Jake Adam York’s latest poetry collection, Persons Unknown, takes the poet in a familiar direction. Like his two prior collections, Persons Unknown is, in the poet’s words, an exploration of Southern history that pays special attention to the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. But York’s preoccupation with this period of American history does not mean his poetry self-imitates or stagnates. Rather, York has built upon his previous works to create a collection of lyric, historical, and cultural relevance.

York’s poetry is a historical poetry. Faced with ineluctable truth, the poet searches for something that is gone now but somehow still recoverable. It is a fiction, but only kind of—it comes steeped in the Civil Rights Movement and its actual memories. York confidently reveals the identities of these neglected martyrs, these persons unknown: Charles Eddie Moore, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Mack Charles Parker, Emmitt Till, Aaron Lee, Joseph Thomas, to name just a few. In his notes at the end of the collection, York informs the readers that in addition to these men, over 80 additional martyrs have been identified. York’s collection is undoubtedly an elegy for these martyred men and women in the Civil Rights Movement. And although York calls these figures in his book “persons unknown,” he is able to recover at least a shadow of them in his poems, and by doing so he is able to make them known again in the realm of the living.

Inherent in its nature, York’s work is focused intently on a particular place—the Deep South. York takes his reader all across this region, to Jackson, Mississippi; Selma, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; and (last but not least), his birthplace of West Palm Beach, Florida. As such, Persons Unknown is filled with personal as well as historical questioning. York’s reflections grow more self-deprecating and intense as he goes on, and these climax in the self-portraits that come in the book’s second half. Take for example, “Self-Portrait at a Bend in the Road.” After catching a vague glimpse of himself in a car window, the author writes somewhat menacingly,

The mountain’s dark behind me.
                My hand’s on the latch
The last warmth still there.

One of us is leaving.

One of us is already gone.

This kind of eerie conclusion to the poem is most effective because of the formal deviations that York has employed here. Most of York’s other poems set up a couplet pattern—which he rejects in “Self-Portrait at a Bend in the Road” for the more breathy tercet. However, York has upended his readers’ expectations by ending with two one-line stanzas, something done nowhere else in the book. This unanticipated deviation heightens the emotional weight of these two closing lines, a precise and conscious move by the poet. By why, the reader might ask, would York do such a thing? What does this kind of poetic construction do?

The answer may come from within York’s own poetry. The last poem of Persons Unknown, fittingly entitled “Elegy,” reaches back into poetic history as well as American history. The mixing of these elements might help explain his motives:

In Greek, elegy means mourning song,
          a poem for what’s been lost, and the Greeks
Always cut something from their lines,
          a syllable or two, to create a silence
or a place to hear it, maybe breaking meter
…
          stepping quick then stopping, so the pain can arrive,
and so the elegy, the mourning song,
          reaches for what’s missing or left behind

York’s study into the Civil Rights Movement is not meant to be an indictment of the American consciousness; rather, he strives to present the stories of these persons unknown so that his reader cannot help but reflect on this murderous chapter in American history. He never sinks into oblique facts, but he does not forget them, either. He never ignores the simple truth that he is writing poetry, and crafts a collection that is moving and substantial. Persons Unknown is a necessary addition to the oeuvre of civil rights literature and the conversation it (still) invokes.

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In a new translation from Nancy Naomi Carlson, the enchanting voice of the visionary René Char is once again brought to life. Stone Lyre, a collection of selected poems from across nearly fifty year of Char’s career, charms the reader with its mysterious and unfettered imagery. But the poet’s particular blend of the personal and the cosmic spheres should not be considered an easy read. Carlson, in her introduction, remarks on the difficulty of Char’s “lyric intensity,” but the results of her translations amount to a compelling success.

Be warned: Char demands much from his reader. His poetry seems to exist in a limbo, where emotion and intellect meet with startling results. His labyrinthine vision leads the reader into a universe where everything seems transformed. But the reader is seldom disappointed because these poems can be anything: sketches of confusion, of imagination, of reverie, of ecstasy.

In “Évadné” Char is at his most elusively ambivalent. The first six lines read:

Summer and our life, we were fused
Fields devoured the hues of your perfumed clothes
Restraint and passion declared a truce
Maubec Castle was sinking in loam
Soon the ring of its lyre would cease
The violence of plants made us reel.

Each line is a full clause, and the reader soon realizes the tremendous density of Char’s thoughts; he has crafted a somewhat mythical setting for his poem and populated it with unnamed characters, all in a mere six lines. This mythos only has meaning because of its clarification of the real, and that is exactly Char’s mission in his poetry—a search for marvelous ecstasy amongst the everyday. This attempt at authenticity through imagination works best in this poem because the images do not take up any peaceful or tender qualities. Rather, the fields devour, the castle drowns into the earth, and the plants are made violent.

