Iron String - Annie Lighthart

Today's book of poetry:  Iron String.  Annie Lighthart.  Airlie Press.  Monmouth, Oregon, USA. 2013.

          "In our time of greed and distraction, the deep music of the poems of Annie Lighthart
          comes like a balm.  As she tempers truth with tenderness, her figurative language, lit
          from within, has a gracious sufficiency exactly fitted to the need for it.  The next time
          someone asks me what poetry can do, I will give them this book."
                                                                                                     —Eleanor Wilner

International Women's Day demands a female poet and I found a monster.  That's the biggest compliment I can muster.  Annie Lighthart is in Nora Gould territory in my admiration.  Annie Lighthart is a monster poet.  These poems have all the weight in the world - and never feel heavy.

Lighthart has such a deft, delicate touch that the fireworks all take place in the readers imagination.

The Second Music

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it

touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in this music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,

the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,

becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.

I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.

...

These poems overwhelm the reader in unexpected ways, as though Lighthart had tapped into that language we all know but never speak.  The urgency in these poems is more of an undercurrent, roiling beneath the visible calm surface.

The Hundred Names of Love

The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of that sleep.

Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child's voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.

One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.

...

There is an emotional sweeping undertoad in each poem and I am there, caught, completely committed to hearing what Annie Lighthart is going to say next.  The poems I've chosen are at random and for good reason.  I simply couldn't choose among the dozens of poems I wanted to share with you readers.

The current of certainty that sweeps through this first book by Annie Lighthart is a delight, this is confident, knowing poetry.  Lightharts stunningly assured voice never falters or wavers, her knowing and logic are feminine in the matriarchal traditional of sharing, nurturing, caring.

Lacunae

The square I carefully dug between the jack-o'-lantern's teeth
The northernmost point on the ice for which men argued and sailed
My grandfather's third and fourth fingers under the saw
And on a summer night, your back on the warm hood of a car,
the death of everyone you never knew outlined in the space between stars

...

Synchronicity.  I really wanted to write about a woman poet today and Annie Lighthart's Iron Spring was the next book on the pile.  By chance, I ended up listening to the Icelandic group Sigur Ros this morning as I was working at my desk.  There is an emotional tide in Sigur Ros's music, a gravity that embraces you, pulls you in.  Lighthart's poems offer the same sort of draw, they pull you into the warmth of their gravity.  Ya, all sounds a little to fru-fru.  But here's the rub, it's not, at all.  These very warm, very human poems are both balm and bristle.  Remember I said Ms. Lighthart is a monster, only monster's write this well.

I bristled at not typing out dozens of Lighthart's poems, truly splendid poems — not for you, the reader, but for me.

The Kindness of the Cello

The cello climbs the difficult steps of time with us, it knows
how all things pass, it knows that there are depths to each

moment that we can hardly bear. It plays them for us,
it is a lifting, or an arm around our shoulders. It is

the evening sunlight and the child growing older.
It is the yellow field and the  turning tree, then

it is the fire that stays lit all night, giving such tender
light to your changing face. And even when you cannot,

it remembers you as you have always been, and in
that whole song is both the truth and the mending.

...

Annie Lighthart is a writer and teacher in Portland, Oregon.  She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

www.airliepress.org
http://airliepress.org/

The World Shared - Dariusz Sośnicki

Today's book of poetry:  The World Shared.  Dariusz Sosnicki.  Translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk.  BOA Editions, Ltd.  Rochester, New York, USA.  2014.

Reading Dariusz Sosnicki is a bit like Vladimir Mayakovsky running into Wislawa Szymborska on a train, they sit down with the patient Raymond Carver and start to hack out poems.  Sosnicki's thoroughly modern voice rumbles across these pages with an echo of old Europe singing background serenades.

These melancholy poems read a little like fables, a little like common knowledge.

There is always something lost in translation, although I'm certain Florczyk and Dralyuk did an excellent job.  I only know a few words in Polish and can't read the original.  The loss I refer to is that unbridgeable gap in the imaginations of cultures.  Even when speaking the same language idiom can be so subtle, ethereal, as to render a meaning translation almost impossible.  When I lived in Eastern Europe I was constantly befuddled by phrases like "drunk as a rainbow", but instantly saw the poetry in the language.  Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk have assuredly found Sosnicki's real voice for us.

Alphabet of Mr. P.: Shopping Bag

The drawer will finally break. There are too many of these bags,

plastic shopping bags, promotional tote bags that promote nothing.

Why collect them all—one cat, and small at that,

who uses the litter box four times a day,

and one trash can won't justify this mania.

He barely opens the drawer and they come mushrooming out.

Fungus in time-lapse footage.

Just watch, and the first puffball will burst

and pieces of foil will cover the kitchen

like a certain village past Kutno, with a pile of garbage

towering to the west of it: The wind tears from it the airiest pieces

and carries them east over the fields. Beware, Warsaw,

your drawer is already bursting at the seams.

