After Hours - Darrell Epp (Mosaic Press)

Today's book of poetry:
After Hours.  Darrell Epp.  Mosaic Press.  Oakville, Ontario.  2016.

The best poems in Darrell Epp's After Hours remind you of the first time you got stoned.  The first time you felt dangerous.

You know how you felt the first time the veil came down.  The first time you saw behind the wizard's screen.  Welcome to a new Oz.

Epp has just the right amount of disgruntled dissatisfaction to fill these poems with the proper vigour. Hope doesn't come easily but it is buried in the seams of After Hours.  Maybe under an old car with a mad dog chained to the bumper, the hard-packed soil oil stained.

The Mongol Invasions

i have as of late acquired the ability to

turn myself into fictional characters,

it's an old man in a rent-controlled

basement today--no one suspects

he's really an eccentric billionaire

with a thousand years of memories.

i prowl the malls, laugh at the

baffled cluelessness of the

bargain-hunting taxpayers.

i seem to recall having

magic powers, a dozen

wives and x-ray eyes;

watching atoms knit

themselves into pairs,

then clans, then faces.

maybe a face will say

hi to me today, maybe

i'll make a new friend

who truly understands:

we'll trade war stories

about missing dorothee

and rampaging across

asia with genghis khan.

...

Today's book of poetry positively romped through Darrell Epp world.  I want to tell you that Epp made me think of Bukowski but in truth Epp is not a Bukowski cat.  So then I'm thinking somewhere between Johnny Rivers melancholy and Len Gasparini rant and maybe with a modernized Milton Acorn thrown in there for a touch of righteous rage.

How silly to be looking for comparisons when Epp can so clearly stand on his own.  These quick and sharp narratives cut clean as a razor.  Epp has found a voice just below the bellow of flat out rage and is comfortable roaming that dangerous territory.  It certainly makes for kick-ass poems.

Our morning read was like watching young kids with their first fireworks, setting them off one at a time.

Contraindications

an unpolluted pacific

a garden of eden sky

the man in the moon

a star's molten heart

a volcano's teardrop

put one of the above under your

tongue every 4 hours or as needed.

do not mix with food, do not answer

the phone, and if anybody asks, tell

them you haven't seen me, tell them

you haven't seen me for months.

...

After Hours is Darrell Epp's second book of poetry.  Today's book of poetry didn't have to go far to find his first book, Imaginary Maps (Signature Editions, 2009), we have a copy on shelf of "coming attractions."  Today's book of poetry will be looking at Imaginary Maps in the not too distant future.

When Milo, our head tech, put Imaginary Maps down on my desk I had an immediate flashback to the first time I read it.  Cue big smile.  Epp is a quick study because he allows the reader immediate entrance to his chaotic world, seasons it with kindness.

The Robert Crumb type front cover of After Hours has a Bukowski type "Hank" character with angel's wings sitting with other barflies as eternity sneaks up on them.  Rarely are covers so apropos.

Telephone Game

the message ran around the world; by the

time it came back to me i had a wooden

leg and lived in a castle made of bone.

my pet unicorn could sing like a bird.

i was a wanted man, one step ahead

of irs, kgb and other sinister acronyms.

i beat superman at arm-wrestling and

punished all who loved me. love's a

word poets use as a crutch, like 'very'

and 'and.' funny how love brought out

my inner martyr: a lesser man would

have broke both your arms. what was

it, that thing you thought you wanted?

sorry. but don't look at me, look at the

universe, downright peacock-y in its

nightly burlesque: supernovae like

popped corks; the milky way,

waving her spiral arms like shiva

herself; the gravity that pulled me

to you, indiscriminate, affirmative, it

felt like heaven, or the next best thing.

...

Maybe After Hours is an entirely coincidental title pick but Today's book of poetry is convinced Epp is giving a big nod to ol' Martin Scorsese's flick of the same name, After Hours (1985).  In the episodic flick, think of individual poems, the hero/loser is entirely over his head from one late night misadventure to another.  The character presents as though he were on top of things, as though he were in control whereas the movie is one continuous lesson in how he controls nothing at all.

Darrell Epp's After Hours discombobulates the reader in much the same way.  It is a great ride. Buckle up.

Darrell Epp

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darrell Epp’s poetry has appeared in dozens of magazines around the world including Maisonneuve, Poetry Ireland, Sub-Terrain, and The Saranac Review. His previous poetry collection was entitled Imaginary Maps (2009). He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

BLURBS

“In Epp’s second collection of poems, he explores diverse themes and imagery firmly rooted against a gritty postmodern backdrop.” 

     – The Hamilton Spectator

“A fun, sly jumble of poems that often tackle weighty issues”

     – Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

“In After Hours, Darrell Epp proves himself as adept at bricolage as he is at ventriloquism. That he manages to not only interpolate discrete, oblique, and temporally disconnected texts and cultural signifiers into his poems, but does so while remaining consistently tethered to the visceral reality of his native Hamilton, a city he describes in “No Sweat” as “awesome and oblivious/and no help at all,” is no mean feat.”

