Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit, as a reviewer I was fascinated by the idea of the book before I even read it, because Flenniken, like me, studied science before poetry; her father, like mine, worked at a nuclear site – hers at Hanford, mine at Oak Ridge National Labs; and her childhood, like mine, was spent in a small town supported almost solely by the dollars brought in by said nuclear site. Her language in this book, of dosimeters, Geiger counters, and unstable ions and their disturbing biological impact is heartbreakingly familiar to me. Her two degrees in engineering led her to work at Hanford as an adult, before she moved to Seattle.

What might be surprising to readers is how different this book is from Flenniken’ first book, Famous, a book of personal narratives about life in the domestic sphere – a quiet book almost modest in scope. If you enjoyed that book, you might not be really prepared for this second book, which is sweeping in terms of trying to capture a history, personal, political, and scientific. While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris. The other difference is a palpable sense of threat, of lives at stake, of a dramatic story unfolding in the poet’s capable hands.

One of my favorite poems in the book is one in which she writes to the father of a childhood friend who died of a radiation-related disease, describing an event where her town had a televised event where she, as a small school child, dresses up to deliver the letters she and her classmates had been asked to write to President Nixon to prevent the closing of Hanford. “To Carolyn’s Father” illustrates how she makes the larger movements of the sixties – anti-nuclear sentiment, President Nixon’s soon-to-happen disgrace, and the treatment of children by schools as instruments of government propaganda – happen in the crystallized focus of a little girl nervous about appearing on television:

On the morning I got plucked out of third grade
by Principal Wellman because I’d written on command
an impassioned letter for the life of our nuclear plants
that the government threatened to shut down
and I put on my rabbit-trimmed green plaid coat…
at the same time inside your marrow
blood cells began to err…stunned by exposure to radiation…

In another poem of Flenniken’s childhood, she recounts how the children in her school were asked to lie in a whole-body radiation counter “and do a little for their country.” “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary” displays her (and by extension, all the people of the area around Hanford) chilling trust in the system: “I shut my eyes again and pledged/ to be still; so proud to be/ a girl America could count on.”

I was impressed by the variety of forms Flenniken used to capture different aspects of her story. Two lovely lyrics, “Plume” and “Green Run,” are concrete poems that reflect each of the environmental disasters that the poems refer to. A series, “Augean Suite,” referring to both the cleanup of the stables of mythology and to a statement of health physicist Herbert Parker’s to Congress about the ways to define the quantities of radioactive exposure, contains the piece, “IV: Augean Gray,” disturbing and beautiful at the same time in its vatic voice and the way the poem is broken over the page:

Women,
        take off your
                    dresses
                                    and undergarments.
        You babies,
                crawl naked
        in the grass.
                Lie down all of you
        under the August sky,
                and nobody ask.
…Lie down, patriot.
        Don’t ask.

Though the book brings together a personal memoir combined with the history of Hanford in an evocative way, Flenniken maintains an almost neutral tone, avoiding inflammatory statements or direct political commentary. She even jokes a little about her history in her poem “Again I’m Asked If I Glow in the Dark.” She does highlight interesting historical notes, such as how different Presidents, from Obama to Nixon and Kennedy, appear naïve in their quotes in the book – at times, dangerously so – about the powers harnessed at Hanford nuclear site. In her lack of condemnation, there seems to still be condemnation in statements of fact, in stories of workers dead from various radiation-related ailments. Yet her tone remains sympathetic towards the men making decisions, her neighbors, her father, her friend’s fathers, aware of the financial and political pressures they were under as well as the limited science about radiation exposure available to them. The awakening of the poet’s skepticism is one of the many stories that unfolds within the book.

Recently, for research related to my own work, I was reading a memoir by a radiation health physicist, Karl Ziegler Morgan, who had worked at Oak Ridge during the Cold War period, and his descriptions of the experiments they conducted there, including taping radium to the wrists of some of the nurses, thinking they might endure nothing worse than a mild skin irritation. It reminded me of the innocent, almost playful attitude people had towards nuclear power in the early days of its development. Reading Plume is not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government.

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In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world of art and poetry. Many readers will enjoy floating along, reveling in the unique ability of poetry to generate experiences and emotions beyond the logic of language. But I look for something solid to start from, a center of gravity that helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions, even if I eventually to decide to drift.