This transparency, however, is a bit uncomfortable:

obviously, bread, cheeses, mineral water, Gazeta Wyborcza,

but alcohol is already creating problems. Especially a small bottle

of Gorzka Zoladkowa, heralding an intimate adventure

in front of the TV rather than a grand party

or a romantic dinner for two, with lit candles,

which, for the life of me, I can't see in the bag. Loneliness is blacklisted

and attracts predators that hunt in packs. Beware, you lonely ones.

Children grab for a bag as chicks grab for their mother's beak,

asking what's in it for them. They get a Snickers bar and jellies,

so as to disappear into the depths of the children's room.

From the standpoint of human civilization this scene isn't too

     comforting,

but the invention of sweets certainly deserves praise.

And it's good to see, out of the corner of one's eye, that the bags are full,

thinks Mr. P., bent over the atlas. To hear how heavily it falls onto the

     kitchen table—

that nothing on which, as usual, you spent fifty zlotys.

...

From the introduction by Florczyk and Dralyuk:

     "Since the 1990s Dariusz Sosnicki has come to be recognized as a singular 

     voice in Polish poetry, bracingly fresh and yet refreshingly unaffected by

     the latest literary trends. This present collection, culled from the past two

     decades of Sosnicki's poetic activity, is a rich, sustained meditation on our

     shared world, which can feel at once lonely and crowded, small and boundless,

     immutable and forever changing."

Mr. and Mrs. P. and Anti-Wanda

Why do Polish girls take off their shoes on the train

and put their feet up on the seat in front of them? Why do they squeeze

     them in

between the knees of that boy in shorts, a none too nice Hungarian or

     German,

to whom they are bound by body chemistry and a few dozen English

     words?

Why don't they respond to our Polish "good morning,"

when we enter the compartment, and then, a moment later,

when the train crosses the border, quickly hand their passports with the

     eagle

on the cover to the customs officer, and stubbornly watch for something

     outside our window?

We did not take the teacher's version of the Hippocratic Oath,

but we're always ready to come to our relative's aid:

Large breasts aren't aren't everything.

We've paid dearly for our disastrous geopolitical situation,

but Gombrowicz and Lem wrote in this language, each slightly

     differently.

Once your Hungarian throws himself out the window or swallows

     poison,

and the German submerges himself in beer, soccer and pornography,

     you'll long for a country

where a bread crumb

gets picked up from the pavement out of respect.

For this country.

...

Civilization can be a disquieting disappointment, Sosnicki chips away at its' under-carriage in the service of truth and beauty.  The World Shared makes our world smaller, more approachable, in this ever expanding universe.

The Ikarus

is packed, only a few people

in bright cloths, talking softly;

but the engine's temperamental and there are scraps

of a whole bunch of poplar fluff—hence so much babble and stirring.

A girl with a baby is grabbing at these scraps:'

how lucky, if I can catch a lot,

then I'll be happy; let it be so,

but it's not okay to shake like that

and rock back and forth in the squeaking seat,

or eat the fucking candy. Do I have to

think of every loser? For a moment the ground disappears

as I look through the rear window—strips of mud fall of the tires

and a contrail hangs in the air, luminous, among the chestnut branches.

(blogger's note:  Ikarus - is a type of bus, and now in Polish, sans accents)

Ikarus

jest wypelniony, ledwie kilku ludzi

w jasnych ubraniach, rozmawiaja cicho;

lecz silnik ma temperament i strzepkow jest cala

masa topolowego puchu — stad tyle gwaru i ruchu.

Poluje na te strzepki dziewczyna z niemowleciem:

oto szczescie, uda mi sie nalapac

to bede szczesliwa; niechby,

ale nie mozna tak trzasc sie

i kiwac na skrzypiacym siedzeniu,

jesc pierdolonych cukierkow. Czy musze

myslec o kazdym ploamancu? Przez chwile nie widac ziemi,

gdy patrze za siebie przez szybe—paski blota odpadaja od opon

i smuga w powietrzu zostaje, jasna, wsrod kasztanowych galezi.

...

Dariusz Sasnicki (b. 1969, in Kalisz) is a poet, essayist, and editor.  He lives in Poznan, Poland.

Dariusz Sosnicki reading Poznan Poetow

www.boaeditions.org

First Anniversary Report: Today's book of poetry.

Today's book of poetry:

March 7, 2013 - March 6, 2014

Books of poetry received:  589
Books of poetry read:  356
Blogs/reviews: 167

Readership:  32,500 total, currently over 130 readers a day.  107 countries.

First winner of the KITTY LEWIS - HAZEL MILLAR - DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE which was awarded to Nora Gould for I See My Love More Clearly From A Distance.  The prize is awarded by me for the book I enjoyed most.  If Ms. Gould ever shows up in Ottawa I owe her dinner and at least two crying Charlies.

