Light Takes - Mia Anderson (Cormorant Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Light Takes.  Mia Anderson.  Cormorant Books.  Toronto, Ontario.  2014.

It Isn't What You Would Think

It isn't what you would think,
divine power.

It is much more like
powerlessness than you would think

or at least that you could
say, or could utter or

give utterance to.
That's where "weakness" comes in

useful, as a kingdom word. It describes a state
we always think we want out of

which is one of the conundrums
the kingdom poses.

It puts up two doors: the Weak
Door and the Strong Door

and most of us are for the Strong.
Empowerment:

such a powerful word. The French
have taken it over without remainder.

But the Strong leads
to the Strongbox. It's the Weak
that opens onto the kingdom.

The Kingdom is not a mighty fortress
except inasmuch as

a fallow field of daisies and wild grasses
is a mighty fortress.

Heaven doesn't seek to trick us.
It wants to be sure we get what we want.

So it gives us the Door to the wide and weedy and weak
and the Door to The Other Place.

It's our choice, to the uttermost.
Ours is the only power there is.

...

Today's book of poetry thought these poems were absolutely fearless and sometimes ferocious.

Many of these poems read like stories we already know, anecdotes passed down from one wise voice to another, common knowledge wisdom sagely reported.

You don't have to know that Anderson is an Anglican priest to feel the presence of the Church in these poems.

I personally usually find a way to shy away from most work too closely affiliated with any specific dogma.  With Mia Anderson's Light Takes, Anderson took it out of my hands.  These poems work, work, work.  I'm not a Christian and it certainly didn't seem to matter, I enjoyed these poems for the fine poems they are.

Like Maggie Helwig, another Anglican priest who happens to be an excellent poet, Mia Anderson is far too smart, her world view far too broad and encompassing to be hampered by any particular label.

We Are Premature

We are premature babies.
The world is our neo-natal ward

in which we are entirely dependent
before we know we are,

in which we are required always
to live beside something

larger than us. And that is
as it should be.

Rebirth is the divine template.
But some of us aren't good at it.

When we've come of age
or like to think we have, we

don't think much of that neo-natal
ward, we hold it in low esteem

even cities do not remind us
that anything is larger than us.

Someone said, "live next to a cow."
That would do it. A mountain would do it.

This fleuve here does it, and
I know of a woman

for whom the fruit fly was enormous
and granted a lifetime of study

and I can understand how
the fruit fly could be huge enough to open

the doors of perception
as they did for her

onto that great plain called the kingdom
that goes on and on and on

and on as far as the mind can feel,
the eye seeing, the heart beating

and we are always right beside it.
It is always right beside us

but bigger than us.

We have to learn this.
This is the view from the pram.

...

(fleuve/river)

Mia Anderson's Light Takes is fecund with religious scholarship, literary as well.  But those are different conversations.  In this conversation Today's book of poetry wants the reader to know how Anderson's riffs on the purpose of jobs and employment, the emotional attitude of water, and so on... left us wanting more of this particular type of wisdom.

Anderson does not proselytize.  She swims in some awfully deep and heavy water and distills this into navigable terrain, smart showers.

Today's book of poetry thought these were elegant and eloquent poems.  Kinetic when Anderson wanted them to be, literally pulsating with sustained and intense intelligence.

Today's book of poetry always likes smart.

Some Poems Just Squat

Some poems just squat
    and hold to one place.
That's them shitting.

Some waft in the air
all moonbeamy-dreamy
    ethereal charm --
Tinkerbell flimsies.

Some go fast,
go far and hard
    pulling a lot of luggage:
sled-dogs in their prime
    winning the Iditarod.

And some run hard
    on one spot and make of it
hallowed ground --

others, with such joy of speed
    they reach their target before
the arrow they've loosed, like
the folk hero getting it in the behind.

And they don't mind,
    those poems, they don't mind.
Some trudge through snow
surviving all odds, putting one fricative in front
    of the other. They
make it to the cabin before the cold
can take them and drape them over the last
    fence but one.

    They make it home
and home welcomes them.

But there are some
    poems which standing
stock still, statue still, thought
    still, fly
without moving an inch
without moving a muscle
without moving a word.

They're the ones
    who by staying soar.
There goes their arrow of desire

which travels everywhere,
as long as it's aimed at
one place only.

...

Mia Anderson's Light Takes is sweet medicine and necessary tonic.  Anderson takes a big step forward with Light Takes, she should take a deep bow.

