Falling Ash - Haibun, Haiku, Senryu & Other Poems - James Fowler (Hobblebush Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Falling Ashes - Haibun, Haiku, Senryu & Other Poems.  James Fowler.  The Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, Volume VII.  Hobblebush Books.  Brookline, New Hampshire.  2013

Those who read this blog with any regularity will know that in general I am not a big fan of any sort of formalism — but good poetry is always good poetry.  Joseph Bathanti showed us something entirely new with the sonnet in Sonnets of the Cross and here, James Fowler utterly astounds with haibun, haiku, senryu and other poems.

A Sailor On Weekend Pass

I met my blind date Friday afternoon on an underground street in
Chicago where she talked the bouncer into letting me into the bar.
Over PBRs she asked if I'd read Ginsberg or Snyder. I said I read
Asimov and Heinlein. After shots of tequila, she told me of her nights
in jail for protesting the war. I told her I was afraid she'd make me
lose my clearance. She walked me back to the train station where the
setting sun cast our silhouette on the wall as I kissed her, once. Two
months later I was in Nam.—I'm still fond of the scent of limes.—I'd
like to tell her that I've read Ginsberg and can recite Snyder's
Turtle Island.—Maybe she remembers when the sun went down.

                                     car lights
                                     flash through the bar windows
                                     shadows
                                   
...

By writing poems of such perfect and precise balance Fowler is clearly demonstrating the place and the beauty for formal poems of this fashion.  Not one word should, or could, be altered without blemishing a facet.

A Poem Made in the Shape of a Burning Buddhist Monk

          in memory of Thich Quang Duc

This poem is made to be read aloud
on a crowded street and dropped,
with a match, into a beggar's bowl.

This poem will lift up in a cloud
of flames. High above, the fire
will burst and feather down upon
the shoulders of those pushing by.

There will be many poems read
in the memory of burning monks.
Tears will streak the sooty faces
of the ghosts. Ash will fill their cups.

...


Fowler's Falling Ashes really is a beautiful book to read, his poetry as surprising in content as in form.

There are edgy, highly political and decisively polarizing poems in this sterling collection along with all the beauty.  Each and every one as perfect and precious as a snowflake.

...

                                   after the rain
                                   a thousand moons
                                   on the street

...

Reading books like James Fowler's Falling Ashes is as refreshing as it is liberating.  James Fowler has given us something of beauty that is rewarding to read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Fowler retired from the US Navy after 25 years as a Senior Chief and used his GI Bill to get a master's degree in Environmental Science, majoring in Nature Writing, from Antioch University in New England in Keene, New Hampshire. He has been privately teaching poetry for ten years and edited Heartbeat of New England: An Anthology of Nature Poems (Tiger Moon Publications, 2000). He has been a judge for Poetry Out Loud.
Over two hundred and fifty of James Fowler's poems in various forms have been published in such journals as Bitter Oleander, Sentence, Connecticut Review, Worcester Review and others.

COVER BLURBS
"A sculptor lives with a piece of wood and studies its color, imperfections and grain in order to bring forth the beauty of its final form.  Fowler's haiku and haibun remind one of tiny pieces of modern sculpture devoid of everything except what is necessary to reveal both life's imperfections and grain. This he does with skill and artistry.  A book you will want to read and reread."
     —Wanda D. Cook.

"Jim Fowler's fine collection of haiku, haibun and a few poems is dominated by a stark sense engendered by experience in war, work abroad, his wife, and nature.  One cannot but be moved by his evocation of war and love and the rest."
     —Bruce Ross

PLEASE GO HERE TO HEAR JAMES FOWLER READ FROM FALLING ASHES:

http://www.hobblebush.com/pages/fowler_haikuetc.html
                   
www.hobblebush.com

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Sonnets of the Cross - Joseph Bathanti (Jacar Press)

Today's book of poetry:

Sonnets of the Cross.  Joseph Bathanti.  Jacar Press.  Durham, North Carolina.  2013.