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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Faking out death is a feat usually reserved for Evil Knievel or Jesus Christ or video game characters. But if you think of lyric poetry as a kind of suspended disbelief in temporality as well as other inexorable facts of life (i.e. DEATH), for as long as the song lasts, then yes, poets fake out death, too. (Maybe the most successfully because words last forever?)

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent to experience (perhaps, because they are).

Poem 11 from “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost”:

Elves, backyard pit barbeque, lilacs,
termites in the backseat:
the sum of it makes a person
want to: lemons, lemons, lemons.

Or, Poem 9 from the same series:

Everybody has their own thing
that they yell into a well about

It isn’t life, in other words, that disappoints—it’s the poems about life—or, what we choose to see. “There are three dead people inside me,” says the speaker, who carries this oracular burden (the dead want a place at the table, too) with a gravitas that at times borders on hilarity: at others, as a bonafide momento mori. Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-animal,” or “becoming-molecular” (both tied to the political aim of “becoming-minor”) surface throughout this aphoristic text—not as forms of shape-shifting or as means of identification with the natural world, but, rather, as a more expansive view on subject-object relationships—and the relationship between material reality and ideology.

Poem 4:

“ . . . because I forgot
how soft . . . ”
I heard you say
as you turned me over
like a split white fish,
ribs flapping. The other half
of the sentence lost inside
your other manuscript.

The speaker’s beauty, and the beauty of the other, undergo transformations—but again, from the level of an internality or subterranean reality which cannot be spoken of it not already experienced (“This will meaning nothing/ to you/ unless you live underwater/ with birds”). This underwater terrain, in other words, is a world wherein values still abide, hence: “Because you are unkind/ to me, you have become/ less beautiful.”

From the serial poem, “The End”:

I miss my beauty
in the field

the long
tree

yelling
palls of hair

my dead
mouth

open
no bird

And, from “Hasp”:

In the sun
pants riding
my hips I was
so beautiful

Why did you leave
me open
like that?

***

The pressure put upon the poem when the lines are one- or two-words long, is significant, as is the success borne from the tensions that ensue between the stanzas, the couplets themselves, and on the individual line between the two or three words (if that many are included). While the formal experiments of The Grief Performance vary (e.g. the prose-y “The History of Knives”; the block stanza of “I am the Scenery”) the desultory and yet strategic language of the terser poems proves the poet’s economy of expression as a rare gift—and even rarer aesthetic choice, in today’s light verse culture.

More sincere than a new sincerist (because more convinced that rather than being f-ed over by god, capitalism or the government, “We’re being/made love to”?), Frey’s debut collection is akin to the bird described by the poet in “Birds are So Soft”: a small creature whose faiblesse is its vulnerability to life, and to love. Walk this line with this poet, upon initial and multiple re-readings, and the promises extended to the reader in “Birds are So Soft” may be, as “an act of magic,” revealed.

Birds are so soft.
You can’t imagine . . .
They get pin feathers.
New feathers that grow in plasticky sheaths.
You have to break them up with your fingers.
Fabulous. A head massage for the birds .
They coo, close their eyes,
and coo. You’ll see . . .
Remove the sheath. It’s heavenly.

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Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come and See: these are books that consider what it means to live familiar patterns, yet know that elsewhere persists an unthinkable and unconscionable violence in which you are complicit.

Jessica Fisher’s second collection, Inmost, is a deeply felt and deeply thought addition to this train of thought. Fisher’s first book won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award; Inmost is the winner of the 2010 Poetry Prize from Nightboat Books, one of the most exciting presses active today. In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans. Never moralizing and never failing to implicate herself, Fisher instead locates these tensions in language, exposing with care the dual meanings, connotations, and shared histories of the words that form her place in the world.

“Things that can’t be held, can’t be helped, in the mind. The latest horror of the latest war, never on these shores,” the collection opens, at once announcing its primary concern and accepting its own eventual failure. We are told that there is the war in the same line that we are told it will not reach us. It is a dreadful reality and the speaker is, in a privileged lie, safe from it. This is daily life for many people (although, importantly, many more are not so lucky), but Fisher from the start expects more from herself than a simple realization of her own position. The violent reality “can’t be helped, in the mind.” However, with the introduction of a child, the mind must still attempt to help in some way, to hold what she can’t hold. “Talk is in the head when shushing a child,” the poem reads. “She is practicing erasure, she is practiced at it. Turn the dial: they’re turning to the war. Stitched, like a slip, on a bias. It gives a sense of the body underneath.”