Mia Anderson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIA ANDERSON lives outside Québec City with her husband. She was for many years an actor, then a shepherd and grower, then an Anglican priest in Québec City. Her theatre career included the Stratford Festival, CBC, Theatre Plus, MTC, Centaur, Manchester Library, the Royal Shakespeare Co. and the Traverse, Edinburgh. Her one-woman performance, 10 Women, 2 Men and a Moose, which toured nationally, showcased then-recent Canadian writers and presaged her own involvement in the writing life. Farming in Ontario she produced, as well as sheep, two Malahat ReviewLong Poem Award-winning poems, one of which also took a National Magazine Award gold. Anderson’s “The Antenna” won the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2013. Her last poetry collection, The Sunrise Liturgy, was shortlisted for the 2013 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry.

cormorantbooks.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.

Embers on the Stairs - Ruth Bavetta (Moon Tide Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Embers on the Stairs.  Ruth Bavetta.  Moon Tide Press.  Irvine, California.  2014.

Ruth Bavetta reads like the most reasonable person on earth in the poems found in Embers on the Stairs.

Don't be lulled or fooled by the even modulation of her voice, these poems are piano string taut and all in time.  Bavetta has nailed the resonant voice.  You hear wisdom, not a lecture, just smart enough to nurture the silly out of you.

Rosalie

Fifty years I worked
the sewing machines.
Kept on even after I married
the salesman with the curly hair
and wide smile. I was past marrying age
by then and glad enough of him.

The vacuum cleaners didn't sell,
so when I got home from work
he was always there, smiling. It was a year
before I found the bottles hidden
behind the radio. I never learned
to drive, took the bus to work,
but I paid for the house,
and the new car when his broke down.

After they cut off his cogliones
because of the cancer
I divorced him so the State would pay
the hospital and the doctors.
He died anyway.
I'd do it again, though, marry
a man who smiles.

...

Bavetta can be very tender when she's kicking at that old can death, but I would tell the reader there is a melancholy price to be paid for her particular wisdom.

You can see that transaction playing out again and again in these heart-rending morality tales.

Such gentle affection can sometimes feel trite or contrived, Embers on the Stairs escapes any of that. Again and again Bavetta reveals some secret knowledge that we have only previously suspected, hoped for.

Last Bus to Paradiso

I shall die, someday, on a tourist bus,
whose weary driver, bored
after three hundred thirty-four
trips to his particular wonder,
nods off for a nanosecond
during sweet and lustful thoughts
of his girlfriend's luscious rump.

One day on the Transpeninsular two-laner,
Baja California Sur,
the speeding bus -- broken seats,
open windows, swaying Virgin and all --
will hurtle to meet its twin head-on,
while passing uphill on a blind curve
with no third gear.

Or will the rear wheels slip and grab,
scrabbling furiously
in Norwegian mud as the driver guns
the engine, desperately and too late,
to escape our sudden sternward slide
into the freezing fingers
of Porsanger Fjord?

I think I would prefer
the Italian coast, where I'll make
a long, graceful, arcing plunge
from the brink of the Amalfi Drive
to join the bones
of some long-forgotten ancestor
who fished the ink and azure depths below.

...

We're not much for name calling here at Today's book of poetry -- but if forced into a corner we'd call Ruth Bavetta's very fine Embers on the Stairs "pragmatic optimism" of the highest order.  Or as one of my favourite writers on the planet, Joyce Carol Oates, said:  "Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst."

Every story doesn't have a happy ending but it is still good to know that hope prevails.

Dream of a Different Life

With my lover I went
where the roads end,
and upstairs there was someone
with closed eyes, closets
with clothes left hanging.
We breathed the dust of bracken
on dry east winds
while beetles swarmed
and the sky grew darker
and farther away.
There was still time,
I said, lying.

...

Life does not always work out as we planned or hoped -- but it does just keep on rolling, with or without us.  Bavetta reminds us of this, with considerable cheer, to take note of the best moments, that is how we endure the rest of it.

Ruth Bavetta

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Bavetta's poems have been published in Rattle, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, North American Review, Spillway, Hanging Loose, Rhino, Poetry East and Poetry New Zealand, among others, and are included in the anthologies Twelve Los Angeles Poets and Wait a Minute, I Have to Take Off My Bra.  Her book Fugitive Pigments was released in 2013.  She loves the light on November afternoons, the smell of the ocean, a warm back to curl against in bed.  She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut.

