Content:
Nabina Das—Yearnings by Abha Iyengar
Scott Owens—Lessons in Forgetting by Malaika King Albrecht
Scott Owens— The Sound of Poets Cooking, edited by Richard Krawiec
Heather Ann Schmidt—Footprints in the Bajra by Nabina Das
Steven P. Schneider—The Wine Dark House by Rustin Larson
Elizabeth Kate Switaj—All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song by Rebecca Foust

Yearnings
By Abha Iyengar
Serene Woods, New Delhi, 2010
Number of pages: 112
Available at: http://serenewoods.com/book_details.php?id=419
Reviewed by Nabina Das

Yearn for the Body and Beyond

This could have been a collection of usual love poems, love that is intense and physical, but Abha Iyengar‘s shamanic voice take us beyond just the deep sense of longing that her poems transmit. Flipping through “Yearnings” (Serene Woods, Delhi, 2010) one notices the tenor of her poems to range vividly from the soft, muted plea to a coy dalliance, to a voice of aplomb. In the very first blush, a poem that reached out to me was “She” – the ‘she’ with her delicate blue throat, an intrinsically empowered woman who “could have any lover”.

Iyengar’s style is playful as well as pithy, her diction conversational, the kind you’d imagine in an intimate tête-à-tête. Besides the love poems, the other compositions are melodic and philosophical. She, like her poetic personas in this collection, is at once hyperbolic and restrained.

In “Denial” the voice is passionate and defiant. Although the image of a zipper as a “metal snake” is invariably masculine in its evocation, it is not difficult to imagine the feminine voice, confident and aroused. The same voice easily glides along the speaker’s daily humdrum routine:

The poet’s oeuvre quite often is that of a soothsayer, made wiser in love:

Iyengar’s allusion to physicality is bold and wholesome:

And at times unabashed:

The ephemeral quality of love presents itself through a stunning stanza such as:

Iyengar is comfortable with using mythology as a prop (The Banks of the Brahmaputra) as well as venturing out for metaphors from hitherto unexplored ideas involving even race, color, skin, quite unexpected in Indian poetry:

The anaphora as a poetic device Iyengar employs well in (A Strange Stirring) with the phrase :

The line break employs a pause like the speaker’s breath, with the enjambment dropping that one word in the next line like a throb.

One sees that device in the negatives as well – “no” and “not” – where the lyric persuasion wins over the curiously italicized portions in the poem.

Something in Iyengar’s voice and imagery is startling, yet it feels familiar to the Subcontinental ear. A song-like (I am tempted to say a geet or a naghma) quality resounds in the following:

Although she writes in mostly free verse, Iyengar’s poetry is marked by abundant internal rhyming, free-flowing rhythm patters and the efficient use of styles like list poems, refrains and even rhymed quatrains. Satire and humor too dot the pages, that of a wily lover or a sage seeker. Published by Serene Woods this year, “Yearnings” is a highly recommended reading for poetry patrons.

Abha Iyengar’s poetry has appeared in Dead Drunk Dublin, Conversation Poetry Quarterly, Long Story Short,Up the Staircase and others. She is a Kota Press Poetry Anthology Contest winner. Her poem-film, "Parwaaz" (flight), has won an international prize at Patras, Greece. She is recipient of the Lavanya Sankaran Writing Fellowship.Website www.abhaiyengar.com
Blog: http://abhaencounter.blogspot.com

Nabina's novel “Footprints in the Bajra” is available from Cedar Books, India, while her work has been published in North America, Asia and Australia. An Associate Fellow for the prestigious Sarai-CSDS "City as Studio" Fellowship 2010 (New Delhi, India), Nabina has won prizes in the poetry contests organized by UNISUN Reliance, 2010; Prakriti Foundation, 2009; and HarperCollins-India and Open Space, 2008. She blogs at http://fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com/ when not writing. An MFA candidate at Rutgers University, Nabina has been an editor with literary zines and newspapers in the US.

