/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ [Sharps] - Stevie Howell (Icehouse Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
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[Sharps].  Stevie Howell.  Icehouse Poetry.  An Imprint of Goose Lane Editions.  Fredericton, New Brunswick.  2014.

The Today's book of poetry offices are empty this morning.  The windchill it is -39C here in Ottawa - but get this, it has warmed up from yesterday.

Milo, our head tech and Kathryn, our new intern, both called in this morning with a case of the St. Valentine's Day Flu.  The same telephone number popped up on the screen for both calls, quelle surprise.

Happy, happy, happy Valentine's Day my poetry puppets.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is made up of sledgehammer blows and razor-sharp ax swings.  Get into it or get the hell out of the way, Stevie Howell cut Today's book of poetry to shreds.  At every turn of the page Howell was able to bust up a different corner of my heart.

If you talk Rip Torn, if you dedicate a poem to Jimmy Webb you damned well better know the way to Phoenix and Galveston and every damned thing in between.  And Howell does!  She knows everything in some dark twist of fate. [Sharps] is an attempt to go public with her larceny and after reading it you're going to want more.

No Good

There's only one thing you can do

With a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity

about human biology.

                                            You wake at sunset, yourself still,

a storm-eye of boredom, drink and LSD.

The only thing that 

                                             ever made sense, was tidy or clean:

how convenient and pre-emptive excuses are,

arising out of capitulated-to

                                             desires, imbibing, cussing, so many

'good times.'

We can assume you were estranged

from yourself that night. But this is even truer

sober. We can guess your past

                                             is a neighbour's unfinished basement,

and when you recline you feel his breath

on your freckles again.

                                             You are a victim too, and the violence

of your life is all you've ever known. It gulps to unwind

its weaving, unknot, and breathe,

                                              but undone can't be done

by doing.

Rabbit trapped, quickening,

you march a man through a thicket, where no one

can hear him plead.

                                              You crush by moving, mulch

the recently fallen autumn leaves, snap branches,

snag open the tear in your jeans.

Your panting.

His panting.

It's a kind of transfusion.

...

There is some dark, dank and dangerous territory in Stevie Howell's world and she is fearless.   Todays' book of poetry was dazed and confused several times before I cracked dawn at the end of Howell's [Sharps].  The language in these poems comes off of the page as though an Al Capone tommy-gun were spitting the words at you in a ratatatatatat exclamation, Howell spills it over the sides of the cup, she turns up the volume, more, more more more.

[Sharps] is exciting stuff  -  full stop.

Howell has the ability to both kick and kiss your ass at the same time.  She is a poetry contortionist.

Airporter driver, ex-European tour guide, through Canmore says,

Canmore smokeless coal afforded war destroyers their

stealth. Stealthier. Carved out coal beds,

the town eroded, as a cough strip-mines and deepens.

The mine was shuttered in the seventies.

An open-mouthed, boomerang valley. The Olympic luge

was going to save it all, they said,

but the price was dear. Up on that peak, it is coiled and asleep.

They used if for that film about

the Jamaican boblsed team, Cool Runnings.

Now the wealth is folks clamouring in who aren't allowed

to buy a home in Banff. They come to ski

or hunt and try to stay -- royalty, celebrities, you name it.

But you have to own a business in town.

One woman, a doctor, schemed and plotted: promised

she'd open a medical office. Council said yes.

She bought a chalet up the side of a hill, leased a storefront on Buffalo,

placed a desk and phone inside, and never crossed

the threshold again. A bitter pill.

They filmed Brokeback Mountain on the Three Sisters. Little Big Man.

See those rocks there, those fingers

of rock like ribs? They say it's a man reclined. The Edge was filmed

up on that range. A terrible film, we can agree.

Alec Baldwin, his grimace and spittle-coated crescendos, beseeching

Sir Anthony Hopkins: How the fuck are we

going to get out of this hellhole? At the free screening

for the residents, we screamed: Look behind you,

you idiot! At the highway!