Fisher is a writer of rare agility and grace. Her poems often move through ideas, form, and language with a singular restrained gesture. It is through these gestures that she manages to find something like a balance to the conflicts deeply rooted in Inmost. “We say mortar both for the shell and what it struck, brick & or stone &.” Language is the site of her exploration, the gauzey space where the daughter becomes a mother, or where the body gives birth. It is a place of multiple meanings, and so of course a place of puns, “Immanent or emanant.” It is the way we move through thought and the way our movement is restricted. “A month or a region, something you pass through. The roads on either side impassable, otherwise of course one would have chosen a different route.” And it is in that movement that Fisher stays, not arriving or departing but seeing what happens if the language is taken for all its meanings. It is a dangerous place to be, and it is where we are.

Inmost concerns itself with motherhood and war, two well explored topics in literature. And it lacks any grand structural or conceptual conceit, instead settling comfortably into restrained, precise language, with essayistic strains of etymology and lyricized images. Yet somehow the book feels incredibly unique and needed, like it is using its beauty in order to draw our eye somewhere we knew we should have been looking but for some reason hadn’t. So much of what is unfathomable must be considered, “the little heart an impossible thing / nevertheless marked by a sign.” In “Ravage,” one of the longest and most explicitly narrative poems of the collection, Fisher declares “Thought I could live in it / & not let it in, impervious as / a body floating in saltwater // eyes open to the shifting sky.” Inmost, thank god, places us there, exposed to the beauty and harm of our own inexcusable failings.

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Dorothea Tanning’s Coming to That is a book full of imagination, creativity and intellect. Reading this collection, which was published a few months before her death in January of 2012, is a great joy as it reveals the imagination of a poet and an artist (not to mention a centenarian).

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.

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Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range in tone; they are frustrated, sorrowful, sometimes funny, sometimes contemplative. The book’s three sections are formally varied. Lehmann writes sonnets and other short, tightly constructed poems, as well as several prose pieces and long sequences.

The first section, “The Devil Is In Detroit,” is dominated by violent imagery and childlike voices. These speakers are as gleeful and terrified as grade school kids muttering curse words for the first time. We have lines like “We call them brats, and mean it” (The Youngest Girls in Memphis), “I have a frontal lobe named Fuck You” (The End of the World), and the epistolary sequence titled “Letters to a Shithead Friend.” Lehmann defends this language and the subjects she chooses by asking later in the book, “Why should anything be inappropriate?” (“Something Very Woman”)

But there is more at stake in these poems than name-calling. Lehmann attends to music, making imagistic and emotional connections that broaden the range of that language. In the sonnet “Muster Lovely,” we have “muck-skimmed pond,” “finger-fuck slut,” and “children / screaming in the summer dusk.” In most of these poems, the voices, however petulant, cry out in a power struggle that’s already lost. When the managers in “The Factory, an elegy in six parts” say “ass- wipe” and “cunt rag,” the words are emblems of the power these characters have over the exploited workers.

The first poem in the book, “A Hundred Words for Loser,” is one of the most successful. This tightly crafted sonnet sets a tone both disturbing and musically forceful. The first lines dance with internal rhyme: “Dear glove-puppet, you should come here; / It’s grey and everybody hates you.” The poem introduces the themes of sexuality and exploitation that spread through the book. A man tells a bible story of incest, in which two daughters’ “syphilitic shadows / slink across the ceiling tiles.” The next lines move us from the story to a back alley and address the “you” of the first lines: “Some suitor you are— / hey pussyfoot, hey horn-ball.” The poem is full of deft shifts. It ends with the surprising “Hey stupid, / bring me dead things and a flat stomach.”

The world of this poem is ugly, and Lehmann offers us no comfort. Instead, she makes us listen—and because of the music, she makes us want to. Of the girls in the bible story, the poem asks, “…who cares / about the movements or their hidden girly ribbons? / They collect, but don’t worry; they stink /of sulfur and twist.” We are told not to worry, not because the girls will be okay—they won’t—but because it’s too late, or they’re not worth the bother.

