Cronk’s first section of her books are composed of love poems that exist in the natural world,: about the sun, bodies of water or even other mammals like horses. In the series of poems that make up Selected From The Wheel of Night, I am drawn to the last two sections. In the first, the speaker talks about love and the struggle of communication. Her imagery and metaphor align to create this sort of marsh the reader enters with the speaker:

BEING IN LOVE MAKES
It hard to communicate
With anyone in any way at all.

It means walking into the lake
With you
Over and over.

The feeling of sinking.
I can say this. You know it too.
We’re in love.

Here we go, down we go,
The unsayable
Between us, we accept it.

The next and last section of “Wheel of Night,” foreshadows the rise of the female voice that is in the second section of this book as it reveals a woman taught to be on-guard; a woman taught to remember the where she is in the Order of Dominion,(which is nowhere); and a woman who must stay “natural” in her role as Female.

My mother said instantly,
Though I thought I was alone,
Always pretend you’re a tiny animal.

You are prey.

You should be alert
In the natural way
When you are alone.

In “Horse Neck-deep in Water, the speaker of the poem aligns herself with a Horse. The horse walks all day and night as the speaker walks through her thinking, her mind frame, and her confessions.

The full strong breast of the horse is morning and day. Its thin legs and make are night. It walked all day and night through the water and won’t last much longer. I confessed my love, confessed all my dept, last night…

Then, a transformation occurs:

I knew I would be climbing into the river and this would be what to wear. Lack bridle. I wore these things and washed my face, took down my hair, slipped down the wet grass, left my things on the bank, left streaks in the mud and climbed into the water. Or I wish I had…

The speaker connects with the horse and in doing so the reader feels both of their strainings with life:

I watch the beginning of its movements, the limbs learning to move in the black water, and find myself what I was before any of this, before it became very late and the river became black…I am what I was before and will continue to be.

The notion of acceptance and taking ownership of one’s life and one’s doings are central to this book, especially in the second part of the book: Having Been an Accomplice. In the poem “The President’s Companion,” the political threads begin to unravel. In doing so, the speaker of the poem recounts the ways in which She and the President have co-existed or coalesced:

That we found ourselves together in the ritual of the everyday, in the
ritual of opening the notebook and writing, the ritual of consulting
the newspaper, the ritual of standing before the questioning crowds,
does not speak to my ingenuity but to the way of the world forever.

Your back slumped as you sat at your desk preparing to leave this
office. I, older now, will meet you on the other side. Everything I
have learned about consequence, I’ve learned from you

Here, the speaker acknowledges and accepts. It is a strange balance of female power and male defiance. In the long poem “Having Been an Accomplice,” Cronk reveals more about this speaker’s ferocity. This is a woman who accepts the spectacle of being female and parades it.

From one bridge to the other I walked, a show for anyone who might see –
now that’s someone spitfire, sure, split of lightning, ramrod, shining axe
glistening steely tale of comet, a streak, a parade of one.

In the next section of this poem, she gives this female a voice, or at least the direction of having a voice:

I want to walk deeply into the darkness, nude as a god, through the /
Self into the darkness.

I want to blow up the Law with Language, having run my tongue/
Around my mouth then thousand times. Instead of not speaking, I/
want to speak.

The idea of blowing something up with language resonates with poetry as the written word is a silent one on the page. The beauty of poetry is the power it packs often in such a small space. Here, Cronk’s narrator may not be speaking publically, but is speaking here, in this book, and it is enough. She is blowing up the world she’s a part of with her language and her ideology, and furthermore, her sex.

In “The Bride Queen,” the speaker is newly married and Queen of her kingdom. She has power and grace, but she is also a Queen to her husband’s King. This poem is one of my favorites as it echoes the live of the ritual, we women often live in. There are echoes here of everywoman:

I’ve taken a husband.        My single ruler days through.
His great big body gives me weak knees,     weak voice.
    What do I mean?     What do I mean?
Satisfaction comes    at this price.

Here, the disjointed lines and fumbled spaces add to the confusion the Queen is feeling. She is somewhat defined through her husband, and perhaps that’s why there is a price to pay. Later in the poem, we see the Queen struggle with the agency she actually has, only to then take matters into her own hands.

Maybe that’s the trouble with being queen of an apartment.
      You think you’re queen of things you’re not.
The vote I cast withered and died in the box.

