On The Altar of Greece - Donna J. Gelagotis Lee (Gival Press)

Today's book of poetry:
On The Altar Of Greece.  Donna J. Gelagotis Lee.  Gival Press.  Arlington, Virginia.  2006.

WINNER OF THE GIVAL PRESS POETRY AWARD

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee's On The Altar Of Greece is a series of Polaroid camera shots of the blue-sky blue-sea wonder of Greece.  Lee turns living in Greece into a poetical travelogue - but do not think white beaches and late night ouzo.

Lee is a full commitment type poet.

She inhabits Greece like it is a marriage between her and the land itself.  Every day she learns some new thing about custom, tradition, language, feral cats, filia/"friendship", the way of things in Greece and the way of things in the rest of the world.

Not Another Ordinary Day

The pots clang against
          the outdoor sink -- the water runs.
It's morning -- these are its sounds.
         Voices from the footpath. The sea breeze
carrying the donkey's bray and farmer's call
          of the day's produce --
melitzanes, maroulia, tomates, lemonia.
          The milkmaid greets me
in the hallway -- her wide girth takes up
          the space between me and my mother-in-law,
but her smile relates the news of a story --
          ehis megalo mouni*
I'm struck by the translation, thinking
          I misunderstood, but her face
reveals the truth. And I wonder,
          How does she know?
Her eyes never leave me and then
          she touches my arm,
as if to verify what she already knew,
          her familiarity almost violative,
but the ease of these women checks
          any ill feeling, and I brush it away, as I do
the hair on my face -- a simple
          act, though the words remain.
And I begin to wonder how this woman
          who milks goats knows about vaginas--
I eye my husband with slight suspicion,
          then quickly erase the thought. The intimacy
of the women of the village has surprised me--
          they reveal their sex lives
as casually as they would
          a daily routine -- and sex
often is, a neighbor explains, routine,
          obligatory. Gamos, as one young Greek man
told me, means wedding,
          and the slang word gamo, to screw.
Having children, the milkmaid explains,
          makes a woman's life worthwhile.
Big teat, lots of milk: big vagina,
          lots of babies? Nice to know I meet her approval,
as I am still childless -- this justification
          proffered, that I would have a good mouni.


* You have a big vagina (mouni: slang for vulva, vagina, female genitalia).

...

Sometimes Lee learns more than she bargained for, more than she wants to know.  But she shares.   As a fearless woman and poet, Lee walks that jagged shore as sure-footed as a barefoot Helena, born to the rocks and sea.

Many of the poems explore the quiet work of woman.  Through these poems Lee sees and shares the essential labour of community and how so much of it comes from the uncelebrated labour, the worn hands of women and girls.

It would have been helpful to know

that winters on the island
seize the breath and hurl it
over the sea, which
sends it back again to lodge
in the throat. It would have
been helpful to understand
bitter autumn, its fruit laboring
on the tree, fat, black-
blue, the strange green of spring
still lingering. In the fields women
curl, down on their knees,
combing the earth for olives,
branches swaying overhead
from force, the arms of men,
the arms of trees, all strength
and heaving. It would have been
helpful to know summer's
undertow and the tenuousness
of the black sea urchin,
only its needles moving with the waves
but ready to release. While I ate,
iodine-red stained my fingers,
the caviar of the sea urchin
rolled on my tongue like clear
words, raw antiseptic. I
scooped them out. It would have
been helpful to know
how to hold the probing
needles back, to keep them
from stinging.

...

On The Altar Of Greece alternates between lovely and breathtaking technicolour moments of a tourist's island journey and a seat of the pants, black dressed, olive permeated daughter of Greece.

Lee has, as much as possible, made herself a natural citizen of her adopted land.

On The Altar Of Greece is probably one the more honest/honed/heartfelt portrayals of real life in Greece that we are likely to see in poetry for a while.  Lee adorns absolutely nothing -- but she does fine and share beauty in the most tranquil and human places.

Woman in Ano Glyfada

Kerchiefed. Tendrils
of silver
touch her face;
she hauls firewood
on her back, lifts
bricks to fill
the shadows
at the base
of her whitewashed home.

Wooden clothespins
wedge my fingers.
Wind hurls sea spray
up the mountain. The sun
places it
on my cheek.

She hesitates,
breeze catching the grape vines
of the trellis, peaches
threatening to fall.
Her eyes
quickly
keep their silence
and traverse the boughs
of her tree
where its pears ripen
over
my balcony.
Doulia, doulia.
Ti na Kanoume?*

Her lips reach back
into a smile,
the weight
of a fallen axe
on the words
I no longer need
to translate.

* Work, work. / What can we do?

