon / who died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.” In “Indian Boy” the speaker asks him: “There was a lake here with fish. Where is it?” and in “Message From Far Way” the poet laments “When people lost trees / they lost the ability to think // and minds were filled / by money locusts.” Starbuck laments not only the loss of trees, but also in “Initiation Poem” that, according to David W. Orr, “Young people can recognise over 1,000 corporate logos but only a handful plants and animals native to their places.”

On the positive side, Starbuck offers some solutions to climate change. One poem with suggestions is “How We Stopped Corporate Psychopaths From Cooking Planet Earth” in which he imagines “’Destroy Your Television Day’” grew more popular/than Xmas and the 4th of July.” and a major oil company is renamed “BlueOrbSolar.” Starbuck’s poems also describe his love for the natural world’s beauty, albeit a world that is quickly disappearing. He continues to write about his passion for fishing in secluded streams and his observation and his admiration of great birds such as the bald eagle, the horned owl and the hawk on (a) wire, from his title poem, who continue to observe and wisely avoid him and other humans.

More realistically chilling, however, Starbuck’s “Thoughts at the End of Empire,” echo somewhat my concern about the lack of AIDS awareness and education in schools and colleges in the mid-1980s: “It’s possible that education will change / from locking children in boxes / to getting them outside in tide pools, / rivers, creeks, deserts, mountains. // It’s also possible, based on our collective / behavior, there won’t be future generations.” Hawk on Wire is a powerful poetry collection worth reading and discussing—especially in writing programmes.

Susan Lloy’s But When We Look Closer is a collection of short stories that describes what happens when some druggy, former ’70s punkers are forced to move back home, to a rest home or other institutions for their own safety. These stories—the dark side of the Sid and Nancy generation—revolve around the subjects of sex, drugs, music, art, money, and mental illness. In addition, Lloy writes about people who are finally freed to pursue their artistic and erotic interests whether this be through finally having a permanent roof over their heads, receiving an inheritance or winning the lottery.

These stories, some no longer than a page, often have snap, but always credible endings. For example in “Where To,” a woman who takes a cab to a bar planning to kill her unfaithful lover. She decides not to, though, after a conversation with her Afghan cabbie, who describes how he ended up stranded up in a country, whose military accidentally killed his family. In “Dylan’s Roost” the young bookstore owner, whose shop provides a comfortable haven for both a rich author and a schizophrenic homeless man, is not rescued from financial peril due to his hard work or his good deeds. There is no karma, no payoff for good deeds, but plenty of financial practicalities in the Lloy’s fictional world.

The type of short stories I especially enjoy, those written about the same characters over a space of several decades, are also represented in this collection by “Close Kin” and “Dutch Lite.” In the first story, the main character, Margaret, then a twenty-something, an art school student, is involved in a three-way with Dutch twin brothers, Theo, a violinist, and Joop, an artist, in Amsterdam. She forms a formal relationship with one to stay in the Netherlands, but later their chaotic ménage trois, in which one man was like “the cold Atlantic greets the warm waters of the Indian ocean,” leads to a tearful breakup and Margaret handing her Dutch identity (indefinite stay) card to a Brussels’ airport customs official. Fast forward years later and in “Dutch Lite” Margaret has literally won the lottery and recently purchased a canal house in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district from where she can hear the Westerkerk’s chimes. However, as Thomas Wolff famously warned, “you can’t go home again,” and she finds her two previous lovers distant and in more permanent relationships than she had with them even though she offers them both space in her new home to practice music and paint with no strings attached. Her efforts to meet a new man also fail due to her being less than forthcoming about why she’s in Amsterdam, afraid her new beau might be attracted to her for just her money. When he also rejects her, she finally realises she, as many of her Lloy’s characters, can’t live in the past or, even with enough money, recreate it in the present.

The Canadian and Quebecois references in Lloy’s book also made it interesting to this American, permanent-resident of the Netherlands, who rarely ventured North of Niagara Falls. Lloy describes life in Canada’s French-speaking province and capital as well as its British maritime provinces. She describes apartments along Quebec’s grand avenues and her characters familiar, urban angst of having to look for flats after the buildings, in which they’ve lived for decades, go condo. Her stories set along the coast include those about recently deceased relatives and being party to the suicide of a terminally-ill, local fisherman and childhood friend. They are also about the relatives and friends who attend these funerals and/or spread their loved ones’ ashes along the shore where they will be near familiar rocky coasts and migratory whale routes.

