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

Blue Angels - Peter Huggins (River City Pubishing)

Today's book of poetry:
Blue Angels.  Peter Huggins.  River City Publishing.  Montgomery, Alabama.  2001.

Today's book of poetry is going back in time today.  River City Publishing from Montgomery, Alabama, sent us a herd of beautiful hardcover poetry titles and even though some of them were published a few years ago they are all new to me and I suspect they will be new to most of you as well.

Peter Huggins' Blue Angels is packed to the rafters with Angels of every colour.  There are also a few ghosts that need tending to in these continuously surprising and entertaining poems.  Blue Angels feels as southern as the beautifully melodious voice of Shelby Foote.  This isn't the south of the "stars and bars", although that's in here too, but this is the south where William Faulkner's home haunts the memory, where going home again to that old house Thomas Wolfe lived in might have you remembering his line  “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

Randall Jarrell is one of the first poets I can remember reading, his poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" still rattles around in the cage that passes for my head and I read that poem over forty years ago.  So it was a multi-faceted pleasure/surprise to come across him roaming around in Peter Huggins Blue Angels.

For the Woman Who Struck
Randall Jarrell

It must have been an ordinary fall day
For her. She hung
On the line to dry in that warm,

Apple-scented air. Humming Telemann,
She swept the leaves off her porch,
Knowing she'd have to sweep it again

Before her day was through. No matter.
Her maple would be in glory soon.
She had the pleasure of its change.

What were a few leaves to her.
She had to pick up her son at school,
Then go to the grocery on the way home.

Traffic was heavy on the Chapel Hill
By-pass. She never saw the elegant-
Looking man who lunged into the road.

In all that noise she heard
The terrible thud of his body
Striking her car. She didn't want to,

But she screamed at him,
Lying on the road like the last
Prim leaf on her sugar maple.

...

I hear Auden.  I hear France.  I hear you dancing in your underpants.  Today's book of poetry felt very much at home in Huggins world.  These poems are all built like old houses designed for the long haul, built to last.

A horse in a swimming pool is an image that is almost surreal except that now, in the Internet Age, we can all watch video of bears, moose or monkeys in someones backyard pool at whim.  Huggins gives us more than any video, he gives us a moment of horse-thought and then his understanding and gentle compassion.  Today's book of poetry is a big fan of kindness and that is a feeling that prevails in Blue Angels.  Poems celebrating kindness are thin on the ground these days but they are always welcome here.

Standing Mortality

A bad thunderstorm
Spooked my neighbor's
Horse last night.
This morning my neighbor
Found her in his swimming pool.
She looked surprised to be there.

Her tail floated behind her
Like a bed of kelp. When
I asked him how he was going
To get her out,
He walked into the pool,
Put blinders and a bridled on her,

Then led her up the steps
Of the shallow end.
She bunched the muscles
In her back and flicked her tail.
I wondered at the fear
That drove her into the pool.

I wondered at my neighbor's
Easy acceptance
Of her fear and her calm
As he led her back
To her stall in the barn.

I wondered that I thought
She looked like a prisoner
Going to execution,
With the hope and serene
Trust of the faithful.

...

Today's book of poetry was up in the air about today's third poem.  Two worthy contenders.  One, a poem about a child's bedtime monsters and the other about the needs of the dead.  There was much discussion at this morning's read.  Milo, our head tech, read both poems to us, twice.  Then Kathryn, our new intern, read them again.  One of the things Today's book of poetry liked about the poems in Blue Angels was their elasticity, their ability to stretch in several directions at once.  In the end our morning reading circle settled on 'monsters' - because who doesn't like those.

Monster Story

As soon as I tell my nephew
He doesn't have to worry about
Water buffalo men in Louisiana,
I know I'm in trouble.
He asks me if he has to worry
About them in Mississippi
Or in North Carolina. I tell him
He doesn't have to worry about them
At all. They don't exist, I say.

He doesn't believe me and I know
I've made a monster to trouble
His sleep. My uncle made
One to trouble my sleep when he said
I shouldn't go swimming at night.
The alligators, he said, would mistake
Me for a fish and eat me.

Try listening to that story
When you're five years old, lying
Flat on the floor, and you think
Water's sucking the pilings
Of your house out from under you.
Go swimming during the day or night
Without thinking your body's not
A sweet morsel of trout or bass
To a hungry jaw-heavy alligator.

Try not to think of white knights
Galloping through your uncle's bloodstream.
They are too late to save him.
Dragons, breathing fire
Into the sweet tissue of his lungs,
Take him down to pure clean bone.

...

Reading Peter Huggins's Blue Angels is a journey to Alabama, a meditation on living well, musings on vapour trails and some good hard lessons on how to be a good person.  In Today's book of poetry world that is a full dance card.

Peter Huggins has published five books of poetry.  Before Blue Angels there was Hard Facts.  Since publishing Blue Angels Huggins has followed with Necessary Acts, South and Audubon's Engraver.

Peter Huggins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Huggins is the author of five books of poems, Audubon's Engraver (Solomon & George Publishers, 2015), South (Solomon & George Publishers, 2013), Necessary Acts, Blue Angels, (both from River City Publishing, 2004 and 2001), and Hard Facts (Livingston Press, 1998). South was shortlisted in 2014 for the International Rubery Book Award. He has published over 300 poems in many journals and magazines, and was awarded a literature fellowship in poetry from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2006.In the Company of Owls, a middle grade novel, appeared from NewSouth/Junebug Books in 2008. In addition, he has published a picture book, Trosclair and the Alligator (Star Bright Books, 2006), which has appeared on the PBS show Between the Lions, received a Mom's Choice Award, and been selected as a best book by the Bank Street College of Education and by the CCBC at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches in the English Department at Auburn University, and he and his wife live in Auburn, Alabama.

BLURBS

"These poems variously marvel at, meditate on, and grieve over significant moments in life. In clear, straightforward, but often surprising lines, Peter Huggins offers his take on a world in which loss and salvation are next-door neighbors, and angels turn up in the strangest places."

     - Jennifer Horne

"Peter Huggins is a rarity - a poet who writes with the clarity of a silver bell. The poems of his new collection allow the reader to see through their surfaces, to go beyond the simplicities, the sweetness and light, to the dark matter of the mind and heart. This book demonstrates a generosity of spirit hardly to be found in today's serious poetry."

     - Thomas Rabbitt

rivercitypublishing.com

467

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.