Most viewed blog:  1996 — Sara Peters

Forthcoming in April - A look at all the books shortlisted for the Canadian League of Poets 2014 Raymond Souster Award, 2014 Gerald Lampert Award and the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.


Ottawa poet and poetry guru Rob McLennan posted this generous profile of what I've been up to yesterday:

Profile of Michael Dennis, poet and blogger | Open Book: Ontario

Tomorrow:
The World Shared, poems by Dariusz Sosnicki, translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk.  BOA Editions.

Familiar Ghosts - Henry Hart

Today's book of poetry:  Familiar Ghosts.  Henry Hart.  Orchises.  Washington, USA.  2014.

I am ready to jump on the Henry Hart bandwagon.  Sign me up.  As far as I can tell Henry Hart can eloquently wax poetic with humour, intelligence and genuine pathos - about anything that strikes his fancy.  These narrative poems unwind as though Hart had a golden spool of poetry on hand and that he just unravels at will.

Whether writing about nature and love or the ghosts of the American Civil War, Henry Hart feels the pulse of the thing, catches the right rhythm. and takes the reader in.

Awoosatash Mountain Fire Tower

I stoke the stove with campers' trash,

hear coyotes break bones and bicker in the flames.

On the pond below, sunlight skates on splintered ice.

The valley breathes, but never says a word.

     Without you, I'm the needle frozen in the compass,

     the sunflower at the bottom of a well.

Yesterday a DJ played "All Along the Watchtower,"

joked about a CEO buying diamond umbrellas for his dog.

Light hardened summit pines in amber.

Blueberry bushes bared their nerves to frost.

     Without you, I'm the needle thawing in the compass,

     the sunflower at the bottom of a well.

Last summer a helicopter scooped the bond with buckets,

doused flames bushwhacking toward the tower.

Minnows flipped like silver dollars into smoke.

The sun's gray sail sank in the horizon's surf.

     Without you, I'm the needle trembling in the compass,

     the sunflower at the bottom of a well.

Charred runes crisscross slopes of ash.

A woodpecker drums love songs on a half-dead trunk.

Blue jays peck roasted cones for seeds.

Still the moon floats like a lotus above the mountains.

...

The range of Hart's poems isn't a stylistic one — no, these poems are clearly all cut from the same careful cloth — but from poem to poem Hart plows through subjects both broad and familiar, poignant and flippant (humouresly so).  Hart even manages to throw in some protest poetry.  When I say these poems all sound the same I'm doing a dis-service because reading Familiar Ghosts is a wild romp.  The voice in these poems has authority and vision and the reader gets that early on, understands that this is a voice you can follow, trust.

From the Memoir of an Amnesiac

The first person I met at the pig roast

was an ex-lobsterman from Maine.

He swore I looked like the poacher

who stole his traps and shot up his boat.

Wearing an I Swim Topless in the Arctic

t-shirt, his daughter offered me tortilla chips,

guacamole the color of gangrene.

Her claw tattoo warned me not to touch it.

"Remember me?" sang a woman in blonde tights.

"I fixed your H-drive last April." I stared

at Chinese characters on her name tag,

said something I don't remember.

A lawyer in a see-through kimono

tugged my shirt, asked if my wife

had recovered from hitting the ox.

I apologized at length for being single.

A Virginia Gazette reporter snickered:

"Ever hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic

insomniac who stayed awake each night

contemplating the existence of a dog?"

"No," I said, squeegeeing sweat from my brow.

A yoga teacher fanned me with her Braves cap,

invited me to her night class. I tried to peek

at the name dangling on her breast.

A history professor with beaded dreadlocks
quipped: "Politics in emerging democracies
is like group sex with Daughters of the American
Revolution. Laughing means you secretly agree."

I wanted to chat with him, but whiskey
had dissolved his name to a Rorschach blot.
Picking at the label on my Samuel Adams
under an AC vent, I felt an Arctic breeze

swirl through the first snow cave
I dug on Whitethorn Mountain. How easy
to remember names when they hovered
like snowflakes around a flashlight!

A psychiatrist mopped his shaved head,
whinnied: "There was a Florida doctor
studying babies cloned from extraterrestrial
skin cells. His cousin was my patient."

A tennis coach poked him with a crutch:
"Maybe you could help my mother.
She recalls everything up to her wedding.
Her ears keep ringing but nobody answers."

The hostess interrupted: "Be adventurous.
Try the king crab and curried squid."
Cracking ice with a tongue stud,
a grad student nudged me: "Remember

that night at that bar? You said you dug
my story about homesteading in Alaska.
That's when we had no power or piped water
and Dad called our fireplace a hippie TV."