They dug animal tunnels beneath the road, like a colliery, and paved

animal bridges above. Cougars stalk their prey

from the bridges. Chain-link along the road discourages animals,

but doesn't repel them completely. Years ago, the big fire

cut us off from Banff. Wilder than anything Hollywood could dream--

smoke hurling bears, wolves, elk out of the woods--

ursus jaws, saber teeth, antlers, nautilus claws,

fur for miles, pummelling the fence,

droving their own hearts into the wire.

...

TBOP would be remiss if we didn't mention the spectacular cover on [Sharps].  Julie Scriver has given us an almost perfect looking book.  Icehouse Poetry is making us all look better.

The best part of the Today's book of poetry world is opening up a book like Stevie Howell's [Sharps]  If you love poetry, and we do, books like this fill you with hope, not necessarily in the world, but in poetry's ability to give you a real experience.  Maryse Holder would have said "to give sorrow words."

[Sharps] is an ontological scat of particular beauty, it is a roller coaster ride worthy of St. Charles of Parker.  Howell isn't trying to impress on us a system for a better understanding of God or faith but instead is sharing her rather unpredictable exuberance to light up some dark corners.

Ballad of Blood Hotel

A film on Bill Callahan,

I was to be the soundwoman.

The director and I rode a limo through Manhattan,

rented my equipment, then he queried what

I thought of every suit jacket he tried on at Kenneth Cole Reaction.

He insisted I sleep in

his 1-bedroom apartment,

informed me we would share a room when we visited

Drag City. Why didn't I move to New York to become

his live-in assistant? He darkened when I said I had a concert ticket

and plans that evening.

He filmed me while muttering

'I might not let you go -- and who'd know if I didn't?'

I made a fake call to a 'friend' as proof

someone was waiting for me. There's footage of this.

Outside, from a sticky payphone,

I cold-called hotels getting 'no, no, no';

until a vacancy by the Hudson, a scoliotic mansion.

A man inside a bullet-proof terrarium, lined in wire,

with taped up chicken-scratch signs: No visitors in rooms.

TV show laugh tracks

ricocheted through the ingress.

Four locks. Inside, a double-hung window,

the faint waft of bleach. The sun-faded floor

highlighted a dark rectangle where the bed had once been.

A black cockroach

the size of a butterflied sausage

hustled across the plaster wall and clung

to the window screen. I pulled down the pane, trapped him

in the lower sash, and he body-drew a panicked infinity sign.

Sweat spurted

from my scalp as I staked

blattaria. Closet: One wire hanger.

Nightstand: Bible-less. Beneath the bed: Not one mote

of dust. Behind the headboard, instead of bugs, an inch-wide

ray of blood sprayed

down the wall, thick as a surveyor's

fluorescent cross on an arterial. A line

steadied by force, the splatter deviated from mean,

skewed left. An ax, no doubt, one blow, to a person prone.

I kneeled on the bed and wept

about Woody Allen, Joan Didion, even Billy Joel's

insipid hit, A New York State of Mind. A class action lawsuit

ought to be launched over the decades of artists' propaganda that lures

you to New York, only to find yourself using a rooming house's

communal washroom,

where a man is asleep or expired

in a shower stall, door agape, water pelting his rump

like an instagram of a foreign countryside. 'Well, that's one way to escape.'

Bill Callahan fired the filmmaker on the third day.

There's all this.

There's all this.

There's all this unedited tape.

...

Stevie Howell just won over some serious fans here at Today's book of poetry.  I can hardly wait to foist this upon the troops when they return tomorrow.  /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is so good you should wear gloves, it might cut you. 

It got me right to the bone.

Stevie Howell

(photo by Neil Harrison)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stevie Howell’s poetry and criticism have appeared in publications such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, and National Post.
Her poems have been finalists for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2012 Walrus Poetry Prize.
She is from Scarborough, lives near the Mink Mile, and studies psychology.

