Particles - New & Selected Poems — Dan Gerber (Copper Canyon Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Particles - New & Selected Poems.  Dan Gerber.  Copper Canyon Press.  Port Townsend, Washington.  2017.

Dan Gerber's Particles - New & Selected Poems covers the years 1971 to the present and the first thing that Today's book of poetry noticed was the consistency.  Gerber is writing with the same careful authority now as he did almost fifty years ago.  Another way to approach this would be to say that Gerber's older poems do not feel dated, they remain fresh as daisies.

It's no mean feat to carry a voice through the decades.  Even the Rolling Stones have changed their sound over the years, Dylan went electric.  Gerber, strong out of the gate,  and has still never wavered.

Spring Creek

Standing at ease in the current,

watching my thoughts stream by,

seventeen thousand thoughts in a day.

If I grasp one the river stops flowing.

Those horses on the walls of the Chauvet cave,

twenty thousand years before the pharoahs—

unsurpassed and thoroughly modern—

before Homer, Heraclitus, or Pollock.

Do we think of pigeons as lowly

because they crowd our trees and the empty spring day?

I saw one torn apart by a hawk — one bird —

and at that moment I grieved.

My grief is here with my joy now,

wingtip to talon, they circle,

one closer at first, then the other.

...

Dan Gerber reminds Today's book of poetry of Robert Bly with his clean voice. But Gerber is a poet on his own, Today's book of poetry can't remember when we last read a poet with this combination of certain and clear.

We could be terribly wrong but Today's book of poetry sees cycles as a central theme of Particles.

The circle of life,"we are born, we suffer, we die" as Anatole France suggested, has been altered by the smooth dulcet tones of Dan Gerber's poems to be, more properly, "we are born, we see beauty and we suffer, we die."

Now don't ever blame Mr. Gerber for the outlandish claims of Today's book of poetry.  But Dan Gerber's shift of the bar is not small change.  In the order of things Gerber's consistent, charming and subtly powerful voice has been ringing the bell through generations who've abandoned the narrative for more academic and esoteric ground.

Not Gerber, he has stayed the course with his reflective posture, careful breathing and sustained optimism.

For Randall Jarrell

                             for Gretel Ehrlich

A man struck by lightning

is seldom appeased by house current.

The bolt that steals vision or

restores it, splits the young poplar,

hurls thunder over the roof,

makes widows of farmwives

and ashes of the barn.

The wild geese never die; the lilacs

reappear each May, and the night sky

continues its imperturbable dance.

...

Today's book of poetry gets excited when the name of any of the giants appears in a poem.  Randall Jarrell was under appreciated, but we can see that Dan Gerber thought highly of him.  Yet another reason to sit down at Gerber's fire and listen to him burn.

Our morning read was a tickle here at the Today's book of poetry offices.  Our heat wave continues; my computer has turned itself off twice this morning, the screen just goes blank with a pppffffffttttt.

It does not like the heat.  Someone was kind enough to leave a chocolate on my pillow last night.  When I tried to open it, liquid chocolate ran all over my hand.  Pure liquid.

We've got the big fans out now, blowing directly on our computers.  Milo, our head tech, is working on better solutions, bless his big egghead heart.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, led the charge this morning.

Dan Gerber's poetry makes all the readers look good.  At every point in these poems Gerber's honest voice, and all of his intentions, are perfectly clear.  His quiet voice rings with authority.

Finally, This Rain

Every spring, foretold by its candles,

the pine grows that much taller.

Becoming the image of the image cast ahead

of what we hope to become —

stars continually revising themselves

and stars too faint to be named

translate the great dark hours of our being

into a language we love.

...

Today's book of poetry has a great deal of admiration for the poet/novelist Jim Harrison.  When we saw his blurb on the cover of Particles Today's book of poetry knew we would like the poetry of Dan Gerber.  We just had no idea how much.

Just like the best in any other endeavor, these poems quietly go about their business without a care in the world.  They know their own strength.  Dan Gerber burns with assured certainty.

Dan Gerber

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Dan Gerber is the author of a dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir.  He has received the Mark Twain Award, "Book of the Year" honors from Foreward magazine, and inclusion in Best American Poetry and The American Life in Poetry

BLURBS

“Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.”

—Rain Taxi

“Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise—sometimes all at the same time.”

 —Library Journal

“These are beautiful meditative poems of surprise and wonder fully engaged with the world of experience, which he regards with a sacramental reverence.”

