Content:
Gail Fishman Gerwin—Detours & Diversions by Nancy Scott
Anthony DiMatteo—Gone Sane by Christal Rice Cooper
Carol Hawkins—Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood
Ami Kaye—Something Knows the Moment by Scott Owens; The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux
Celisa Steele—For One Who Knows How to Own Land by Scott Owens
Cindy Hochman—Beyond the Scent of Sorrow by Sweta Srivastava Vikram
Karen Bowles—Jazz by Jéanpaul Ferro

Detours & Diversions
by Nancy Scott
Main Street Rag, 2011, 42 pages, $7
ISBN: 978-1-59948-299-6
Reviewed by Gail Fishman Gerwin

Nancy Scott’s chapbook Detours & Diversions takes readers through the poet’s life as she executes palpable and emotional turns from usual paths. Written with the courage of retrospective honesty, Scott recalls her journey through life’s stages, some lived on the precipice of danger, others in comfort zones that suddenly change direction.

Calling on poets’ experience with readings – including the worry about audience size, appropriateness of poems, subject balance—she takes us to a New Jersey library, where she faces an unexpected detour. A child—When’s it my turn? —upstages her, stealing the evening with his spunky open reading. His confidence contrasts sharply with her own youthful anxiety:

My piano recital, I forgot how to end
Für Elise, until a disembodied arm reached
through the curtain and yanked me off the stage.

This stage fright rides the generational road; her young son drops a prop during a London production and cannot complete the show.  She explains that he is so in 17th-century character that his fear comes not from the faux pas but because “I was afraid what the King’s soldiers would do to me.”

Astute observer, Scott’s word choice is direct, almost sparse, propelling the reader through her poems—in fact, through the entire book—at an unrelenting and musical cadence. Scott allows readers to explore caverns deep inside her comfort zone.

She takes us to a youthful encounter with a rugby player from New Zealand as they approach Madeira. After her trademark exquisite description of time and place—a funicular ride where they could view the ship, “a miniature glistening off shore,” they move on to a detour, a place between the lines:

Let’s explore more of the island . . .
Yes, the black and white tiles in Municipal Square, which was
not at all what either of us meant.

We see Scott as this daring young woman. We see her and others in locales that her words describe better than a travelogue: the Bay of Biscay in a fierce storm, a turboprop from Bismarck to Portland at night in a summer deluge, a fiery crash (“The Name”) that takes the survivor on a detour to a place where his memory evaporates and his own name is foreign to him.  In “Crossing the North Sea,” we rock on a nauseating ferryboat crossing, feeling as helpless as the poet as she watches priceless passengers— “thirteen purebred Arabians, pride of a Saudi Prince” — escape their confine and disappear into the water’s raging darkness.  Her diversion, their detour, no turning back, an indelible photo forever captured in the chilling narrative.  “What had these poor horses done to deserve such a fate?”  She asks that question as the poem begins, makes us eager and terrified to reach the awful climax.  She delivers this metaphor of terror, loss, and impotence in just 21 lines.  Most of Scott’s poetry in this book is like that; it’s as if she holds the poem in her hand, rich with color and innuendo, then splays it on the page in a series of short lines, constructed to perfection.

She finds diversion in simple acts: jury duty, where a sheet cake placates a group trapped by the “virtues of civic responsibility” and an insomnia-tainted night filled with cups of tea, infomercials and the morning paper’s “thunk on the driveway.” We’re exhausted with her, lulled into padding around the house, then jolted by the end of the poem, a sudden rhyme in the narrative: “ . . . at least pretending to sleep, make that old rooster earn his keep.” 

Scott takes curves from first-person narratives to third-person vignettes in a flash; she can deliver a prose poem about an unexpected gashing of her adult son’s head as she closes the trunk of her car. The title of the poem tells all, we think: “The Risks of Having Children and One of Them Putting His Head Where It Doesn’t Belong.”  But no, this is a poem about electric family dynamics and resignation; it is a poem for all people at all seasons of life.

Her third-person detour poems—about a coal miner who became a professor, “fertilizing the minds of so many students;” a dreamer who left his wife and children wanting; an undercover agent doubling as a lady of the evening—leave us wanting to know more.  Who do they represent?  How does she know so much about them?

Scott takes on the Internet, bidding against anonymous rivals on eBay, then googling her name and finding out her “true identity.”  She’s “Playmate of the Month,” “theatre critic,” and wed to “Thomas, a burglar,” among other things. Googlers now can find an added identity for the real Nancy Scott, poet.  This prolific writer, who has shaped word images through three previous volumes, has developed a complementary creative path with her exceptional talent for collage.  Many works, already exhibited in over a dozen venues, incorporate segments of cardboard dividers that separated her books in boxes.  Is it a detour?  A diversion?  Or more of a parallel road, the two genres letting Scott’s creative spirit run in words and in the visual arts without stop signs to impede the traffic.