BLURB

"These poems are coded emergency and emergent code; hail, cut glass, cathedrals, systems, skeletons, and scorched earth. Stevie Howell has found a fault line underwriting Reality and turned this fissure, this terrible brokenness, into a lens. She sees the queasy, exact particular and can phase from its contours into metaphysics and back before we sense the ground shifting. As astounding debut. An astonishing collection, full stop."

     - Ken Babstock, author of Methodist Hatchet

Stevie Howell

Live at the Thirty-fifth Taddle Creek Happening

(June 12, 2015)

video: Taddle Creek

gooselane.com

437

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.

Folding the Wilderness Within - Joan Shillington (Frontenac House Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
Folding the Wilderness Within.  Joan Shillington.  Frontenac House Poetry.  Calgary, Alberta.  2014.

Joan Shillington's second book of poetry, Folding the Wilderness Within, is rock steady from the first page to the last.  These poems are gorgeous constructions ripe with tension, drama and passion. 

Shillington's poems carve us a new notion of what it is to grieve, to lose.  That loss is there like a weight but then these poems redeem and reward the reader with intelligent surprise.

The Neighbour Speaks from Beyond

Let me say, this is not how anyone could imagine it is to drown.

August water creeping over my soles, then ankles. Slow list of

boat and there I was, caught between nightmare and reality. I

tipped the last of the twenty-six past my lips then lashed my

wrists to a rope and eased myself across the overturned hull.

Rum burned in my gut as if I had swallowed glass from the

bottle. Haunted voices hurled themselves from a distant

shoreline. Words, distorted, sank. Confused letters on black

water. I counted the seconds between lightening and thunder.

Paper, scissors, rock. Our Father who Art in Heaven. Cold

cleaved my body. I rocked and swayed with waves. I became

boat. Storm. Water. Rain. Soon, I was not seen but could see. I

saw the dark beyond the cottage. Family. Wife. Children. A girl

on the opposite shore who could not come. And now, she has

forgotten my name.

...

Today's book of poetry picked out a hoard of poems from this collections that we felt you HAD to see.  Shillington sets the bar rather high at the start of Folding the Wilderness Within and then she sustains that fierce standard like John Coltrane holding a moment of beauty in one note and turning it into a song.  We liked this book.  Shillington calls on the voices of the dead and the dying to help when no other voices will do.

Shillington mentions poet Richard Harrison as a friend and mentor in her notes.  Harrison is an old and respected friend of Today's Book of Poetry.  We don't quite go back to our teens, but close.

It is easy to imagine this manuscript going through Richard's disciplined hands.  If these poems meet his standard then they certainly meet ours.

Ordinary

         After Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what ordinary is, you must visit a funeral home

and view the body of a friend you made plans with just a few

days before. You must watch as the people dearest to you, buried

beneath flowers, sympathy cards and lasagne casseroles, have

their mother's urn pressed into their hands. You must stand in

their home and see the unmade bed and laundry still scattered

on the floor. Then you must hug and kiss good-bye, turn the key

in your car and drive home less than a week after the phone call

and discover that milk and bread still line grocery store shelves,

traffic lights change green, yellow, red. Your dog needs grooming.

You step into the rain, walk through the neighbourhood,

past the church. Yellow parking lines gleam wet, your dog busy

on new grass and then look you look up as an SUV pulls

alongside and see the smiling face of Vivian, who you haven't

seen in six months. She rolls down her window and you pick up

your wet dog, hold him as he shivers beneath your jacket. Your

feet sink into the soft earth as you walk across the boulevard and

then you stand in the rain as the city hums around you, and

become one of the two women talking in the quiet of a road.

...

The poems in Folding the Wilderness Within, romantic lamentations, prayers, praise-songs, made for a very passionate morning read at the Today's book of poetry offices.  Our head tech Milo and our new intern Kathryn both brought in friends for the event - and as you all know - you show up for the morning read then you have to participate in the morning read.