Outside, petals snowed from a pear tree.
I shivered in the cave on Whitethorn Mountain,
watched kids chase a Labradoodle with plastic bats
shouting terrible names.

...

The best part of doing this blog has been the discovery of new poets, Henry Hart may be my best discovery yet.  I've read Familiar Ghosts and Hart is instantly among my favourite poets.  It is a bit like the first time I read Sharon Olds, frequently putting down the book so that I can gesticulate wildly.  In my head the drone:  "Oh ya, there are people out there this good, this smart."

It's a happy, jealous discovery.

Alba

He didn't say anything,
          just spat at the sidewalk,
shoved black garbage bags of clothes and crates
          of books into the U-Haul,
and drove to his other woman on the coast.

She sat in a chair on their new porch roof,
          stared at arabesques
of bugs under the street's one light,
          waited for stars to read her
her rights, cauterize her cuts.

After the black turned blue,
          the whippoorwill calling his name
from the thorn hedge,
          the Doberman gnawing its chain
no longer mattered.

She climbed down the fire escape,
          let the brook's soft song
lead her into the woods. By a spider
          catching the sun in its net,
she knelt to sip her shadow.

Minnows stitched her face
          broken by the pool's ripples.
She tore up a Jack-in-the-pulpit—
          not for honey on its purple tongue,
but for roots Indians used to poison strangers.

...

Henry Hart is the author of three previous books of poetry: The Ghost Ship, The Rooster Mask and Background Radiation.  He is also the author of three books of criticism, and a biography of James Dickey.  Hart's poetry has won numerous awards including the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize in 2010.

He has a new fan here.

Scour as I might I could not find video of Henry Hart.  But I did find a photo.

Orchises Press can be found at:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~lathbury/

Small, Imperfect Paradise - Dallas Crow

Today's book of poetry:  Small, Imperfect Paradise.  Dallas Crow.  Parallel Press.  University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.  Madison, Wisconsin, USA.  2013.

Dallas Crow's Small, Imperfect Paradise is a bit of an emotional roller-coaster.  We get brief glimpses of a happy world but in short order the wheels come off and the poems paint the collapse of a family.  The redemption for the reader is in the quality of the poems.

The Aesthetics of Gravity

Think of the pleasure boys take in falling,

the hours they devote to it: ko'd, shot

in the back, machine-gunned in the 

gut; tackled, clotheslined, checked,

body-blocked, tripped; in slow motion

whenever possible; preferably

for an audience of friends or family;

dramatically, comically; into

pillows, hay, leaves, mud, snow—

any pile promising padding or a mess;

water, too; flips, splits, bellyflops,

can openers and cannonballs.

Some may argue that phylogeny

recapitulates ontogeny, that

they are reliving that initial fall

from grace themselves; others may

insist they somehow sense their

own mortality, and are preparing for

their future decline; but I am convinced—

watching my sons catapult and pirouette

through the invisible air, then replay

those all too brief moments of flight

again and again for friends—they are

enchanted by the aesthetics of gravity.

Icarus is their hero, not for his

Pyrrhic success or greedy heedlessness,

but for his most delightful failure.

...

Richard Brautigan had a poem about the end of love that I will paraphrase (because I am writing this from bed and am too lazy to go find it downstairs).

     there is no better feeling

     than waking up in the morning

     and not having

     to tell someone

     you love them

     when you don't love them

     anymore

(my apologies to Richard Brautigan for whatever I've done to the real poem - which I will find and reprint)

Dallas Crow is mining some of that same disillusioned territory.  But in these poems there are children, a family, and there is nothing bittersweet about the story - yet the poems are exactly that - bittersweet, tasty.

Small, Imperfect Paradise

Imperfect as it is, this

is paradise. My soon-to-be

ex-wife, the traitor,

sleeps upstairs, while I

lie awake down here.

Why is this paradise?

Because the kids

don't know yet.

...

These poems about loss are almost too familiar as they drag us over the rocky shoals of disappointment.  But these short, sharp jabs have a cumulative effect.  Crow has distilled his anger, grief and hope into something vibrant.

Divorce

Like a home movie played backwards, the gifts

are rewrapped and taken away, the guests

sidle awkwardly out, and then your children leave,

smiling and waving, leaving you alone in the empty

house. Alone. And then more alone. The silence

you've always adored wraps itself around you,

enveloping you in its octopus embrace.

...

Dallas Crow is a high school English teacher at the Breck School in Golden Valley, Minnesota, he lives in St. Paul.  His poems have appeared in numerous journals.

paralellpress.library.wisc.edu

By following this link you will find a recording of Dallas Crow reading his poem "The Holy Order of Fish Handlers".  The recording is from The Beat, Northern Community Radio, KAXE & KBXE.

https://www.prx.org/pieces/98872-the-beat-dallas-crow-the-holy-order-of-fish-ha