...

Today's book of poetry really liked the hard work Lee did here.  This is a different appreciation of Greece, a different conversation.  This is a conversation that celebrates women, looks at the world they take care of while the rest of us spin around outside, but controlled by the gravity within.  It is likely as close as I will get to a Greek kitchen even though I was transported back to our happy days in Samos and Paros.

I remember watching two cats fighting in an alley behind our room in Samos.  I sat on the porch, in the shade, and drank ice-cold white wine that I had poured out of a 2 litre plastic pop bottle.  There was a little wine shop right at the bottom of our stairs (all of Samos, the city, is on hills around the harbour), where I could get a plastic pop bottle filled for about fifty cents.  A local retsina, crisp and clear, like pine-honey.  I watched those two cats fight, drank the local, saw that blue sea under that blue sky.

Se parakalo - if you please.

On The Altar Of Greece won the 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category.

It was nominated for:
2007 Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry/Literary Criticism
2007 Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry
2007 Writers Notes Book Award for Art: Poetry
2007 Levis Reading Prize
2006 Pushcart Prize
2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for Poetry
Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry
2006 National Book Award for Poetry

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

Photo by Alicia Kozikowski (Pryde Brown Photographs)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee earned a B.A., cum laude, in English and creative writing from Sweet Briar College, where she was a Davison-Foreman scholar. She lived in Athens, Greece, for many years. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly publications, including CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The Midwest Quarterly, the Seattle Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. 

Lee was a finalist for the 2007 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize for her poem "Docking at Limnos" (Calyxpress.org). Her poem "The pines" (published inTerrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments) was nominated by Simmons B. Buntin, editor and publisher of Terrain.org, for the Best of the Net 2007 anthology by Sundress Publications.

BLUBS:

"Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s On the Altar of Greece actually does place its reader before, or on, an elevated place where the ceremony of everyday sublime life in Greece plays out. Without resorting to prefabricated classical references we’ve already heard to the nth, she includes us totally in everything she experiences and sharply senses there, the orange-turned-yellow air, corners of walls, the shaded grove of stone men, the dark beach, a thread through looped thread, Poseidon cracking a wave, goat bells, 'the speech unfolding / that flung dice against the white walls / until they wore eyes.' Then, as important, there’s the undertow of her subtle and deft suggestions of how the people in these scenes relate, and of the intriguingly close connection she herself has to them. Ms. Lee shows us a new, vivid, freshly layered world inside an ancient and long-known one. With her eyes, strong mind and solidly classical style of picturing in new terms this historical place turned myth turned real again, the journey of our time at this altar offers us a striking, immense set of views of a world we thought we knew, and still, wonderfully, do know in much richer ways by the end."
—Don Berger, Judge of the 2005 Gival Press Poetry Award, Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland, and author of Quality Hill and The Cream-Filled Muse

"Award-winning poet and longtime resident of Greece Donna J. Gelagotis Lee presents On the Altar of Greece, a free-verse poetry collection that explores the majesty, venerable history, and wonder of Greece from an American woman's perspective. Poems contemplate mundane aspects of daily life such as food preparation or the relationship between neighbors, as well as holiday celebrations and the taste of simply experiencing a different way of life. An evocative and memorable tribute. Remembering You: 'Gamma, epsilon... / Slowly your name spells itself / to me, my tongue catching the letters / along the contours, bulging through / interior openings that flip the letters / onto their backs. And I have / forgotten what they said to me. / I have forgotten the taste of your alphabet.'"
—Susan Bethany, Midwest Book Review, March 2007

givalpress.com

336


Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Honey - Richard Carr (Gival Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Honey.  Richard Carr.  Gival Press.  Arlington, Virginia.  2008
(Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award)

Whimsy and delight would suggest the wrong thing, but whimsy and delight are at the fore of Honey.

Richard Carr gives us a sequence of such silly joy that the reader spills with glee.  But there is enough seriousness in here to give you a heart attack, sweetly.

Intelligent and witty doesn't cut the mustard with Honey, but witty and intelligent are two of the first visceral responses to this tapestry.  This is some fine weaving.  Richard Carr is as sure footed as spider on its' own web.

IV

No amount of washing can divert the ashtray
from its purpose.
The Bearded Lady, clean shaven in the off season,
offers me a cigarette,

and we share a thin, gravelly smoke.
I want to be like her.
She is a mirror. when she stirs her coffee,
the whole restaurant stirs.

...

These poems rollick with frenzied imagination.  Richard Carr has limitless spark and endless horizon.
Each of these stunning short poems adds another colour to Carr's explosive palette.