Lloy’s description of mental illness, especially schizophrenia and its relationship to art, is also a distinctive feature of these stories. In “Even Sad Dogs Smile,” Lloy describes the “meds” that prevented Daleighla’s, her main character’s, schizophrenic episodes so she wouldn’t try to destroy the bathroom sink to stop the noise coming from its drain, but which also “clouded her head” so she could no longer create remarkable and edgy paintings and drawings. One episode is announced by her dog, Romeo, who suddenly says: “Give it over, you greedy, tight-fisted bitch,” as she offers him a piece of her sandwich. Tragically, after struggling for years to be represented by a gallery, just as she is accepted, she has another episode in which she destroys most of her work and when she comes back to herself, can’t create anything new that’s as good.

Lloy’s But When We Look Closer is a unique collection of short stories set in North America and Europe where her characters struggle with drugs, sex, art, money, mental illness and, most importantly, loss. As in life, so as in her fiction, Lloy’s characters discover too late that they can’t really change themselves, (even through plastic surgery,) or their past.

The next book I’d like to recommend for this summer is Gary Beck’s Tremors, a very generous collection of 104 poems. As will be familiar to readers of my previous reviews, what nature and climate change are to Starbuck, eroticism and social commentary are to Beck. The book’s epigraph by Apollinaire about ‘having known all kinds, who didn’t fullfil their destinies’ announces Beck’s socially-aware poetic view towards the close of his life which reverberates throughout Tremors. His first poem, “Entropy” is concerned with the passage of time and his desire to “accomplish/anything meaningful/in remaining days.” In “From the Terrace” he compares himself to an elderly lizard/hulking on a heating rock.” In poems such as “Dementia” “Ailment,” “Trapped,” “Summons,” “Question,” “Last Gasp,” and “Tempus” the theme of ageing is described through various metaphors and from different perspectives.

Other poems criticise the wielders of artistic, social or financial power. In “Middle Class Poets” he scorns the “bloated poets,”…“sneering” at “the world” because of their “protective cloak of tenure…mumbling impotent objections”. In “Past Sighting”, the poet “saw a processional of faces / loved ones I have known and lost”. In “Futilism” he ponders power and observes “Castles are only safe/from marauders / when built on hilltops” and that they are only maintained by “oppressive power / harshly inflicted/on diverse vassals.” Perhaps timely food-for-thought for the current, Microserf, pre-robotic generation. In his very short poem, “Free Will,” Beck refers to destiny again: “The lines of destiny / in my troubled life / have never been as thin, as crossing, or not crossing,/ the next street / turning the next corner / expecting discoveries.” In “Errata” he “fondle(s) old mistakes” and shows “hopes…curdled / by too much desire / for material things.”

In Tremors, the poet finds an uneasy respite in literature and sex. In poems such as “Lust Song” and “Inspiration,” Beck refers to “the tender lust of power, / dreaming you perfect” and “Praise for reawakenings.” In “Woman” he pines: “I can do without you no longer”.

His less frequent and more unusual poems include the picturesque and informative “Mallorca” with its beautiful description of the island and its history and “Hitchhiking North” in which the poet bathes in a pond and leaves feeling the “water’s pure deliverance.” It’s a pity there’s not more of this type of poetry in this collection. Perhaps because this deliverance is brief, as the tremors mentioned in his poems “Detached” “I lie beside your tremors / silent, hoping to endure” and in “Ianamorata” “When last my fingers, / gripped hard to your flesh, / squeezed until my tremors burst,” quickly return Beck to his primary modes of eroticism and critical social observation.

In Tremors, Beck has written a generous, poetic collection, from which readers will certainly find at least a some poems that will deliver a few mindquakes.

Electric Psalms, new and selected poems is British-born poet and Amsterdam-resident Kate Foley’s latest book. Its first eight sections contain many of Foley’s more well-known and previously published poems from her first collection, Soft Engineering, to her most recent, The Don’t Touch Garden, the latter of which was reviewed in AQ14, in autumn 2015. The ninth section includes 27 new poems with subjects as wide-ranging as pre-, natural and recorded history, being a linguistic ex-pat, dangerous Amsterdam cyclists, ageing, Quaker meeting, an artist’s unstoppable urge to create, and the evolution and possible end of humankind. In 28 pages, Foley explores these subjects and more with her keen sense of observation. In poems such as “To Write a Natural History, “What I Once Knew,” “Squirreling — Or An Archaeology of Memory,” she zooms in on the words that “lie in the cave of our mouths,” or “the spider on the back gate / (that) drew a marvellous / map with silk, / a living harp / to sing winged creatures in” and “All the lives you touched live on walls,” respectively. “My Humble Body,” “Why is Patinated OK,” and “What I Once Knew” are all about ageing, “from The Other Side of Sleep” about dying and “Washing the Dead” about death. Though some poems contain the same subjects, each creates a different mood, by using a different structure, style and set of metaphors.

