Honey - Richard Carr (Gival Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Honey.  Richard Carr.  Gival Press.  Arlington, Virginia.  2008
(Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award)

Whimsy and delight would suggest the wrong thing, but whimsy and delight are at the fore of Honey.

Richard Carr gives us a sequence of such silly joy that the reader spills with glee.  But there is enough seriousness in here to give you a heart attack, sweetly.

Intelligent and witty doesn't cut the mustard with Honey, but witty and intelligent are two of the first visceral responses to this tapestry.  This is some fine weaving.  Richard Carr is as sure footed as spider on its' own web.

IV

No amount of washing can divert the ashtray
from its purpose.
The Bearded Lady, clean shaven in the off season,
offers me a cigarette,

and we share a thin, gravelly smoke.
I want to be like her.
She is a mirror. when she stirs her coffee,
the whole restaurant stirs.

...

These poems rollick with frenzied imagination.  Richard Carr has limitless spark and endless horizon.
Each of these stunning short poems adds another colour to Carr's explosive palette.

IX

Design in the gothic city
a matter of assemblage,
I wear a massive clothing of stone monuments
and scaffolding.

The street a chaotic plaid of asphalt repairs,
I dent the pavement
where the work is still fresh,
hot.

The soles of my feet blacken my apartment--
walls, ceiling, all of it.

...

I usually require more of a narrative thread but found these tireless ditties endlessly fascinating.  It's like they came out of the barrel of a machine gun, each bullet as faultless as the other.

Carr would, I expect, be a marvelous dinner guest -- his imagination rolls out like a big sun that is constantly rising.

LXXXIII

I gather to my cheekbones
crabappled blossoms drenched in a cold drizzle.
I lick violets, kneeling obscenely,
and draw yellow dandelion heads into my mouth.

I want to taste what the bee tastes,
nectar and pollen, but more, her chemical imprint,
footprints on the petals,
to learn where she has been, what orchards and nurseries.

gardens, graves --
and if she ever blushes.

...

A blushing bee, footprints on petals.  I loved these.

Everyone here at Today's book of poetry chose three different poems for today's blog -- but I chose the three you read here.  It could just as easily been any three poems picked at random from this electric book.

Dazzling stuff, sweet like honey, and a little sticky.

Richard Carr

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Carr grew up in Blue Earth, Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis. A former systems analyst, web designer, and tavern manager, he has taught writing and literature at several universities and community colleges. His other poetry collections are Ace (The Word Works, winner of the Washington Prize), Honey (Gival Press, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award), and Mister Martini (University of North Texas Press, Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize). His chapbooks include Butterfly andNothingness (Mudlark) and Letters from North Prospect(Frank Cat Press, winner of the Frank Cat Press Poetry Chapbook Competition).

BLURBS

"Poet Richard Carr weaves together lovely and unlikely connections in his Gival Press Poetry Award winner, Honey (978-1-928589-45-7). Wrinkled plants, a goldfish and the poet drink water while outside, 'The clouds rain gasoline.' A Bearded Lady stirs coffee in a restaurant, birds listen to our voices on a telephone wire, and 'somewhere a dying child / wears a wig of [his] donated hair.' Lyrical, laced with longing, these 100 short poems create a world where 'The best stars slide across the sky in retrograde.'"
ForeWord Magazine, July 2009

"Honey is a tour de force. Comprised of 100 electrifying microsonnets, Richard Carr’s invention recalls Berryman’s Dreamsongs, for brilliance and wit, but is more readable. Open to any page: language and image startle and delight, like 'Einstein’s blown-fuse hairdo.' The whole sequence creates a narrative that becomes, like the Hapax Legomenon, a form that occurs only once in a literature."
—Barbara Louise Ungar, author of the award-winning collection The Origin of the Milky Way and final judge of the 2007 Gival Press Poetry Award

"This sequence of compact poems is musically subtle, visually surprising, and, at times, deeply moving. More than this, though, Honey is an ambitious, intricately unified book, part brilliant lyrical meditation and part surreal Bildungsroman. In it, Richard Carr creates a character whose search for truth and self (accompanied by the Bearded Lady, the Poet, the Boy, and the Hapax) is delightful and ambiguous. Honey is a poetry collection unlike any you’re likely to encounter. It is a wonderful, breathtaking achievement.