But there are things I could do. What a nasty queen I am.
I’ve read the reports, I see all the fakery and I let it go unpunished.
      What a foul, selfish queen.

She grows unsteady, and she falters:

Oh, I do want him of course, there go my knees.
(Wait, no, knees, stand please!)

There was something more I was going to do.
                I need just a few minutes.
There was something I was ready to see.

Cronk’s book Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent. Knowing that it has a political landscape, it seems that we can all be any of her paginated queens. Sometimes, we don’t know what to do; sometimes we don’t have the right words to diffuse a situation; and sometimes we have ulterior motives. Other times, we accept our place in the world. I feel like women have been told one of two things their whole lives, either (a) you’re only a woman (which negates our sex), or (b) you are foremost a woman and use that to empower you. In her book, we see both things amidst the royal world and the domestic world. When the queen stamps around her apartment, it could be you or I stamping around our apartments. But like Cronk proves, there is always power in the Word – no matter what form it actually takes.

I’m going to end this review as a true teacher with a common cliché, “Power is knowledge,” but I’m going to add in, “so is reading.”

Related Posts:

• Coming to That, by Dorothea Tanning
• I Was Naked Face
• Being Gnawed to Bone
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

I’m often impressed with poets who take risks in their writing, and sure, being 100+ definitely takes some edge off, but what I enjoyed most about Tanning’s poetry was her inventive subject matter. For example, in the poem “Cultivation,” Tanning writes in a Peter Rabbit meets Tim Burton sort of way. The poem begins:

Cultivating people can be arduous,
With results as uncertain as weather.
Try oysters, meerkats, turnips, mice.
My mouse field was a triumph…

Here, she compares people in an imaginative way that reminds me of T.S Eliot’s Prufrock by conjuring up oysters and meerkats. She continues the poem by merging not only the landscapes of city and country, but also the technological landscape of the 21 st century:

Now, as before, each day dozens
Of perfect mice leave for the city.
There, they have made many friends
Among computers, and with them
Are developing skills inconceivable
To their forebears. Already these
Cultivated mice and their computers
Penetrate guilty secrets…

Her mice leave for the city. Her mice have friends, some are “among computers,” and these mice have guilty (perhaps avatar-esque) pleasures and secrets. Every time, I take a risk in my own writing, whether imaginative in content, creative in form, or delusional in constraints, I’m proud of myself. And, every time, I discover someone else who has also done it. This time, it’s a famous 101 year old! It’s refreshing to know that someone who lived over a century, who was married to the famous painter Max Ernst, and friends with many other famous writers and artists was still so unique and fearless in regards to her art and her poetry.

My favorite poem in this collection is, “Interval With Kook.” Here, she gives the reader a definition of Kook in her epigraph, “Kook: A hybrid of unknown origin, often mistaken for a human being.” In the poem, the speaker meets a Kook, forms an unlikely relationship and is then forsaken. I can’t help but wonder if Tanning was a Tolkien fan. When the speaker finds the Kook, it feels like Bilbo Baggins waking up on the bottom of Gollum’s cave and discovering both Gollum’s strange language and strange behavior:

It was then I saw the kook.
Tall, he stood over me
Wearing a droop-winged hat.

………………..

It was that easy.
We climbed to my place
On Kickapoo Hill.
He stayed.

She domesticates the Kook by inviting him into her home and thereby into her personal world. Furthermore, she is tender and kind and even intimate in that she renames him: “my kook.”

Before long I had come
To think of him as my kook
Not ‘That kook,’ ‘This Kook”
Of ‘Some kook.”
No, he was my kook.

By calling the Kook, “my kook,” she endears him to her. This is a common writer’s tool, but here, the hybrid is entering the human sphere and we, the reader, believe her. Similarly, I saw this same technique this week, in reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal. Here, Winterson describes the many ways in which her mother was a religious fanatic and a monster, but she also refers to her mother as, “my monster.” Again, we have another endearment. It’s ironic to think that two small letters “m” + “y” could do so much to a person or thing.

Another poem that resonated with me was the poem “Woman Waving to Trees.” The poem is simply about a woman standing beneath the trees, but the woman notices the extra-ordinary within the ordinary. It’s a beautiful poem about taking the time to notice what is beautiful in the world. Though it is again, imaginative and even fantastic, it brings careful attention to the familiar:

Not that anyone would
Notice it at first.
I have taken to marveling
At the trees in our park.
One thing I can tell you:
They are beautiful
And they know it.