Lessons in Forgetting
by Malaika King Albrecht
Main Street Rag, 2010, 48 pages, $7
ISBN: 9781599482453
Reviewed by Scott Owens

Reviewing Malaika King Albrecht’s debut collection of poems, Lessons in Forgetting, feels a bit self-congratulatory. After all, I helped her revise some of these poems; I published three of them in Wild Goose Poetry Review; I helped her determine the arrangement of the poems; and I was the author who recommended the collection for Main Street Rag’s Author’s Choice Chapbook Series. I am certain that somewhere someone will say that it is inappropriate, maybe unprofessional, for me to write this review. The truth is, however, I don’t care, and if you read the book, neither will you.

Considering how strong these poems are and how vital this collection is, it would be a disservice to poetry readers not to recommend it. Poetry, it could be said, is the perfect blending of sound, imagery, meaning, and emotion. And each of the poems in Lessons in Forgetting succeeds on each of these levels. As a teacher of contemporary poetry and creative writing, one of the most difficult questions I face, repeatedly, is what makes a contemporary poem good. It’s a complicated question that can only be answered in sentences containing phrases like “yes, but” or “that, and.” It is easier and probably more useful to simply provide examples, and virtually all of the poems here can used for that purpose.

Take, for example, the poem “Riddle Song:”

The first thing one notices about this poem is the careful, methodical pace of the words, created by a preponderance of stressed syllables (typically 4 in as few as 6 syllables, lines 2 and 15 for example), and the precise attention to detail, which echo the patient gentleness of the father in the poem. One might also note the pointed alliteration in places, such as the beginning of the third stanza where the repetition of the velar “k” creates a sense of broken speech as the speaker struggles with her emotions. And finally, any reader would sense the almost-magical, gentle lyricism of the last line whether or not they could explain that it is created by the use of the word “gently,” the sounds (three alveolars--“g” and “s” twice and a final diphthong--unique as an endsound in this poem), and the fact that this line is the only perfectly iambic line in the poem.

Such subtle technical mastery is common throughout the poems in this book. There is, for example, the subtle separation of an adjective from its noun in “Winging It” (“she struggled to find the bird’s / name.” The extra moment the reader spends returning to the beginning of the next line to complete the thought seems to mimic the hesitancy and uncertainty of Alzheimer’s. There are clever internal rhymes, like “Benadryl pills” in “One Last Time,” and vital assonances that link one stanza to the next, “unsweetened tea / / She reaches . . . retrieves,” from that same poem.

Thus, any of these poems could be used as illustration of good contemporary poetry. What is more, however, confronted with the question, “What makes a good contemporary book of poems,” one need only extend one’s arm with Lessons in Forgetting held in their hand and say, “This,” this cohesiveness, this relevance, this intentional alternation of dark and light, this manipulation of emotion, surprise, and contrast, this chill and chuckle of recognition, this recording of the challenges of being human with such immediacy, such clarity, and such refusal to look away from the difficult moment that it deepens our experience and understanding of what it means to be human.

Malaika King Albrecht’s Lessons in Forgetting is an important collection because of its subject matter, dealing with Alzheimer’s, but it is an impressive collection because of the poetic mastery with which Albrecht records her experiences with and reflections upon that subject.

Malaika King Albrecht's chapbook "Lessons in Forgetting" was recently published by Main Street Rag. Her poems have been published in many literary magazines and anthologies and have recently won awards at the North Carolina Poetry Council, Salem College and Press 53. She's the founding editor of Redheaded Stepchild, an online magazine that only accepts poems that have been rejected elsewhere. A former rape crisis counselor and substance abuse counselor, she has often facilitated Poetry Therapy Groups for her clients. She lives in Pinehurst, N.C. with her family and is a therapeutic riding instructor.