     – Phillip Crymble, Hamilton Arts & Letters

“I enjoyed these poems immensely.”

     – William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist

“Lucid, raw and honest poems, refrains that slide with grace and wit from the particular to the general, from past to present and back again, authentic and absorbing.”

     – novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Little Buddha)

“If you ever get caught in the subway between stations, try to sit beside a guy like the guy who wrote these poems.”

     – novelist David Gilmour (The Film Club, Back On Tuesday)

“Funny and fun to read, playful but also deadly serious…a depth of experience got at only in the best poetry.”

     – novelist Samuel Thomas Martin (This Ramshackle Tabernacle, A Blessed Snarl)

mosaic-press.com

588

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.

Angular Unconformity, Collected Poems 1970-2014 - Don McKay (Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions)

Today's book of poetry:

Angular Unconformity, Collected Poems 1970-2014.  Don McKay.  Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions.  Fredericton, New Brunswick.  2014.

Angular Unconformity means a particular gap between two known strata of rock in a geological formation, at least that's what Milo, our head tech, came back with.  It is the space that occurs between what we know for certain and what we want to believe is true.

Today's book of poetry's personal adventure with the excellent poetry of Don McKay began over thirty years ago in a class on the "long-poem" taught by that Black Mountain/Tish poet Robert Hogg. It was in that class where I first read McKay's Long Sault.

Far more importantly, Robert Hogg's class on the long-poem was where I met the joy of my life, my wife, K.

It doesn't stop there.

It was only a few short years ago that K and I were invited to an elaborate garden party/dinner/BBQ for an old friend who now lives in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Turns out she brought Don McKay with her and I got a chance to meet him.  More accurately, I wouldn't leave him alone until he talked to me.

Since that time I have been lucky enough to share a couple of more meals with the esteemed Mr. McKay courtesy of my Scrabble friend Nurse Rachet.  Don, one of the more humble people on the planet pretends that he is amused by me and I follow him around like a I'm a puppy and he has bacon in his pocket.

We're not exactly buddies but he certainly is a friend.  Long before I met him I wrote my undergraduate paper for the long-poem class on his Long Sault and I have admired his poetry ever since.  In person he is nicer than you can imagine.

From Long Sault

A Feeling Of If, A Feeling Of But, A Field Of Fire Hydrants

For a time, we were

amazement--

     they got

     this house-moving machine with tires so big I can

     show you the picture my brother standing up

     inside the hub he is ten years old that can move

     a house so gentle they just leave the pictures on the walls--

unfettered, soaring in suspension of feeling.

The rhetoric was

a shepherd to us (though later

we might have said superintendent without sensing

any change) the way

we could be inside its shell but never

really know which history

was being made, and never asking

whose.

Here was a map coming out in dotted lines

to be filled in with the right answer.

Here was a rapids in the noose.

Here was a field of fire hydrants waiting for a town.

Here was a marina in the field of fire hydrants

waiting for the water to arrive

to whisper sibilant up to the waiting wharf.

The river was about to swell.

It was doing the Charles Atlas course, would be

the servile giant.

Its language was unlocked: Power & Prosperity, Development & Growth.

Look at that bicep

                              (or that

snake-bit arm we would never completely think,

or think only as far as

the feeling of if

the feeling of but, never to the fettering flag-

planting noun, as though

the making of the feeling and

the making of the dam were cognate

pregnancies

                    (or carbuncles, as we

couldn't have said until we'd seen, a feeling

of if, a feeling of but, a feeling of smelling,

even when we named our humdrum town

'City of Power and Progress,' smelling

its industries still smoking at both ends like cigars.

...

McKay's Birding, or desire came out in 1983 and hit Today's book of poetry right on the chin, we were smitten.  Tight, allegorical magic/music.

McKay has built an unassailable reputation in Canada for his poetry, wait until you read his bio, but Today's book of poetry would be remiss if we didn't tell you all how often Don's name shows up in the back of other books of poetry, when they are giving thanks.  Don's kind poetry hand has supported and encouraged an army of younger Canadian poets.

From Birding, or desire

L'Hirondelle

     To be idiomatic in a vacuum

     it is a shining thing!