Detours & Diversions reveals passion of young love, perils of marriage, excitement of the extraordinary, and the reward of aging.  To this end, she closes the collection with a tribute to her granddaughter, Leah, to whom this volume is dedicated.  The two are on a fall walk, surrounded by treasures—leaves, dropped bird feathers, stones— all handed to Scott (Leah calls her Mimi) for safekeeping.  She asks Leah if she’s tired, if she can still walk, wondering “ . . . how can I carry this forty-pound child . . .?”  Leah answers, “Yes, I just stay on the path.”  Scott recalls her own diversions and admits that at this moment, “I don’t want to be anywhere else except on the path that has brought us both here.”

What a journey Nancy Scott has taken.  How generous she is to invite us along.

        
Gail Fishman Gerwin, a Morristown, NJ poet, is author of the memoir Sugar and Sand, a 2010 Paterson Poetry Award finalist.  Since 2008, her poems earned four consecutive honorable mentions in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards competitions, with publication in the Paterson Literary Review.  She is an associate editor of Tiferet and her work appears in journals including Lips, Edison Literary Review, Caduceus, The American Voice in Poetry: The Legacy of Williams, Whitman, and Ginsberg, andonline at Adanna, Cutthroat, yourdailypoem.com, and Poetry Center at Smith College. A former educator, in 1984 she founded inedit, a freelance writing/editing firm. 

Gone Sane
by Christal Rice Cooper
River King Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-0965076449, $15
Reviewed by Anthony DiMatteo

This is a disturbing book with its "chorographic" impersonations and lyrical narratives that offer something like a panoramic view of the violence of the 20th century. How does one achieve perspective on such repeated mass destruction of people and the environment, of what civilization holds sacred? A still greater challenge is how do we get unused to the violence and the endless warfare, make it less personal and familiar, something we can look at with new, unaccommodating eyes, an urgent task given our apparently open-ended state of emergency we find ourselves in, with terrorism and counter-terrorism so hard to tell apart at times.

Cooper's poems again and again put acts of violence in our face. One poem simulates the voice of an anonymous woman who suffers domestic rape ("His bloodshot eyes bleed on me"), another mimes Hitler's mania ("nothing happens / except when I speak"), another imagines Jim Jones in crazed monologue ("I want you to drink from the planted cup"), and still another personifies the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima as Enola Gay's baby ("Her offspring cracked the earth").  How does one sing of the Holocaust?  "Workmen's tables with leftover debris - / human pelvis ashtrays" (from the poem "Bergen-Belsen").   Trying to turn suffering into song is one thing (the perennial work of the blues);  turning song over to violence, becoming enthralled with it, is another.         

On the other hand, from numerous moralizing allusions to Jesus and Adam and Eve throughout the book, one can assume the author to be of the Christian faith. Her allegiance to it sometimes sprouts in unlikely contexts such as in the portrait of Sitting Bull, with Cooper comparing his relationship to a buffalo to how "Adam and Eve once roamed, / following the Great Spirit's footsteps / to a garden." Or one can take her poem on Robert Kennedy where he is "like Moses...the only one holy enough / to see the bush / burning." One is not sure how seriously to take such staged collisions of history and scripture - as in the same poem, where "the Father and the Son were/ laughing with the mafia."  One can ask regarding such voracious syncretism, at what point does the advocacy of one's faith disallow consideration of the otherness of others?  

At a minimum, if one is true to the paramount Christian doctrine of loving another as oneself and turning the other cheek, one must be strongly against violence. Yet, as the philosophers Georges Sorel and Walter Benjamin warned, who can fathom such violence on a massive, pervasive scale as seen in the 20th century and after, without falling prey to it in some way? Perhaps Cooper too has fallen into its abyss - perhaps we all have, long since accustomed to the many private, economic and state-sponsored forms that violence has taken. Having depicted so many versions of it, including its culturally dominant matrix of power and capital featured in a batch of poems obsessively focused on Jackie Kennedy Onassis ("She had money. Liked money. Loved money"), Cooper's book sadly ends in a dead-end, with the curse of a father against the murderer of his daughter: "I want to see him rot." In this way, the book at times seems to enact the reverse of its title as if the poet had succumbed to a brutal seduction. Along with Onassis, Jim Jones emerges as a major figure of the book. His portrait on the cover of the book hovers ominously above the faces of children, and this false shepherd is enigmatically described in the title of one poem as a "Mad Giggler Gone Sane," presumably connecting this poem with the title of the collection.