If Mark Twain were a Baptist minister and he was narrating the biblical baptism by fire of one of the "Our Gang" characters — maybe that's the feeling I'm getting from Joseph Bathanti's most excellent Sonnets of the Cross.

Or try this one — you've got Thomas Hart Benton painting the background for a Catholic pavilion populated by questionable louts of dubious faith and the ghost of Bill Hicks.  None of these people actually appear in these poems.  What I am trying to do is share some of the feeling these poems create.

Jesus Falls The First Time

He came late to walking and I fretted

lest the blue yield of my virginity

was flawed in marrow and sinew whetted

by innocence whelping Divinity.

He could speak, but refused. He knew His name,

knew Iscariot was His betrayer,

the psalter's achieve portending His fame,

had committed to memory Isaiah.

His first toys were hammer, nails, adze and awl,

His own apprentice bench from which he pitched

and split a cleft above his eye, a fall

that would have killed another child, I stitched

my pretty baby while he read a poem

about bands of angels bearing him home.

...

It has been a long time since I've read the Bible and it will probably be a long before I read it again - but if I were going to I would want it translated by Bathanti.  I find his language, idiom, dialogue all utterly sublime.

These fable like sonnets are perfectly twisted to fit your ear.

Jesus Meets The Woman

They bump into Him shopping in Bloomfield.

It's how many years?  He's skin and bone.

The hair.  The beard.  Some kind of radical.

But still He shows respect, kisses each one,

inquires about their health, tells them to pray,

ask anything in His name and it's theirs.

They laugh.  He's probably on drugs, they say.

His poor widowed mother.  Thirty-three years

old, a grown man, and still can't settle down.

The little bit He makes He gives away,

while poor Mary sits in one room downtown,

practically on welfare, day after day.

they don't mention the thorns or bloody cross.

He's not a bad kid, just a little lost.

...

Sometimes you find poems and sometimes they find you.  Joseph Bathanit's Sonnets of the Cross may be an instructional manual for an introduction to faith or a guide to writing better poetry.  Take your pick.  I found these solid poems thoroughly entertaining, full of deprecating humour and a particular charm, wit and intelligence.

Jesus's Body Is Removed From The Cross

My father, Paul, and Ronnie Villani

laddered up to cut Him down at 3 sharp

in flouts of lightning.  The Allegheny

caught on fire, its banks brimmed in boiled carp.

With claw hammer and crowbar, my dad pried

the spikes from His hands and feet.  In the end

he hack-sawed the rusted pig iron, and cried,

working quickly because the Pinkertons

the strike-breakers had hired to execute

the Union Christ sped back to Golgotha

to jail them.  Ronnie bore Him to the boot

of Paul's blood-red Oldsmobile Electra.

They drank to the Savior: Corpus Christi.

Shots of Black Velvet chased with Iron City.

...

This beautiful limited edition chapbook was designed by Dave Wofford of Horse & Buggy Press in Durham, North Carolina.  The images used to illustrate this book were created by Ron Moss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Bathanti is the Poet Laureate of North Carolina. He is the author of six books of poetry:  Communion Partners, Anson County, The Feast of All Saints, This Metal, Land of Amnesia, and Restoring Sacred Art.  He is the recipient of two Literature Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Samuel Talmadge Ragan Award, the Linda Flowers Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Carolina Novel Award, the Novello Literary Award, the Spokane Prize, the Roanoke Chowan Prize, the Ragan-Rubin Award for Literary Achievement, and the 2013 Mary Frances Hobson Prize.  Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing and Writer-in-Residence of Watauga Global Community at Appalachian State University,

Meet Joseph Bathanti

www.jacarpress.com

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Old Hat - Rob Winger (Nightwood Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Old Hat.  Rob Winger.  Nightwood Editions.  Gibsons, British Columbia.  2014.

Rob Winger's Old Hat is that something new you were waiting to read.  These poems have that haunting quality of deja-vu.  These poems are sometimes a little like that dream you just can't quite remember until Winger puts his finger on it.