 —Kevin Prufer, editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing

givalpress.com 

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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.

Time Out of Mind - Laurie Block (Oolichan Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Time Out of Mind.  Laurie Block.  Oolichan Books.  Lantzville, British Columbia.  2006.

There are an infinite number of tragedies in this modern world.  It is a smorgasbord of tears, an endless litany of horror.

But perhaps there is no pain quite so primal as the death of our mothers.

My mother, like Laurie Blocks', did not go gentle into that good night.  She went screaming, cursing her early demise until all reason abandoned her.  In the end she was a meat-puppet blathering at the diminishing light.

No sadness like it.

Slap

Even before I arrive on the ward and check in
with the nurse I know it's my mother by the sound
a relentless hammering as she slaps her knees
and the arms of her wheelchair punctuate
the lunatic corridor, a long day closing
with a dull thud and an open hand.

This is no case of nerves, the drumming
of a mind on edge or absent
as it taps a table or the crystal face
of a watch, fingers feeling their way
along the smooth hard surface of an agenda
toward cancelled appointments and imminent events.

Nor is it holy vacancy, autistic hands
rearranging the sacred furniture and music
of a deep deep world while waiting
for the call. There are no visible signs
of grace as she bangs against the mystery
of matter and the limits of medicine

only the wreckage of what she used to be
a vacant lot littered with orphaned shoes
and unwanted metal, the broken springs
of thought and language where all she knows is
to kick it into life, shake the machinery
until it starts to run like it did.

...

Laurie Block addresses the anguish of those left observing.  With a knowing eye he shares the grief of the witness.

These aren't easy poems to read -- but there is something reassuring about them.

These poems are that voice recording the steps towards the ultimate darkness with diligence.  Nothing is left out.

Lights Out

Your absence has grown
to the size of a grapefruit
floating beneath my skin
irreversible, neither self nor
other but an organ or a thought
without a home, a question
that won't fit and can never be
answered or forgiven.

Don't you go dying on me
again, bending one morning
to tie a shoelace or to open
your book, you lost your place
falling into silence, a hand
at my elbow, a voice
turning and returning.
What did you mean to say?

That this room will be a comfort
that the earth will continue
to amaze, whether or not
you are here cool and familiar
to the touch, darkness will contain
the loss, something to bump into
press against like a wall
or a dream you insist on
passing through, these words

only a membrane, a story
I can neither finish nor put down
stumbling between the beginning
and the end, feeling for the door.

...

This book won't cheer you up, that not a poets' job.

The job is to illuminate, startle, report, imagine and so on.  Laurie Block's Time Out of Mind does all those things and more.

He looks at what most of us try to turn away from.  Block ventures into those harried moments before death and tells us what he sees.

Smudge

Without love how would I be here
to see this day dying how would I notice
the golden light anointing airborne
wings, the holy outcry of ice
letting go and birds as they soar
and descend, returning to touch
the open water of ancestral lakes, the nests
that hold their deep blue history  and perfect
oval future. Once again I am here, in time
for the arrival of eagles and untold geese
more ducks than I can name: Mallards and Teal
Bufflehead and Goldeneye, each one
recognizing their home in creation, gifted
to read the opinion of the wind and call out
the complete story of up and down. Myself
I don't need to know why they fly or who
dictates the revolution of heaven and earth
it's enough to see the season turn, to hear
the hum of generation and witness how they govern
the green shifting territory between water and sand.
This country where I am always a guest, walking
along the edge, welcomed and cleansed
in the smudge of the setting sun.

...

Time Out of Mind is no fun, but it is very necessary.

Laurie Block

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurie Block is a poet, playwright and storyteller. He was born in Winnipeg and now lives in Brandon, Manitoba. His previous work includes a chapbook of poetry, Governing Bodies, and a bilingual collection of poems, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, based on his experiences in South America. He is also the author of a full-length play,The Tomato King, produced by Theatre Projects of Manitoba in 1997, and a short piece, Pop! His short story, While the Librarian Sleeps, won the 2003 Prairie Fire fiction contest and, most recently, The National Magazine Award Gold Medal for fiction. Time Out of Mindis the winner of the inaugural Lansdowne Poetry Prize.