 —Mark Arendt, awards judge, Society of Midland Authors 2013 Book of the Year Award in Poetry

“[Gerber’s] poetry explores everyday experiences and images, successfully converting them into something unique and magical.”

 —Library of Michigan

“[Gerber’s] evocations are clearly, simply rendered with an almost Zen-like kind of meditative transcendence.”

 —Fallon Eagle Standard

“[Gerber] is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of humans, relation with earth and existence itself.”

 —ForeWord

"Dan Gerber's work is completely untarnished by fad or fashion and I enter it again and again with a sense of wonderment.  When our age pass, this work will remain."

—Jim Harrison

Dan Gerber

at the EP Foster Library

Video: AskewPoetryJournal

coppercanyonpress.org

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration

Hick Poetics - Shelly Taylor & Abraham Smith eds. (Lost Roads Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Hick Poetics - An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry.  Shelly Taylor & Abraham Smith editors.  Lost Roads Press.  Jackson, Wyoming.  2015.

Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith have amassed a small poetry army and they are on the attack.

Abraham Smith had this to say in his introduction to Hick Poetics:

"   so come on here where the dogs are bored and the doors are unlocked & the flies growl unoriginal in their nascarlefthandturnings, loam under a nail, for you, dear reader: this lush hustle of the beyond as heard & slapped or gentled awake by 40 poets, without only tourist eyes, who have known, in their times, a back road, a lost road, by ear & by hand."

Today's book of poetry rarely takes on anthologies so why Hick Poetics?  Jim Harrison.

If his name is on it - I'm in.  Turns out Harrison is in some splendid company.  There are forty of 'em and they seem determined to burn the house down.  These poems might be of rural origin but you're going to recognize the song they are singing.

Let's start with this untitled atomicbombpoem by Tim Early:

A dog beneath and a dog above. The trailer single-wide or double,

underpinned or not, on its lot or part of a larger park, has lost its

formaldehyde smell or not, is level or not, has broken windows or not, is

landscaped with mulch and monkey grass and hibiscus or not, has septic tank

that ceases to function during heavy rain. A hound kicked to death or not,

that spent its life rolling over other hounds in the muck beneath the stoop,

that gnashed into the ribcage of a deer, that  was crushed onto the asphalt

or not, a nimbus of fleas around its asshole. Pill bottles on the counter, "an

illiterate person has my pills," "get me my scripts," "get me my fucking nerve

pill," a preacher's crotch distended into the River Jordan, a coterie of Elvises

in various stages of decline, crush it up, honeysuckle, kudzu, dandelions, ivy

trellis, railroad trellis, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Sugar, sugar diabetes,

brown lung, loom-plucked scalp, missing fingers, SPAM, LITTLE DEBBIES,

nerve endings on fire, bad liver, glaucomyrrh, LOST TIME ACCIDENT,

GOODY POWDER, seven dust, asbestos in the brake pads, ROUND UP,

smelled like formaldehyde for a solid month, THEY THEY IS SOME DIRT

THAT IS PERMANENT!, he was an alcoholic and he married this woman he

met across the state line playing the poker machines and they moved in next

to her brother's liquor store and they kept him drunk all the time and he

died on the floor in own shit and piss and she got his pension and kept

on living in that house. Direckly, tireckly, notish, law they, lordy, I declare,

I'm fixin' to you fucks, bait, pison, deef, spicket, his'n, her'n, yourn, airish,

kindly, poorly, they said Mr. McGillicuddy lived in the chimney and he was

insane and had a long pecker and they did not say it was shaped like a scythe

but in my imagination it was shaped like a scythe and I saw him mowing the

field with his pecker and the other thing like I said was he was insane and

the older cousins would shove our heads up into the chimney so our heads

would just loom up into his insane darkness and he had long teeth and then I

figured it out he was metaphor for my Aunt Gypsy Rose Lee with the bullet

fragments in her skull and for my cousin who died in restraints at the mental

hospital in Morganton and for my grandmother's mania and for her. SATAN. "I

will beat your ass." "Gary got his ass beat," "that boy needs a fucking beating,"

"Eddie tried to kill that dude with a railroad spike he is a stupid bastard,"