Would I pass her by again, as always leave her standing with her head

bowed by her locker, looking like she'd forgotten the combination to

everything? Could I tell her now that no one, not the most depraved of

us, deserves high school? Could I explain the way we locked her in our

lust, never speaking to her but only of, and only in the locker room, how

we turned her into a statue of desire? Could I ask her about the feathers in

her locker, taped to the inside of the door? What would I say to that sad

fabulously breasted creature, now that my clumsiness has gnarled? Walking

down the corridor of metal doors to find you crying soundlessly, black hair

pouring, the weight of the combination lock heavy in your hand like --

I see this only now -- the absence of a cock you loved. In memory, I fur-

nish you with drapes, a used fridge and a bedroom suite ($299 at Zellers)

which I carefully arrange around you. On your cold fake marble floor I

lay this old braided rug I bought and lived on later in Saskatoon. Here

on your coffee table (slightly scratched, half price) I am leaving my copy

of The Birds of Canada. And listen: during the long industrial softball

double-headers of your future, be sure to look up at the lights in case the

Nighthawks may be up there

                sideslip

                                        downglide

             flashing their long barred wings they

                                               intersect with shadflies on the ad lib,

moves we never thought of, never made.

...

Today's book of poetry enters a Don McKay book with the certainty that with eyes and ears open we are about to be amazed.  Angular Unconformity, Collected Poems 1970-2014 weighs in at a hefty fill your boots 584 pages and does not disappoint.  It is a necessary treasure.  We here at Today's book of poetry believe Mr. McKay still has a library of fine poems yet to write but this tome will bring you up to date.

Today's book of poetry is always surprised by how McKay gives us access in his poems.  The topography and subject range always vary but the emotional accessibility is a constant.  The poems are always intelligent whip-quick, as though there were a built-in codex we all knew.

From Strike/Slip

Pond

Eventually water,

having been possessed by every verb--

been rush been drip been

geyser eddy fountain rapid drunk

evaporated frozen pissed

transpired -- will fall

into itself and sit.

                            Pond. Things touch

or splash down and it

takes them in -- pollen, heron, leaves, larvae, Greater

and Lesser scaup -- nothing declined,

nothing carried briskly off to form

alluvium somewhere else. Pond gazes

into sky religiously but also

gathers in its edge, reflecting cattails, alders,

reed beds and behind them, ranged

like taller children in the grade four photo,

conifers and birch. All of them inverted, carried

deeper into sepia, we might as well say

pondered. For pond is not pool,

whose clarity is edgeless and whose emptiness,

beloved by poets and the moon, permits us

to imagine life without the accident-

prone plumbing of its ecosystems. No,

the pause of pond is gravid and its wealth

a naturally occurring soup. It thickens up

with spawn and algae, while,

on its surface, stirred by every

whim of wind, it translates air as texture--

mottled, moire, pleated, shirred or

seersuckered in that momentary ecstasy from which

impressionism, like a bridesmaid, steps.  When it rains

it winks, then puckers up all over, then,

moving two more inches into metamorphosis,

shudders into pelt.

                              Suppose Narcissus

were to find a brown pond

to gaze in: would the course of self-love

run so smooth with that exquisite face

rendered in bruin undertone,

shaken, and floated in the murk

between the deep sky and the ooze?

...

This morning's office read was legendary.  The Today's book of poetry offices were over-run with poet traffic this weekend.  Poets Justin Million and Elisha Rubacha from Peterborough spent the weekend here on Dagmar.  They are the heart and soul behind bird|buried press.  They scoured the stacks and were able to find poetry to take home from our "extras" shelf.  

On Saturday Robert Hogg came by to say hello.  You might remember Robert Hogg's fine books Heat Lightning, Of Light, Standing Back and There Is No Falling.  I had Milo go back in the stacks and bring out some Robert Hogg material that wasn't signed.  It's signed now.

Today's book of poetry wouldn't want to put words in Robert Hogg's mouth but we both agreed that Michael Ondaatje might be the best Canadian poet.  We also agreed that Don McKay was Canadian poetry royalty, although I'm sure Don would never see it that way.

The visiting poet vibe was all over the office this morning and it showed in the reading.  Mr. McKay would have enjoyed it  -  we certainly all enjoyed Angular Unconformity.

Don McKay

ABOUT THE POET

Don McKay has published numerous books of poetry and several books of essays. The poetry has been recognized with a number of awards, including two Governor General’s Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His most recent book of essays, The Shell of the Tortoise, received the Winterset Prize for Excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador Writing for 2011. Paradoxides, his most recent book of poems, winner of the E.J. Pratt Prize for Poetry, includes meditations on geology and deep time, while pursuing ongoing obsessions with birds and tools. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

not sure why

Poet Don McKay reads the poem "Sometimes a Voice" from Another Gravity, shortlisted for the 2001 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

Video: Griffin Poetry Prize

gooselane.com 

587

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.

Believing is not the same as Being Saved - Lisa Martin (University of Alberta Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Believing is not the same as Being Saved.  Lisa Martin. Robert Kroetsch Series.  University of Alberta Press.  Edmonton, Alberta.  2017.

Believing is not the same as Being Saved is a quietly elegant book of poems.  Lisa Martin comes to Today's book of poetry with a book ten years in the making.  You can see and feel the meticulous care Martin has taken in crafting these poems, constructing this book.