Author of 5 collections of poetry, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, author of “Musings” (a weekly column on poetry), founder of Poetry Hickory, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and a writer of reviews of contemporary poetry. His work has received awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. Born in Greenwood, SC, he has lived in NC for the past 25 years and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College. www.scottowenspoet.com

The Sound of Poets Cooking
edited by Richard Krawiec
Jacar Press, 2010, 172 pages
ISBN: 9780984574001
Reviewed by Scott Owens

It happens to all of us at one time or another. Late of an afternoon, we start to feel a certain emptiness, as if something is missing, something needed. We call it hunger or craving. And the more we try to ignore it, the stronger it gets. Maybe we long for something light and refreshing, or something heavier, meaty. Maybe just something sweet. Or maybe we can’t figure out exactly what we want. And that’s when we know that the answer to our appetite is surely a buffet. And that’s just what Richard Krawiec has arrayed before us as editor of The Sound of Poets Cooking. Whether we long for something exotic, something familiar and comforting, something spicy, salty, or even a bit saucy, this enticing collection of delectable delights is sure to satisfy.

To be clear and leave metaphor behind for a moment, The Sound of Poets Cooking is a new, 172-page anthology of poems about food accompanied by related recipes, from Krawiec’s fledgling press, Jacar Press. And it is an impressive debut, featuring wonderful work from poets both familiar and new, including two NC Poets Laureate, Fred Chappell and Kathryn Stripling Byer, and numerous other standards: Joseph Bathanti, Kelly Cherry, Jaki Shelton Green, Susan Ludvigson, Joanna Catherine Scott, Shelby Stephenson, and more, wrapped in a clever cover with an image of Buddha cradling a pomegranate, eggplant, carrots, tomatoes, sweet potato, chef’s knife and some spiky yellow fruit I’m not familiar with, appealingly conveying the mixture of spirituality and whimsy one might expect from poetry about food.

Of course, individual poems and individual recipes from the collection prove both enjoyable and useful, but like any good recipe, The Sound of Poets Cooking also masterfully blends disparate elements to create what might be experienced as a single savory delight, a cohesive record of the diverse ways in which the culinary arts and poetic arts are woven into the fabric of our memories, our experiences, and our daily emotional and intellectual lives. Here a reader finds the mock heroic tetrameter couplets of Chappell’s “Pot Luck Supper: Aunt Lavinia Strikes” delicately balanced by the therapeutic free verse of Grey Brown’s “Scrambled.” Or the stick-to-your-ribs heaviness of Debra Kaufman’s “Minestrone, Rainy Day” relieved by the joyful ad-libbing of Alice Owens Johnson’s “Gumbo.” Or the formal propriety of Jim Clark’s “Sunday Dinner” harmonized by the titillating temptation of Deborah Kolodji’s “Eggplant Parmigiana.”

As for the recipes, there are many I intend to try my hand at, including the onion pie, the Brussels sprouts & goat cheese risotto, and the coconut cake, but like Lenard Moore’s daughter, the one I look forward to the most is the three cheese macaroni and cheese.

To whet your appetite a bit more here is a sampler platter of some of my favorite lines from The Sound of Poets Cooking. Bon appetit!

from Scott Douglass’ “Bread Crumbs:”

from Pat Riviere-Seel’s “Road Trip Conversation:”

from Susan Meyers’ “Fork: Song for the Misunderstood:”

The Sound of Poets Cooking features work by 59 poets, including Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Kelly Cherry, Jaki Shelton Green, Susan Ludvigson, John Hoppenthaler and others.

Richard Krawiec has published two novels, a story collection, a book of poems, four plays, two young adult biographies, feature articles and more. He has edited 4 anthologies. His fiction and poetry appear in Shenandoah, Witness, many mountains moving, NC Literary Review, Artful Dodge, So'wester, Connotation, and elsewhere. He has won fellowships from the NEA and the NC Arts Council. He is founder of Jacar Press, a Community Active literary press.

Author of 5 collections of poetry, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, author of “Musings” (a weekly column on poetry), founder of Poetry Hickory, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and a writer of reviews of contemporary poetry. His work has received awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. Born in Greenwood, SC, he has lived in NC for the past 25 years and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College. www.scottowenspoet.com

Footprints in the Bajra
by Nabina Das
Review by Heather Ann Schmidt

These lines from the poem “ Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta” by Reetika Vazirani, capture the journey one takes in Nabina Das’ novel, Footprints in the Bajra. This story sweeps one up in the world of young Nora, who leaves her life in Dehli, against the wishes of her family and friends, to go touring with an acting group to Bihar in rural India.