I enjoy this poem for the way it admires the world and praises it. The poem continues and the woman waving at the trees is in perfect synergy with the trees themselves. They communicate through their gaze at one another. The poem ends with a direct address by the speaker to the trees:

…Raise your
Heads pals, look high,
You may see more than
You ever thought possible,
Up where something might
Be waving back, to tell her
She has seen the marvelous.

The poem “Waiting” discusses the past and the future in a meditative way. It feels almost like a journal entry in the way it begins:

Back then, with time on my hands
And in our back yard, I waited for the future.
The Future. For me as for everyone else,
The very words had a whiff of promise.
If things were not going too well at present
They would surely delight us in the future.

The speaker is writing from a new frontier, or a new decade. I enjoy the hope in the poem and the lack of despair. It is hard to write about one and not the other. The speaker discusses the many ways in which a person can “wait” and the many places a person can “wait” in. It’s a comical and lyrical poem. It feels reflective of a lifetime, but of course, could just be an invented world. I particularly enjoy the second to last stanza for its conversational tone:

Still later, when I was more in touch with
The world, they told me, “You have a future.”
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
What did my little future, whatever that was,
Have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?

Tanning brings the world into her poetry and that’s something I enjoy. Here, she uses dialogue to extend the internal conversation regarding the “the future” and “the real thing.” We are all searching for the “real thing,” and never knowing what it really is. Tanning’s poetry is as unique as the artwork she’s produced over the years. It’s real and vibrant, even at the end of her life. This last book of poems is a simple treat – an embrace.

I’m pleased to say, that I recently learned that Dorothea Tanning’s poem “Graduation” will be one of the new featured poems in Poetry on the Subway in New York City. What a wonderful way to pay tribute to a great poet.

Related Posts:

• Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
• I Was Naked Face
• Being Gnawed to Bone
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

Carol Muske-Dukes’ Twin Cities is a meditation on the way the world is doubled in the self, in literature and in the world around us.

In the title poem “Twin Cities,” we are inside the speaker’s childhood, and the past. The speaker speaks to herself and to that of the river: “I think that the river returned then to two-sidedness–An overhung history of bottle flash and drift.” The speaker reflects on memories of old friends, and those memories not fully remembered – meaning the river’s (perhaps geological) past. The speaker discovers that she and the river are two of the same: “We were all in this together.”

In “Two Coasts,” -Dukes reveals her dualities of home and the difficulties that lie within living a bicoastal life: “wak[ing] up in somebody else’s night,/ somebody else’s day.” With this polarity, she also discusses the duality of life: “You learn to live in transit, / Both trigger and safety.” Life is in constant motion in time and in physicality. The trigger and the safety are interesting counterparts in the so-called “game of life. “Here, exists another doubling, one with life and death. Similarly, the same argument follows in another poem, “River Road:”

As the opposite of fate. Imagine a speed

At which you could make what was happening

Not be true, a speed at which you could bargain

For it: that you, on fire, from this minute forward,

Could be somebody else.

The idea of being somebody else is desirous at times to everyone. When we rename something, it changes. It is renewed, born again or simply doubled. Perhaps it exists as two distinct identities. In “Boy,” the speaker is renamed “boy” while fishing in the Himalayas in her twenties. She is renamed because she is an anomaly:

Taller by half foot –

Gawky in my rolled jeans and cap – they

Chose to look away from my small breasts and

Voice-lilt and rename me in the lexicon of sex.

Not only is she literally given another name; but the name is nondescript as it is one based purely on gender. Here, her identity is split. She says it is bewildering:

Their one word for me and it was not sister or/
Daughter: I was naked face; twenty seven, a rebel, /
I thought

Putting gender aside, at the end of the poem, she becomes fish-like, “I gasped like a fish, till I was a pair of eyes on a plate,/ That body the world wishes both to savor and destroy.” Here, again, the body is just a body, and not a species or a sex.