IX

Design in the gothic city
a matter of assemblage,
I wear a massive clothing of stone monuments
and scaffolding.

The street a chaotic plaid of asphalt repairs,
I dent the pavement
where the work is still fresh,
hot.

The soles of my feet blacken my apartment--
walls, ceiling, all of it.

...

I usually require more of a narrative thread but found these tireless ditties endlessly fascinating.  It's like they came out of the barrel of a machine gun, each bullet as faultless as the other.

Carr would, I expect, be a marvelous dinner guest -- his imagination rolls out like a big sun that is constantly rising.

LXXXIII

I gather to my cheekbones
crabappled blossoms drenched in a cold drizzle.
I lick violets, kneeling obscenely,
and draw yellow dandelion heads into my mouth.

I want to taste what the bee tastes,
nectar and pollen, but more, her chemical imprint,
footprints on the petals,
to learn where she has been, what orchards and nurseries.

gardens, graves --
and if she ever blushes.

...

A blushing bee, footprints on petals.  I loved these.

Everyone here at Today's book of poetry chose three different poems for today's blog -- but I chose the three you read here.  It could just as easily been any three poems picked at random from this electric book.

Dazzling stuff, sweet like honey, and a little sticky.

Richard Carr

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Carr grew up in Blue Earth, Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis. A former systems analyst, web designer, and tavern manager, he has taught writing and literature at several universities and community colleges. His other poetry collections are Ace (The Word Works, winner of the Washington Prize), Honey (Gival Press, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award), and Mister Martini (University of North Texas Press, Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize). His chapbooks include Butterfly andNothingness (Mudlark) and Letters from North Prospect(Frank Cat Press, winner of the Frank Cat Press Poetry Chapbook Competition).

BLURBS

"Poet Richard Carr weaves together lovely and unlikely connections in his Gival Press Poetry Award winner, Honey (978-1-928589-45-7). Wrinkled plants, a goldfish and the poet drink water while outside, 'The clouds rain gasoline.' A Bearded Lady stirs coffee in a restaurant, birds listen to our voices on a telephone wire, and 'somewhere a dying child / wears a wig of [his] donated hair.' Lyrical, laced with longing, these 100 short poems create a world where 'The best stars slide across the sky in retrograde.'"
ForeWord Magazine, July 2009

"Honey is a tour de force. Comprised of 100 electrifying microsonnets, Richard Carr’s invention recalls Berryman’s Dreamsongs, for brilliance and wit, but is more readable. Open to any page: language and image startle and delight, like 'Einstein’s blown-fuse hairdo.' The whole sequence creates a narrative that becomes, like the Hapax Legomenon, a form that occurs only once in a literature."
—Barbara Louise Ungar, author of the award-winning collection The Origin of the Milky Way and final judge of the 2007 Gival Press Poetry Award

"This sequence of compact poems is musically subtle, visually surprising, and, at times, deeply moving. More than this, though, Honey is an ambitious, intricately unified book, part brilliant lyrical meditation and part surreal Bildungsroman. In it, Richard Carr creates a character whose search for truth and self (accompanied by the Bearded Lady, the Poet, the Boy, and the Hapax) is delightful and ambiguous. Honey is a poetry collection unlike any you’re likely to encounter. It is a wonderful, breathtaking achievement.

 —Kevin Prufer, editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing

givalpress.com 

291

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

Protection - Gregg Shapiro (Gival Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Protection.  Gregg Shapiro.  Gival Press.  Arlington, Virginia.  2008.

Although this book is eight years old it is brand new to me -- and as refreshing as a needed cold shower.

Protection is Gregg Shapiro's first book and it is gob-smacking good.

Today's book of poetry could talk about the LBGT references (as the acronym stood in 2008) but there is no need.  This poetry is so inclusive you might think Mr. Shapiro has been in your head playing with your thoughts.

Anyone who likes good poetry is going to love the high octane brilliance of Gregg Shapiro's dancing. Like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, Shapiro makes it look effortless -- but then like Fran Lebowitz -- he makes it true as a comedy howitzer.

My Mother Says The F-Word

At first, it felt like I'd been slapped across the face --
open palmed and swift. It reminded me of how she
would try to break up fights between my brother
and me, in the back seat of the car, while she was
driving. She would take her shoe off the foot that
wasn't needed for braking or accelerating and flail
around behind her on the off chance of making contact
with a flying arm or leg. This would make us laugh
so hard that we soon forgot why we had been fighting.
My father had been saying it for years, the word
coming out as easily as air. I know my mother
must have been dying to try it out for herself, slip

into it like an expensive Italian pump. I know I learned
to say it before I ever heard my father use it at the dinner
table, over the phone, in a traffic jam. He waited until
we were old enough before he spat it as us, watched us
retreat a little, than treat him like one of our schoolyard
buddies. It will take some getting used to, hearing it from
my mother's mouth. A mouth not accustomed to such
expressions or outbursts. A mouth full of praise and
kisses, outlined in Quicksilver Coral lipstick and easing
into the smile of someone who knows they're too old
to have their mouth washed out with a bar of soap.