Overall, to be fair to the greater purpose it has, the book manages to lodge a protest against violence by showing its pervasive presence throughout our society and world. One just wishes the poet had committed herself more directly to the more difficult, unsensational task of indicating some way beyond it.

Compartments:
Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms
by Carol Smallwood
Paper, $15, ISBN: 978-1-937-53600-8,
146 pp, 6x9, August 2011,
Anaphora Literary Press Anaphora Literary Press
Reviewed by Carol Hawkins

Carol Smallwood's poetry exposes the active inner life of a curious observer.  In her collection, "Compartments," she reveals the mind and heart of a poet who knows how to unravel mysteries with sensory details and probing questions.  Structured forms, like the villanelle and the triolet, frame fluid topics.  Smallwood invites visitors to share her vision of her thoughts.  Elements of time and place ground the reader to a particular setting that allows access to the poems.  This poet likes to grasp at ordinary things, turning them around in her mind and then translating her ideas into strict lines that reveal truths about unknowable things.  This poet desires to know all, and to share her intimate vision with her readers.

For example, in the poem, "By the Barb Wire Fence," Smallwood takes on the villanelle to corral the passing of time.  Lily, the protagonist, seeks refuge among the birds and bees, but not in some silly romantic sense.  On the contrary, she hides her tears, weakened by some weight of memory and regret, perhaps a gripping need for something permanent, but the recognition that nature doesn't hold still.  One dominant image in the poem, a stone foundation, reveals a mystery.  The poet writes:

Lily went where bees made blossoms fall,
near a stone foundation too old to recall.

Even the stone foundation shifts from an assumed place of permanence to a place unknown, an inner mystery, the awareness that nothing is fixed, not even our desires or intentions.  No one knows what the foundation once held up.   Yet, this place of decay holds life:   "bees make blossoms fall," and "birds built nests without trepidation," shifting scenes that allow the narrator to turn inward, to seek further refuge, near "the barbed wire fence."

The triplets within the villanelle create a context from which to describe the natural world, while the reframe and conclusion in the closing quatrain leave the reader in a setting of peace.  The center line in each triplet begins to reveal a conflict:  the narrator's need to break from "obligation" and seek out an old tree in a quiet spot to "linger as the sun sank."

The rhythm of the poem echoes the rhythm of life, always moving but seeking pause.  "The Barbed Wire Fence" opens up a Pandora's Box, a bundle of different meanings, each dependent on the reader's own associations.  This reader sees a narrator, who appears trapped, yet the fence is down, she can run if she chooses, a breach in the enclosure allows her to leave, but she stays, and settles for a pause.  Why?  "Family obligations" that make her wonder how it all turned out this way?  Did she ever really have a choice?  The poet writes:

Lily wiped her tears as the kids still small
returned from a game of interrogation

Explicit tears for implicit reasons, except for her close reference to "kids" as they come back from a game of questions that must seem difficult to answer.  Lily's mission, "to see the oldest tree of all," opens and closes the poem, as she resonates with her surroundings:

Lily went where bees made blossoms fall
and birds built nests without trepidation
near a stone foundation too old to recall.

Another concrete scene, this time "A Vision Triolet," contains a doctor, a stain, a reality check, and a photo.  Again, the impermanence of life, the passing of time, aging.  More lines of tight rhyme, eight lines per stanza, the repetition of entire lines, like the villanelle.  The length of lines matter, tetrameter, ABaAab, as in "quick, case, photographic; quick, Geographic, space," followed by AB, "quick, case."

A Vision Triolet

A digital fundus photo is quick,
recommended for anyone just in case--
each eye must stare till photographic;
a digital fundus photo is quick,
the results rival a National Geographic
glossy spectacular of outer space.
The digital fundus photo is quick
recommended for anyone just in case.

The optometrist pointed to murky stains
"Due to common aging," he explained
fed by vessels deep in my brain.
The optometrist pointed to murky stains
foreign as a NASA Mars terrain--
the exposure, dull red, self-contained.
The optometrist pointed to murky stains
"due to common aging," he explained.

Just in case of what?  Those questionable "murky stains" may "be due to common aging" but what does that say about life ahead . . . a red stain, a void, a "dull red, self-contained."  The poet found the whole scene strange, although the image seemed quite familiar to the optometrist.  The poet's confused.  Isn't the poet's job to make the strange . . . familiar? 