This is yet another case of Today's book of poetry feeling our skill set is not quite up to the task.   How can I explain how the universe of each Martin poem is a self contained marvel or how collectively these myriad universes meld into one clear, constant gaze?  Lisa Martin has some serious jam.

Believing is not the same

as being saved

The summer I was fifteen a girl at my church camp

fell from the high rock where she'd been lying

in the sun. I heard the news on the phone

which rang in a room where I was trying to die

without technically killing myself: it was an age

at which much of what we did passed as pleasure

but was actually terror. The girl who fell punctured

the room with a question: is this really what you

want? Her scream loud enough to travel

an hour's hike away to where the tanned, shirtless

boys' counsellor dressing by the fire recognized

its message. He ran the entire distance in bare feet,

a pair of worn shorts, sweat rising to the surface.

He was a teenager himself -- each footfall

bearing him toward the absolute far edge of youth,

strength. he gathered her in his arms, carried her

body to camp, despite everything. He ran, even then,

though what compelled him had altered, though his

muscles changed, became the animal necessity

we need to get through. Her death cradled to him

like the child of his own he would one day hold, and no

doubt, love. The news came, in the room where I sat,

and then went. And did I gain courage? I knew

the exact quality of light on the surface of that rock.

Each night at camp, the year before, I'd walked

silent amidst the roving beams of flashlights

on the same trail of mulch, moss, rock, not knowing

the choice I would one day run toward, then --

irrevocably, turn from. After that, I absorbed

air, knowledge, like dew -- testing God against

all better judgment. I started thinking that summer

of cedar bark and stones, the texture of the path

beneath the feet of the boys' counsellor as he

ran -- I believe he felt everything -- carrying her

death and love with his body as only the

living can. I flicked off a switch that summer

as I walked. I wanted to understand

darkness, the quality of my heart:not light,

but spark. Even then, the path I was on

extended far past the limit suggested

by the way the path curved gently toward

the bright fire, voices singing softly

in darkness not inflected yet with the cry

of her voice falling impossible through air that

couldn't catch her. Even now, what I want most

isn't to walk past that song into knowledge.

Believe me: I want to sing, despite

everything. I want to believe

we all could be saved.

...

Birth, death, love, loss - yep, they're all in Believing is not the same as Being Saved as bold as brass and writ large.  Martin understands that much of life is a paradox, that joy and sorrow are birds dancing on the same high wire.  Martin is trying to concern herself with how one lives a good life, how one becomes a good person.  Today's book of poetry has always thought this a noble and worthy pursuit.

Luckily for us Martin is completely up to the task.  Reading these poems we know, we see, that Martin is striving for a stab at truth in each and every one of these lyric narratives.  Martin is systematic and as cool as a cat with a bird in her mouth.  These poems are ready to bargain you to another place, just like Bukowski's Mockingbird.

Dancing the path to understanding

Sitting in the audience tonight listening to strings

rub strings in the dark like the frenzied wings of insects

who want to mate -- and, so, survive. Though you

aren't here the memory of you is flickering in me

like filaments in light bulbs at the VIA Rail station

this morning where I left you before the sun

even rose all lit up against the dark. I'm here:

the train you're on is stopped on the tracks

squandering moonlight; I'm watching Pascal

the Quebecois fiddler working with his feet

to artfully dislodge the desired feeling, dancing

the path to understanding, like a bee before bees,

while I regard, from behind, the dark heads

of the others closest to me. Heads still as

stone monuments, yet acute with compound

longing. I'm told lens-bearing-eyes

have evolved at least seven times, so perhaps

there is still something missing, something

we do not yet see. I close my eyes

to listen, to isolate the message, that nectar

we only find if someone else waggles

revelation. That practiced disclosure, art,

is what we live on; it's what we eat, how

we love; it's what all the work sometimes

miraculously amounts to, yet doesn't

guarantee. How hard it is to break through

noise into music. The fiddle's yearning is not lonely

in the darkness but accompanied by bass

notes, the heart's acoustic strum; sadness

like ours isn't empty but filled with what

surrounds it -- as a dance contains

the path it cannot name.

...

The Todays' book of poetry offices are a little different today.  Visiting poets Justin Million and Elisha Rubacha are currently snoring in the Stuart Ross Poetry and Guest Room so the rest of us are trying to keep our vibrant hum to a minimum.  We have the stereo on low.  This morning it is Saint Charles of Parker and Lady Day, the sublime Billie.

Today's book of poetry was recently gifted two large boxes of poetry, mostly Canadian.  After culling through and finding more than a dozen treasures - we left the boxes on the floor of our office for any visiting poet to romp through and take what they please.  Justin and Elisha loaded up upon arrival last night, they are in town for the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair which is taking place this afternoon.   They both read at the gala last night.