BLURB

"These poems, and the eloquent essay that precedes them, are bittersweet, outraged, heroic, surprised, witty, sensuous, occasionally surreal, generous, broken hearted. Poems of middle age, mourning the loss of a mother to slow dementia, fiercely resisting the downward spiral of amnesia. A beautiful book, a necessary book, a grand shout at the hubris of modern medicine, that claims to protect us from physical pain while multiplying the diseases of the spirit. The poems startle us into clarity, the discovery of pure love, 'coming into fullness at the end/of the season.'"

     --Di Brandt

oolichan.com 

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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.

The Beauty of This World - Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva (Parallel Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Beauty of This World.  Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva.  Parallel Press.  University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.  Madison, Wisconsin.  2014.

"A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world,
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away."

                                                                   Mary Oliver
                                                                   from Flare 12

Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva starts her marvelous chapbook The Beauty of This World with this perfect Mary Oliver quote.

It is the exact right tone to set for these poems.

Zurlo-Cruz is subtle and slightly subversive.  These poems start you in one clear direction, a recognizable path and then Zurlo-Cruz effortlessly turns the world around under our feet.  It is an accomplished feat of engineering, an impressive skill to have.

We Have Always Known Grief

There were always the fireflies, rising
out of the grass at dusk, the call of crickets
at summer's end when the fat milk pods begged
to be split and their seeds to float like
questions on the wind

and the endlessly churning lake, impervious
to the cries of seagulls, changing color with each
passing cloud, smoothing bits of shattered
bottle glass and spitting them back
as jewels to be treasured and forgotten
in a small girl's pocket

the roar of the city bus after depositing
the cleaning ladies on our unimproved
suburban lanes as if aliens from
another planet, the immigrant grandmother
enthroned on a lime-green plastic
lawn chair, tugging her black sweater close
on the hottest summer afternoon.

...

Zurlo-Cuva's poem "Post Card to My Mother" rang so familiar to me that for a moment I thought I'd written it, which is faint praise for poor Ms. Zurlo-Cuva - but this poem paralleled my life experience in the most surrealistic way.

I had to share it with Today's book of poetry readers.

Post Card to My Mother
                            -Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

On the lane from Sudeley Castle, a shaded
stone bench beside a brook and a meadow. A horse
grazing far off in the corner seems not to notice
when I sit down to rest from the gravel dust
and a midday sun. "You've dreamed your whole
life about England," my mother said as I packed
to leave. "I worry the real thing might
disappoint you." It went unsaid
the number of real things that had come
to disappoint her.

I pull a post card and a pen out of my pack
and pause, listening to the rush
and slap of the brook over stones, the world
imperturbably green. I sit frozen long enough
that the horse comes to investigate, leaning
over the fence to blow a puff of hot breath
on my shoulder.

Years later, boxing my mother's things, cleaning
out her desk after the funeral, I find
among the other letters and cards, the one
picturing Sudeley Castle. On it I had written: Dear Mom,
I am not disappointed.

...

Well that teared me up real good.  Caused a tear for one or two of our interns as well. Handkerchief time.

There are no pyrotechnics or marvels of post-modernist construction in The Beauty of This World.  These poems are old-school, bell in the belfry, certain.  The ring with clarity.

My Mother's Bones

We buried her in pink Pumas -- her last
mail-order purchase -- and now I can't stop
picturing those sneakers cradling
the small, gnarled bones
of her feet. We ought to have dressed
her in woolens, a London Fog
for the damp, instead of the pale
summer dress she'd worn to parties
and teas, and matched
her vivid blue eyes -- so thoroughly
unsuitable for an eternity
in the ground.

...

Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva's solid poems are ones you could hang your hat on, come in, make yourself at home with.

Today's book of poetry staff all liked this book, solid as rock, subtle as a knowing whisper.

Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva grew up in Milwaukee, got her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has lived there ever since. She works as a journalist, editor, and writing teacher. Her novel, Travel for Agoraphobics was published as an e-book in 2011.

parallelpress.library.wisc.edu 

289

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.

Civil and Civic - Jonathan Bennett (Misfit/ECW Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Civil and Civic.  Jonathan Bennett.  Misfit/ECW Press. Toronto, Ontario.  2011.