On the first page of the novel the sharp contrast between Nora and Muskaan is made apparent--Nora is an urban young woman while Muskaan is a rural one. Their differences are what make the beginning of the story so engrossing--the tension between them causes the reader to want to invest in each character:

If you misrepresent them, they’ll abduct and kill you,” says Muskaan, our hostess, who swats my attention as though it were a distracted fly bumbling over a new odour. All the while she keenly observes my face as if I am wearing a mask to cover up my reaction. In reality I try to peer at myself in a small mirror on the wall. I get unsettled by the jagged murals of the tigers and the hunters staring at me from that rough surface and wipe my kohl in the gradually failing evening light. She brings in a kerosene lantern and hovers over it. Kerosene lantern! I thought we had entered a new bright millennium. But I knew it while coming to this village that Durjanpur was a world of darkness and shadows that jostle in the slightest light (Das 15).

It is also the ups and downs of Muskaan and Nora's relationship that keep the story going from Bihar to New York. Their relationship seems to symbolize the constant search for understanding between Democracy and Communism that exists in our world--an understanding that could allow for more peaceful coexistence. The characters do not lie flat within the story, but rise off of the page and grab the reader's hand, pulling them right into the middle of the bajra fields. This excerpt from the chapter from Muskaan's point of view gives testament to her liveliness:

How far will Headmaster Sahay encourage a young woman like me? To read, write, teach his students, go out alone. Really, mausaji depends on me like a father does on his son, to carry out his mission, his dreams and his philosophy. No one else will understand this. So, after I finish running all the errands, I find myself a curled little bookworm in my room where the retired jamun tree, which doesn’t bear any more berries comes spreading its bulky shadow to say hello to me in the evening"(Das 27).

The novel educates its readers about how India is a patch quilt of many terrains and beliefs, many struggles and individual ideas on how those struggles can be overcome. Das' unique approach of presenting each character's point of view in chapters throughout the story also lends itself to a more intimate reading experience. Das also shows a tremendous talent for meaningful dialogue and poetic description that paints the landscape in, both, muddy water color and languidly emotive word pictures. An example of this is found in a narrative from Headmaster Sahay because it puts the reader right in the middle of rural India from whence he came:

It has a story that started from little village houses with tile roofs and backyard gardens of coriander and broad beans mingling with weeds and flower-stalked grasses. It started from small towns where people carried honey drops on their tongue tips and loose change tied at their shirt-ends. They chewed tobacco and smelled of country (Das 132).

Upon finishing this work, one will feel that they are a little bit more aware of how understanding comes in many different forms, and so can friendship.


Nabina's novel “Footprints in the Bajra” is available from Cedar Books, India, while her work has been published in North America, Asia and Australia. An Associate Fellow for the prestigious Sarai-CSDS "City as Studio" Fellowship 2010 (New Delhi, India), Nabina has won prizes in the poetry contests organized by UNISUN Reliance, 2010; Prakriti Foundation, 2009; and HarperCollins-India and Open Space, 2008. She blogs at http://fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com/ when not writing. An MFA candidate at Rutgers University, Nabina has been an editor with literary zines and newspapers in the US.

Heather Ann Schmidt received her MFA in Poetry from National University. She teaches writing at Oakland Community College, ITT Technical Institute and Mott Community College. She is the founder/ publisher of recycled karma press. Her chapbooks are: Issa's Spider (Victorian Violet Press, 2010), Matryoshkas (Victorian Violet Press, 2010), Bat's Lovesong: American Haiku (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2009), Channeling Isadora Duncan (Gold Wake Press, 2009) and Njaa (recycled karma press, 2008). Her books are: (Village Green Press, 2010) and On Recalling Life Through the Eye of the Needle, The Owl & the Muse: Collected Tanka (recycled karma press, 2009). Forthcoming poetry collections are Transient Angels and Red Hibiscus from Crisis Chronicles Press. Her website is HeatherAnnSchmidt.yolasite.com

The Wine-Dark House and the Poet’s Journey
By Rustin Larson
Review by Steven P. Schneider

Rustin Larson has been quietly writing his poems in Southeastern Iowa for over twenty years now. Gradually, he accumulated a body of work that has attracted the attention of other poets, critics, and that increasingly rare specimen, readers. For his efforts Larson has won prizes for his poetry, has been featured as an Iowa poet at the Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 and 2004 and has read his work on the public radio program Live from Prairie Lights.