But Char’s images are not entirely sinister, either. The envoi disconnects physically from the rest of the poem and upends the dark mood of the previous fifteen lines. It reads, “This at the start of endearing years/ I recall the earth loved us a little.” Char’s poem works in two seemingly disparate directions, moving toward both feelings of tenderness and tragedy. The reader is left with questions: If the years are so endearing, why does the earth only love a little? Is the speaker of this couplet the same as the previous stanza?

But Char does not concern himself with working to answer any of these notions. In the same vein as his Surrealist contemporaries, he does not concern himself with answering the question, but with simply putting it forth.

Another question the reader will find themselves asking is, Why the title Stone Lyre? In a subtle but brilliant move, Carlson has arranged Char’s poem “Invitation” to begin the collection.
The poem’s conclusion may give some insight into the choice of title:

I come before the rush of springs, when the stonecutter’s
work is done.

A thousand years weigh less than a corpse on my lyre.
I summon the lovers.

Note that this introductory poem ends with an invocation—not the prototypical appeal to the Muses, but a summoning of the lovers, an invisible couple that Char envisions and uses to inform the rest of the collection. The poet literally flips the most recognizable poetic convention on its head. Carlson, in her introduction, describes the care she took to preserve Char’s exquisite Provençal meter, and she finds in the title Stone Lyre “a dynamic quality of a balancing of opposites.” This perhaps best states the way in which Char’s poetry works, in two seemingly irreconcilable directions.

Char’s lyric expressiveness should be recognized as masterful, yet Carlson’s care in translation also necessitates praise. She takes care to include his most emblematic short poems, and even though they only occupy a tiny section of the page, these are often his most devastating pieces. “The Oriole,” which can be reprinted here in its entirety, is one of these:

The oriole breached dawn’s capital town.
The sword of song closed the cheerless bed.
All forever came to an end.

In just a scant three lines, Char is able to invoke a dated verse form (the aubade) with a singular delicacy. He remolds usual cheery imagery here (a bird welcoming the morning with the “sword of his song”) by pairing it with a paradoxical and pessimistic proclamation on time. How can “all forever” be so limited? Why is the bed so miserable early in the day? The universe of the poem seems so miniscule to the casual observer, but Char invites his reader to imagine more, to feel more, and to see more than is actually presented on the page.

Char has also returned to even older verse traditions for inspiration, and remade them with a fresh passion. A notable example of this is the ekphrastic poem “Magdalene with Smoking Flame,” inspired by the painting by Georges de La Tour, circa 1640. This is ekphrasis, the refraction of one medium of art (painting) seen through another (poetry). Just as painting is a recreation of reality on canvas, so poetry is a recreation through text, via language. Each recreation occupies its own universe, but they can be used to refract one another in intriguing ways. From “Magdalene” come the lines

To trample the signs of seeing you suffer, I’d wish today for snow-covered grass: I’d turn away from death’s form—crude and harsh—under your tender hand. One capricious day, others, less avid than I, will remove your canvas blouse, will invade your alcove.

Char is not solely interested in a physical description of the work of art, but in altering the perception of it in his own poetry. Rather than lines, this poem comes as a block of prose, and yet the constant caesuras caused by the punctuation give the piece a lyrical resonance. The inclusion of “death’s form” references the skull that is beneath the young lady’s hand in de La Tour’s painting, but the reader does not specifically need to know this to appreciate Char’s lines; the speaker’s voice takes on a note of kindheartedness in longing for an end to Magdalene’s suffering, even while hinting her innocence will be lost once “others…will remove your canvas blouse.” The mode of ekphrasis gives Char a concrete foundation by way of de La Tour’s painting, yet he alters the customary rhetoric to achieve his own vision.

Carlson’s translations are another refraction, another ekphrasis. She recreates Char’s enigmatic voice with remarkable clarity in the English. This collection does well to select poems from throughout his prodigious career, from all across the Char universe, and yet each poem feels connected to the book as a whole. As Ilya Kaminsky says in his foreword, “Anyone who opens this book…will love her musical use of our language.” Carlson has returned Char to the English in exactly the manner he occupies the French: at once expansive and delicate, imaginative and intimate.

The difficulties a reader may face make this collection more rewarding for the challenge. The selected poems in this collection make it perfect for the seasoned Char enthusiast or the first-time adventurer. He so perfectly blends the cosmic and the romantic that no reader should feel disappointed.

To understand Char, it is vital to understand and accept the apparent oppositions in his work as much as possible. In creating his own particular brand of lyric/aphorism/prose poem with an unfettered imagination, René Char seeks to put the ineffable in words. But be warned: the foreword insists, “one is not reading words in a language but sparks of flame that deny any attempt at interpretation, or rather that open themselves to multiple interpretations at once, clashing with each other.”