Most interesting are Foley’s poems about life in Amsterdam. These include “A Different Psalm” about Amsterdam Quaker Meeting, “The Collective Noun for Bicycles” and the book’s title poem, “Electric Psalms.” The last two are about the city’s seemingly mad cyclists who are a law onto themselves. In “Electric Psalms,” Foley describes cyclists who “whirr (past) like demented coffee grinders.” She marvels at the torrent of helmet-less cyclists, “Helmets? Ha!” some wearing “high heels” or with “mobile phones…clamped to one ear.” In “Electric Psalms” it’s “Traffic lights? Ha!” or bikes with “no brakes,” or cyclists who “Text as you ride?” all of which captures the hurly-burly of living in central Amsterdam.

There are also poems about music and musicians reflecting the influence of the nearby Concertgebouw on Foley’s life. In “Borrowing the Old Man’s Shoes” she describes how Beethoven “stepped out of his carriage to write music on the road.” In “Tuning the Brook with Stones,” she writes of the music water makes as it goes downstream.

Foley even includes an apocryphal poem set in the Netherlands entitled “After It’s Over.” In the poem she asks what will happen: “when all the restored windmills / have broken loose…when Facebook turns the same / tired page tirelessly, / and all the ringtones of the world / sing in polyphony?” Her solution to this domesday scenario and one of the keys to her poetic perspective as a trained midwife and scientist is “to celebrate / the grief of elephants, / their ivory yellow sadness, / the scattered far-flung / molecules of belief.”
AQ

AQ18 Spring 2017 Book Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Jacob M. Appel. The Mask of Sanity. The Permanent Press. ISBN 978-1-57962-495-8, 256 pages.
Jacob M. Appel. The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street. Stories. Howling Bird Press. ISBN 978-0-9961952-1-8, 181 pages.
Lou Gaglia. Sure Things & Last Chances. Spring to Mountain Press. ISBN 978-0-9863490-4-1, 194 pages.

In this issue I continue to review authors published by non-traditional or indie presses who I believe offer more than what the big-five have served up on their spring reading lists. I feel that these three books of indie fiction offer stories that are quirky, yet human; comic, yet profound; fantastic yet realistic. Their authors, though occupying different points of the social spectrum, come to some of the same conclusions about the human spirit groping its way towards safety, love and recognition.

The first book is The Mask of Sanity by Jacob M. Appel, who is interviewed in depth in this issue. This book is about Dr. Jeremy Balint who becomes a sociopathic serial killer (the reader initially thinks) in order to cover the final murder of his wife, whom he discovers one day, by accident, and unobserved in flagrante delicto with a hospital colleague. On the surface, Dr. Balint looks like a devoted husband, father and physician who appears to be moving up the ladder at the hospital where he works due to his expertise, ambition and a bit of luck. Unfortunately as readers discover, this is not the case. Positions and awards become sometimes ironically available to him due to his cunning, envy and willingness to do anything, even kill strangers, to achieve his endgame.

The characterisation in The Mask of Sanity is excellent; each character has a distinct and believable voice and behaviour. In addition, Balint’s homicidal plans mesh like the gears of a clock until someone leaves the front and back doors of his house open and a neighbourhood toddler wanders in and into the family pool where it drowns. This ultimately leads to the suicide of one of its grief-stricken parents, which could unwittingly unmask Dr. Balint’s murder spree. The Mask of Sanity is full of surprises and will keep the reader wondering if Balint will be caught all the way to the very end of the story.

Appel’s second book, The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street. Stories. won the 2016 Howling Bird Press Fiction Award, one of the many fiction awards Appel has been awarded over the past decade. Each of these stories are peopled by a different cast of characters: an elderly couple who discover their prefab retirement home has been delivered to the wrong address; a group of older, suburban women who organise a topless, backyard protest, a dying man who wonders to whom he should his stockpile of antique iron lungs, a starving, middle-age actress who’s trolled by good reviews by a man she rejected for a date in high school; a couple who grapple with pulling the life support plug on their teenage daughter who was bullied into committing suicide. These stories have different characters and settings but all revolve around the issues of bioethics, quality of life, challenging conventional notions and how love, no matter how quirky, can sometimes provide comfort in an uncertain and difficult world. Thematically these stories are deep whilst, at the same time, they are also entertaining. If they don’t move you, challenge your perspective or occasionally make you laugh, then perhaps you should seek professional help.