Rustin has not only put his energy into his own writing, but through his community service work and community radio show “Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost” has promoted the careers of other poets. He has also promoted the work of other writers as editor of the Contemporary Review and as poetry editor of the Iowa Source and more recently as the coordinator of a poetry reading series at the M.U.M. library. It is no wonder then that his own poems express empathy for the human condition, with its foibles and exaltations, its needs for community and friendship to ward off existential loneliness. Larson’s poetry is distinguished by an impressive emotional range because of the empathy he feels for others.

Larson’s first book, Loving the Good Driver (1996), had several excellent poems. Two of them are sure to become contemporary classics. His poem “The Paternal Side,” published in The New Yorker, is skillful in its quiet evocation of his ancestors from Norway, who like other Scandinavian immigrants moved to the plains -- to Iowa -- for a better life: “to be someone with a little power over destiny / and cheese….” The other poem, “Melons,” is the kind of quirky lyric-narrative that characterizes some of Larson’s best work. In this poem he and his partner “wandered the earth dreaming / of the perfect incorruptible melon.” The poem concludes with the surprising and delightful image of the poet weighing his big round head in his hands, like a melon. The humor in this poem is contrapuntal to the more serious tone found in “The Paternal Side,” and his poetry often oscillates between these two strikingly different notes.

Larson imported several of the best poems from his first book into his second book, Crazy Star (2004), selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005. He also included several new poems and further established himself as a strong contemporary poet. His poem “Cleo” is a favorite among readers for its humorous yet poignant description of a “basset hound, overweight, lazy / and sad.” “Lord of the Apes” is a tragic narrative of love and redemption, the story of several characters who lead the kind of lives Thoreau described as “quiet desperation.” One of them, a teenage girl, shows up on the poet’s front porch one night, crying in distress over her boyfriend who in anger has punched his arm through a window in their mobile home. As in so many of his other poems, the poet provides human shelter and warmth to the distressed and dispossessed.

In his most recent book, The Wine-Dark House, Larson adds many memorable poems to his fine body of work. This is his most hefty volume, totaling 101 pages. He has clearly hit his mid-career stride and many of the poems have been published in excellent literary journals. Indeed, Rustin’s commitment to the “small, literary journal” throughout his career provides testimony to the importance of these journals for a poet. They have provided a good forum for his work, and he has provided them with consistently imaginative poetry. In this collection, as in the previous two books, Larson demonstrates his versatility as a poet.

The opening poem, “Baker’s,” rivals in excellence the earlier poem “The Paternal Side.” Both poems use description marvelously to evoke character and scene, which are normally the province of the fiction writer. Larson is adept at the lyric–narrative poem, in which a depth of emotion is conveyed and sustained within a narrative frame. In “Baker’s,” for example, the reader is treated to a view of the poet as a young boy, sitting patiently for a haircut in a place called “Baker’s.”

Larson has an eye and an ear for the small town barbershop that reminds me of Tim O’Brien, the fiction writer and author of The Things They Carried. Like O’Brien, Larson situates this poem during the Vietnam War era, and while the boy in the barber’s chair reads comic books, the mature poet reflects that Baker surely dreamed the head of hair he trimmed would one day be returned in “a blue silk box from Asia.” Larson expresses both a nostalgia for Baker’s and the atmosphere of his barber shop as well as offers a wry political commentary on the times.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is simply entitled “Poem.” It is different from many of the others in the collection and invokes the way the mind, or the poem, can lose track of itself. In this regard, the “Poem” may be a commentary on Alzheimer’s or creeping senility. It is both frightful and humorous. Larson repeats the phrase “I had no idea” with consummate skill to convey the sense of mental “slippage.” He writes: “I had no idea I had no idea I forgot where/ ideas came from I had no idea I was / afraid of the ideas I was failing to have.” (18) This is a startling example of self-consciousness gone awry.