This tricky triolet, a quirky form meant to grasp what is slipping away, the poet's most valuable tool, sight. The repetition of "stains" in the second stanza work well to drive home the point of over exposure, in this case, to time, "the dull red" left behind.  A moment of vision, indeed, of the mystical kind, and the repetition of the line:  "the digital fundus photo is quick" liking the sound of these words and the image of National Geographic, the "result rival" a lyrical quality with tight rhyme-"glossy spectacular."  The artist works here, in and among these forms, such as the villanelle and the triolet, to craft common themes, like aging and regret, in mirroring reframes.

Many poems, like the earliest triolets in English, were written as prayers.  This collection of Compartments could hold the same intention, like chants of extreme repetition, limited rhyme, limited lines that allow the structure to disappear, even though it dominates.  These qualities of form, combined with the simplicity of content, convey a shared understanding, to make Compartments a good read.  The personal becomes universal through images and sounds, and meaning moves closer, with each carefully constructed line.


Carol Hawkins holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught writing and directed writing programs for over twenty years, in public and private colleges and universities, both nationally and abroad. Her writing appears in the National Women's Studies Journal and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal; Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing (Key Publishing House, 2012). Currently she is working on a memoir that explores the intersections of gender, economic class, and literacy.  She lives and writes from her home in Downeast Maine.

Something Knows the Moment
by Scott Owens
Published by Eyewear
ISBN: 978-1599483023
Reviewed by Ami Kaye

Something Knows the Moment is by far the largest canvas Scott Owens has worked on. This time around he ventures into sacrosanct territory as he tackles our very foundations of belief. This poetry collection articulates our innermost conflicts about the subject. Owens plies his talent with a heightened sense of language and examines what he embraces as well as what he repudiates. He understands the disconnect between religious texts and their imperfect interpretations, and the limitations of theology as a whole which he explores with honesty and compassion, characteristic traits of Owens as a writer.  Early in the book (from "Having His Hands Before Him") we feel the emotional impact of "God had a son," "…so with his silence/he nailed him to a tree/so with the shadow of his hand/he took him back/and with his long spine/he lay down beside him/and wept deep/into the hands before him." The book's title comes from the poem "Common Ground," written to his brother, which ponders the extent and allowances of love:

"I do not believe God will bend
to kiss this mouth.  I do not believe
the wine will turn to blood.  But something
knows the moment of sunflower,
the time of crow's open wing,
the span of moss growing on rock,
and water washing it away."

Owens furthers his quest in "Covenant," as the speaker tries to comprehend the immensity of belief. We see how the origin of life is connected to its nomenclature. Owens' natural love of words is apparent in "Learning the Names,"  "…without reason or rhyme but just/ the joy of weight on his tongue." At such vital moments, Owens reminds us he is a poet. We feel the visceral thrust in "Original Sin":

                      "I opened

my brother's body as I opened
the land to plant this seed
of knowing."

Readers of Owens' previous books will feel the shift in poetic vision in this one. Deft and masterful, the expository tone and structure takes an exponential leap. "The Dream of St. Francis" reads like a meditation on a text, its style is pure and luminous: 

"It started with the hungry look of stars,
wind a trembling lip, earth
a field of mouths closing on air.
For all I gave I thought that God
would show me the way, give me the means

to make my life a sacrifice.
He gave me nothing but pierced hands,
a dream of the world in need.
All I had left was myself.
I gave my hands to doves, shadow wings

incapable of flight."

Finish the review here:
http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/12/guest-review-kaye-on-owens.html

The Book of Men
by Dorianne Laux
Norton, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07955-5
Reviewed by Ami Kaye

In her newest collection, The Book of Men, Dorianne Laux solidifies her standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today. Fans of her previous work will find an even greater range in this new book as she exposes the reader to fresh terrain with her unmistakable charm and genius. The scope of the book is expansive, from its clever and intricately rendered cover art to each of the poems within, reflecting a world in which the author unravels the mystery and splendor of men, and by extension, mankind itself.

Dorianne Laux orchestrates this poetry ensemble in the key signature of the “Y” chromosome. She wields her baton expertly to produce a varied mix of voices, styles and moods. The dynamics of her music result from a fine metrical balance and precise diction. She is a poet who takes chances, one who wants to “regret nothing.” In “Antilamentation” the speaker asserts “You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,” and encourages us to embrace our mistakes as an inevitable part of life without dwelling on the past. Laux is a versatile writer with a strong poetic repertoire, her skill with language and pacing, impressive. The exuberance and wit in her work facilitates intimacy between the reader and writer as in the poem “Late Night TV, where the speaker ponders the mysteries of life: “We know nothing of how it all works,/ how we end up in one bed or another,/ speak one language instead of the others, what heat draws us to our life’s work.”