BLURBS

"Embers on the Stairs is the latest book from Ruth Bavetta, an accomplished poet and artist. Her poetic tone is modulated but she relates discoveries both amazing and heart-wrenching ...  This is a collection that will be wept over for its poignant truths, delighted in for its unique and exact images and cherished for its wisdom and foibles, its sheer engaging humanity."

     --  Joan Colby

"Ruth Bavetta's poems are clever. But that's okay because they are also heartbreaking and universal and astonishingly good. As you read them, you wonder how she got into your house to see and report such things. These are mature poems. A woman looks back over her life and yes there were mistakes, but there was much joy too. I really had to laugh at the guilty pleasure of buying books, and eating standing in the kitchen were calories don't count. These things are almost better than sex, except there is no need for glasses when having sex. See -- this is a book should read."

     --  Lisa Cihlar

"Bavetta's poems are refreshingly modest, almost delicate, yet able to transform the ordinary again and again through their potent imagery."

     --  Jefferson Carter

moontidepress.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.

Resume - Chris Green (Mayapple Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Resume.  Chris Green.  Mayapple Press.  Woodstock, N.Y.  2015.

Today's book of poetry is tickled pink to be back in the saddle after our sojourn to the south.  Luckily I took a herd of fine books of poetry with me.

Today, Today's book of poetry is looking at Resume by Chris Green.

Resume is all about jobs, work and the world that demands that of us.

I'm not saying Chris Green is a genius, I don't know the man, but these are wizard smart poems.
They crack like the fast end of a bullwhip.

These poems are alive with dark humour and profound wit.  And knowing, Chris Green knows stuff, he knows the emotional toll paid by those that toil.

Janitorial Ode

Each month a new motivational
poster above the urinals:
nature scenes with slogans like
DARE TO SOAR. Management
trying to love us.
But someone was taking dumps
in the locker room shower.
A kind of protest. My job:
to muck out the message.
A typical day, I hardly said
anything to anyone
except Henry, the machinist
prophet, who always took
the short view: she's fuckable,
she's fuckable, she's
definitely fuckable.
In the factory, sex worked
like a machine's heavy
breathing -- obvious as the absence
of windows. Tom and Bill were lovers
who had the same small job:
pushing a rod. They wore too-short
denim cut-offs, tube socks,
shirts tails tied into halter tops.
Tom would call ooohhh baby,
snatch at my ass when I mopped.
I wanted Michelle, the opposite
of a rich girl, braless, up to
her elbows in toxic acetone
(lunch time, I'd grind into my
writing hand, a kind of one-armed
violence until I'd explode).
then during the full heat of noon
I'd eat on the bank of a drainage
canal. I was young, lying
in the sweet ditch grass, my feelings
buried deep, deep. I didn't
want to admit it, but I was
heading straight to the bottom.
As if to prophesy, one day
a whole swollen deer floated by.

...

Boy, oh boy!  Resume is that rare book of poetry where there are no extra poems, no floaters.  Every one of these suckers is essential to this collection and hot as a fired pistol.

These are all good poems, there are several I might even call great -- or at the very least, very, very good.

Mr. Green is diabolically beautiful almost every time he opens his mouth.

These poems had the staff here at Today's book of poetry screaming out loud and almost coming to blows to see who would read the next one out loud.

Amy Gerstler mentions Studs Terkel when she talks about Chris Green's Resume and she is right. Studs Terkel's Working is an encyclopedic look at the heart and calloused hands of working America. Resume, although slight in pages in comparison, packs the same modern punch.  His contemporary voice is a take on the same territory -- but it is a take informed by the journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, the poetry of everyone from Auden to Bukowski.  Green has his finger on the modern and sometime macabre world as though he were a puppet maker, the rest of us puppets.

Aviary Security

The Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park:
birds in their undress--
redheads, goatsuckers, Lucifer hummingbirds, rough-legged hawks.
And peacocks in blue-fire skirts.

You can't choose what you do. I was young. full
of fear. Birds barred from the sky
appealed to my sense of remoteness.
Then, as if a dark dream--
I caught a man raping a peacock.

Not mythic
like Leda and the swan, this was Salt Lake City,
a place where people swallow impossible plots:
Jesus appeared in America
after his resurrection and strong-armed natives
to make us a heaven of Mormon men.