In the title poem, “The Wine-Dark House,” Larson, who is a master of the domestic scene, is reading late into the night Homer’s Odyssey. The poem’s title echoes the phrase “wind-dark sea,” which Homer used dozens of times in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Like Odysseus, Larson has been trying to find his way home, or at least to redefine that home. Larson’s vehicle for his journey is the process of writing itself, which he has dedicated himself to and which he knows can be both circuitous and serendipitous. But the writer who pursues his craft, like Odysseus who pursues the journey home, must have patience. Larson plays on the word “patience” in this poem. “There is a planter of impatiens / whistling in the hoop.” “I have taken / my lessons in patience/ from the wine-dark house.” The poem ends magically.

Larson and the house become one; just as the poet and his journey are one. The wine is a metaphor for darkness but also inspiration, and the poet who “drinks the wine” surrenders part of himself to that inspiration, to the darkness in the house, to the quietness of reading a book, to the lushness of metaphor and to the wine of his own imagination.

These days to read a book of poetry is to engage in an act of subversion, to surrender the mind to the quiet act of discovery in a world full of noise and fear. In The Wine-Dark House the reader will find many treasures to marvel over and to stow away.

Rustin Larson's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, The Atlanta Review and other magazines.  The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009) is his current collection. Crazy Star, his previous collection, was selected for the Loess Hills Book's Poetry Series in 2005. Larson won 1st Editor's Prize from Rhino magazine in 2000 and has won prizes for his poetry from The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation among others. A five-time Pushcart nominee, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 and 2004, a featured writer in the DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts in 2007, 2008, and has been highlighted on the public radio programs Live from Prairie Lights and Voices from the Prairie. He is the host of the radio talk show Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost and lives in Fairfield, Iowa.

Steven P. Schneider is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he also serves as Director of New Programs and Special Projects for the College of Arts and Humanities. Steven is a founding member of the South Texas Literacy Coalition in the Rio Grande Valley and is the recipient of two Big Read grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has used the "Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives" traveling exhibit to promote the teaching of culturally relevant literature and creativity. Steven offers a variety of workshops on these topics to both high school and college students and teachers.

Steven Schneider has published his poetry widely and given readings throughout the United States, including public performances at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Fort Kearny Writers' Conference, the UTPA Summer Creative Writing Institute, and the South Texas Literary Festival. He has also been interviewed and read his work on NETV. Steven Schneider's poems and essays have been published in national and international journals, including Critical Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The Literary Review, and featured in American Life in Poetry.

He is the author of several books, including three collections of poetry, Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives/Fronteras: Dibujando las vidas fronterizas, Prairie Air Show and Unexpected Guests, and a scholarly book entitled A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope and the editor of Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons's Long Poems. He is a winner of an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poetry and a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship.

All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song
by Rebecca Foust
Many Mountains Moving Press (2010) 80 pages, $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-886976-24-5, Poetry
Reviewed by Elizabeth Kate Switaj

The title of All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song seems a difficult one for poetry, given its abstraction and the tension between its two adjectives: to be gorgeous and pitiless suggests a chilly, if apparently sophisticated, kind of beauty that can be difficult to achieve without becoming glib. Still, the first poem of the collection, "Altoona to Anywhere," opens with lines that show that poet Rebecca Foust can strike precisely such a tone: "Go ahead, aspire to transcend / your hardscrabble roots." Neither those lines, nor the rest of the first stanza give any indication of sympathy for the addressee. The rest of the piece, however, shows that this collection will not merely fulfill the promise of the title: the turn and the concrete details of the second stanza, however, make clear that if there is not sympathy or pity, there is certainly empathy and a sense of shared experience:

What does hair smell like under shampoo? The unsophisticated world "you" left never created a word for it; the world "you" have tried to enter doesn't need one, so it takes a whole line. Stop consonants, "b" and "p" and a proliferation of commas underscore the sense of being unable to progress. Finally, a sentence fragment at the poem's conclusion restates and makes clear the scope of the rest of the book:

These poems tell that story, describing the beauty of life and the specifics that remain despite the details that change; the telling resists pity, even as the carefulness of telling demands the emotional investment from the reader that it implies on the part of the author or speaker.

