"The images are meant to be inhaled deeply, like a mind-bending drug. Reading this volume, sometimes I felt like I was in a theater, watching a beautifully conceived and executed animation. The poems have a narrative element in a hybrid-cinematic sense, an original blend of imagism, narrative and language poetry. Wallace’s mothers could be H.D. and Gertrude Stein; her poet-sister Harryette Mullen.
From “Star-Spangled Valentine Shagged in Drab”:
I fell hard for the Wide Open,
your scrap yards and tree-lined rivers,
parking lots etched into prairies.
All this inside myself, a broken
bottle gleaming. Tell me a story,
begin with a flag unfurled
and a sun-warmed body of cows,
black/white and black.
Wallace conjures up a defunct television game show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” where participants traded what they had for the possibility of something more valuable, hidden behind a door. They were often disappointed. Wallace’s game of love is quite solemn. What valentines wait behind doors numbered one, two and three? " To finish the review of "Blinking Ephemeral Valentine", go to this link.
To learn more about Joni Wallace's collection, visit Four Way Books online.
Eileen Pollack’s new novel, “Breaking and Entering,” takes place in rural Michigan in 1995 — the epicenter and high point of the militia movement, before increased scrutiny and revulsion at the Oklahoma City bombing put some militia groups out of business and sent others underground. (Though not a militiaman, the bomber Timothy McVeigh attended their meetings and spent time on a Michigan farm with his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols.) The Oklahoma City attack comes about a third of the way through Pollack’s book, a real-world event that informs and shadows the fictional ones.
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Pollack is an engaging writer with a first-rate eye for the telling sociological detail, like the Militia Babes calendar in the Banks’s farmhouse. There is tension and menace when Richard or Louise encounters some new misunderstanding or threat. But since the author’s intent is to explore intolerance, hatred and evil, it is not enough that these forces merely simmer and self-perpetuate. The stakes are raised, and escalating consequences play out.
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Whatever our politics, there are times we can all feel like foreigners and outcasts in our own country, just as Louise becomes a foreigner in her own marriage. And it is Louise who carries the novel, with her good impulses, her fallibility and her wish for a transforming passion. We always hope that people can change, reassess, realign. It is fitting that Louise, at the novel’s end, provides just enough hope to bring the story home.
Read the rest of the review here.
Even before Sydney Lea became Vermont Poet Laureate, he was being called the “heir-apparent to Robert Frost,” in part because his virtuosic poems tell dramatic and keenly-observed stories about rural northern New England’s people, creatures, and landscape. Pulitzer Prize Finalist, winner of the 1998 Poet’s Prize, Sydney Lea has also been called “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” When he isn’t writing, he is often walking or working outdoors, promoting nature conservation and literacy, or spending time with family. On Sunday, February 5 at 3 pm, Lea will read some of his poems for us and talk about the process of creating them. He welcomes your questions as well.
Whether you’re a lover of poetry already or just curious, please come—it’s not every day a Poet Laureate visits our neck of the woods. And if you think you don’t like poetry, then absolutely make sure to carve out a piece of your wintery Sunday afternoon for this special occasion (you don’t know what you’ve been missing!) Prepare to be inspired.
Sunday, February 5 at 3 pm. Refreshments. Free.
—for Cora Jane Lea
A small hare's stride displays itself in snowdust up on this knob
that we call The Lookout. Young of the year.
I whisper the term our old folks use to name
a prior spring's wild things—or the year itself, young year.
New grandfather now, have I a right to the phrase? I speak it no matter.
To me its assonance appeals;
its heft of optimism and forward-looking
correct a mood. It's a counter-cry to my vain appeals
to some power unseen that it remake me into a youthful man,
that it change this world. I scrutinize
a certain mountain's western flank, ravines
turned to fat white rivers in winter. I likewise scrutinize
myself in relation to mountain. I used to charge her up and down
in a slim few hours. Today I wonder
if I'll climb there again, my strength and stamina less
than once they were. What isn't? The mountain. The mountain's a wonder.
With inner eyes I see its trees, knee-high at 4000 feet.
I see myself step onto aprons of stone
at her summit. I'd never have dreamed how much I'd love it,
loving that child. In youth the thought would have turned me to stone.
On The Lookout's granite, a wisp—unidentifiable, blooded—of fur.
So many hundreds and thousands of victims
in a cruel season. Behind the mountain an airplane
aroar to put me in mind of bombers searching out victims.
In time it may even be that I'll prefer to see her from here,
not here from her. I mean the mountain.
Wonders never cease, it's rightly said.
Those inner eyes go back and forth from infant to mountain,
where even now in January the hardwoods' fraught tight buds
display their purple, enduring signal
of spring. Which will come. Which has never failed to come.
Already the girl and I have developed private signals:
I can waggle my tongue at her, or flutter my fingers, and make her smile.
I can lie back humming in uncanny peace,
child on my chest, and I can remember how
I held her father. But I think I hold her better. Peace:
perhaps it's for this one exchanges his further dreams. And perhaps I know
what's worth the knowing here on earth,
among its weather-decked hills, its beasts and birds
in their ceaseless cycles, migrations. Of course the glorious earth
will take me back, of course the young-year hare give profligate birth.
Young of the Year
Four Way Books
And because no critic can refrain from recommending more books than he's supposed to, you might also consider:
Torn by C. Dale Young (Four Way Books) — Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and Torn demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision.