Saying Grace
By James P. Lenfestey
27 poems
$10.00
Marsh River Editions
M233 Marsh Road Marshfield, WI 54449
ISBN 0-9718909-6-X

I never got lost while reading James Lenfestey’s recent collection of poems, Saying Grace. There is a great, clear, calm steady presence in each of the 27 poems that comprise this, his eleventh and most expansive collection. This is complete package thematically. Jim says, "Many of the poems in SAYING GRACE were composed on long car trips across Wisconsin, when I turn off the radio and let my mind come into the moment. Then, when I see two Amish on bicycles, or the gold hay bales of a farmer’s field in July, or the roadside flowers in August, or the ‘ferns in the dark hollows of the forest’ on September 11, 2001, I actually see them, not what is in my mind. I see, and hear what they are saying."
    
I felt the same comfort reading these poems as I do reading the poetry of Albert Huffstickler or Robert Bly. Poems that appear to be thematically simple and observational on one level, but that dig deeply into the complexity of the moment.
I felt "Driving Across Wisconsin / September 11, 2001" was one of the best 9/11 poems I have ever read. "Do the trees know what has happened? / Is that why that one’s crown / is rimmed with fire / that one’s arm / droops flagging yellow? // Sumac, thick as people / on a crowded street, redden suddenly from the tips. // Ferns in dark hollows of the forest reveal their veins. // Bouquets of asters, purple and white, / offer themselves from the side of the road / to all wounded passing by."

"Han-shan, a seventh century Chinese Zen poet, is my poetic mentor," says Lenfestey when I asked who his favorite poets were. He credits Han-shan with bringing humor to poetry and notes, "Humor is under used, under appreciated." Lenfestey’s ability to use humor is patently evident in, "Getting Close to Home" :

"I swear that woman passing me in the silver / Grand Am is Betty Larsen, though / she’s been dead ten years or more, / and wouldn’t be caught dead / in a Grand Am. / But that’s her platinum bouffant hairdo, / her profile straining forward to get home / before her husband / to greet Don at the door in / fresh makeup, fresh lipstick , / a fresh drink in her hand / for his hard day. // And that man riding the Harley next to me - / that generous belly under the strap / T-shirt, the thin arms, / the wispy white hair blowing / from under the kerchief - / that man is my father, / who never road a Harley, only horses. // I must be close to home."
    
These poems alight so perfectly on the page, they read so well, I wondered about Lenfestey’s writing process, "I always travel with a notebook, and begin to write that feeling down when it comes, propping my book against the steering wheel if I am in the car. I don’t stop. When I arrive where I am going, or get back to my office, or whenever I can, I sit down with the notebook. And that feeling comes back, and I write it down, begin to shape, then to polish, what I write, but always on the armature of that emotion, that vision, that sound, that line that came to me." He goes on to say, "Some poems are rewritten over 20-30 years hundreds of times. All are rewritten some. The issue for me is, like sculpture, to keep sanding off the odd or rough sound. In SAYING GRACE, having read the poems aloud now a few more times, I would now change a few sounds on a few poems. But for the most part these poems feel finished to me, ready to hang in a gallery."
    
 I loved his short poem, "Dead Deer With Flies": Roadside shimmer. / Bloated white belly. / Black orbiting moons." And also his poem titled, "Crossing the Freeway": "It’s November, hunting season. / I could see you clearly in the / golden early morning light / bursting through cut cornstalks / in a fatal dusting of fresh snow. // Behind me, an armada of semis. / Before me, you, beauty, racing toward me / in full stride across the median." And concluding with, "Signs of failure are everywhere. / Every few miles / red entrails spray the center line, / bloated bellies float in shoulder weeds, / crows pick at crumpled hide and bones, / white tails flag the passing wind. // And between those bloody marker? / Ten thousand invisible successes - / swift, decisive contrails melting / into the soft, nibbling bark / of next year’s wobbly fawns."
 