“The Factory” is one of the book’s several long sequences, and the most haunting. Here Lehmann creates a world of power striated between managers and workers. Despite its brutality, the poems have the otherworldly tonal quality of a children’s story, a fairytale or myth. The workers lament their exploitation and hopelessness. The first part in the sequence begins, “The managers are giving silver dollars to our children, / are telling them that if they are good, they can have our jobs / once we’ve died.” The workers in the poems watch their children file past the windows while they are trapped inside and subjected to the managers’ offhand dehumanizing cruelty. In the sixth part of the elegy, “Memo to All Workers,” the managers dictate orders: “You will not get headaches. / You will practice reverence, and it will flood / you like coolant.”

“Letters to a Shithead Friend,” another long sequence in the book, is less ambitious. The title is emblematic of the project as a whole: a voice wounded and angry, and not afraid to show it. Here the fury is a response to a failed relationship and the struggle to regain a sense of autonomous self. “Mostly I am writing angry poems,” the letter writer says. Lehmann plays around here, which is fun to read, but some of the words and images seem arbitrary: “He says Sidecar, tomato, bulgur-wheat, bumblebee” and “I am a tiny communist with sunburned shoulders.” Despite its charm, this poem lacks the power found elsewhere in the book, in part because the rhythm slackens. Nonetheless it’s full of great lines. The simple statement, “I am cleaner than you,” contains the force of the entire poem.

In the second and third sections of the book the horror and threat are at bay, and the poems have a chance to move around a little. Lehmann’s range expands when she gives herself some space, allows emptiness into her poems. In “The Poem is the Story 2,” Lehmann writes, “The idea was to write something very quiet and subtle, / but then we were playing Oh Hell again at the kitchen table, /and out popped a poem with a curse word.” The straightforward quality of this voice is welcome. Its humor and self-awareness provide an access point that the tight and shiny sonnets can repel. The poet reveals herself as human and warm.

The poems in these sections are located geographically in the South and Midwest, and in dreamscapes and pastoral landscapes. If the first section is like a child calling names in the schoolyard to hide her own terror, the latter parts of the book dispense with the name-calling and brutality, and tremble in an uneasy companionship with loss. Things are a little calmer, as though the girls’ hair ribbons in the first poem have already unraveled: “Someone has sent a letter and someone has returned a letter. / We were hanging out on the front porch when it happened.” The bells we hear in “Ten Bells Tell” are “Not signaling apocalypse.”

At her best Lehmann exhibits a depth of sympathy and uncertainty paired with keen observation. Take the beautiful last line of “The New Town,” a poem straightforward in its loneliness and grounded in a real winter landscape: “The frozen sheen is a cheetah made of light; it will catch us, if we run.”

As a whole, this diverse collection is tonally overshadowed by the first section. If you read a bunch of poems that say “cunt” in them, it’s easy to overlook the tender, quieter poems of the second and third sections. And that’s a shame because there is much in them that deserves attention. Despite these issues with tone and juxtaposition, Between the Crackups is a strong and risky first collection, and worth reading. In “The End of the World” Lehmann writes, “I wanted to sing a song that had emotional register.” Plenty of times, she does.

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Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors explained that these fit young men roving about in traditional dress— painted torsos and masks—could take things from you, intimidate you, and even push you into a small stream. They represented ancestors, reminding us that we were standing (eating, taking photos, buying things) on their land. It was best to avoid eye contact.

Unscathed on San Geronimo Day, I discovered later that the tricksters had permanently penetrated my consciousness. A lost key held me captive in a hotel room in New Jersey, until I found it inexplicably in the bathroom wastebasket. In Jemez Springs, New Mexico, I woke during the night to searing headlights, but there was no car. And there’s more.

Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.