Re/Signs From The Big Board

Press operator for zero.
Press menu for pound.
Please try your hang-up and call again.

Do not arm raises.
Do not intersect blockage.
Do not drink your drives.
Do not attempt to defeat the polarization
of your plugged-safe attachment purpose.

Exit emergencies only.
No red on rights.
Enter donut.

Workers doubled when speed fines present.
Use of prohibition motorized.
Drawn ahead: caution bridge.

The Fox expressed here does not represent the opinion of views.

Persecutors will be violated.
Performers may be strip-searched.
Suggestive parenting is strongly guided.
This is an open door, never keep fired.

Board on, baby.
Come on to yielding traffickers.
Bump speed ahead.
John 16:3.

Please inform your pregnancy if you suspect you are a doctor.
Please keep excessive minimums to a noise.

Smoking no please.

If you have a nurse, please give it to your x-ray.

Please keep your personal longings with you at all times.

At the dash of the long end, followed by six seconds of silence,
the clock will be one.

It's the know of the world as we end it.

...

These poems are SO Canadian, Al Purdy would be proud.  The characters in these poems understand that Wayne Gretzky is a de facto Head of State/Saint/lead character in part of our National Dream.  They also understand our national small-town ethos.  Winger juxtaposes small-town Ontario and our Mike Holmes hopes against a world where the Joy Division sings national songs.

What We Thought
     after Matthew Zapruder

You put on the first album you ever bought
and the pastel map turns dusty.
Remember the margin where the song
dips down into silence? Can that take us

to the Sunday School basement, where Judas or Peter dies,
so they lay his felt effigy sideways on the green board
and raise triumphant above their pinkish hands a radiant
red-headed Christ? (None of them have heard of Palestine.)

Next door, the country-mile railroad leads to shows:
a visiting Methodist choir; a visiting Presbyterian missionary;
a visiting troupe of men in cork, their olde-tyme stump speeches
unsure how creaking clippers got retired from the sea.

It's best to understand we were just kids. That we built dangerous
forts out of bent Plexiglas, climbed green quarry walls,
trudged over nuclear-waste mountains to school every morning
and only ever knew Cowboys and Indians.

The genteel townsfolk still used the word "negro" then.
We lumped it in with all our other translations for "foreigner."
Wayne Gretzky had grown up next door, and damn, he was Polish,
we thought; not a single one of us knew Grant Fuhr wasn't German.

In that Alice Monroe story, written before we were born,
they cram into the crumbling town hall to stare at the black Africans
and wring their hands with pleasure when they sing so "authentically."
Somewhere in 1979,  that's happening in small-town Ontario;

it might be still. We were made to read their stories, though not as if
they mattered. Our fathers worked with them, lowering steel into
the underworld of smelters. They called them strong but didn't elaborate.
How we've ever found the names for things I'll never know.

Somewhere, I ride my first thirty-three-and-third RPMS
down the angry Appalachians all the way
to the muddy south, where the needle hits its vinyl edge,
then goes to sleep in its silent, salted cradle.

...

These wonderful poems are full of a myriad of delights.  Smart poetry always comes first on my poetry pedestal.  Old Hat is learned wisdom, new lessons, an almanac of Wingers' excellent imagination.

Cellphone

I'm explaining to my class that no one knows
anything about anything.

Truth is a tortoise photographed
in the seventies. I say, or, as one guy puts it

from the back row, the only thing for sure is that
"I do and/or do not exist," stressing his oblique.

There's no Walt Whitman, I'm saying, up there,
in a respectable shirt made in Bangladesh,

unless we all agree that the milk in the glass
from the cow is the farmhand.

Outside, the sky continues it meaninglessness.
The potted plants don't bother to lament.

Heels sink into lawns and airplanes become algorithms
for the deep weight of heavy water.

There are expressions digging in
beyond the lectern's bored cement.