 I greatly enjoyed this collection of poems. Lenfestey’s mastery of word and phase blended well with a Wisconsin landscape that he makes throb with metaphor and meaning. If only all of us could slow down long enough to look and see with the eyes of Jim Lenfestey.
     If you live in Wisconsin, Minnesota or Michigan and would like to hear this poet read, please contact him at Jimfest@aol.com. I can only imagine that the twists and turns of his voice reading these poems will add a rich color to this road trip across the fields, forest and through the small towns that are all brought to life through the gifts of this heartland poet.

By: Joseph Farley

116 pages / 103 Poems
Price: $10.00
Cynic Press
P.O. Box 40691
Philadelphia, PA 19107
ISBN: 0-9673401-4-4

I wondered as I read Joseph Farley’s spare, plain spoken poems that have a haiku-feel to them, if environment dictated his migration toward poetry which his friend, mentor and well known small press poet Louis McKee characterized as,” tight, disciplined lines, conversation, colloquial diction, and soft touch.”

I wondered if the challenges of being both a publisher and a writer doesn’t force one to compress language mirroring the compressed time one has to write. Farley’s skill at writing so sparingly is seen in nearly every poem of this collection, such as “Circles”: “I never could stand / for hours / watching a toy train / run in circles / the way my father could. / I always needed / a destination, couldn’t sit / a lifetime / in one place / calmly laying track.”

I asked Louis McKee about the dilemma his friend faced being both a writer and a publisher and he told me, “Joe is one of those people with a busy life, and the addition of publisher makes his schedule all the more hectic. The result is that Joe has too little time, and gives too little attention, to his own writing. Had he dedicated every moment to getting his own poetry out there, instead of fostering the work of so many others, me included, his selfishness would have been understood, and his mark greater and more greatly appreciated”.

Farley is the editor of Cynic Press which publishes Axe Factory Review, Low Budget Science Fiction, Low Budget Adventure Stories, Cynic Book Review, Vomit, and Holy Rollers as well as books by poets such as Louis McKee, Xu Juan, Joseph Banford, and others. I wondered what drove Farley’s style and he told me, “I am fascinated by traditional Asian forms. English language imitations often miss the complicated metrical and rhyme patterns in Asian poems, especially in Chinese poems where tones are supposed to match or repeat in a certain manner. As a non-tonal language, the best I've been able to come up with in English is striving for repetition, when possible of a consonant pattern with near matches permissible and occasional rhymes, off rhymes, and near rhymes thrown in, but I never let ideas of form get in the way of what needs to be said. I'll sacrifice the anticipated pattern for an emotional, comic or philosophical riff. I'm attracted to form, but don't want to become trapped in it. I also think about the visual sense of a poem, how it looks on a page. Prayer and chanting fascinated me as a child. Some of this incantation quality rubs off on my writing. Cummings, Bukowski, Lowell, Roethke, Etheridge Knight, Verlaine, Mallarme, O'Hara, Williams, and Levertov have all been liberating influences in one way or another. Louis Mckee is responsible for holding my feet to the fire, and forcing myself to ask the question, Is this good enough yet?"

McKee, who met Farley as a student in his high school, also got Farley started as a publisher. Their first collaboration was Axe Factory. Farley says, “I was sort of conned into doing Axe Factory by Louis McKee when I was an impressionable youth. He bailed out after three issues. Being a creature of habit, I continued. McKee was a teacher at my high school and gave me the poetry and editing bug. Before I met him, my main interest/desire was to write science fiction, fantasy and possibly pornography. He thought I had more talent as a poet, so I blame him for corrupting me.”

And here is what McKee says of his friend’s work, “What I like about Joe Farley's poetry is how disarming it is. It is smart, but at first taste you might not think so. He will write directly (or so it seems) about the commonplace, the everyday. He'll do it casually, and in a colloquial voice. And then your eye trips over a word or phrase, or you see something from the corner of your eye, and suddenly the poem seems not so casual, so ordinary. Farley is concise, and precise, and clear. And clever, fun to read. His best poems are those which deal with the personal -- often sad and uncomfortable moments brought into another light, one that can glimpse the world in a grain of sand (if you excuse the stolen image). His social and political poems come with a healthy cynicism, and that same wry humor that strips the discomfort off the personal. It is, I guess, this "voice" that I think makes Farley's poems such a pleasure to read.”