Jonathan Bennett's Here is my street, this tree I planted (Misfit/ECW Press, 2004) starts with a quote from the great American painter Edward Hopper:

"I guess I am not very human.  I didn't just want to paint people posturing and grimacing; what I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house."

A simple enough declaration for both painter and poet - and Bennett followed through.  These very human and plain speaking poems, entirely unadulterated, yet always casting light certain to illuminate.

Civil and Civic, Bennett's second book of poetry, opens with Bennett painting once again.  Plain language where the words don't betray themselves but are clear, concise and with purpose.  These poems are canvases we can admire for the sunlight Bennett casts on the previously mundane.

The events in these poems, are for the most part, not extraordinary but for the patient reader they certainly are rewarding.

Back Roads

It is a beautiful car, it is a concession line.
Late light, amber and broken by the ashes

and cedar groves, streaks the dirt road now
and into the future. Three deer appear just

ahead, still as lawn ornaments, at the edge
of a field of farmed firs. Shots do no ring

out and the buck does not collapse forward
onto its knees, heavy head falling to its rest

on the wet grass, doe and fawn away into
the thick green. Instead, the motor purrs;

they stand their ground as we pass.
Shoot, see those deer? Where? Look.

At the crest of a hill is the house we love
to admire, way out here. The owners rake

at the edges of their lawn. It's a stone farm
house. They do not invite us in, of course.

We slow, their home in our sights. They do
not see us. Not really. The light sinks in

fast and pools of dark collect in the valleys
as we take the turns slower, resorting

to headlights. Silhouettes of barns cut dusk
exactly the shape of themselves and birch

march up hillsides, as if determined to escape
reflection by the river, or be caught by that

roadside painter who would sell the night sky
out her for big bucks back in the city.

...

Jonathan Bennett's poems always seem to dealing with some undercurrent of light, as though every secret in the universe is vulnerable to a particular strain of illumination.

In Civil and Civic Bennett's candlepower is focused on those small moments that give us all pause, those moments where our thoughts turn into decisions, the choices which determine what road we will be taking seem to become more obvious as the oblivious dark recedes and morning breaks, as Emily Dickinson would exclaim, "excellent and fair."

Civil and Civic

You talk across periods; I draw on arms
with blue pen, The Clash, et cetera.
With gall you hang posters, know the slogans.
You savour the word disobedience,
chew chocolate first thing in the morning,
as I follow you around, onto the bus,
ignore exposed hip skin winking love, love.
Trapped, wet in a tent, some bitch recites Brecht.
We play Hacky Sack.
                                    They open tear gas.
An act born from a crowd's seething will
I heave the blunt harm of a brick at helmets
and shields, a slow, magnificent arc.
My brick in flight is like a dove, you shriek.
A boy falls and is crushed. We are all filmed.
Two cars are torched in the square after dark.
Over there you haver at a statue's feet,
the bronze general dismounts and runs you through.

...

"Haver" is a Scottish work that means to talk nonsense.

Bennett's poems are both stuck between the pastoral certainty of the rural country and the less certain and frantic city - and a bridge between the two.  These poems are perched on a see-saw that goes up and down to the refrain of "private", bounce, "public."

These well lit snapshots are political one moment, worldly and personal high water marks the next.

And then there is the painting, and always, the light.

After Painting Wild Apple Trees

A mile east, the oxen steam, nose-blow clouds
into the grave chill, puff, shake soaked leather.
He heaves a mattock at a stubborn stump.
Through her still-young pout she sucks at damp hair.
After hewing pine, she suggests apples,
which he bites wide-mouthed, wincing with the sour.
Oxen huff. Let it rot, she says plainly.
He over-arms the core at underbrush.

Two hundred years of light drips this clearing.
No apple baubles: a post-fruitful palette
limns limbs, their osteoancient gestures
canvas a feral orchard, gouged, layered,
verdure and crowded, yet sky and white,
frame woolly chance as harvesting this delight.

...

Okay, sometimes Bennett's private prism is a little more articulate than just plain speech - but the resulting paintings/poems are ones that we here at Today's book of poetry admire.

We look forward to next show, a sometimes Illuminati, I bet when Bennett walks into a room he turns on every light.