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In these recent times of economic distress, it makes more and more sense to view all aspects of life through an economic worldview, in terms of what people might call ‘market value’. However, problems begin to appear when this financial-minded perspective is made to fit over the realm of poetry. Books of poetry make notoriously shabby houses, and poems hold little-to-no nutritional value for the human body. However, I have found that as I have been forced to tighten my budget I lean more and more on the wisdom found in poetry. If the maxim holds true that. “the market knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing,” then I submit this corollary: “sustain yourself with Aaron Belz’s poetry”—an inestimable value for a remarkable cost.

In hard times like these we could all use a laugh.

While teaching English at Providence Christian College in Ontario, California, Belz moonlights as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles (how many poets can boast that?). This may seem an unfeasible combination, but as Belz elaborates in a recent interview, “I see a lot of what goes into writing jokes also goes in writing poems: juxtaposition, tone-shifting, verbal equivocation.” Throughout Lovely, Raspberry, Belz’s latest collection, the astute poetry reader is sure to pick up on this theme of blending. Belz skillfully melds poetic structure with eccentric humor, sarcasm with tenderness, delicate similes with downright goofy puns. In the poem “shifters,” the speaker calmly explains,

One of our children has a tree stump for a head.
It’s weird, but she also has little clumps of hair, so
that’s reassuring.

Bizarre images such as this are the norm in the collection, and at some point the reader will probably start to wonder if Belz will ever get to the ‘serious’ parts of the book. As the reader continues, though, they are likely to find that this propensity for finding strange relationships between objects has a certain magic to it, a kind of outrageous sincerity. Each conceit, each stanza, each line sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion. An example: after debating the semantics of sexual innuendo for seven stanzas, the speaker comes to an awkward conclusion, deciding,

…It’s confusing

for the listener, and the listener
is whom I care about. However,
sitting erect on Mr. Fibitz I do feel gay,
happy enough to ride him for hours—
it’s just no longer what I say.

Silliness is the engine that drives this collection, but Belz proves his abilities by oscillating from the dryly sarcastic to the gut-wrenchingly convicting. At times, his tone verges on scathing and even violent. In “what,” after exchanging cursory, impersonal emails with a forgotten former acquaintance, he relegates the correspondences to the inbox labeled ‘I hate my life.’ Later, in the short lyric piece “you are you,” the poet elaborates on the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘us,’ noting that the only real cause for alarm is

when you show up, coked up, crazy,
and end up passed out on the floor
with your cell phone playing a melody
just inches from your unclasped hand[.]

These kinds of inverted expectations that Belz stows away in his poems are what draw the reader in. By coloring his insights with such a poignant wit, Belz can successfully blend the poetic sensibilities of harshness and comedy.

Besides stylistic devices, Belz’s use of language is also notable. His diction and syntax are rooted in American English, but he is able to find room for innovation and creates subtle resonances within his poems. In “as cole becomes less of an anomaly and the large car slows,” even the title is fun to say aloud. The opening lines present a uniquely human dilemma:

Every human body faces the same basic challenge:
What to do with all those sensory impulses.

I spent one summer returning them to their sources
uninterpreted.

The speaker clearly knows this is an impossibility; the very nature of human sensory perception is a chemical interpretation of various external stimuli. However, the point here is not the feasibility of such an experiment, but the manner in which the speaker presents it, particularly the relationship between ‘body’ and ‘faces.’ Echoing the title, Belz embraces the linguistic anomaly he has created in the final stanza, where he ends with a quaint yet satisfying conclusion:

Today the so-called sun sends pieces or waves of light
into my retinal cortex and deep into my brain, for it is

summer again, and the spice bushes reek of cumin,
and all the boats in the harbor are swaying in unison.

Lovely, Raspberry is certainly not a perfect volume of verse, though. Belz displays a cunning wordplay and a gift for clever internal rhyming, and these elements lend a lovely melody. However, obnoxious stanzas full of onomatopoeia and alliteration that are overdone sometimes break this up. While these devices have their place in poetry, the places Belz chooses to use them proves overwhelming and takes away from the meaning he is working to convey.

Too much of contemporary poetry is concerned only with its standing as such—a never-ending cascade of contending aesthetic schools, sensibilities, and too much homely self-introspection. A poet must be out in the world, living a real life somewhere if he is going to have anything true to write about. Aaron Belz tries not to take himself too seriously, to the benefit of his verse. These poems work in a way that shows a frank understanding of human emotion and interaction and a skillful use of language to make light of everyday life. In a post-postmodern world obsessed with severity, Belz shatters any notion of that with his quirky yet poignant poetry.