Everyone in our offices enjoys taking home new poetry so the arrival of the boxes, much like that of Million and Rubacha, was like Christmas.

But there isn't much celebrating in Today's book of poetry offices this week with the departure of Odin to greener poetry pastures.  As Lisa Martin helps us to remember, helps us understand, there are as many different types of loss as there are methods of grieving.

The office troops rallied when we opened up Believing is not the same as Being Saved.  Kathleen, our Jr. Editor, opined that Martin was "a new kind of feminist" so of course we had to ask what she meant.  Kathleen replied that Martin was a "pragmatic realist and subterranean subversive at the same time."

The troops did rally, Odinless, for an engaged morning read of Believing is not the same as Being Saved as we danced Ms. Martin around the room.  You wouldn't instantly get that these poems are so robust because Martin's smart might be confused for delicate.  Martin is no such thing.  She is detailed, precise  and certain.

Some of what we know about airports in the

21st century

Some of what we know about winter light and the flight of birds

or waiting in long queues of astonishingly ordinary people

like us, or whom we could love, or wouldn't want to. I guess I've been

heartbroken a long time without knowing it -- we do this. Go without

knowing as if the content of our propositions has anything to do

with the great fire fuelled by God-knows-what that's bruised

the horizon. Just as the flare of the refinery and all violent

condemnation makes a bruise in the heart of this terrified world.

Maybe the thing each of us doesn't want to believe in

is what fuels us, our guilt and love fluttering where the walls

meet the ceiling like those birds that live in airports disoriented

by light and warmth they can't leave, even if it doesn't nourish them.

The birds arrive as we do, through the boarding tunnels:hungry,

carrying everything we need, or believed we do, or the one thing

we were able to find. The birds are usually sparrows and enjoy

the plants and the water features, like us. It's only cold in here

because the sun's turned away. House sparrows tolerate the noise

well but suffer, in the end, from lack of darkness. Most of us have

seen them congregating up there, singing to a sky that won't be

reached by available means. Maybe we know only what we must.

Scourge of janitors, those charged with keeping up appearances, birds

can be found by attentive travellers everywhere from Edmonton to Singapore.

Inside anything, at any time:locate a container for something strange.

Geocaching in airports has reached an all-time high, despite the fact

enthusiasts are still taking more than they every put back. Most airports

sport massive viewing windows, but hardly anyone's looking through.

Even so, the sun rises over tarmac. But if you know anything

you know this. You know it's not the sun that turns away.

...

Today's book of poetry was newly smitten by the writing of the talented Lisa Martin and can only hope we don't have to wait another ten years to read the follow-up to Believing is not the same as Being Saved.  We are certain it will be worth the wait but less sure we have another ten years in us.

Lisa Martin, get to work, and thank you.

Lisa Martin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Martin. Award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Lisa Martin is the author of One Crow Sorrow (2008) and co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss (2013). She teaches literature and creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.

uap.ualberta.ca 

586

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.

Body, in Good Light - Erin Rodoni (Sixteen Rivers Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Body, in Good Light.  Erin Rodoni.  Sixteen Rivers Press.  San Francisco, California.  2017.

"...bliss, like a memory, can be unearthed by scent."

                                                                                                 "The Body Lathe"

                                                                                                  Erin Rodoni

Erin Rodoni's Body, in Good Light has enough light to charm your eyes open wide but there will be tears enough before the end.  Rodoni has poems built on sustained intensity but without any anxiety, passion without pontification.

Today's book of poetry is a bit distracted today as our associate Odin is putting in his last days with us.   Odin has been presented with a bigger and better playground and is unable to say no.  We understand that and are proud of the work he has done here, we are sorry to see him go.  Odin never talked all that much but we sure listened when he did.

Body, in Good Light is just the sort of book Odin likes best, unapologetic intelligence, open-hearted wit and kindness.

The Ninety-Year-Old Woman On My Table

is speaking into the lavender-spritzed air

between us. Her muscles Braille another

story. She's telling me about her niece,

who lives with a man she'll never marry.

It's complicated, you see. There's so little

between her bones and mine, a thumb's

pad, a tendon's frayed twine. You see,

he has a wife. Sometimes it seems these

bodies just appear under my hands. She has

some kind of condition. They all touch

their own shoulders, their lower backs

to show me where the pain is. Sometimes

they want to touch mine (right there) as if

we don't all inhabit the same sad pockets

of skin. Can't move, can't speak. I imagine

there are people hired just to wash her

where her husband can't. Certainly can't

have sex, and I suppose he has all he wants

with my niece. Our muscles are toned to transfer

gentleness. From lover to child. From stranger

to self and back again. Sometimes the weight

of a toothbrush seems too much when I remember

I must lift it twice a day until I no longer can.

They have children together. I've kissed my own

grandmothers into smaller and smaller beds,

fixed their hair -- all wrong I'm sure. I suppose

he must have loved her. Now he tends her

like a houseplant. Or maybe she's a ghost

orchid in a greenhouse in a snowed in city.