Laux’s agility with the narrative is evident in poems like “Middle Name.” In this poignant piece, the speaker wonders about the woman in a black and white photograph, “the one my mother loved enough to give me her name,/ to find a camera and take this photograph, Louise, keeper of my mother’s secrets and dreams.“ The finely nuanced emotion in Laux’s work causes her creations to take on a life of their own. The impact of her poems is a result of crafting which she achieves through careful, precise language, as in the line from “Staff Sgt. Metz,” where he does not sip, but slurps the coffee. In the opening poem, Laux presents a vivid snapshot of the testosterone-laden army man. “His hands are thick-veined” she tells us, The good blood/ still flows through,/ given an extra surge/ when he slurps his latte,”

The lyrical heft of her lines clearly takes on center stage in poems such as “Dark Charms.” “Eventually the future shows up everywhere” she says of time and its ravages. The echoes of emotion weave inevitably with music in this gem. The reader is aware of a haunting beauty, a mystical awareness riding fluidly on the arc of the poem:

We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the key to lost names.

In the “The Secret of Backs” the speaker shares the thrill of ordinary moments. She creates a tension by building sensuous images and then into that silence drops a phrase that takes your breath. Her words create a compact and powerful lyric expression and pulse with libidinal energy, while meaning and content are layered and build from sentence to sentence:

The up-swept oh my
nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love.

In “Late-Night TV,” Laux draws an arresting image by combining the violence of birth with the tenderness of parental love:

What cup of love poured him into this world?
Did his mother touch her lips
to his womb-battered crown
and inhale his scent?

Some of the poems such as “The Rising” reverberate with power. There is something palpable about the poem, its raw urgency and warmth is compelling. We can feel the beating heart of this poem as the mare struggles to give birth, we can see the action, pitch and roll. We are with her on this rollercoaster of pain and glory—the intensity of this poem builds with its motion, gait, and rhythm:

and by a willful rump and switch of tail hauled up,
flank and fetlock, her beastly burden, seized
and rolled and wrenched and winched the wave…

Finish the review here:
http://wildgoosepoetryreview.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/ami-kaye-review-of-dorianne-lauxs-the-book-of-men/

For One Who Knows How to Own Land
by Scott Owens
Reviewed by Celisa Steele

I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on “reverse regionalism” (a concept I coined with the confidence and confusion of a young intellectual) in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Robert Penn Warren. If regionalism is the influence of place and its trappings—characters, landscape, language, mores, etc.—made manifest in a writer’s work, then reverse regionalism is the influence of the writer on the place he or she addresses in her work. Or, at least, that’s the gist of what I remember writing.

For One Who Knows How to Own Land (FutureCycle Press, 2012) resurrected reverse regionalism in my mind because the poems in Scott Owens’s newest and ninth book show not only a writer profoundly influenced by place but also a writer shaping place in the act of writing.

There are poems in For One Who Knows How to Own Land that match what one might expect of a book focused on the rural Carolina Piedmont: poems about red dirt and cows and “tomatoes / bigger than two fists” (“Moccasins,” 28-29), poems about droughts and hunger and heat, poems about family and love and violence. “7 Haiku,” “Americana,” and “Triptych” are exemplars of what might be expected of a regional writer, as is the collection’s eponymous poem, which concludes the first of the book’s three sections (“Learning Through the Darkness”). These regional poems are no less powerful for their predictability of subject or setting—Owens makes them new with image and line and sound. “For One Who Knows How to Own Land” ends:

And I realize
those who know
how to own land never rest.
They can always be seen
sitting on ruined porches,
framed in darkness,
deep in the night. (33-39)

Alongside the more traditional fare of regionalism, Owens offers poems that call into question the memories of place and its people, as in “Fallibility of Memory” where the development of the land makes it hard for the speaker to believe his memories of what used to constitute his entire world.

Nothing was left

of memory, not the deer
stands, the tree house,
the forts of broom straw,
not the goat field, the fox

traps, the sliding rope,
not the battle-worn trails
that reached the end
of what we knew. (32-40)

With the fallibility of memory comes invention—the opportunity, and burden, of the poet. In “The Event Rightfully Remembered,” Owens resists the urge to pigeonhole a memory and, rather than creating a single scene he can neatly encapsulate, he presents the reader with multiple versions of the same scene:

The white horse
whose hoof slipped
…………………………
could have been
a white Pinto
whose drunken tire
slid off the edge,
a birch branch blown
between the boards
in a summer storm,
or the white horse
whose hoof slipped
between the boards
of our makeshift bridge. (1-2, 5-15)