Jonathan Bennett

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Bennett is the author of five books including the critically acclaimed novels Entitlementand After Battersea Park, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories, Verandah People, which was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. He is a winner of the K.M. Hunter Artists' Award in Literature. Born in Vancouver, raised in Sydney, Australia, Jonathan lives in the village of Keene, near Peterborough, Ontario.

BLURB

“As accomplished as Jonathan Bennett is at using language, he’s never fussy or precious about it. With his exacting, contemporary voice, part colourful reporter, part reluctant witness, his lines gain their effect by serving experience in the most necessary way possible, via clear-eyed attention and vivid diction. The result is an immediacy often lacking in other poetry. Civil and Civic’s nimble narratives will crackle in your ear.”

     - David O'Meara, author of Noble Gas and  Penny Black

Jonathan Bennett reads from Civil and Civic

ecwpress.com 

288

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.

Smoke Of Her Body - Stephanie Levin (Jacar Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Smoke Of Her Body.  Stephanie Levin.  Jacar Press.  Durham, North Carolina, 2011.

Winner of the Jacar Press Poetry Book Contest

Dorianne Laux has it right.  Ever actually been punched so hard in the stomach that all of the air in your body simply leaves?

It's like an instantaneous vacuum that leaves you on your knees sucking air.  At first you don't even realize it hurts.

It's only when you gasp, your throat in some raspy almost silent prayer.

Well, sit down on the floor so you'll have less far to fall.

Stephanie Levin just sucker punched Today's book of poetry.

Devotion

God was a beautiful man

who was deeply in love with me.

He said, I know you're only seven,

but you have an old soul.

He knew everything about me. He knew

what the backs of my knees smelled like.

I imagined all my past bodies cut out

and standing up in a row behind me

as he'd tug my T-shirt over my head.

...

Smoke Of Her Body goes to some harrowingly dark places.  I'll go you one further -- unless you've seen a certain type of evil, a particular shade of darkness and malice -- you may not recognize anything here.

These poems are the sound that might have come out of the silent maw of Edvard Munch's "The Scream".

I exclaimed, quite loudly, as frequent readers of Today's book of poetry may remember, after reading each of the first several pieces in Levin's Smoke Of Her Body.  I swore loudly, multiple times.

I swear for two reasons, the first is when poems are so bad I'm annoyed at their ability to have found a publisher.  The second reason is the exact opposite, when the poems are so good that I'm instantly transfixed.

The Teachings

Later, when I wanted to know about Hell--

if I would end up there--

she'd nod her chin for me to lie back down,

lift the tail of the sheet and lower it

so air rolled in waves beneath

and the cotton landed

cool on my knees, then pull

the quilt over me, place the end

in my fingers balled up beneath my chin,

and say, We're there already.

...

Well, these are that -- instantly game changing, welding me into place, so to speak.  

But now a third reason to swear -- along with excellence, Stephanie Levin has introduced fear as a criteria.  I was mortified and exhilarated as to where she would go next.

Not a roller-coaster thrill but definitely an amusement park, perhaps a fun-house, filled with monsters.

Second Anniversary of His Death

In the linen aisle of Target, I mouth the words

to Barry White in Muzak overhead,

and there's my brother in this movement:

chin bobbing to the left, neck moving

snakelike to the beat.

I see him driving, seat pushed back

like a La-Z-Boy, eyes bloodshot,

nodding to the music just like this.

A saleswoman approaches; I have to leave here.

I won't cry in a store like this.

But they make those aisles long

so you're sidetracked as you try to leave,

and I find something for him:

pizza plates in the shape of an extra large slice,

with pigs in chef hats, pepperonis flying.

The perfect gift for my brother, and he's dead.

...

Put on your seat-belt, turn off your phone.  "This is" to quote the toughest dame out there, "going to be a bumpy ride".

Stephanie Levin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Levin received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Folio, River Styx, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. Her collection, Smoke of Her Body, was chosen by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2011 Jacar Press Poetry Book Prize. The mother of two, she teaches reading at Carrboro High School.

BLURBS

"This one just has that punch in the stomach, 'wow, who the &#!% wrote this' factor going for it. I like how the poems are strong, yet understated, loud and quiet at the same time."

     - Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

"Unrelentingly harrowing."

     - Marie Howe, author of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

jacarpress.com

287

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.