Probably still does, in his way. The globe

unshaken, shelved in one of these little rooms

where hands polish it with love

so unconditional it's cruel.

...

Erin Rodoni talks about cancer and childbirth and chemotherapy and the impending death of a younger brother and when she is doing this she is covering some damned sad territory, sweet and profound.  As a reader you'll feel compelled to turn to the next page, Rodoni keeps the iron under your feet suitably red.

Today's book of poetry also wants to warn you.  Rodoni moved us to real, running down the cheeks, tears more than once.  As much of a crocodile as I can sometimes be those were real emotions running down my old face.

You Kept My Summer Dresses

when I died, and jewels worn closest to my skin.

You warmed them in a fist, watched hemlines swish

dust, once my thigh. When you lie

beside your new love now, do you miss

the little nicks not on her shinbone,

the mole your little finger doesn't brush?

Hush, I know about darkness, how it funnels

a sort of light we see as flesh

through our sealed lids. I know about rooting

toward comfort's infrared.

I only meant to say I can't forgive you.

I'm not God, just a voice inside your head.

You remember, don't you, what I said

about the heart? To do the things it tells you?

Soon she will jump at necklaces curled like cobras

in your sock drawer. Soon it will be time

to wash my dresses, leave them slapping on the line.

All I ask is, just once more at dusk, stand

in the life we shared, let night gather

behind the dresser, beneath the bed.

Let shadows press open the closet and breathe

the last moths of my scent.

...

Our morning read was a tempered emotional affair this morning.  We were all on edge because of Odin's bon voyage.  Every time Rodoni crossed an emotional bridge one of us jumped out of our skin and to be pulled back from the ledge.

Odin calmed us all down, as he always does, kissed everyone, left.  A class act all the way.

When I got back to my office there was a short note from Odin on my desk.  He said "that Rodoni woman is built from strong stuff, first rate poetry from an intelligent woman's voice.  Remember that you grew up under the care of a strong, intelligent woman.  Stay the course."

We Chop Onions, Listen To Billie Holiday

The windows fogged. Our eyes. My brother slides the knife from his

wife's fist, dances her around the room. Her body already out of breath,

he folds her to his chest. They revolve in one place: teenagers during 

the last song of prom. My husband stands behind me. I lean into his

weight. And for a moment I let myself conjure a child with her smile

and my brother's green eyes, a child who will never run through this

house playing tag with the child I don't yet have. Beyond the steam on

the windows, fall's first frost sharpens the marsh grass, and the arced

maps in the stars tick past without us until we are already ghosts.

...

Erin Rodoni's Body, in Good Light is flat out excellent.  You should give a copy to every woman you know.  Wouldn't hurt any of the menfolk either.

Erin Rodoni

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) and A Landscape for Loss, which won the 2016 Stevens Manuscript Prize sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and is forthcoming later this year. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal, among others. Her poems have also been included in the Best New Poets anthology, featured on Verse Daily, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and honored with an Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing programs. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young daughters.

BLURBS

“I walk toward you barefoot,” writes Erin Rodoni, a poet who can speak with the same ease of private elegies and public journeys, of childbirth and of changing trains in Krakow, of grief on losing a loved one to cancer, and of ‘borrowed countries / where bougainvillea scales balconies // like a romance language.’ Here is a book that journeys out into the world, and also inward—into the mysteries of private life, of the body, where ‘bliss, like a memory, can be unearthed by scent.’ I love how wisdom enters the moment of passion in these poems, where we see ourselves living here, on this earth, ‘believing // in these bodies.’ This is a marvelous debut.” 

     —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa 

“The aesthetic that courses throughout Erin Rodoni’s sumptuous debut—tender and bittersweet, but also clear-eyed and unflinching—recalls Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy, in which the earth’s dream is ‘to resurrect / in us invisibly.’ That ache of regeneration and rejuvenation is made manifest in Body, in Good Light. In the section entitled ‘A Sort of Light We See as Flesh,’ the poem ‘The Chapel’ brings us to a woman’smemorial service, where Rodoni faces ‘an altar draped in fabric / that belongs to no faith.’ At the end, though, she says: ‘We praise/ the faith of whatever machine // keeps the warmth in her hands.’ By extension, that warmth extends to the poet, to those she holds dear, and, thankfully, to us.”
     —Thomas Centolella, author of Views from Along the Middle Way


sixteenrivers.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.

Asking The Names - Michael Miller (The Ashland Poetry Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Asking The Names.  Michael Miller.  The Ashland Poetry Press.  Ashland University.  Ashland, Ohio.  2017.

Michael Miller writes time machine poetry.  These poems are completely in the present, poignant, powerful and in the best sense of the word; pretty.  At the same time these poems are about the passage of time and what is endured, what is learned, what is savoured, what is mourned.