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Readers of energetic, ornate, and enthused poetry—step forward. I’ve got your woman. Sandra Beasley’s newest collection of poems, I Was The Jukebox, can best be described as playful surreal. Her poems take on the forms of pocket-sized fantasies; in each of her finely tuned poems, she occupies herself with representing different experiential voices, and she succeeds (to a tremendous level) at creating fascinating slices of reality and interesting characters.

Beasley ‘speaks’ through the most unlikely of forms, including but not limited to: the sand, an eggplant, Osiris, and the world war. In her most audacious identity-assumption, Beasley speaks as the duckbilled platypus. “I’d like to point out there’s no other kind,” the speaker snidely begins. The creature comes off as a curmudgeon, certainly sexually frustrated, and ends by kindly telling Disney to piss off. “The Platypus Speaks” is most especially wonderful considering it is a tightly-bound and brilliant sestina, an elaborate structure that could, in less capable hands, come off as repetitive or commonplace. The poet balances attention to form with her experiments in voice, enticing without overwhelming the reader.

In the midst of the disorientation created by the poet’s many voices, the reader should beware not to regard Beasley’s poems as flippant. Her abilities allow her to suspend the reader in a state of both elation and frustration in one thought-process, and this can lead to some very exciting results. Beasley’s poems have the capacity to wind up and smack you in the face, leaving you reeling you for the rest of the day. Her motifs can swerve to more severe subjects and yet still retain a signature crisp tone. The eighteen-liner “Vocation” ends:

Once I asked a broker what he loved
about his job, and he said Making a killing.
Once I asked a serial killer what made him
get up in the morning, and he said The people.

It’s funny, but not too funny, and Beasley thrives in this middle ground of meaning. She may choose to quote inanimate or voiceless entities, but she can bring different humor, idiosyncrasies, and intentions to each of her subjects. She uses finely focused poetic imagery and juxtaposition that could open up even the most stubborn reader’s imagination. In “I Don’t Fear Death” the poet ponders the immortal question of—immortality. The speaker may not fear death, but her greatest dread exists on a more sublime level. She admits that,

Photo by Matthew Wordman

what I’m really picturing
is Omaha: field after field

of sorghum crisp to my touch
and one house on a high hill,

sheets on the line.

The poem ends:

In Omaha,
the town names me Queen of

Everything. You are the slow
dance, the last ring of smoke:

to be held tight, and then only
this colder air between us.

The speaker doesn’t fear death, as the title suggests, but obscurity—an existence without meaning. The speaker would rather lose her life than go to the Midwest, and her relational appeal at the end denotes connections of ‘smoke’ and ‘air.’ These ethereal symbols exemplify Beasley’s talent for disorientation. Smoke may appear to dance, but the last couplet’s awkward grammatical construction allows for a multiplicity of meanings. What is really being held tight? Is it the ‘you’ of the poem? Or the cold air between ‘us’? Writing like this demands complicity from the reader and makes the collection supremely enjoyable.

I Was The Jukebox is broken into three seemingly indistinct sections, but there is a subtle cartography to the collection. One of the neat editorial tactics used in the collection is the presence of paired poems. For example, opposite “I Don’t Fear Death” stands “Immortality.” Together these poems are a reminder that you must take life on the terms it is given you. Although “Immortality” tackles the same themes as its partner-poem, it views them through a different voice. The speaker does not focus on the specifics of insignificance, but instead weighs obscurity through the lens of disintegration, saying,

Face it: I will never
appear on the flipside of a nickel,
…
I want to be the ball and the bat and the mound
And the sweat and the grass.

This poem may be the only one to disappoint the reader; it contains one of the few lines that need to be qualified as flawed. Beasley’s imaginative powers are in overdrive here, at the sake of their acumen. The poem ends with the somewhat kitschy couplet, “I want to be the vampire who drinks / a tall glass of me so he can live forever.” Typically, vampires in fantasy have always been immortal beasts, so this ending seems contrived and out of sorts. Luckily this does not occur often enough to sidetrack the reader. The rest of the collection resounds with a profound aura of desire, constantly returning to muse on the dilemmas of mortality, antiquity, and the future.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to think when a poet releases a second collection. Should the newer poems be considered in the light of the previous book? Or should each work be critically assessed based on their separate merits? Will the poet stagnate, self-imitate? Or evolve and refine? I Was The Jukebox transcends these expectations. Sandra Beasley’s crisp images and multiplicities galore construct an enlivened world for her reader, bringing what Gregory Orr calls, “authority of imagination.” Although most of her poems are character-driven, her lyricism cannot go unnoticed. Each poem is an experiment that recreates from the codex of language a powerful brand of imagination.

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