For One Who Knows How to Own Land is full of reminiscence, but not a jot of mawkishness. Owens’s connection to the land—its past and its people—is more nuanced than simple nostalgia. For every idyllic swimming hole or wildflower recalled, there is a memory of the harder side of the past—the emotional, physical, and financial struggle. In “Compensation,” Owens shows how the deprivations of the child shape the adult: “We’ve filled the house with food again, / staved off another stubborn ghost of childhood, / starvation, uncertainty, neglect” (1-3). “Breakings” takes a boy’s target practice on bottles, jugs, “a red-lined slopjar, anything to make a noise / as it swallowed the rocks or took the blows / hard against its side” (6-8) and expands that image into the many breakings of his childhood (a father sent to war, a mother harried by the demands of family, domestic violence, a grandfather worn down by farm work) and then into his adulthood, until:

He wanted to leave it all
behind, to break the habits
of breaking, but even now,
he knows the hearts of those
he loves like glass. (54-58)

Like the end of “Breakings,” the epiphany in “Pulling the Nails” is so believable, so beautiful that my mind merges completely with the speaker’s. He is taking down an old house, leaning his weight on a crowbar to free rusted nails from swollen wood:

and when they finally popped out,
I was surprised to see
the light from inside shine through.

I can’t help but wonder,
when soldiers pulled the nails
from Christ’s hands and feet,
what force had to be used,
if they resisted like this,
and how much light spilled out. (15-23)

Owens, by the way, is no stranger to religious themes—his earlier collection Something Knows the Moment (Main Street Rag, 2011) looks in-depth at God, faith, and doubt.

The light in “Leaning Through Darkness to See the Stars,” the quasi-eponymous poem of book’s first section, is more secular—the stars of the title are birds’ eyes. Along with the fine sounds (all the dark ds building up to alliteration near the end, the importance of dead emphasized by the rhyming already following so closely, the lamenting vowels in pocked and sloppy), the poem’s power derives from its refusal to name its subject: no mention of crow, not even of bird. The poem concludes with a kind of ambivalent sympathy for the crop-eating birds:

Most seemed half-dead already, wings
tattered and pocked full of holes,
faces sloppy and scarred.
Only their eyes seemed clear,
black stones shining in death’s dull face. (29-33)

Not naming the subject is another example of the reluctance to reduce that we see in “The Event Rightfully Remembered,” a suspicion that labels are just a reductive convenience.

There is plenty of death in the collection. “Rosemary Is for Remembrance” is perhaps about the grandfather to whom Owens dedicates the book. “Brock” and “Kendall” also feature death prominently. “First Peanut in America Grown Near This Site” is more oblique, opening with levity:

Not on this spot, you understand.
Not even in some primordial field
here lost to roads or billboards,
………………………………………………

Such wonderful vagueness makes anything possible.
Anyone standing on any inch of soil,
arms akimbo, might say, “Here it is,
the X of my body marking the very spot.” (1-3, 8-11)

But it closes with a grin-ending scene:

Near here my uncle is buried.
Nearer he fired a shot somewhere
behind his left ear, his wife and daughter
nearby. The ground is nothing
like what they threw over him
as a preacher spoke his careful words
on a hot August day with sweat
dripping from each pallbearer’s stony face. (30-37)

As we see in “First Peanut…,” Owens captures the profound connection between place and people throughout the collection. “Homeplace” ends:

A place is just a place,
one as good or bad as the other.
It’s the people you care for,
or hate, who keep you
coming back, or never let you go. (22-26)

Despite the words of that poem, I get the feeling Owens believes place and people can’t be separated. Those people we keep returning to live somewhere, and that place too is important.

Possession is often the connection between people and place—the one, in fact, suggested by the collection’s title. But the book suggests that possession may be as tenuous and fallible as memory. “Vacancy,” the final poem in the book, concludes:

There are still pecan trees
and stray flowers, and new rocks
rising each winder, and the pines have regained
half their height, but the cows
belong to someone else now,
an absent renter, and no garden graces
the hillside, as if the land could only
be used and never again possessed.

Possession suggests definition, boundaries laying out where a parcel of land starts and ends, and those lines crop up in several poems in the collection, like “The Exploration of Edges.”