Lou Gaglia’s Sure Things & Last Chances is a darkly humorous collection of short fiction. Many of its stories are set also in New York, although his characters are working and middle-class bridge and tunnel residents rather than Appel’s Manhattan doctors, psychologists and other urban professionals. A theme similar to both writers, however, is looking for love, although many of Gaglia’s characters are unwilling or unable to take chances, or if they do, find themselves in less than ideal relationships. Some have been abused or bullied as Greg in “Networking” who as a teen was hung over a railing by a boy’s father for tackling his son. Others such as the narrator of “Penance” take out their aggression on competitors by killing ants and then going to confession. Others such as the “Lost in the Woods” protagonist, stumble from one romantic mishap to another. “The Listeners” is a story of two different men’s break ups with women overheard by the narrator in a library. The first, remembered from years ago, was due to a difference in religion. The second is related in the present and due to a girlfriend related her near-death experience to an unbelieving, superficial boyfriend. The narrator in his mind tries to comfort the second woman, even though she’s not there, just part of an unfortunate story: Where did you go? What did you see when you died? I’ll listen. I will., the main character says to himself on his way out of the library. In other stories such as “Almost Like Steve McQueen” Gaglia’s protagonists try to summon false courage to go to the dentist. “Winging It” depict son’s and grandson’s desires not to be like their fathers, the grandson not wanting to be pegged in any profession, versus his father’s desire for the stability of a nine-to-five job after his own father had had so many jobs, his mother “couldn’t name them all in one day.” This typifies the swing of the occupational pendulum over the generations—one generation choosing adventure with risk and the next, security and boredom, after the unstable childhood caused by an adventurous father.

What I find most pleasing in his fiction is that sometimes Gaglia’s stories are also a continuation of an earlier narrative. The shy, 30-something introverted Greg in “Networking” returns years earlier as a physically-abused teenager in “Butch.” This gives Gaglia’s fiction an interesting continuity that is also found in his story “Hunger” when his protagonist thinks later about the Italian waitress, Jeanette, who was kind to him after he was beaten up in “Letters from a Young Poet” in Gaglia’s previous collection, Poor Advice. In fact, there’s quite a lot of working and middle-class, school-of-hard-knocks violence and cruelty in Gaglia’s stories. The kind I remember from my neighbourhood where parents physically “disciplined” their children with belts and boards, and the neighbourhood bullies chased and assaulted anyone weaker or smaller whilst their parents turned a blind eye. Violence was also a part of sports that were played in my neighbourhood, mostly football, baseball and hockey, these matches ending usually when someone was injured. (My reprieve from grammar school football came when my front teeth got chipped and my parents imagined the impending financial pain of future dental bills). It’s the realism of these stories, with their everyman protagonists trying to make sense out of a violent and abusive world and how it arrests their development later in life, which makes these stories all the more compelling.

AQ16 Summer 2016 Book Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Utmost by Hiram Larew. I. Giraffe Press, ISBN 978-0-9972243-0-6, 35 pages.
Resonance by Gary Beck. Dreaming Big Publications, ISBN 978-1523916405, 135 pages.

During the last quarter, I received two books that I felt were worth reviewing due to their artistry and scope. Both are by present or past AQ authors and both describe similar concerns such as aging and love. However, their poems have different settings such as country v city and the natural v the human worlds and different approaches. The first book is a poetry chapbook entitled Utmost by AQ16 contributor Hiram Larew. The second is a poetry book entitled Resonance by AQ12 contributor Gary Beck.

Utmost’s 23, one-page or half-page poems are suggestive, meditative, find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and use common words to express enigmatic thoughts. “Anything Can Happen” is the most concerned with the inexpressible and the unknown “You love what’s next more than people—/…You’re so grateful for what’s unknown.” The poem “What Do You Think” also describes Larew’s love of the unexpected. “But most of all/I worship stuck doors/Because they make me blink when I didn’t expect to” or the upside-down world of “Marvely” “When bad tastes like candy/And good is just ache?”