Everyone, I'm saying now, eats the carrot root
and throws away the flowers.

Nothing I say is ever ready
for reason.

...

Old Hat turns cliche inside out, literally.  These are taut, tender and tense occasional poems that step away from the self-imposed universes and frameworks self-imposed upon Winger in his two earlier books.  These observational poems are laser guided and still reflective.

Reading Winger, for me, is like dipping into an old John Steinbeck novel, where there is always twice as much on the page as you originally thought.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob Winger's first book, Muybridge's Horse, was a Globe and Mail best book, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and won a CBC Literary Award. His critically  acclaimed second collection was The Chimney Stone.  Born and raised in small-town Ontario, Rob is a proud alumnus of Mount Allison University, has a MA in English Literature from the University of Guelph, and has a PhD from Carleton University. He currently lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.

COVER BLURBS

"hypnotizing"

     —P.K. Page

"a serious accomplishment"

     —Ken Babstock

"so finely achieved — its luminously sustained lyric, its compelling narrative, its inventiveness and virtuosity"

     —Dionne Brand

"a remarkable achievement"

     —The Globe and Mail

Arc at VERSeFest '13 -- Part 3 -- Rob Winger reads two poems

www.nightwoodeditions.com

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The More Easily Kept Illusions - The Poetry of Al Purdy, selected with an introduction by Robert Budde (Laurier Poetry Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The More Easily Kept Illusions.  The Poetry of Al Purdy.  Selected with an introduction by Robert Budde.  Laurier Poetry Series.  Wilfrid Laurier University Press.  Waterloo, Ontario.  2006.

There is very little I want to say about the work of Al Purdy except that I revere him like a God.

The Laurier Poetry Series should be a must for every library in our country.  These excellent books focus on our best poets and present them in the best light.

Hockey Players

What they worry about most is injuries
          broken arms and legs and
fractured skulls opening so doctors
can see such bloody beautiful things almost
not quite happening in the bone rooms
                             as they happen outside
And the referee?
                             He's right there on the ice
not out of sight among the roaring blue gods
of a game played for passionate stockbrokers
children wearing business suits
and a nation of television agnostics
who never agree with the referee and applaud
when he falls flat on his face  
                                    On a breakaway
the centreman carrying the puck
his wings trailing a little
                                    on both sides why
I've seen the aching glory of a resurrection
                                    in their eyes
                                    if they score
but crucifixion's agony to lose
—the game?

                               We sit up there in the blues
bored and sleepy and suddenly three men
break down the ice in roaring feverish speed and
we stand up in our seats with such a rapid pouring
of delight exploding out of self to join them why
theirs and our orgasm is the rocket stipend
for skating thru the smoky end boards out
of sight and climbing up the appalachian highlands
and racing breast to breast across laurentian barrens
over hudson's diamond bay and down the treeless tundra where
auroras are tubercular and awesome and
stopping isn't feasible or possible or lawful
but we have to and we have to
                                               laugh because we must and
stop to look as self and one another but
           our opponent's never geography
                                               or distance why
         
                        it's men
                        —just men?

And how do the players feel about it
this combination of ballet and murder?
For years a Canadian specific
to salve the anguish of inferiority
by being good at something the American's aren't
and what's the essence of a game like this
which takes a ten-year fragment of a man's life
replaces with love that lodges in his brain
                       and substitutes for reason?

Besides the fear of injuries
is it the difficulty of ever really overtaking
a hard black rubber disc?
—Boys playing a boy's game in a permanent childhood
with a screaming coach who insists on winning
sports-writer-critics and the crowd gone mad?
—And the worrying wives wanting you to quit and
your aching body stretched on the rubbing table
thinking of money in owners' pockets that might be yours
the butt-slapping camaraderie and the self-indulgence
of allowing yourself to be a hero and knowing
everything ends in a pot-belly

Out on the ice can all these things be forgotten
in swift and skilled delight of speed?
—roaring out the endboards out the city
streets and high up where laconic winds
whisper litanies for a fevered hockey player
Or racing breast to breast and never stopping
over rooftops of the world and all together
sing the song of winning all together
Sing the song of money all together

                    (and out in the suburbs
there's the six-year-old kid
whose reflexes were all wrong
who always fell down and hurt himself and cried
and never learned to skate
                        with his friends)

...