The great fan of color
and the man, a squalid Yeatsian
thrusting through an emerald field, a burning wall.
He was moaning
like an idiot, kneeling like he was praying.
The inconceivableness.
The long blackness of the peacock's glance.

I dragged the man through the aviary. It made no difference.
The poor dead bird and the man never cured.

...

These dark and dense poems crackle with heartbreaking humanity, they grab the reader on the first page and thrash the crap out of him/her.

Read six lines of a poem by Green to my wife yesterday.  She is still talking about it.  In a good way. And she is aces.

Green seems to have a sensibility similar to a more literary Bukowski, but perhaps subtler, Green will still blow your head off, you just don't see it coming in quite the same way.

Loss Specialist, American Express

That morning Republican Sonny Bono
called and said, "Fuck!" no Gold Card;
needed some big dumb diamonds.
Otherwise, the day was drear...infinite hours
on a tiny salary in a gray sea.
I was reading a poem by Auden,
something bleak to stay awake.
My Mormon boss yelled, "Heck!"
His ex-wife appeared in full rage,
stopped everything, screamed, "Oh you know why!"
She yelled and yelled--
gripped their daughter's hand.
My boss stayed where he was, stared
as if at a precipice...
He began to cry.
We all waited and wondered
at their anguish.
The daughter,
spiraling, terrible. I understood:
family awkward implausible. Later on,
no one comforted him. He had his own heaven.
And I returned to Auden.

...

If you can, find and read this book.  Then go searching for anything else by Chris Green, I know I will be.

 Chris Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Green is the author of three books of poetry: “The Sky Over Walgreens”, “Epiphany School”, and “Résumé”. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Poetry, New York Times, New Letters, Verse, Nimrod, and Black Clock. He’s edited four anthologies, including “Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature Poetry, Prose & Photography”, and the forthcoming “I Remember: A Poem by Chicago Veterans of War”. He founded LitCity (www.litcity312.com), a comprehensive literary site for Chicago. He teaches in the English Department at DePaul University. www.chrisgreenpoetry.com

BLURBS

This a wonderful cycle of poems. As Studs Terkel once wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Through the vehicle of various jobs, roles, labors, and employments–manual, artistic, emotional, literary, familial, etc.–Chris Green gives us a lyric tour of human complexity, oddity, behavior and occupation. He has a novelist’s powers of observation. Résumé is full of humility, wit, smarts and heart, and all kinds of quiet astonishment. Studs would have loved it.

 —Amy Gerstler

These clear-eyed yet inventive poems about work offer a hard-won wisdom that lifts us above suffering to understanding. Green’s is a marvelously spare and colloquial voice with the kind of detail that cherishes and transforms our lives, that compels us with the authority of experience. His material is his own and others’ brutal and toxic jobs, which in the hands of such a skillful poet, provide a vision that reaches beyond the subject to his spare but complex epiphanies.
— Christopher Buckley

Working odd jobs going nowhere, the fear of futility, the problem of money, the uncertainty of life—such are the burdens of youth. In Résumé, Chris Green resurrects and transforms such lost periods of life. He sees that every job teaches, affirms that even the lowliest job is a step. Résumé is not merely a record of employment— it is art employed so that human dignity can be redeemed through understanding and wisdom.

 — Richard Jones

Chris Green

reading his poem, "Deer Sonnets"

video courtesy: jonnymess

mayapplepress.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.

Today's book of poetry is on holiday - back April 1.

Off to wrassle alligators and pythons in Florida.  Wish us well.

See you April Fool's Day.

Michael Dennis

Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief - Tim Bowling (Gaspereau Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief.  Tim Bowling.  Gaspereau Press.  Kentville, Nova Scotia.  2014.

The picture I have of the cover does not do justice to the lovely Wesley Bates woodcuts that grace this beautiful book.  Gaspereau Press books are not like the others.

Today's book of poems looked at Tim Bowling's Selected Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2013) back on May 13, 2013.  We loved it.

You can see that blog here:
http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2013/05/selected-poems-tim-bowling.html

Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief is Bowling's twelfth book of poetry and perhaps his best to date - which is saying a hell of a lot.  Bowling has been a big favourite here at Today's book of poetry.  His book Low Water Slack (Harbour Publishing, 1995), is required reading for our interns.