Thoughts about aging are also found in “Boy Howdy.” Larew refers to aging by saying his father’s: “…coat pockets were really my teenage years.//Carry on now is how I feel now — ” In “Vista” he writes: “I’m new at being old.” “Rafters” opens with “Maybe you can’t roar to start/Anymore as others can.” The next poem, “Your Life’s” terminal line is “Not forever but a dot.” along with “It’s Getting Late,” which comments on the aging process: “Too often it seems shoulders are cold.”

Larew’s poems are also about the comfort that he feels in the outdoors “…the best work you will ever do is when/You are opening the barn.” His enigmatic use of images from the natural world to express his thoughts are most prevalent in “Who Is” when he writes: “What I won’t say is why/What I will say is look/I might even whisper smoke—/But I won’t say you.” His line “I will only love a small piece of sky” shows once again his love and trust of the natural world. In “But More” we can see Larew’s artistic delight in the natural world and the ability to imagine other, unknown places. “To swell summer as apples do/Or shade swirls like bridges can/To be lights on in other rooms”

The last and title poem brings the writer back to the natural world with images of “I would be garlands older…”spoons of dirt…”an idea that scratches radishes redder”…”A bird straddling two branches.” These poems are imagistic, enigmatic little gems with one foot in the natural world and the other in the world of the imagination. I highly recommend this collection.

Resonance by Gary Beck also discusses the subject of mortality and especially aging, (among others) but within a New York City nightscape. “Old Age” for example which mentions: “youth’s unebbing hunger/is eternal and denied.” reminds me of William Yeats’ “Long Legged Fly” poem in which Caesar considers his battle options. Other mentions are included in the poems “Change” in which the writer is asked to be a pallbearer for a man he barely knew: “I think about an acquaintance, now dead./I never liked him…I look at pictures of the dead/and barely remember their faces.” or in the very short, “Woeful Vision” where the poet sees a woman he once knew: “No longer young/but not older than me…and a wrinkled face/that has forgotten smiles.”

Unlike Larew, Beck directly describes social and sexual relations. In “Opium Escape” Beck describes the intoxicating and sometimes unwise nature of being in love. In “Fond Pause,” “Sad Mate,” “Two Songs of Lust” and “Separation” he describes the separation felt by the unloved from the active world that goes on. “Severance” is about the intensity of a one-night stand/brief encounter, “Renunciation” about how unrequited love that burns itself out and “Electronic Loss” includes new metaphor about losing a love in a telephone booth or over the phone. Beck’s social consciousness is best expressed in his poems “Dire Prediction” in which his wonders what the the loss of jobs to the service economy will mean to those “who will walk through fire, bullets, blood,/to protect us.” In “Children of Deprivation” he wonders about the effect of capitalistic hoarding from poor in a land of plenty—“know swollen barns of grain/rotting on a distant government preserve.” In “Rebel’s Pliant” he hopes humankind will overcome “its obliterating madness.”

Buried within Resonance, however, on page 98 of this 135 page collection, is the book’s real touchstone, a vignette about the poet’s first submission and its relative worth, entitled “First Poem Sent — Oct. 1962.” In a few lines, Beck describes the respect a poet’s hard, passionate work receives as it is sent on its way: “(I) gave it to the postman./Without a glance/he tossed it on a pile/and it fell to the floor.” Other ars poetic or ars longa, vita brevis poems can be found in this volume including “Possession” with its “dozen poems on my desk…works of beauty wisdom joy wild hearty lusty obscene reverent ecstatic maudlin curious erotic mad exuberance….” “Art Calls” is a prose poem that goes right to the gut as it describes a poet’s struggle in discovering and fulfilling his calling.

There are many good poems in Resonance. However, the volume could do with a thematic regrouping of the poems to give the reader a better overview of Resonance’s approximately 110 poems. In addition, I would suggest moving “First Poem Sent” to the very beginning so it could function as a sort of prologue or proem. These two changes would help a reader dip more easily into this long and varied poetry collection.

AQ15 Spring 2016 Book Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Scott T. Starbuck. Industrial Oz. Ecopoems. Fomite Press. ISBN 978-19425-15166, 111 pages.
Jane Summer. Erebus. Sibling Rivalry Press. ISBN 978-1-937420-1, 185 pages.
Priscilla Atkins. The Café of our Departure. Sibling Rivalry Press. ISBN 978-1-937420-87-1, 77 pages.
Wendy Gist. Moods of the Dream Fog. Finishing Line Press, 29 pages.