Today's guests were an excellent addition to the poetry reading team.  We here at TBOP believe that the real music in poems is best heard aloud.  Ms. Shillington did not let us down.  These beauties sounded better than spare change.

TBOP's morning reads are open to the public.  

Summoning

         Please come before winter.

         Before north winds crumple veined leaves to the ground

and prairie grass is laid by snow.

         Before river's rage slows to a trickle between ice floes

or low clouds obscure landscape and snow muffles earth.

         Please come before frost snaps limbs or yellow birdsong

is erased by this season.

         Please come before the absence of light weighs on me.

         Please.

...

Joan Shillington's narratives follow a hard clean line and we like that, clean as the burn from the flame of a one-hundred and fifty proof flame.

Joan Shillington

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Shillington is a Calgary poet and has been published in The Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire and Freefall Magazine as well as four anthologies. She has won various contests over the years.  She is currently a poetry editor for Freefall Magazine.  Joan’s first book of poetry, Revolutions, was published by Leaf Press (2008).

BLURBS
These poems, at their best, achieve their power through withholding, to create an intimacy – sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal – that involves us even as it reveals the unspoken otherness of lives not our own. Though there is much loss here, the poems’ sustained attention to what endures makes the collection a celebration of the essential force of family. 

     ~ Stephanie Bolster

Joan Shillington’s new collection mines “this threshold of ordinary” to show the gleaming moments in all our small lives. Anchored in the detritus of daily routine, Joan knows “each word and their order”, revealing memories as archetypal as a hand of cards. Her adolescent narrator is unforgettable, “flamed one hundred and fifty proof in metal spoons, / sliced elk membrane from out-of-season carcasses, / fur falling wild …” For Shillington, the dead “are just people who / are very quiet.” But Shillington gives the quiet ones space to roar. Her poems spill over with the full throttle details of lives thoroughly lived. This book illuminates, offering us moments of grace in our flawed world.

     ~ Lisa Pasold

Welcome. You’re in for a treat, a second book from a poet fully committed to the art. I’d say a perfect second book because I can hear, in the Tsar-like footsteps of the poet’s father in all his daring, bare face turned to the wind, the echoes of history’s grasp on Joan’s first poems. And then hear the change in the insights that arise from a story but flash free of it to stand outside of any particular narrative in order to fit with many. Consider, “I dozed beside sleep,” or, of a butterfly on her arm, “Now this little epistle pleats its bright wings slowly,” or, of anywhere: “Here, we are all strangers, separated by death pains and dusty roads, quiet about the wrongs in our lives.” These are poems filled with the double-pleasure of poetic truth: the secrets are disclosed, but the mystery remains.

     ~ Richard Harrison

frontenachousepoetry.ca

436

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fucks.

...

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

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

Desert Snow  -  Jim Harrison

I don't know what happens after death

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

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

I was upset not hearing the predicted rain

that I very much need for my wildflowers.

At first light I see that it was the silent rain

of snow. I didn't hear this softest sigh

of windless snow softly falling

here on the Mexican border in the mountains,

snow in a white landscape of high desert.

The birds are confounded by this rare snow

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

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

but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,

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

...

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

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

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

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison  -  Danielle Pafunda

I felt a funeral, we whisper.

A shiver as the procession

marches cross our graves.

Such grave robbers

we, taking the spunk

out of the cemetery

and the blush off the urn.

Taking heart, and boiling it clean

like a beet. Deepest pink.

Under our nails flesh,

and a rivulet

runs the elbow.

Everything tastes dirt

in the companionable ground

where we lie open-mouthed.

And dirt means nothing,

just like life 

or air used to do.

When it wasn't something

you could get a speck of it

on you.

Stop.

We sound almost chipper,

this flock of dun-colored birds.

Broken-beaked maracas.

...

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

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

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

lostroads.org 

435

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.

Paper Wings - Rosemary Clewes (Guernica Editions)

Today's book of poetry:
Paper Wings.  Rosemary Clewes.  Guernica Editions.  Essential Poets Series 215.  Toronto - Buffalo - Lancaster (UK).  2014.