Miller also has the rare capacity to write openly about enduring love without ever sounding overly romantic or trite.

Silence

In the wordless void between us

The domain of silence

Is greater than anything we can say.

This is where love becomes

A meadow blossoming,

This is where I can hold you

Beyond the ephemeral touch,

Beyond the unfolding petals of desire

Which must always close.

...

Miller's short poems have the qualities of fine crystal, they are transparent so any flaws would be immediately obvious.  

If you were to ping one on the side with your finger, the resonance you hear will be a fully formed tone, abundant in colour regardless of it's brevity.

Devotion

Prepared at exactly five o'clock,

Placed carefully before her

On their immaculate table,

The meals he makes

For his paralyzed wife

Are the language of enduring love.

With spotless silverware

He feeds her with every morsel

Of his patient tenderness.

...

Asking The Names made for a contemplative morning read at the Today's book of poetry offices.  It's another beautiful sunny day so we have all the doors and windows open.  It shouldn't come as any surprise that this morning's office music is a mix of Dexter and Pharoah.

Mr. Miller supplied his robust poems and his delicate voice.  These are intensely personal and studiously carefully poems that remind Today's book of poetry of the best of Wendell Berry and Robert Bly.  Poems like these require a mature voice and considerable time in the saddle, wisdom like this only comes with time and experience.

Keeping Alive

Beethoven and biopsies,

How they keep me alive,

How making love with you

Keeps me alive,

How I want to make love

For as long as I can,

How I want your body

To cover mine

As I take that final breath.

...

Asking The Names wanders through the fields and adventures of youth, the horrors and memory scars of military service, battle and loss but it is Miller's unabashed tenderness when talking about his love that has won the day for Today's book of poetry.

As Dexter Gordon's Dale Turner says in the great Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight, "Lady Francis, there's not enough kindness in the world."  Today's book of poetry is happy to report that Michael Miller is helping to improve that balance.

Michael Miller

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Miller's first book The Joyful Dark was the Editor's Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at The Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Sweanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Raritan, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review. Darkening The Grass, his third book, was a "Must Read 2013" selection of The Massachusetts Book Award. His poem, "The Different War," was the 2014 First Prize winner of the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Award, and anthologized in Yeats 150 (Lilliput Press, Dublin). Born in 1940, Michael Miller served in the Marine Corps from 1958 to 1962. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

BLURBS

I read Michael Miller's poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling.

     - Richard Wilbur

Michael Miller's poems are finely tuned meditations on nature, war, city life, and growing old. The recurring theme of love, the cycles of light and darkness, of fear and hope, of life and death, echo from poem to poem. One realizes reading these poems that one must climb to get into the light, that certainty is uncertain.

     - Gary Lee Entsminger

Michael Miller's poetry addresses the nuances of this contradictory world. In Asking The Names his empathy embraces the pain of soldiers and the poignant lives of the elderly. Most moving, perhaps, is when he writes about enduring love. Miller's poems, each expertly wrought, are radiant.

     - Nikia Leopold

ashlandpoetrypress.com 

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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.

What Weaponry a novel in prose poems - Elizabeth J. Colen (Black Lawrence Press)

Today's book of poetry:
What Weaponry - a novel in prose poems.   
Elizabeth J. Colen.  Black Lawrence Press.  Pittsburgh, PA.  2016.

What Weaponry - a novel in prose poems saunters into the room like a tattooed lady in a perky summer dress with a pistol in her purse and a smear of lipstick still tasty on her lips.  Elizabeth J. Colen is not new to this game and her characters are all body and soul, just like a jazz song, tattered and somehow still hopeful on the battered field of love.

These beautiful assaults are instant karma and sad fate.  Colen has access to instantaneous emotional intensity with her wide open heart channeling all the dreams of her wounded heroes.

This poetry novel burns.

We Are Only Animals Furred

And Undone

In this land time stops, white bird hovering in the

pre-dawn. Unseen fawns high step the wet grass.

And we, feet and shin bathed in shallows seas of

scrub, marvel at the complete dark.  "There's

nothing," you whisper, and then say nothing more. I

know you mean the world has closed its doors.

We haven't slept but tired's come back to wild elation

the way all things circle back to meet their opposites.

The way I sometimes become you again. And

through bare toes feeling for the towpath, and that

stab of electric light moved on by our motion, we

find the neighbor's barn door. No light in neighbor's

kitchen, no horse sounds from the yard. Only the

crickets and your breathing, pale face posed, the

gun still in your hand.

...

Today's book of poetry was gobsmacked by What Weaponry and pleasantly so.  Every time I begin to waver another poet comes along to give us hope.  Today's hope is supplied by these electric jolts from Colen's stun gun.  Elizabeth J. Colen is a talent to celebrate.  