Last year was a very productive year for non-traditional publishers addressing contemporary issues such as climate change and global warming and timeless personal ones such as the love and sudden loss of a friend or partner, or depicting their unique corner of the world. The four books I’ve chosen to review for AQ15 are concerned with some of the issues mentioned above and, because of that, I felt they were of sufficient merit to warrant a review in Amsterdam Quarterly.

The first book is Industrial Oz, Ecopoems by Scott T. Starbuck. Industrial Oz is a pro-ecology, anti-war, anti-banks, philosophical, counter-culture poetry book. In his essay, “The Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world….Poets … are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society…”

In Industrial Oz, Starbuck takes this charge very seriously. Industrial Oz depicts Starbuck’s many interests and concerns such as hiking, fishing, pollution, species extinction, rain forest destruction, global warming, the disposal of nuclear waste, the wisdom of indigenous peoples and their “pacification” by Europeans, the “taming” of the wilderness, the disappearing pensions of Generation X, and war’s effect on the “home front” including vets with PTSD and other disastrous, sociological and environmental problems. It asks and answers important questions such as how were the Americas “settled” by Europeans, how were its resources acquired and used and, as a result, what is the future of those continents and the planet?

Starbuck’s poems use various approaches, some more programmatic, others more aesthetic. Structurally and thematically Starbuck’s poems can sometimes be longer, somewhat political Ginsbergian riffs such as “Why All US-Made Nuclear Waste Must Be Stored At The White House” or “What if one Night a Big Solar Storm Went By?” Other times his images and examples or “evidence” are more subtle and his lines shorter, but all his poems are just as compelling. For example in “How It Is” the effect of global warming and its disastrous effect on coastal countries is rendered quite simply and geographically: “Sometimes you forget Greenland exists/…Then it melts and Holland disappears.” In “River Reflections” in just 46 words Starbuck’s discusses his own political stance—how politics considers him unimportant, how he has rejected TV, and the source of his power against the system. “Like the elk/my vote/won’t be heard” but the poem ends with the defiant: “I am a nonessential/ and unproductive/ worker// yet a threat/to the machine /merely by resting// and thinking.”

In his poem, “Thinking About the Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2014 Conference in Seattle,” he challenges the seeming non-awareness or lack of interest in academic programmes for environmental/political issues such as the death of sea stars and polar bear cubs due to climate change and the 100-tonne Fukushima nuclear storage tank spill which happened a week before this writers’ convention. (I remember getting feedback on my AIDS poems from professors and students in a mid-80s graduate writing programme and both parties wondering aloud if perhaps I wasn’t being a bit “hysterical” about an illness that might not turn out to be so serious). As an image of these programmes solipsistic and incorrect focus, Starbuck describes how as a child he carved sand circles: “for onlookers to enjoy//before the next set of waves erased everything.” Some other poems, such “Poem for Ishi” and “Of Whales and the Hinckley Hunt on Christmas Eve, 1818,” could also be used in secondary and tertiary, cross-curriculum writing and history classes related to questions about what happened to Americas’ indigenous peoples and its wildlife after their “discovery” and the “pacification” of the Americas by Europeans.

Throughout all the poems in Industrial Oz, though, no matter what their format, the central thread is Starbuck’s love and concern for the wilderness and the Earth. And in that light, all of the poems in Industrial Oz are worth reading if you share Starbuck’s concern for the future of mankind and the planet.

Next follow two elegiac books published by Sibling Rivalry Press that use two different approaches to chart the writers’ grief as they remember/memorialise a loved one. The first book, Erebus, is about someone killed in a plane crash, the second, The Café of our Departure, about the memory of someone who was slowly slipping away with cancer, who, in the end, decided to take his own life. Both depict the haunting that memory creates due to a desire to try to hold on to some part of these people’s lives and their relationship with the narrator in the past and carry it into the present and future. However, the two employ different, stylistic approaches. The first uses a more objective, factual, and scientific approach in its recapitulation of the relationship and attempted recovery of the person. The second uses a more aesthetic approach using art, museums and food to try to remember an almost life-long friendship.

The first book is Jane Summer’s Erebus. Erebus is the most southern, active volcano in the world, located in the Antarctic continent. In Greek mythology it is also the entrance to the underworld. What Moby Dick is to whaling with its catalogue of sails and harpoons, Erebus is to fatal, exotic sightseeing plane crashes. It is a well-written, obsessive, extended catalogue of grief about the crash—a history of what was taken suddenly—the passengers’ lives—and what was returned much later—some exposed bodies or parts and personal belongings including some, ironically unspoilt, colour photobooks of Antarctica and passengers’ journals.