The poems I've chosen for TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY are all standards, classics.  And why not?  Al Purdy is a giant.  To quote David McFadden,  these are poems worth knowing.

Home-Made Beer

I was justly annoyed 10 years ago
in Vancouver: making beer in a crock
under the kitchen table when this
next-door youngster playing with my own
kid managed to sit down in it and
emerged with one end malted—
With excessive moderating I yodelled
at him
           "Keep your ass out of my beer!"
            and the little monster fled—
Whereupon my wife appeared from the bathroom
where she had been brooding for days
over the injustice of being a woman and
attacked me with a broom—
With commendable savoir faire I broke
the broom across my knee (it hurt too) and
then she grabbed the breadknife and made
for me with fairly obvious intentions—
I tore open my shirt and told her calmly
with bared breast and a minimum of boredom
            "Go ahead!  Strike!  Go ahead!"
Icicles dropped from her fiery eyes as she
snarled
             "I wouldn't want to go to jail
             for killing a thing like you!"
I could see at once that she loved me
tho it was cleverly concealed—
For the next few weeks I had to distribute
the meals she prepared among neighbouring
dogs because of the rat poison and
addressed her as Missus Borgia—
That was a long time ago and while
at the time I deplored her lack of
self-control I find myself sentimental
about it now for it can never happen again—

Sept. 22, 1964: PS, I was wrong—

...

Al Purdy, although admired, has yet to be properly canonized.  But make no mistake, he is securely snug in the blanket of his legacy.  These are all poems we should teach our children to recite from memory.

This volume serves as a marvelous introduction to those unfamiliar with Purdy and as a welcome addition to the vast catalogue of critical material available.  Robert Buddes fine essay on Purdy is in tune with the Laurier Poetry Series mandate.

I am currently reading We Go Far Back In Time (The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987), which makes this final poem so tender for me.  This poem reminds me that giants once roamed this land.

Earl Birney in Hospital

He knows me and does not
know me and the fatal
facility for transposing
myself into another someone
ends with me peering out
from his eyes into my eyes
and dizzily thinking
My God! My God!
I have stopped being Me!

But calmer now:
he knows me and does not
know me and I am coloured
shadow in sunlight
his brow furrowed and puzzled
with his effort of not knowing
poems he's written and not written
yet that will never be
and he smiles in memory
of whatever smiling was
and it is somehow left for me
to write them remembering pain
of not writing beyond
this grey land of nowhere
forgetting the pain before
beautiful verb and handsome noun
agreed to live together
for better or worse somehow
and kicked their heels
in the printed word
while the shadow stranger waits
the strange shadow
watching and ill at ease
and a little afraid:

as he questions himself
asks himself: Who is this guy?
Why is he here?

At that very moment
when the puzzlement is greatest
I smile at him
and the why and the smile together
glow just beyond the poem
and shine on his face and his face shines
and for that one moment
my friend remembers
among the multiple choices
of his lost remembering
he chooses
and the poem blossoms.

...

Al Purdys' major influence over contemporary poetry in Canada will remain for as long as people are writing poems.

The Laurier Poetry Series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press is an essential Canadian archive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Al Purdy's down-to-earth voice populates thirty-three books, including The Cariboo Horses, North of Summer, Sex & Death and Piling Blood.  The two major collections of his work are The Collected Poems of Al Purdy and Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy.  Al Purdy died in Sidney, BC, on April 21, 2000.

ABOUT ROBERT BUDDE
Robert Budde teaches creative writing and critical theory at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. He has published two books of poetry (Catch as Catch and traffick), two novels and a book of short fiction.  He maintains two online literary journals at http://stonestone.unbc.ca and http://writingwaynorth.blogspot.com.