Rosemary Clewes got my full attention when she Tom Thompsoned into poetry her kayaking experience in Georgian Bay.  Then she turned all eloquent Billy Bishipish and flew me into World World I with her father.  These were both excellent maneuvers.

Clewes writes with a thorough clarity that has you instantly involved and invested in her narrative.   These narratives travel, visit the arctic, fall in love, age graceful and curious.

Shadows

When the cloudless sky has both eyes open

and you're wandering

in the dim keep of the old growth forest,

you might notice the absence of twitter.

The till's tinny ring after lunch

that sense and nonsense traded between the tiny tables

made you hungry for earth smell,

sun's hesitation amongst the ferns.

This is August after all.

You leave the protection of Sitka spruce and pine

for the sea, the eleven mile beach of light & light.

Sun, looking for a shadow,

falls headlong over you,

puddles a Quasimodo at your feet.

You take a photograph of this to remind you

the geometry of light is incalculable.

* * *

There's an epicene beauty peculiar to shadows.

You suspected you were lost to your real shape and name --

yet the sun's blind flourish rights itself,

assures you, you are a woman:

shade's voluptuary, flaring hips over sand.

* * *

Sundown's elongations are dying to go home.

Sit. Wait now for the faint music of your shadow's

   protraction,

your shadow's shadow filling up with moon.

This is no trick.

                        Don't leave the desert beach

until you see

                        how ocean's ebb leaves ripple-repeat in sand,

the same signature over and over,

like stories you tell about yourself.

You have told so many, you think you know who you are.

...

Clewes tells us "the geometry of light is incalculable" but that doesn't stop her from showering her considerable light in calculated measures sure as a metronome.  Today's book of poetry was touched to my fragile heart by how Rosemary Clewes understood water from a kayak's point of view. Kayaking is a relatively new experience for me but Clewes gives words to the most eloquent of my own imaginings in such a way that I am both jealous and grateful.

Milo read the flying poems this morning and imagined himself all Snoopy and Red Baron, he imagined himself airborne. Kathryn read the kayaking poems and is now doing a google-search for everything else Rosemary Clewes.  After this morning's read Kathryn quickly nixed Milo's flying lesson plans and told him that they were going on a kayaking trip this summer.  Neither of them asked me about holidays.  Milo has never been away from electricity but he has also yet to say no to Kathryn.  

I read the other poems and it was my pleasure.  Paper Wings is from Guernica Editions "Essential Poets" series and Today's book of poetry couldn't agree more, every poetry collection should have some Clewes in in.

Dawn Paddle on Lake Huron

Before the wind so much as shivers the bay

I'm out in my quick yellow kayak

cutting trails through the reflected sky

                                        bent on everything;

silence, light and big water,

                 the seeable clearness of under,

                         the slip-shod tongues of rubbled stone,

the green reach into shadowed boulders.

Some undercurrent of the lake's body always alive

quivers on the crooked field of stones beneath my bow.

                                               I drift, seabird idle,

summoned beyond myself, restless for the never end,

the spine and flex in the mind,

                                                 the inside-out of water,

the sedges, the silt and swimming things.

                                                         Put me inside that too.

The gills, the cyclopic eye and the still mouth.

...

Today's book of poetry is now a Rosemary Clewes admirer.  We're pretty sure that anyone else who picks up a copy of Paper Wings is going to be an admirer as well.  This is smart poetry by a witty and wise woman who sees the universe with optimism.  There's no sentimentalism in the Clewes canon but there sure is a lot of grace.

Bill

You died, and then I dreamed we were young again.

You fed me sweet cake, spreading it over my lips

so I could taste it. I wake to the scent of gardenia,

creamy petals, deckled brown

crushing against your blue serge suit.

I'll See You In My Dreams, always the final cut

the disc jockey played to wind up another holiday ball.