Erebus has three, formal chronological divisions or parts entitled: 2013, 1993, and 1973 in which the writer works backwards to her relationship with the plane crash victim, Kay Barnick in New York City in the early ’70s. In the preface, Summer warns that “this story is based in fact…but it is above all a work of art, and thus a certain amount of leeway must be allowed.” Throughout the three sections, Erebus’ two-line lyric stanzas bind and build on the effect of information from news stories, photos, aircraft, airports, Antarctic geography, maps, wildlife pictures, notes left behind by her dead friend, a quotation from Aristotle’s The Neomachian Ethics about friendship, items of New Zealand history and culture (including James Cook’s “discovery” of the island), Summer’s implication of a possible airline cover up related to the crash, white flight and increased crime in Manhattan in the late ’70s, an equation of the deadly g-forces exerted on bodies of those in the unsurvivable crash and lastly, a list of all passengers and crew to tell a chilling and unrelenting tale of an airline catastrophe and the loss of a loved one. Using this method, Erebus, as an artistic creation, is certainly worth more than the sum of its parts.

The second book, Priscilla Atkins’ elegiac book, The Café of our Departure choses a different strategy. The Café of our Departure is also divided into three unnamed sections with an epigram from James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem.” This poetry remembers a loved one from a much more epicurean perspective based on art, good friendship and food and poetry. The book describes Atkin’s gay, high school boyfriend and later, former husband, Mike, including his slow death from cancer and his choice to end his own life. The poems include references to their favourite cafes and restaurants “Unguided tour of Grief with Green Wallpaper,” museums “Resolve,” art “La Nature Morte” and “Sky in a Jar,” and photographs “First Trip to Chicago After” interspersed with teenage adventures of buying greasy fast food and fishing trips in “Mike,” a reconstruction of Mike’s suicide in “Resolves” and many references to the poetry of James Schuyler, which I imagine both the writer and the subject greatly admired.

Another aspect about this book that is exceptional is Atkins’ honesty as she courageously describes her ex-husband’s impending fatal illness/suicide and his changing role in her later life as they became more aware of his sexual orientation. Her acceptance and depiction of Mike’s gay “friend” Mark, is also exceptional as shown in the poem, “Anything You Want.” “Before heading downstairs/Mark said: “Take anything you want.” Atkins writes that amidst the stacks of Fiestaware, the “Shirts, slacks hanging in the closet;/rows of empty shoes” all she wants to do is to: “lie in your bed/and keep watch/.”

Throughout the book, Atkins uses different poetic forms—from two-line stanzas and traditional four-line quatrains to longer free-form stanzas. All include Atkins attention to detail to and objects such as in her poem entitled “Mike” in which she references death in the beginning but also the fun and companionship they experienced as teenagers: “Only you and I would be giddily/in overalls digging out/petrified worms (from the last trip)…For an entire year, we snorted/like Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine. (Pity the poor teachers/who had us in class together)./Summer days we’d drive your parents’/ car all over hell and back/…—but mostly to laugh and talk, to get the/feeling you get after doing that for hours.” Due to this wide span of time and poetic forms, The Café of our Departure is a fitting and moving memorial to her former friend and husband.

Wendy Gist’s Moods of a Dream Fog chapbook contains poems that describe the people and landscapes of the American Southwest some of which were previously published in more than 14 different literary journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly. Gist is not only adept in her selection of images but also in her use of different types of typography and lines. Sometimes she keeps her lines short and lets them float down the page as in “Drip Wish”

The woman peers
       out the
                  tent screen,
                           looking,
                     flat
on her backbone,
      at bloat between
monolithic
         slot of volcanic
                    tuff

Other times she writes moving block prose poems, such as “Visitor at Tsaile Lake” and “Morning Beat.” My other favourites in this collection include “Canyon de Chelly Echoes” which uses repetition to recreate the indigenous American ritual very effectively, and “Midsummer Night at Isotopes Park,” which includes this fine stanza, is a very poetic and sociological, contemporary description of Southwestern culture:

“Fine men I so love, husband and son, grub nachos, imbibe
pricey beer. Fun-loving women fork strawberries and kiwis
from fruit cups, sip Blue Moon draft, turn tipsy to us, laugh,”