Childhood

I want it back. It is unseemly
to admit so. The many who confuse
a love for the present of the past
with a love for something dead
roll their eyes. Forget them.
This is for men and women
of certain years who,
having left prints on the sand,
remember the feeling
of castles in their fingers
and turn for the fanfare
blowing silent out of the mouth
of the sun, for those who,
when the utilities are paid
another month and the children
in their intensities occupied
and the laundry transferred
once more to the light,
sit on the grass in the yard
and place one hand
on the sun-warmed gold
of the sleeping retriever's fur
to take the pulse
of that small self
they say goodbye to
a little more each day,
for those voters, tax-payers,
bearers of the ordinary burden
without end or praise who
for a few seconds
bury their faces in the old trinity
earth-sun-beast
and breathe that lost present alive
tending the last coals of a fire
in the woodcutter's woods
before the blank page of the story
turns back again
with the sound of a whale
sliding its Victorian nursery
for the last time
into the sea.

...

"Childhood" starts off this sterling collection like the whistle of a train announcing its definitive arrival with authority.  This lament to aging is Bowling at the height of his considerable powers.  It breathes the same air as The Old Man And The Sea.

Time is a lonely hunter bearing down on us all as invariably as Orion looking down on every night. Bowling knows time and the stars burns equally bright.  These poems read as though they were chiseled into stone, carved as runes of wisdom for those to come.  As though the very earth loosed them in a fit of chthonic wonder.

Two Young Men In A Duck Punt

It's still dark, they wait for something.
Light? Time? Though their lives
and ours consist of light and time
it is not for these they wait.
But see the tension in their necks
shoulder -- what else could be
the cause? Even if you say
they wait to kill, what
have you ever done to the light
and time besides?

The river around the rushes
flows black, the salmon smolts
cluster thick in separate gleams --
the knives of the knife-
throwing before the show.
Frost thaws on the gunwales
water drips off the oars
the breath of the young men
comes down-slow
and visible, there are no rings
on their raw hands. They wait
without knowing, for everything

as you have done, are doing,
there in your row at the seminar
at the breakfast table, on the knife-
scored seat of the city bus,
with the frost burning off
and the day's last windfall
rotted in your lap, waiting
for the horizon's stir
the thousand clock hands
at the centre of the present.

How fleetingly lovely
the ordinary annulment
of our skies
as the tide changes
and smoke leaves the barrel
and those young hands
like ours
gather all morning
each soft inch
of the bloody rope
whose pulling sounds only the silence
in which is heard

light and time
light and time
light and time

...

Today's book of poetry has always enjoyed the poetry of Tim Bowling and Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief cements what we always thought.  Bowling is one of our best.

Bowling is more formal than he first appears, and fiercer.  These poems work like the inside of a fine watch, all delicately intertwined and necessary for the silent mechanism to keep track of time.  All those gears grinding away and we don't hear a sound.

The Last Days of Summer
Before the First Frost

Here at the wolf's throat at the egress of the howl
all along the avenue of deer-blink and salmon-kick
where the spider lets its microphone down
into the cave of the blackberry bush -- earth echo
absence of the human voice -- wait here
with a bee on your wrist and a fly on your cheek
the tiny sun and tiny eclipse.
It is time to be grateful for the breath
of what you could crush without thought
a moth, a child's love, your own life.
There might never be another chance.
How did you find me, the astonished mother says
to her four-year-old boy who'd disappeared
in the crowds at the music festival.
I followed my heart, he shrugs,
so matter-of-fact you might not see
behind his words
(o hover and feed, but not too long)

the bee trails turning to ice as they're flown.

...

These poems long to understand our world, put it into perspective despite the complex layers of narrative that demands.  Bowling has found the language that both connects us to and explains mysteries we have yet to unravel about ourselves.  We want to listen to everything Bowling has to say and he never disappoints.

Bowling must be an excellent listener because it appears he doesn't miss a thing.

Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves should be sainted by the small press world.  They are the Huckleberry Saints of Canadian publishing as far as Today's book of poetry is concerned.  No one does it better.  They can be counted on to produce books of unsurpassed physical beauty.  Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief is but one of a long line of visually stunning and consistently gorgeous books lovingly produced by Gaspereau Press.

Tim Bowling

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief is Tim Bowling’s twelfth collection of poetry, others of which include TheAnnotated Bee & Me, Fathom, The Memory Orchard, and Selected Poems. He has also published a memoir, four novels (including The Bone Sharps and The Tinsmith) and a creative work on book collecting and poetry entitled In The Suicide’s Library. Bowling lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

gaspereaupress.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.