In “Heroine,” the literary-self is identified. Muske-Dukes addresses Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, (a favorite to many) to further discuss the way the self is reflected in the literary world — on the page. Nowhere can doubling be better found that in Bronte’s novel, as the “mad colonial wife, ” Bertha is Jane’s “double.” Bertha doubles in Jane what Jane cannot express: her passion, her angst, perhaps even her self:

So, the happy ending relies, as always, on varieties
Of comeuppance: Jane’s class avenged, Rochester
Humbled and sightless, the mad “colonial” wife
Setting fire to the rafters, the little kid coquette”

“Heroine,” continues to unravel the self in relation to the literary by looking also at the relationship between Rochester(Jane’s love interest) and Jane and then Jane and Bertha (Rochester’s wife):

Except for the matter of the thread, the breath-colored
Filament linking two hearts with pretty much nothing
In common. The thread pulses like a Bronte umbilical,
Which it is. We are reminded once again that its length

Is infinite, its connection eternal. Though not, finally,
For the two sexes; rather, woman to woman, beyond
Class or aptitude. Like the clean path of the flare,
Shot and ascending across latitudes, against satellite.

The pleasure in this collection of poems is the multiplicity of meaning. Focusing on the multitudes of reflection and duality, the poem “Mirror,” is powerful in both its self- reflection and its literal reflection. The poem is about a memory.

The first independent act I managed as a haunted/
Kid was to lift the heavy round antique mirror /
I’d found in the attic and hang it from a nail…

Further in the poem, the speaker sees herself in the mirror and analyzes the beauty and non-beauty that exists there. She is a witness:

Now in my sixty-third year, the mirror graces/
My bedroom wall. In its depths each man who/
Stood behind me in reflection, all disappeared./

And the image—shattered, unshattered – visible.

The literal reflecting nature of the mirror causes the speaker to do her own self reflection:

once, as a child and again, many years later.

The book closes with the triplet of the title poem, “Twin Cities:”

Then the sudden
Twin – how she stepped out of me, took everything –

Then flung it back, whole, doubled, each time she turned.
& turned, absorbed in breath, her task of never looking back.

Here, the twin returns to the narrative, nature, reflection, and the echoing of the self within the self.

Everywhere the world is doubled. Nature itself is doubled. Even in our own writing our voice can be doubled – sometimes double-edged. Muske-Dukes book seems the perfect read for this time of year when the year is winding down, yet life is still rumbling forward. Thinking about her, “trigger, not safety” I still wonder at how much we are doubling in our daily lives that we are unaware of. Sometimes, I am constantly aware of what vividly lives in each day and what lies dormant, waiting for a time to surface. Twin Cities is a book that makes you think about the past, the present and the self in a haphazard sort of way.

Related Posts:

• “Crossing State Lines: An American Renga” edited by Bob Homan and Carol Muske-Dukes
• Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
• Coming to That, by Dorothea Tanning
• Being Gnawed to Bone
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara

Tom Sleigh’s Army Cats is a poetry collection rooted in his journalistic days in Beirut after the 2006 Israeli/Lebanese War, but is threaded with love, literature, and family When I saw him read at New York’s Poet’s House he touched on the genesis of some of his poems saying, “[some topics are] not the kind of thing I could put into an article.” Of course, poetry was the right fit, which brought about his latest book.
In “Beirut Tank,” Sleigh writes about the army mechanic and his tank and in doing so, humanizes both the tank and its creator in such a way that the reader feels for the daily toils of the mechanic:

…the tank is old, small, about the size
Of a horse and cart. The armor plate shines green
Under the streetlight. The sprockets, almost rusted out.
Somebody forgot to grease the nipples. The timing belt is nicked
And worn. The spare parts from France don’t fit. This wire
Crossed with this wire makes a catastrophic fire…

The mechanic spites his tank, not unlike that of a lovers’ quarrel, annoyed at uncompleted tasks and ill-equipped parts, but he also looks tenderly on his metallic creature:

He stares up in that live, minute, completely
Concentrated way of scrutinizing something
Of someone you thought you understood:
The tank’s underbody completely covers his body,
They look like they’re embracing when he reaches up
Inside it, his needle nose pliers crimping, twisting,
Pulling down hard. There, you see that, it’s all corroded.

Sleigh’s use of line breaks help move his poems into unmarked territory. The “embrace” between the mechanic and his tank is unexpected and brings the reader further into the speaker’s observation of the mechanic’s duties.

Sleigh is particularly good at addressing the reader in such a way that makes the reader pauses for self-reflection. In his poem “Stranding,” a poem about corruption, deceit and ghosts, the mirroring of the speaker and the reader is seen.