For me, however, the short erotic poems including “Blush” and the title poem “Passion Fog” are the most arresting. “Passion Fog” explores both the light and dark sides of attraction and why one should be careful: “She can’t tell/up till now/if he strives to bite/or kiss tender.” Unfortunately these poems are not at the very beginning of the chapbook where I would have placed them, but come after “To My Dream,” “Intimate Waters,” “Electrolysis of Love” and “Winter Walk through Twilight” which don’t seem to resonate with me as much as the other 23 poems, but then a score of 19 out of 23 isn’t bad either. Gist’s Moods of a Dream Fog poetry chapbook is a good, strong entry in the world of first chapbooks. I recommend it especially for readers interested in poems about love, passion, relationships and the landscapes and cultures of the Southwestern US.

Zero—Let Us Explore The Stars Exhibition, Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum   7 July to 8 November 2015
by Bryan R. Monte

If you are in Amsterdam on a rainy afternoon and the lines at the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum both wind down the street, may I suggest a visit to the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum’s, Zero— Let Us Explore The Stars special exhibition. Even though I thought I was fairly well versed in “Modern” art, I was surprised last July to attend the press opening for a retrospective of an art movement about which I had no previous knowledge.

Zero is an exhibition about a group of optimistic, future-oriented, European (Dutch, French, German, Italian and Swiss) artists, who, in the 1950s and early ’60s, used simple, cheap, monochromatic and sometimes recycled materials in novel ways including puncturing, (Henk Peters), cutting and burning, (Otto Piene), mounting or stacking (Amando and Jan Henderiske) or just painting and/or displaying found objects (Jan Schoonhoven).

Zero artists (or spouses) with the Zero Manifesto on wall behind them at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, (4 July 2015). Back row l. to r.: Elizabeth Goldring Piene, Christian Megert, Jan Henderikse and unidentified woman. Front row l. to r.: unidentified man, herman de vries and Uli Pohl.

Just as with any new movement when people are experimenting with materials, some were more successful than others. Henk Peter’s Aquarel (1966, 2014 reconstruction), a wall of water-filled, triangular-shaped plastic bags filled and hung against a black background and illuminated by spotlights was for me the simplest yet most memorable work in the exhibition. The 20 rows of perfectly aligned bags of water catch the light in such a way that they actually shine against the black wall. Followed closely thereafter would be Yoyao Kusama’s One Thousand Boat Show (1963) a boat made of what looks like white stones, with hundreds of identical smaller images of the same boat projected around it, which seems to float in the room. And a third work would be Jan Schoonhoven’s R 62-16 (1962) mentioned above which, once painted white and mounted, shows the simplicity and the restful rhythm of its repeated structure.

Less successful in my opinion, however, are Amando’s tires mounted on a wall, Guenther Uecker’s chairs or TV sets with nails pounded in their sides or Jan Henderiske’s beer crate or cork sculptures, which although most students are accustomed to stacking crates in their rooms to make cheap shelving, I wouldn’t particularly call that art. In the same vein, herman de vries’ white, seemingly architectural, model building blocks don’t move me as much as Otto Pien’s perforated metal drum with its rotating internal light source that casts changing, expanding and deflating geometric images on the surrounding walls. Similarly the optical illusions that would come later in the sixties are preceded by works such as François Morellet’s, Sphère-trames, stainless-steel sculpture (1962) or the more dynamic optical illusions (albeit monochromatic ones) created by Günther Uecker’s, Heinz Mack’s and Otto Peine’s Lightroom gallery: Homage to Fontana (1964).

Some of Zero’s real treasures, however, are reserved for almost last. Two galleries to the left of the entrance hall (the last two if you follow the map provided by the museum) is a room of Zero videos. The best of these are the nude body painting performance art of Yves Klein with a live, seated audience and string quartet accompaniment in addition to Heinz Mack’s silver spaceman clothing, tall poles hung with round and banner-like silver reflecting material which seems set on another planet rather than on a North Sea beach. The former clearly seems to pre-date the later sexually-free counter-culture happenings that would take over campuses and the art world just a few years later.

Even if its sunny outside, I’d still recommend you take a break from the crowds on the Museumplein and use the opportunity to learn more about a relatively unknown (for me) 1950s and early ’60s European art movement which was the historical predecessor of the optically illusionary and happenings art of later ‘60s and early ‘70s. I guarantee your time at the Stedelijk will be well spent.