We have heard all these stories before, in one version or another, after all, how many stories are there?  But Colen has found the right traction to make her startlingly lived-in/innocent voice unique.

Today's book of poetry had some extra help this morning.  Before everyone else arrived I was sitting in the shade at the front of our building and rereading What Weaponry and enjoying the quiet street, the occasional cardinal whistle, the sun coming through the large trees down the road.  Our friend Pistol dropped by with his pal Thomas.  When they sat down I handed What Weaponry over to Pistol and asked him to take a peek.  Pistol started reading, he always opens a book of poetry at a random page and starts in there, and the first time he raised his head he was smiling and said "well, that was okay."  And of course he meant much more.  

He buried his head in What Weaponry again and when he came up for air he was a convert.  Pistol doesn't like all that much, I show him poetry whenever I can, but when he does like it I know I've hit on something special, splendid.

Wife Beater

There's a tattooed girl at the counter in the bread

shop and she's thin and she's tough and she's scarred

and you start talking about what her life must be

like. Tank top, wife beater, fresh bruise on her chin.

You wonder if she's somebody's wife. And the shirt

doesn't come all the way down to her pants, which

are low, which are black, which are ripped at the

knee. And the shirt is a little dirty around the

middle like she'd rubbed up against some dirty

truck. And I see your eyes turn down and you look

at her waist and you whisper something about

stretch marks. I tell you you have no business

speculating about the nature of those. Was she fat,

you said, but you decided it was babies. And how

many. You give her seven babies, but she's probably

only twenty-three and just looks forty-four. She

hasn't had time, I say and you say, she looks like the

world, this girl, she looks like the whole damn world

has been sitting right in her lap.

...

There's a dark engine revving hard and running the show in Colen's wheelhouse and the poems in What Weaponry are often bracing as a result.  But Colen is wall-papering her sad confines with jewels.  No matter how darkly set these gems glisten with revealing light.

Today's book of poetry found Colen's mastery of the prose poem invigorating.  Each of these poems ends up bigger than the sum of it's parts.  These are screenplays.  Colen seasons each page with an intoxicating mix of tender, tawdry (in the best possible way) and tired.

When Today's book of poetry says "tired" we are talking about that bone-funking weariness that too much experience welds onto your face like ritual scars.

Last Meal Of Gin

What it took: two days to get used to. The break-off,

lesion to touch, legion. And where were you when?

And then admitting that dream. What breaches.

What I would have made up, but didn't. From there,

dories everywhere, talk of unicorns, what horns,

whatever, the red birds that did not alight on my

arms: there was no going back. Everything right

now is about you. Standing in the dim kitchen,

knee-deep in me. Standing in the living room, the

lights clicking off. Timers. I can't see the face for the

face, can't see the place for the what if. We were a

mob of lost parts, a wreckage of history. Weekends

are tiny models of the world, what weeks want to be.

Sometimes what years. Might contain all electric, all

thought. Which way we went. A tug on the hair and

the clock shakes, pulling you forward by bangs,

waking up bruised. Waking with loss everywhere.

...

Elizabeth J. Colen's What Weaponry is exactly what Today's book of poetry wants to see when we open a book of poems.  We want to see sparks fly, stick around and find out what is buried in the ashes.

Colen made a fan out of our friend Pistol this morning and that's a difficult get.  Today's book of poetry was already convinced.

Elizabeth J. Colen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014), and Your Sick (Jellyfish Highway, 2016), co-written with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee. She teaches at Western Washington University.

BLURBS

• Handsomely forged like the best scenes of the best art films, Elizabeth Colen’s What Weaponry moves between expansive seashores and claustrophobic interiors to illuminate or exorcise the emotional interstices we all inhabit. Such violence and tenderness rubbing up against each other! It’s impossible to look away. And if, as Colen insists, 'There is no mystery here,' it’s because she has exposed the beautiful ugly subcutaneous.
       —Debra Di Blasi
In What Weaponry, Elizabeth J. Colen has done something much more challenging, much more nimble than write a book of prose poems. She has created a wonder, a linear circularity – “We haven’t slept but tired’s come back to wild elation the way all things circle back to meet their opposites,” – she has embedded a book of poems inside a book of prose. “Say you didn’t say his name. Say you sang it.” So I won’t. I will. I just have to follow her. Let her make music with the stories she puts in my mouth. Let her wake me.
    —TC Tolbert

The vortex of bold words that whip through Elizabeth Colen's What Weaponry are messages fully articulating a new form of body. A new sense of love. Radiant and containing "all electric, all thought," the language found in Colen's latest book generously provide a jittery syntactical jolt. What is constant in these dazzling lyrical vignettes is the desire for intimacy in the throes of love's changing face. What Weaponry swerves, plumbs, sears and burns for that which eludes but is right before us. It's a remarkable book.
     —Oliver de la Paz

blacklawrencepress.com 

583

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.