But the ditch knows
Just who we are…

What choices are you given,
What makes you want to swim
Out of your own element?
The demure little ear-holes
And intelligent clear eyes,
The fate from birth sealed

Inside its smile,
Spent flukes and tail
Being gnawed to bone.
The curt unrevealing stare
Mirroring back my own.

In “Refugee,” the speaker is a witness to an everyday moment between a mother and her small daughter, an experience most readers can relate to. But look, this is no ordinary moment: though the small girl is playing with her doll, she and her mother are refugees and the girl is horribly disfigured. As a witness, the speaker travels emotionally, into the young girl’s future; thereby, adding a tinge of tenderness to the displacement and the disfiguration of the girl’s life. In doing so, the poem is a hymn, something at once tender and loving, like prayer.

The woman she will be tells her that she’s pretty
Such a pretty girl, and the child she is
As the mother knows it too, she nods her head
And for that moment the three of them agree.

A poem like “Revenant” is haunting, captivating and beautiful. The speaker is contemplatively smoking a cigarette, but as the title suggests, the poem is full of the has-been, the what-if¸ and the subjunctive tense for anyone who’s ever taken French. The poem offers a piece of something that could’ve happened against a could-be love-story.

1.
I light one cigarette off the butt of another
In the deep quiet of the study that magnifies
The moment when two lovers come together
Just after the bomb hits and their bodies

In the cellar, in God knows what excesses of emotion,
Turn sculptural, frozen in their last position.
To think like this used to make me queasy –
But then the thoughts become your body…

The poem stumbles between painful memories of the erotic and the political, but does so in grace, like a dance. In the last stanza, the speaker is somewhere between pain and pleasure, haunted as the addressee takes on the form of a cat. The word “revenant” comes from the French “Revenir,” meaning returning or to come back to:

You were there, taking on the soul of a cat, and came
Slinking by my elbow, butting and rubbing…

And then you lay down on my chest, your throaty,
Deep purr rumbling so loud the explosion

Faded out and all I could smell and all I could breathe
Was your hot, damp breath breathing into my mouth.

The final lines are dense with the heat of memory and of breath. The reader is left alone with the revenant to witness the tender-terror they have cast on the living.

Though the underlying pull of Sleigh’s poems are in the direction of the political and the militaristic, there are poems that uplift the reader, like the nostalgic poem, “On First Avenue and Sixth Street,” the poem “Triumph” which crosses matriarchy, with allusions of literature and history, and the poem, “Self-Portrait with Shoulder Pads” that ties together sports, sibling rivalry and humor.

One of the most powerful and terrifying poems in Army Cats is a poem centered on a YouTube video of Saddam Hussein’s execution but summons the one and only, William Shakespeare. “This Thing of Darkness” (a reference to Shakespeare’s Caliban) is heavy, not only because of its content, but by its prose form.

Whoever is holding the cell phone – and it is my hunch that it is Shakespeare, since who else could write such a scene in which Saddam’s lavish rhetoric and defiant presence could exact from its audience this precise mixture of horror, sadness, joyous vindication, and disgust –seems under constraint to keep the phone hidden from the authorities in the room; and so making a virtue out of his necessities, Shakespeare succeeds in building the scene’s tension by showing it from the perspective of someone whose moral sensibilities are revolted by the spectacle but who can’t tear his eyes away.

Here, we get a glimpse of “Sleigh the Scholar” in the way that the execution scene becomes a lesson in staging and in drama. Even when Sleigh is humorous, it is tinted with a moment of horror for the reader: “And, of course, In Shakespeare’s eyes – Shakespeare, who must find all this horribly familiar, but promising material.” The beauty of the poem is the way Sleigh admits Shakespeare into the room:

This is something an old pro understands: it’s not enough to use the imagination as a form of insider privilege to give you access to the scene of an historic execution. Take it from Will Shakespeare, former butcher’s boy and glover, you’ve got to skin and tan it with your own mind before you can relish it, deplore it.

This collection has made me want to slink myself, like a cat, into literature, rub up against history and relish its connection to human curiosity. I want to summon up those writers who have shown the way of the future, through their words of the past.

Related Posts:

• Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
• Coming to That, by Dorothea Tanning
• I Was Naked Face
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White