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

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Yaw - Dani Couture (A Stuart Ross Book/Mansfield Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Yaw.  Dani Couture.  A Stuart Ross Book.  Mansfield Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2014.

Dani Couture is a poet in full and confident stride.  These solid poems resonate with assiduity and authority.

Hail Mary

after John Berryman

I am the thermometer's single glass vein.
I am the dull roar of a thousand wet parts.
I am a pan of burnt milk left out to cool.
I am an eye tooth and a quarter short.
I am keeping all the aisles and exits clear.
I am a plastic stretcher on a December beach.
I am thanking you on behalf of everyone here.
I am the neighbour's borrowed knife.
I am twin golden retrievers keeping pace.
I am a street in your honour renamed.
I am both the unanswered phone and the caller untethered.
I am the turned back to the Hail Mary pass
in the last seconds of the final quarter.

...

These are poems you are going to want to read again, these are poems you are going to force on people who don't read poems.

Couture has a fine ear for the nuance moment and a sharp enough tongue for the hard of hearing.

Yaw

Like an anchored ship,
something keeps me

tethered to the very
beginning of the record.

It asks not for a change
in direction or stop—

instead, begs
a descending

to meet it. Fanged
iron holding on.

It is not enough
for you to be dead.

Can't take it with you.
But still you try.

You live on
as undertow,

as suggestion:
a gentle voice

on night highway
that whispers, sleep.

Except you forget,
would-be husband,

the year I cried
lengths of rope



everywhere, looped
around wrists

and fingers
like so many rings.

Clove hitch,
sheet bend.

Bowline,
constrictor.

Knowing how
is knowing

how not to.
What to twist,

what collar pulled
or slack pushed.

...

On first go, I read this collection like a hot knife going through butter.  Like a drunk cramming junk food at 3 a.m.  The second read was dinner at a fine Montreal bistro.  The truth is, this slim volume, Couture's fourth, is a feast.

Corrections

The sky was not blue. It was the colour of a jay,
days dead and frozen to suburb sidewalk.

The man was not holding a telescope, but an umbrella,
its skin peeled back—a cool, silver skeleton.

The word she said was not no, rather a repeated list
of fowl: Little Auk, Rock Ptarmigan, Red Knot.

the hoofprint was not shaped an imperfect moon,
but the inward eye of Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs boson stare.

The neighbour's complaint was never the overhanging tree,
but the hidden sharp end of a hem-worn story.

The problem was not the knitting needles,
but a hillside galaxy of failing aspen.


The feral cat with freshly sewn belly was never yours,
pieces of her dark matter birthed under every porch.

The hum was not centred on some fenced island,
but the communal vibration of our silence.

We regret the errors.

...

Yaw is a Stuart Ross Book, this imprint offered by Mansfield Press continues to pump out some of the most interesting poetry in the land.  Good on them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dani Couture is the author of Sweet, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and won the Relit Award for Poetry. In 2011, she received an Honour of Distinction from the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Her other books include Good Meat and Algoma. Dani is the literary editor at This Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

COVER BLURBS
"Couture is a sensitive and talented writer and her portraits are fine and clear."
     —Michel Basilieres, National Post

"Sweet has a complexity that extends far beyond the notes detectable by our mammalian taste buds."
     —Stevie Howell, Arc Poetry Journal

"It is easy to borrow Couture's own words to describe hers: honed, pared, exactly cut. Her sensory, often simple, language is kept tidy with meticulous line breaks and punctuation. It's rich with suggestion and sound play..."
     —Janet Henderson, Books in Canada

"[Couture has] an ear for the social ecology of humans as tuned as the one for flight patterns of birds or the eating habits of a grizzly bear. Sweet is an excellent read: short, sweet, and constantly challenging."
     —Jacob McArthur Mooney, Torontoist

Dani Couture, Black Coffee Poet, Union Station

www.mansfieldpress.com

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