Peppertown, Ragtown, Daryl was handsome and dated white girls they cut up

his face with a straight razor, thirty or forty cuts, each an inch or so long, they

sprayed David with bird shot just for fun, he killed his best friend for fucking

his wife invited him over to watch the race and met him with a shotgun at the

door when his friend turned away he shot him point-blank in the back, DALE

EARNHARDT HEALS THE SICK, you fucks, my brother lost fifty pounds after

Dale was killed at Daytona he was so depressed, JANE SMILEY WRITES of

THE SCOTCH-IRISH: "Mean as a snake and twice as quick...oh, excuse me. I

am losing my judicious tone...". Fuck you, Jane Smiley, Minstrel Corn

Pone. Minstrel Corn Pone. Whistle Pig, peaked, job it with a stick, job that

shit with a stick, catched that tree frog, I knowed to throw it back, Jesus face,

Sissy Holler, we is just folks and these is just some cultural interstices, "the

absence of teeth, and the compromised nature of the gums, give the tongue

freer range, and indeed, create an almost limitless field for linguistic play and

invention. Teeth have everything to do with the Lord and social Darwinism

and distract the poet from his orphic emptiness," gum it up in the Berkeley,

gum it up in the New Yorks City, POETRY! POETRY! POETRY! you subhuman

fucks.

...

Yes, Tim Earley got our full and undivided attention post haste.  Earley also made for a spectacular reading here in our offices this morning, Milo took him on and did him proud.

Hick Poetics is modern country with lots of Earl Scruggs/Johnny Cash/Patsy Cline tucked into the back pocket for leverage.  Across the board the poets in this anthology had the hammer down.  Some very calloused and hard working hands wrote these poems.

Desert Snow  -  Jim Harrison

I don't know what happens after death

but I'll have to chance it. I've been waking

at 5 a.m. and making a full study of darkness.

I was upset not hearing the predicted rain

that I very much need for my wildflowers.

At first light I see that it was the silent rain

of snow. I didn't hear this softest sigh

of windless snow softly falling

here on the Mexican border in the mountains,

snow in a white landscape of high desert.

The birds are confounded by this rare snow

so I go out with a spatula to clean the feeders,

turn on the radio not to the world's wretched news

but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,

the warbles and shrieks of love, laughter, and bullets.

...

Jim Harrison never disappoints me.  Today's book of poetry has been a big fan of Harrison since 1977 when I picked up a copy of his book Plain Song at Toronto's This Ain't The Rosedale Library Bookstore (a great and dearly missed treasure).

For a tough old coot Harrison can be down right tender.

Harrison is a known commodity, the really pleasant surprise with Hick Poetics was that the poetry didn't fall off after the big guns had their say.  Quite the contrary, the poets that were new to me were all pitching big league heat.  Taylor and Smith must have had a ball putting this project together and they've chosen wisely.

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison  -  Danielle Pafunda

I felt a funeral, we whisper.

A shiver as the procession

marches cross our graves.

Such grave robbers

we, taking the spunk

out of the cemetery

and the blush off the urn.

Taking heart, and boiling it clean

like a beet. Deepest pink.

Under our nails flesh,

and a rivulet

runs the elbow.

Everything tastes dirt

in the companionable ground

where we lie open-mouthed.

And dirt means nothing,

just like life 

or air used to do.

When it wasn't something

you could get a speck of it

on you.

Stop.

We sound almost chipper,

this flock of dun-colored birds.

Broken-beaked maracas.

...

Danielle Pafunda has a new chapbook from Birds of Lace Press called When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land.   Today's book of poetry is a big fan of the long title and this one is aces.

Pafunda, Harrison and Tim Earley are all clearly from different poetry planets but all three fit quite nicely into the Hick Poetics quilt.  And that is a good way to think of an anthology, as a quilt.

This one is rural, colourful and it will keep you warm.

lostroads.org 

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

The Green of Sunset - John Brantingham (MoonTide Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Green of Sunset.  John Brantingham.  Moon Tide Press.  Irving, California.  2013.

The Green of Sunset is what you might get if you made a benevolent Frankenstein out of Hemmingway, Jim Harrison and the very sensible Sharon Olds.  Who knows what Brantingham will think of that when he sees it.  But it is meant in an entirely complimentary way.  This is big boy stuff with attitude, and then when you least expect it Brantingham's heart and voice turn sentimental but never soft.

There is a manly, tough-guy veneer to these poems and Harrison would approve.  And these poems would pass Hem's scrutiny because they are as solid as poems get, as solid as iron, there are no chinks in this armour.  Then there is all that intelligent tenderness and hard earned emotional wisdom.