A poetry anthology invites generalizations. At our best, we seek connections. At our worst, we engage in stereotypes. The poets—14 men and 7 women, representing 21 different tribal affiliations—move me, with a magical, musical blend of experience and craft shared by good poets everywhere. Editor Kenneth Rosen says in his introduction, “in these poems… memory and past experience are somehow holy, sacred, to be handled with care,” which isn’t necessary unique to Native American poetry. In a grander and more inclusive statement which absolutely rings true regarding the poetry in this volume, Michael Ryan, in his essay “Poetry and the Audience” says: “…in this historical moment poetry seems both more anachronistic and more important as a custodian of time, a preserver of bodily memory in its rudimentary sense, the one million years of humanity and four billion years of life of the earth.” And he subsequently quotes Heinrich Zimmer, writing about Native American storytellers, “Each poet adds something of the substance of his own imagination, and the seeds are nourished back to life.” Yes, that’s it. That’s what it feels like to read Voices of the Rainbow, which has as much range as reverence.

Turn to the first poem in the volume, “Winter Burn” by Roberta Hill, of the Wisconsin Oneida tribe. You will sigh as if settling into a warm mineral spring at Ojo Caliente. From the first stanza:

When birds break open the sky, a smell of snow
blossoms on the wind. You sleep, wrapped up
in blue dim light, like a distant leaf of sage.
I drink the shadow under your ear
and rise, clumsy, glazed with cold.
Sun, gleaming in frost, reach me.
Touch through the window this seed that longs
little by little to flare up orange and sing.
Branches turn to threads against the sun.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s (Laguna Pueblo) “Poem for Myself and Mei: Abortion (Chimle to Fort Defiance, April 1973)” says not a word about what took place—but white space equals sorrow, and the poem ends with butterflies—you have to go back to the beginning of the poem to find them. They “die softly/ against the windshield/ and the iridescent wings / flutter and cling/ all the way home.”

In Janet Campbell Hale’s (Coeur D’Alene) bereft and skinny poem, “Desmet, Idaho, March 1969” she writes of hearing the ancient tribal language, as older people at her father’s wake speak to her as if she understands.

“Flock”, Lance Henson (Cheyenne) is a six-line, supremely elegant poem where “snow moves / like an ancient herd.”

There are angry poems, like Anna Walters’s ( Pawnee/ Oto) “A Teacher Taught Me”, “a teacher taught me / more than she knew / patting me on the head / putting words in my hand / –“pretty little Indian girl”, with each stanza ending with “laugh and say – “aye”. Carter Rivard’s (Osage) “Advice From Euterpe” begins: “They hire you for the silk to line their budgets / and give you immortal tenure / among the well-thumbed leaves / until you spin”. Lew Blockcolski’s (Cherokee / Choctaw) “The Urban Experience” Parts One and Two disturb and engage me with their anger as well as sorrow: “so one anxious evening, everso late, / in the cream white of his jail cell / he dreamed the midnight dancers / buried him head down.”

Sorrow and the ghost of Robert Creeley run through “Drunk”, with hungry and tightly woven, meticulously patterned tercets—a complex, eminently human poem by Caroll Arnett (Cherokee).

Harold Littlebird ((Santo Domingo / Laguna Pueblo) won my heart with the title of his poem, “For the Girls ‘Cause They Know”, which begins

good night, my two little cloud ladies
Elima, fat dark rain bearer
you are echoes of summer
the flooding of rivers
the shaping of arroyos
the treads in my eyes
Chamisa, gentle misty lady rain
you bring a joy to the fields

Anita Endrezze-Probst (Yaqui) enchants with “Raven / Moon,” a lush and lovely re-working of a Native American legend: “She tosses the Moon / to her wild-eyed son.”

These are just a few jewels from this book of 200 poems. Don’t be surprised if you have unusual dreams (thank you, tricksters), especially after reading the contributor’s biographical notes. Apparently an editorial decision froze them in the year 1975 which is as mind-bending as some of the poems.

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Born in 1927, Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and an admired translator . His rendering of The Poems of St John of the Cross is rightly revered by believers, non believers, scholars and general readers. His translations of texts essential to understanding Judeo-Christian history , including The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha, and his work on Kabbalah, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, are masterful restorations, and he has edited, co-edited and compiled many anthologies. He has also published seventeen volumes of poetry and three memoirs, all displaying the range and profundity (a word I use sparingly) of his creative and spiritual appetites.

Those appetites have led to previously hidden or distorted meanings in material he encounters, bringing to bear his understanding of Greek , (the language into which the Bible was first translated) Aramaic, (the everyday spoken language of Jesus and his neighbors) Hebrew (the language used in Jewish places of worship) and the cultures these languages are entwined with. By the time Barnstone gets through with text, it is more precisely accurate, and often beautiful.