When I learned you were sick I wrote, reminded you

of the 'snowball dance' we won at Judy Blackey's party;

how you doubled me back over your arm, kissed me

under the mistletoe.

I wore pale yellow net, boned bodice with a frill

to hide my budless chest, and after supper

you 'dosey-doed' my strapless dress from front to rear

and when I thought you weren't looking

I swung it back.

Earlier still, your sweet trebles at our piano --

my brother, you,

rehearsing Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado:

the light rain of your voice falling fifty years

like a continuing sentence.

How you noted my name.

...

Today's book of poetry was thrilled to be introduced to Rosemary Clewes and Paper Wings.  Clewes struck me as someone I've been reading my entire life, or should have been, that's how natural her voice feels.  TBOP felt like Clewes had been giving the low-down all along.  

We're sure glad she's come along.  This sort of charm and experience doesn't come along nearly often enough.

Rosemary Clewes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toronto poet Rosemary Clewes is the author of two books: Thule Explorer: Kayaking North of 77 Degrees(2008) and Once Houses Could Fly: Kayaking North of 79 Degrees (2012). In 2005, she was nominated by The Malahat Review for The National Magazine Awards and, in 2006, a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. She has made seven trips to the Arctic, travelling by kayak, raft and icebreaker.

BLURBS

Paper Wings is born in the ground of the Bruce Peninsula and then hovers above its landscape like a hawk, surveying rock/shore/tree magic, moving into the imagination, the spirit, other landscapes, all the way to the Yukon and the High Arctic … Using her intense language and the white page in original patterns, Rosemary Clewes goes beyond what is real or what isn’t into the poetry of the spirit, the great journey. It’s a book of power and energy and image and rhythm and prayer – and marks her immediately as a poet to watch.
     - Brian Brett

Here is a poet utterly taken by the universe, by the created world, natural and human, in all its glory and with all its artifacts, its deep and delicate mysteries. Her lines cut a clean kayak-path through the waves and currents of experience. Her words, with disarming ease and grace, pilot through the skies of the Great War with a father long dead, and perform surprise tangos on the gravel bar of a northern river. These poems are talismans for keeping the ordinary, extraordinary.
    - John Terpstra

guernicaeditions.com 

434

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.

Walking: Not a Nun's Diary - Concetta Principe (DC Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Walking: Not a Nun's Diary.  Concetta Principe.  DC Books.  Montreal, Quebec.  2013.

Compelling.  Heart wrenching.  Concetta Principe's Walking: Not a Nun's Diary grabbed me and would not let me go.  Today's book of poetry would tell you that grace under pressure is where the hardest gems are formed.

Principe is a flaneur in the Michael Herr fashion and these poems are like punches to the stomach, little bombs that you can't avoid, arrows straight to the heart.

Hands 19

Carlos' best friend is a Jewish woman who sneaks from her

home to visit him. He hates all Jews who are not his best

friend, and waits for the final Judgement when the evil that

they have done will smite them down. Moshe has a theory

that the Arabs all age too fast: it is genetic. He smiles at

them, but that's all I've seen him do. The woman who lives

in Berlin refuses to look into the kitchen of the cheapest

kosher hotel in town. And there are Born Agains who

claim their Jewish roots in order to have the right to sit and

wait for the Second Coming. He is due soon. They identify

with the Orthodox Jews who keep to themselves.

and where is God?

ah, yes

those maps are precious

even if you do get one

by accident or manipulation

you must acquire the art

of reading what is not there

...

Got to the end of my first read of Walking: Not a Nun's Diary and was reading Concetta Principe's "Notes" and "Thanks" and lo and behold -- the first person she thanks is Luba Szkambara.  Luba is a lady, a lawyer, a legend.  Luba and I have been dearest friends for over thirty years.  She is one of TBOP's biggest fans and supporters, Luba reposts almost every TBOP blog/review, bless her cotton socks.

Today's book of poetry is not surprised to hear that Luba had an eye on this poetry.  Luba knows her stuff and likes it strong.