I remember as a child expecting lines
on the ground separating North
Carolina from South, South Carolina
from Georgia, Greenwood County
from anywhere else. Often rivers
obliged, Catawba, Savannah, Saluda,
and one time in a place called Carowinds,
there it was, as I always expected
to see it, a broad, yellow stripe
saying, Here you are one place;
There you are somewhere else. (1-11)

The narrator remembers too how he wanted to live between the lines:

There might be a sign—Now Leaving—
And then a thousand feet further—
Now Entering. I wondered how
they couldn’t be on the same post
and thought I’d like to live
between the signs, not belonging
to anything except the earth. (19-25)

And Owens has done just that with this latest collection—he’s figured out how to live between the lines, belonging to the liminal land equal parts his own creation (reverse regionalism, if you’ll humor me) and his creator. He inhabits the region that produced him and a region that he shapes and sings in all the beautiful poems of For One Who Knows How to Own Land.

Celisa Steele’s poetry has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Anglican Theological Review, The South Carolina Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and others. Her first poetry chapbook, How Language Is Lost, was published in 2011 by Emrys, an arts foundation based in Greenville, South Carolina. Learn more about her poetry at www.celisasteele.com.

Beyond the Scent of Sorrow
by Sweta Srivastava Vikram
Modern History Press (World Voice Series), 2011
ISBN # 978-1-61599-097-9
Reviewed by Cindy Hochman

Poetically speaking, trees have been etched into our consciousness since we first had to memorize Joyce Kilmer’s poem in grade school (and before we even knew that “Joyce” could be a man’s name too!)  In Sweta Srivastava Vikram’s small, but stunning, chapbook “Beyond the Scent of Sorrow,” the metaphor of trees is given a vital context and a mournful bent.  These poems focus specifically on the eucalyptus tree, which has been deemed expendable in the southwest of Portugal, slated to be replaced by the mighty oak, to which the poet draws precise and plausible parallels to a catalog of abuses and injustices leveled at women everywhere.  We all know that it is not nice to fool Mother Nature — and in these 19 poems, Ms. Vikram rallies, in feminine solidarity, to her cause.

The opening poem, “Eucalyptus Trees,” provides an explanatory backdrop for Vikram’s themes:

Homeless will be the birds,
as the gatekeeper of mother
nature, the eucalyptus forest
sits on the pyre of sacrifice
. . .
eucalyptus, like women, watch in dismay
as the world prints signatures of deceipt—
announces a death sentence inscribed on her body

These poems possess a raw earthiness and urgency befitting the somber subject matter.  It is apparent that the poet did her research before tackling this project, which adds a rich and credible dimension to poems that are already breathtaking in their scope and tone — the poet knows from whence she speaks; these poems are smart and informed.  To read Vikram’s work is to be caught up in brambles of empathy — don’t be surprised if you smell wood, smoke, and fire.  She does a skillful job of personifying the trees to reflect both the strong and vulnerable qualities of women, in tropes that run the gamut from martyrdom to survival.  From dense forests to sultry bedrooms, there are hints of sexuality, pain — and the language of violence (“the loyal friend of the hills is being stabbed;” “sad verses and lonely earth undress me every night;” “my womb is punched again.”)

Like the cork oak
selectively stripped of their bark
every ten years of their lives
to quench a lover’s thirst
for wine in Evoramonte, Portugal,
I am undressed
night after night
until my wounds mock
the myth of one thousand years —
God was seen residing in me once,
just like the tree.

It is significant that, in her acknowledgments, the poet includes a disclaimer, in essence making the point that “pro-woman doesn’t mean anti-man.”  Indeed, despite such titles as “It’s a Man’s World,” “Unholy Men,” and “The Ritual of the Sexes,” it is clear that the poet’s intent is not to engage in male-bashing; her rendering of the genders is grounded in matter-of-fact reality rather than screeds of blame.  In the same vein, the line “God was seen residing in me once” does not represent a swipe at religion so much as a temporary loss of faith due to a heartbreaking plight. 
 
In highlighting the various inequities that women often have to endure, the poems branch out to encompass more than just ecology gone awry —  the poet also correlates economic inequality and the corporate conundrum, giving the book a sense of relevance and timeliness; indeed, this poet leaves no stone unturned:

It was all going well until wells started flooding—
mouths filled with cactus and daffodils

of approvals and bonuses.
. . .

leaving jellyfish and poisonous turtles

 

for every feminine jaw and lip flying
towards success with a ring on her finger.

So, too, in the pointedly titled “Poverty Is a Woman,” the poet laments that “gender bias swallows my money.”

“Beyond the Scent of Sorrow” portends a rebirth of earth; a renewal of not only foliage, but hopefully, of humanity too, for even within the emotional tangle of endangered trees and wounded women, the poet speaks from a position of towering strength.  You will find ashes and abandonment here; the denuding of both the natural world and the flesh-driven one, and yet, the poet does not forsake beauty for message — taken as a whole, the poems paint a landscape in language that is harsh but somehow lovely.  One gets the distinct feeling in reading these poems that, having battled the elements, all that is stately, beautiful, and necessary will, in the end, survive — and bear fruit.