This sense of repetition at times becomes intensely personal. In "Things Burn Down" each member of the family has their own version of "damask": "Dad’s damask / was a gray square he hacked on to clear the ash / from his throat." It may not be what is typically thought of as aesthetically pleasing, but it was life and so has its own beauty. At other times, the personal, individual poems reach the limits of the gorgeous and pitiless. When the speaker of "Backwoods" asks how a woman could go back to her abusive husband, the repetition of the abuse is implied, but the questions seem to suggest an attitude of pity or of contempt: the former interpretation violates the spirit of the collection, the latter seems unfair. Even the abusive husband gets a little understanding with the contempt issued to him in "Purple Heart": "three / tours in Korea cost you your wife / and sad, cutter daughter." The contempt for the absurd wealthy family in "Safari" is tempered by the misery of the woman in the preceding poem "Marrying Up." "Apologies to My OB/GYN" certainly carries contempt for doctors more interested in cost and convenience than life, but it comes after two poems of anguish about a difficult labor and premature birth, so it comes across primarily as an expression of a mother's righteous anger.

The extent to which pitilessness and empathy can co-exist is questioned by such poems, as well as by the connections between the personal and the more generally human made in "Sometimes the Mole Is Merely":

What does the casual inclusion of autism among these deadly instances say about the speaker's ability to understand autistic people? Fortunately, the poem does not stop there. The next few stanzas describe the accident, concluding:

Rebecca Foust has begun by echoing a bleak and dehumanizing attitude toward autism and transformed it into gratitude over her autistic son's survival.

In other poems, which reach beyond the personal, the sense of return and repeat extends beyond the individual and even, to a certain degree, beyond the human. In "Allegheny Mountain Bowl," the pain of job loss and sustained poverty is subsumed into "feet [that] beat a work boot tattoo: laid off, laid off, laid off." In the same poem, repetition is inscribed in the landscape itself, even if, as in "Allegheny Mountain Bowl" it takes a human being to see and name it:

In a different context, this need for the human subject might be a weakness, but here it's part of the point. The natural world may be part of the "gorgeous, pitiless song" but to escape entirely into it is as impossible as leaving behind one's community of origin entirely behind to move into another human community. As "Strip Mine" starkly suggests, this impossibility is not only because one remains inescapably human but also because to be human in the natural world is to change the natural world, even that which came before the human:

All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song reveals Rebecca Foust's ability to blend the personal with the impersonal and, in so doing, to create a sense of connection to other humans and to the world at large which is beautiful not despite being without pity but because it is without pity. The sense of repetition and the inescapable which is woven through that pitilessness becomes a journey not of changed circumstance but of understanding, concluding with a poem that begins, "Now she can see..."

Rebecca Foust's books include All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Book Award, 2010), and Mom's Canoe and Dark Card (2007, 2008 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prizes). Her recent poetry appears widely in journals including Hudson Review, Margie, North American Review, and Spoon River Review. God, Seed (Tebot Bach Press), a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens, is forthcoming in September 2010.

Elizabeth Kate Switaj's reviews have appeared in Gender Across Borders, Feminist Review, Galatea Resurrects, Experimental Fiction & Poetry, and Mad Hatter's Review. Her first book of poetry, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. She holds an MFA in Poetics and Creative Writing from New College of California and a BA from The Evergreen State College. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at Queen's University Belfast; her thesis explores the influence of James Joyce's work as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language on his fiction. She also serves as an editorial assistant for Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing.

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780979847066/magdalene--the-mermaids.aspx
http://www.elizabethkateswitaj.net/