Concetta Principe isn't timid about walking into the mix, most of Luba's friends aren't.  This book is a pilgrimage that unglues the politic of a centuries old struggle, Principe renders this titan conflict human, she cuts it down to scale.

Frontier of Construction - Gaza

For Rachel Corrie, aged 23. killed 5:20 p.m., Rafah,

      Palestine, March 16, 2003 by an IDF bulldozer

If I were a soldier driving a bulldozer,

a peace activist would be a fly

on the wall of the house

I am here to destroy.

If I were a peace activist

I would look into the eye of the blind

and make hurricanes with the wind of my moving arms.

If I were a soldier

I would lie rather than admit

to murder.

If I were a peace activist

I would hate with all my heart the fact

that I am privileged enough to have a home

while theirs are broken in their faces.

If I were a soldier

I would hate peace activists even more than Arabs

because they grew up in happy parks

while our playground here is war.

I am a peace activist

wishing I could move my arms to make heaven fall

and crush the soldier with the weight of its light.

I am a soldier

trained to detect and wipe out danger

and ignore what can't be changed.

I am a peace activist

thanking God he is not my brother.

I am a soldier

Unable to sleep at night due to nightmares that haunted

     my mother until her death.

My name is Rachel

and I would do it again and again and again

until he does what's right and kills the engine.

I am an Israeli soldier,

prepared to wait until my next life

to cry for the things that happen here.

...

Principe has a hard, firm hand and these poems show it, there is no slack in this rope.

This morning's reading was a relatively quiet affair.  These poems marched into the room and shut everyone up.  Very steady readings and intent listening.  Now Milo and Kathryn are in the corner pulling down names of Israeli poets, Palestinian poets, Jewish poets, Lebanese poets, Syrian poets, and so on.  Once those two go into the corner, that's the day.  They have become a universe of two.

Kathryn picked the first two poems for today's blog, Milo choose this one:

My German 8

My father is an 8 year old in the dusty little town in the

rocky hills of southern Italy, Calabria, where they grow

olives and figs at their door. The smell of jasmine is a mist

dispersed by the towering puppet of the Madonna paraded

through the streets of her feast day in August.

I think it is a fall day when father runs through the dust

of inner streets to arrive home panting at his papa who, in

World War I, lost two unimportant fingers from his right

hand, and the lower half of his left arm.

They live on his war pension in one room with a stove.

My father says, "Papa, you must buy me a black shirt, now."

"For what?" replies papa.

"Because tomorrow we are having a concert. Everyone

in the school is in the concert and we must each wear a

black shirt."

"Give me your shirt," orders his father, and then puts the

good white cotton in the over, still hot from baking.

In minutes the shirt is done, covered in good soot. Papa

gives it to my father, still warm saying, "Tell them that is as

black as we can afford," and laughs.

...

Principe's sense of humour is sooty and we like that here at Today's book of poetry.  "My German 8" reminds TBOP of that one time we were in a small barbershop in Barga, Italy.  The elderly gentleman who had so kindly translated my hair-cutting needs, upon leaving the barbershop and entering the street, paused in the doorway, raised his one arm in a dramatic gesture, gave the fascist salute and then yelled "Il Duce!" at the top of his lungs.  Then he turned, smiled, nodded and walked out into the Italian sun and the Italian afternoon.

Most of the time we don't know a damned thing.  If we are are lucky, someone like Concetta Principe comes along with a book like Walking: Not a Nun's Diary and shines a little light.

Concetta Principe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Concetta Principe is the author of two previous books-Stained Glass (1997) and Interference (1999)-and has written and directed for TV, including the Vision TV series on Biblical archaeology, The Naked Archaeologist. She is currently completing her PhD at York University, where her work considers representations of the messiah and the Muselmann in twentieth century cultural and intellectual works, arguing that these figures are evidence of a trauma of secularism dating to first century Judea. She has managed to find coherence in her unconscious compulsion to think politics and revelation together.

dcbooks.ca 

433

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.