The Poems of Jesus Christ are excerpted from his Restored New Testament, which Norton published in 2009. It is no secret that The King James Version of the Bible, thanks in part to its popularity and melodious sound, had an immense and ongoing effect on writers. For all its linguistic and musical influence (I am in love with that sound), it was written in paragraphs that obscure the shapes of the poetry of the original.

The Prophets and Psalmists of the Old Testament, and Jesus of the New, spoke in poetry, and Barnstone puts Jesus back where He belongs. Part of his method is to share samples of poems by Whitman and Heaney that are threaded with Biblical references, some very clear, some a little obscure, reinforcing my conviction—one that may strike some as old fashioned—that Biblical studies are essential to understanding literature.

Barnstone is modest, fair, and generous with credit. In his introduction he mentions that the 1966 Jerusalem Bible was the first to put the Gospels into verse, and “liberates all words of Jesus from prose lineation.” That Bible was produced by Jesuits and is a glorious milestone, enriched when reflecting on The Poems of Jesus Christ.

It is no secret that poetry can be memorized with efforts that seem natural, as opposed to what it takes to own prose. This has much to do with how the body absorbs rhythm and sound, and how spirit processes sound. So in restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

Every page in this project is backlit by scholarship and appreciation for what he encounters. Noting that “The Gospel of John is unparalleled in the Bible,” he reminds us that its “prologue is magical for believers and nonbelievers, a singular moment in religious scripture and world literature.” He goes on to say that “The first luminous lines of John are not lines of poetry spoken by Jesus, but a poetic account of Jesus’ voyage to the earth.” It makes perfect sense to declare:

In the beginning was the word
And the word was with God,
And the word was God.

The entire verse is quoted, accompanied with clarifications containing Hebrew and Greek, speaking to God’s achievement of making matter from word. Atheists and agnostics can also recognize that this is powerful to contemplate if one cares about what words do. This makes it the appropriate prologue to every speech of Jesus as John reports :

Get these things out of here!
Do not make the house of my father
A house of business!

This famous passage highlights Jesus’ fury at the commerce in the temple, and the Barnstone translation is stronger and more alive than its predecessors, bringing one closer to the speaker, which is the goal of every translator’s effort. It is also a reminder of what Barnstone calls the “solo performance” of Jesus, whose life story is one of constant connection with people, including his adoring Mother, even when they found him weird to the point of unfathomable.

Utterance is effort to persuade, so even if one does not accept the divinity of Jesus, Barnstone has strengthened the voice here. When Jesus tells a woman that he does not condemn her, the poetic form bolsters the morality of compassion, intensifying its necessity :

Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?
Neither do I condemn you.

The Jewishness of Jesus and his spoken language, Aramaic, have taken centuries to get used to, and in those centuries have suffered much abuse. In titles to each passage of poetry, Barnstone’s gifts often remind us of that, in a manner so restorative it could be called soothing were the message(s) of Jesus not so radical. In the Gospel of John, 10.25-28, 30, the title is both a reminder of occurrence , and an indirect reference to word and light :

HANNUKKAH IN YERUSHALAYIM, YESHUA
ANNOUNCES HE IS THE SON OF GOD

Hannukka is celebrated as the festival of lights and miracles, the unexpected gift after great travail. So listener/reader is linked by Barnstone to immeasurable brilliance. This happens on many occasions when Jesus speaks in these pages:

Be Children of Light

For a little time longer the light is with you.
Walk about while you have the light
So that the darkness may not overtake you.
If you walk in the darkness
You do not know where you are going.
While you have light, believe in the light
So you may be the children of light.

The Poems of Jesus Christ is a book that shimmers with intellectual, spiritual and literary grandeur, to be engaged with for generations. Keep it within reach, for the “living water” the finest undertakings bestow.