The Wages of Cynicism

Imagine me, cynic that I was, 19 years old, sneering at a Yu-

goslavian village whose favorite daughters and sons talked

directly to Mary--the gut reaction of a clever kid--who would,

in the next five days, see himself for what he was and learn to hate

that fraud inside himself. It's taken me these last twenty years to

forgive myself for that, and God, so much more, and it makes

me wonder how long it will take for me to forgive myself for all

that I am doing today.

...

Brantingham isn't afraid to call himself on his own bullshit and that is refreshing.  The Green of Sunset is a palette where Brantingham is mixing colours and digging into the canvas hard, it's a big canvas and he is using all of it.

This is the first time Today's book of poetry has encountered the poetry of John Brantingham even though almost every poem in this collection was previously published.  These poems feel familiar, like you have heard them before, they are like stories passed down at late night fires.

Brantingham's narratives almost always circle back on themselves with new and deeper revelations about who the poet really is and as these coils filled with joy and power and remorse tighten, the palatable tension rises.

The Art of Merging

He's been on the road five hours after taking it from his boss all

day, when a big white truck cuts into his space on the freeway.

He lets it all go at once; the job he didn't want, the miscarriage,

the wife he betrayed, his brother's addictions, everything in one

long sentence of hatred, and the truck takes his sentence and

his sins, and it hauls them away forever like that beautiful goat

wandering the Sinai.

...

Today's book of poetry is using three of Brantingham's shorter poems from The Green of Sunset for today's blog/review - but it could just as easily have been three longer poems.  At this morning's reading the short poems took on a Richard Brautigan flare, Brantingham's longer poems took on the tone of sacred text from a modern voice, a hit on folklore and legend.

Poem about the Pacific Crest Trail that Devolves into a Kind of

Sentimentality I'm Not Ashamed of

On the couch last night, I realized that I was never going to hike

the Pacific Crest Trail--not the whole thing--and I guess I

could add that to my long list of regrets if I had ever wasted time

with that kind of list.

     There was a time twenty years ago when I dreamed of tak-

ing the hike from Canada to Mexico in a three-month journey of

silence and self-reflection, swimming into myself and finding the

peace that lay in the middle.

     What a pretentious ass I was, and what a fool I was to think

that peace lay some place inside me when it was sitting right here

the whole time on the couch in that space beside you.

...

Today's book of poetry liked how real and true every word in this collection sounded.  The Green of Sunset has a moral center that these great prose poems revolve around like planets

 fighting for the sun.  Brantingham likes the clean message and these poems gleam.

John Brantingham

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Brantingham is the author of hundreds of poems, stories, and essays published in magazines in the United States and United Kingdom. His books include Mann of War, a crime novel, Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods, a short story collection, The Gift of Form, an instruction guide for beginning formal poetry, and East of Los Angeles, a poetry collection. He teaches English at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California and lives in Seal Beach with his wife Annie and dog, Archie Goodboy.

BLURBS

"It is difficult to praise a book of poems that you already feel so emotionally connected to: it seems unnecessary, a gesture that only takes away from the beauty, wisdom, goodness, honesty, imaginativeness, and spirituality of the work itself. Nevertheless, John Brantingham's The Green of Sunset is the finest collection of poems he has ever written, which is saying something, considering he's been producing excellent work for going on 20 years now. Let the prose poems contained in this collection stand alongside those in Mark Strand's Almost Invisible and Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods as some of the most accomplished of the past decade. Simply put, these poems are the work of a writer operating at the very top of his craft."

      - Paul Kareem Tayyar

"In an age of superficiality, mediocrity and sound-cliches, John Brantingham is a genuine throwback to when Men of Letters roamed the literary prairies: a scholar, novelist, poet, essayist, scriptwriter, public speaker, reviewer, professor, mentor, and festival organizer. He is first-rate in everything he turns his mind and hand to. His poems benefit from the breadth of his life experiences as well as his formal academic training. His creative and intellectual emanations brim with his enthusiasms, his versatility, and the depths of spirituality and social conscience at the core of his soul. There is no one of whom I could speak more highly, as a write and as a person."

     - Gerald Locklin

"Our best writers weigh their words carefully, and John Brantingham is certainly one of them. He is a craftsman with a huge heart who cares deeply about people and stories and the chaos we call our lives. His characters are beautifully rendered, real and true, at once vulnerable and courageous. Wise and insightful, Brantingham's work brilliantly captures the light and darkness in us all."

     - James Brown

John Brantingham's

poetry reading at the EP Foster Library

video: AskewPoetryJournal

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DISCLAIMERS

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.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.