...

Shapiro writes little screenplays to movies we all want to see.  His cinematic vision
and technicolour detail suggest a deep well that he has access to.

Some of these poems read like great morality plays with sitcom laugh-tracks and good lighting with   Shapiro, the expert puppet master seeing all.

And sex.  There is lots and lots of sex.  For the most part, joyous and loving, playful and celebratory.

Looking at the Ceiling

Rug burns on my elbows, tailbone, shoulder
blades, scalp. Burn for burn, I still come
out ahead. Wonder how I can go to the beach,
take off my shirt in public (everyone will
know!). I will lie on my back, basted in
sunblock, naming clouds. For now, I will lie
on the sand-colored carpet, stare at the galaxy

of water spots on the ceiling. Cobwebs
are moonbeams, jutting out from the light
fixture. Your face is a planet orbiting mine,
light years away. Our lips collide, tongues
tangle, teeth clack like a meteor shower.
Satellite hands, you are out of this world.
Tell me again about the big bang theory.

...

Shapiro is a details guy, he illuminates the general conception of things by reducing them to the moments of  human nuance that we all understand.  This is a very good skill to have.

Today's book of poetry was happy-shocked by this book.

February

The boss's wife comes to me with secrets
I must take to heart, to my grave, beyond.
Spilling from lips, thick with red. Punctuated
by brown eyes darting, silent clicks in code.

Facts to be filed, stored for future reference.
She told me that she broke down in the shower.
Crumpled into a heap of steam, salt and water.
Her dreams kept me awake at night. Vivid dreams

of forbidden addictions, another life. Now I know
why February can be as cruel as April. Twenty-eight
days, mimicked by March, with little or no chance
for improvement. Just the promise of white going
gray, hardening like cement.

...

Gregg Shapiro

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregg Shapiro is one of the leading literary figures in Chicago’s gay and lesbian communities and an influential critic of the literary and musical arts.

Locally, his work has been published in Outlines, Nightlines, En La Vida, BLACKlines, and Gay Chicago Magazine. His music commentaries are heard on LesBiGay Radio.

His reporting on the sexual-minority arts scene is syndicated throughout North America, appearing in Baltimore, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, West Hollywood, Philadelphia, Miami, Toronto, and Houston.

Shapiro has worked tirelessly to increase awareness of Chicago’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered literary excellence, both within local sexual-minority communities and beyond them. He has been a member of the New Town Writers and the SoPo Writers groups and has organized readings for them. He has supported Gerber/Hart Library through benefit readings and through donations of signed first editions and manuscripts. He has been a participating writer and performer in arts festivals, and adaptations of his works have been produced at Puszh Studios and Bailiwick Repertory theaters.

Though quiet and unassuming, he has received national recognition for his own poetry and fiction. His works were heralded on the cover of Christopher Street, the gay literary publication of the 1980s and early 1990s, and some of them have been featured on Dial-A-Poem Chicago. His works have appeared in more than 50 literary journals and in more than half a dozen anthologies.

Shapiro’s expertise in popular music is widely recognized. He has been a judge at the Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards for the past three years. He has presented workshops and been on panels at the annual OutWrite conferences. In Chicago, he has taught workshops and judged student work at Columbia College and in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts writing program. He has also organized group readings and panel discussions at local bookstores.

At every event in which he is involved, Shapiro strives to include representation from all sectors of Chicago’s sexual-minority communities. He is one of Chicago’s most honored openly gay writers and has long promoted recognition of the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered literary and musical talent.

*Please note that this bio was reproduced directly from the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame website:  http://www.glhalloffame.org/index.pl?item=133&todo=view_item

BLURBS
"Moving across the country, Gregg Shapiro finds his poetry on the same highway traveled before him by Henry Miller and John Rechy - at the intersection of sex and night, the place where the brakes go out."
     Carol Anshaw, author of Aquamarine, Seven Moves and Lucky in the Corner

"Gregg Shapiro's stunning debut marks the arrival of a new master poet on the scene.  His work blows me away."
     Greg Herren, author Mardi Gras Mambo, Jackson Square Jazz and others.

Gregg Shapiro

Filmed at Outwrite Bookstore, Atlanta, Georgia

February 12, 2008

givalpress.com 

262