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Filmgoers this year who saw the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (or not) entered the prehistoric Chauvet caves of Southern France in a stunning modern way. The labor to return to the stone womb felt transformative but untranslatable. The viewer lacked the keys to that kingdom. Questioning whether poetry is/has a door at all, I nevertheless went looking for a key into Harriet Levin’s new, second collection of poetry. There, I found her poem “Key,” and along the researching way, Colin John Holcombe, an impressive polymath living in Santiago, Chile. He explains, “Modernism is where we are now, broadly speaking, if we include Postmodernism and experimental poetry. Modernist poetry is the poetry written in schools and poetry workshops, published by thousands of small presses, and reviewed by serious newspapers and literary journals — a highbrow, coterie poetry that isn’t popular and doesn’t profess to be. To its devotees, Modernist styles are the only way of dealing with contemporary matters, and they do not see them as a specialized development of traditional poetry, small elements being pushed in unusual directions, and sometimes extended beyond the limits of ready comprehension.”

In a recent interview, Harriet Levin explained herself, “My poetry is hard to describe because it varies from book to book. I wrote my first book after grad school (University of Iowa Writers Workshop) so I guess I was responding to what I learned there and trying to subvert that in some way.” Her first book, The Christmas Show, was selected by Eavan Boland for a 1996 Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize and was a winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and a Grolier Prize; it was a Philadelphia Inquirer Notable Book. “My second book,” (A 2009 National Poetry Series finalist), “was written also as subversion, largely as a response to a reviewer of my first book, who said I should stop looking out through the ‘lens of rape.’” That criticism can’t be leveled at her new collection, whose perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees. Hive is a word that recurs, and the nervous energy of the poems gives the reader a non-alcoholic buzz.

Levin’s introductory selection of a quotation from Isaac Newton’s Principia directs a reader’s point of view: “in philosophical disquisitions, we ought to abstract from our senses, and consider things themselves, distinct from what are only sensible measures of them. For it may be that there is no body really at rest, to which the places and motions of others may be referred.” But I found among the poems in Girl In Cap and Gown the greatest charm in many invitations to reflect in tranquility, the title poem a case in point. Along with its persona of a young woman who resembles a murdered co-ed, you lose and regain yourself again.

I gasp…
What happens is
they put me in her place
at the bottom of a deep ravine.
I close my eyes. I hold my breath,
the possibility becoming next.
And then it stops,
and I come back.

The 38 poems are organized in three sections titled Girl in Cap and Gown, A Lens, and Survey of Debris. My favorite in the second grouping invokes Beowulf’s welcome by Hrothgar, its title Hine halig God/For ar-stafum us onsende, (Beowulf, ll. 382-383). This translates, “Blessed God out of his mercy this man hath sent,” and arises organically out of the poem in which the father’s love for this fragile boy mirrors Beowulf’s heroic/tragic narrative.

Alone with the boy
in the cabin all winter,
the wood creaking
and the fire crackling,
reading him to sleep
from the text
that as he worked on the translation,
clawing open steel-edged consonants
to slip in vowels,
words that grackle in Anglo-Saxon,
thud to the ground,
now hold the hush
of this father’s love for this fragile boy.
…He kissed the back
of the boy’s neck
before getting up
to throw another log on the fire,
smoothly rolling it
into the flames,
resisting the temptation
to let the fire die out
for the boy’s peace of mind.
…He pictures the boy
shaking snow from his hair
as if sensing death,
he did not want it
to touch him…

The ambiguity/double entendre of those masculine pronouns causes a full stop, the last lines inviting the experience of tranquil reflection. The evocation of the ancient poem and the use of turgid Anglo-Saxon diction achieve a temporal dimension for a reader’s inner eye which I enjoyed again in the crescendo-like poem “Vestigial” from the third section.

She slips on snow packed steps
rushing for the subway.
She zooms through tunnels,
goes through a dark time
emerges, then goes through it again,
creeping along, heavy enough to muffle thought,
the bitterness of clove,
the pungency of cardamom
and the coarseness of coriander,
traveling away from the dark soul
of the pot, cast iron with baked on drippings
of garlic cloves…

“In A Jam,” also from the last section, includes another show-stopping double entendre (so much depends upon a so):

The river is a miracle of attentiveness,
eyes and blood, wandering
through a passage so labyrinthine
grief is released,
unlike the place we inhabit
which stands so certain
with a door to lock
and a key to fit inside it.

And “Key,” at the end of Survey of Debris, turns out to be an imagist expression that feels as sprung and affirmative as the Gerard Manley Hopkins Birder that closely precedes it.

Through canopies of whirling woods,
whippoorwills, woodpeckers, warblers,
finches, cardinals, swallows stippled
at dusk, delight, stir,
rouse and rescue him in such
abundance, he will not fall.