Even the brevity of the chapbook speaks volumes, as if to remind us that the conservation of trees is directly linked to the production of paper, which of course is Vikram’s stock in trade.  And it is on this scorched parchment that she proves that her bite, in the poetic sense at least, is just as fierce (and passionate) as her bark.

Cindy Hochman is a proofreader and research consultant from Brooklyn, New York.  She is the editor-in-chief of the online journal First Literary Review-East, and an associate editor of Mobius, The Poetry Magazine.  She co-hosts the Green Pavilion Reading Event, and conducts interviews for Poetry Thin Air Cable Show in Manhattan.  Her poetry is forthcoming in the New York Quarterly, Nomad’s Choir, The Stray Branch, and Rhyme & Punishment (an anthology of humorous verse).  Her book reviews have been published all over the place.  Her work has recently been translated into Turkish, and her latest chapbook, The Carcinogenic Bride, has been featured on Winning Writers.

Jazz
by Jéanpaul Ferro
Published by Honest Publishing, 2011.
81 pages
Review by Karen Bowles

The cover of Jazz, a collection of poetry by Jéanpaul Ferro, is multi-layered and intense; the colors intermingling with a plethora of pictures showing depth, interconnection, and somewhat maddening possibilities. It is a good preparation for the words within. Ferro’s work, splashed across 81 pages, prompted me to read the poems aloud to a friend. I settled into a rhythm quickly, my voice rising and falling along a theme of revelation. Each poem felt like a confession I was professing, and each line reverberated in our heads after I had read them. It usually brought on a discussion, a sharing of personal stories, and me saying: “I’ll read just one more and be quiet.”

I was sent Ferro’s book during a difficult part of my life, and was glad of the opportunity to dive into work. Undoubtedly, Ferro has himself felt this way. Many of his poems deal with themes of loss, soldiers, war, darkness, being left by those you love. But he also imbues resoluteness, determination, tenderness, and splashes of color:

Her soul was the color of God
a thunderhead of apple red, and in wavelengths…

Readers are treated to a myriad burst of pigments: “gray chairs; white tulips, a white cage; your libidinous red dress; the city steeped in bottle green; I watched her walk out a blue door; melancholy yellow; darkening skies where whiteness used to be.” Ferro paints his compositions with startling observations amidst a sometimes bleak backdrop. Readers can sense depths of expression that encourage multi-readings in order to glean the full extent of what is being said.

Ferro also expounds upon the endless presence of poetry in our lives.

I see it all on the looks on each passing face,
secretly, eyes dreaming poetry out of the light,
living the life they got---right or wrong, perfect/not;
I’ve never heard singing so dark in a place…

In “This Much,” we again see darkness mixed with poetic platitudes:

so at night I took her by the feet out into
the ten kinds of darkness,
her mouth whispering the way the Internet
whispers poetry…

Ferro goes on to reveal slices of a life spent traveling; views of the Paris catacombs for instance, mixed with wry but loving observations about his fellow citizens:

everyone in a state of denial: beautiful and imbalanced---
the way Americans can be sometimes…

He often mentions Ground Zero throughout his poems, suggesting an intimate connection with New York, and an endless haunt of the lost world of yesterday dancing with the hopes of tomorrow:

We slip out into the seven worlds
to listen to flamenco guitar the day
before the war begins…

your beautiful brown eyes are caught
all night like this in a sort of hypnotic trance,
going up to Brooklyn in the blink of an eye,
you, dancing all around our apartment
when you think no one else is looking…

One of my favorite stanzas of the book comes from the poem “01/20/2009,”

You said you wouldn’t wake me
until the shoreline fields all looked
like rose quartz…

I could write a lengthy thesis on all the connections I found weaving their way through each poem like “the soft cry / of the barbary macaques.” What I can offer to readers of this review is the endorsement of Jéanpaul Ferro’s collection of work in Jazz, and an invitation to read them aloud to friends, share your confessions, and admit:

but I am just a little bit broken,
broke in all the right places---
a million little jewels that split apart

all across the ground.

Karen Bowles is the founder, publisher and editor of Luciole Press. She gained the nickname “Firefly” from a friend for her enduring love of glowbugs in the South; “Luciole” means firefly in French. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in Literature. Her work has been published in the book Sunrise from Blue Thunder, multiple literary journals, book covers, reviews, and other forthcoming publications. You can find her gazing at stars and arguing with bossy blue jays.