Arm’s yield, body’s fit.
       Let guilt not create
                   the opening.

             Forced to turn. Stopped short.
Clasped in one hand.
       Vines cut down to reveal
             the dappled on.
       I am waiting.
                   Sitting on rattan
                         among the scented,
                   focused on emptiness,
      a single notch, a slit,
                         grooved, declivitous,
             sliding into an intensity
                         that is neither unrepeated or
                   undiminished.

That Key sent me back inside the Chauvet cave all the way to Coleridge’s Xanadu, paved by Harriet Levin’s double negative affirmation of repeated, undiminished orgasmic pleasure in what remains & renews. From now on, we can also read the pronoun:

For s/he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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In the opening poem of Christopher Howell’s Gaze, “Home Stretch,” he concludes with, “Receive me. Here are my silver / wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them / leaves have been falling all these years.” And as readers, we do receive him, trusting Howell’s confident voice.

Howell’s voice works very subtly. After the first few readings, I was ready to declare Gaze unremarkable, which is not at all true. Howell surprises by not trying to surprise at all. His language and imagery do not draw attention to themselves. His leaps are not what we postmodern readers have been conditioned to expect. Once a reader takes these poems on their terms, the poems become really intricate and beautiful.

In “Long Arm of the Lake,” my favorite of the collection, Howell tells a simple and cliché story of a family fishing trip from the speaker’s childhood. The poem operates, just as most of his poems, by behaving exactly as you would expect a mediocre poem to behave, capable yet pedestrian. The second half of the poem, without drawing focus or announcing its shifting, hinges on the word “terror.” After, the poem is about religious fear, “too tired to care / about whatever version of the Devil / my hook had caught.” The speaker’s version of the Devil is a five-pound bass, “flopping and miraculous,” which the speaker will take “and beat its brains out on the stern,” just as he’d been taught. The possible interpretations to this idea and Howell’s wording show his deft handling of complicated subject matter in disarmingly simple ways.

Throughout the collection, Howell sustains the image of crows. In “Long Arm of the Lake,” he writes, “I thought it might be a kind of crow, one of the gods / of hatred …” This connection permeates all mentions of crows that follow. Section three has a subtitle of “The Inner Life [With Crows].” These gods of hatred show up everywhere. “The Refusal to Count Beyond Seven” begins:

There were seven crows inside her
gibbering and flapping, emitting
the occasional squawk, much more
like a suddenly discovered moon than language.
Sometimes she hopped around
because of this.

At sunset we would find her on the roof
looking for the rest of her clan
or for that Nebraska corresponding
to a crow’s curious need for endlessness.

Seven gods of hatred live inside her. They have a curious need for endlessness. Without the earlier connection, this poem would be lovely but easily dismissed. With the earlier connection, this image has a beautiful relatability. Who doesn’t feel gods of hatred sometimes? Who doesn’t understand the “curious need for endlessness? Later, in “The Wind off the River Asks if I’ve Seen Myself Lately and, if so, Do I Remember the Name,” he ends,

Suddenly, in answer to the wind, I see myself
exiled in the far north of longing. Forsaken

by the crows, I have bought only one book
and I read it again and again.

Somewhere, the curious need for endlessness gave way to forsaking. What comfort to be found in this far north of longing. All of these descriptions alone are entirely forgettable, but if a reader remembers the small, subtle line that links crows and gods of hatred, then every reference is made complicated, beautiful, human.

After the first reading of Gaze, everything in me wanted to dismiss the collection as underwhelming and unimaginative. I looked to poems as proof, such as the word “jaunty” to describe a hat in “Long Arm of the Lake” (has that word ever in the history of our language described anything other than a damned hat?) and the poem “Checkers,” in which a game between Jesus and Buddha allows for cheap and dull religious platitudes. Every time, though, I couldn’t do it. This collection is one that is so different from most of poetry, from the Modernists on, where the flashiest and most clever poems receive the highest reward. Instead, what Howell has given us is a quiet collection that gets to you, that stays with you. It isn’t a book of poems that behave like we expect poems to behave, but more than that, these poems live with you beyond the experience of reading. This is gazing at a fire so that the after image is with you, for a little bit at least, every time you close your eyes.

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