Here is another example of Farley’s precise writing, “Supplicant”: “the emperor / walks / in the surf, / pant legs / rolled-up / toes digging / in the sand // a small crab dances sideways / away from a wave // the emperor / wipes / his glasses / stares / at tiny / legs / on the empty / bench.” Many of his poems leave, and are intended to leave, the reader suspended in image – a weightless feeling that is numinous. He has taken narrative poetry, stripped it down, kept its story line, and filled it with white space. These are effortless and relaxing poems to read. Again, in “Portrait”: “When the time came / to paint her portrait, / we opted for a nude. / The artist started with her ass / and spent a year there, / then six months / on each leg./ The breasts took a decade. / And the face? / He says he’s / coming to that / real soon.”

Farley again and again, shows masterful restraint. One can follow the theme, find its center and softly land with the aid of only a few words. As in “Suckers”: “catfish fed / under the waterfall / glued to the green / stone dam // how many years / since I’ve seen anyone / catch a fish here? // the rapids froth / with detergent; / the factories upstream / look the other way” And again in his wonderful poem “Pussy”: “An iris / in full blossom, / a split peach, / a pomegranate / eaten from / the center out. // Few things taste / as sweet on the tongue, / few words sound / as fluid. // She followed me home. Can I keep her?” Just a great, great piece of writing.

I admired the spare, quiet insight I found in Suckers and the remarkable skill that it took for Farley to whittle these poems down to nothing but their soul.

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FINISHING LINES
By: Ellaraine Lockie

32 Poems / 47 Pages / $5

Snark Publishing
637 W Hwy 50 #119
O’Fallon, IL 62269

Word Count: 1,362 (not including header or reviewer’s bio)

Since being bitten (badly) by the muse six years ago, Ellaraine Lockie has received eight Pushcart nominations for her poetry. She accumulated over sixty poetry awards by the end of her first year of actively submitting work. Her first published chapbook entitled MIDLIFE MUSE won the Poetry Forum’s annual chapbook contest in 2000. And if that doesn’t get your attention, she has received over two hundred awards in poetry since launching herself into the great poetry super highway – just six years ago. But before you go and take a flying leap off a tall building and break all your pencils you should know that while she is new to poetry, she is not new to writing.

She told me about her jump into poetry, “I previously had written in other genres (and still do)--nonfiction, magazine articles and children’s picture books. Seven years ago I had not read a poem since high school, except for the occasional one I came across in children’s literature. I thought I hated poetry; I thought it had to rhyme. Then one day an old friend sent me some of his poems and wanted my opinion. I liked them, but they didn’t rhyme. So I called my children’s writing mentors for advice. When they told me about free verse, I became obsessed with writing it and with getting it published. This happened at a tough time in my life, and poetry became my salvation. I just jumped in and started writing like crazy, unaware of what other poets were writing. I entered the poems in contests before submitting to editors, knowing that I needed something in cover letters to entice editors into reading my work carefully.” If she needed verification that she was on the right track, she certainly got it.

Lockie’s fourth book of poetry, FINISHING LINES, reflects her refined grasp of language and form. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Lockie was a chronic re-writer, for not much in any of these poems seems extraneous. She told me, “I re-write constantly. I re-write until every word is the perfect word for what I want to say at the time. I re-write until I am in love with the poem. My theory is that if I don’t love it, how can I expect anyone else to even like it? I often continue re-writing after a poem has been published. It’s an evolution.” Her careful hand is seen in , “The Whipping Woman”: “The woman I hire to daughter my mother / makes bi-weekly visits to the dementia ward / Lies down beside the near-still waters // Accepts the mouth kisses wet with drool / From where gravelly words / dribble down washed-out gullies // Like a whipping boy she bears the brunt / of each face-to-face flagellation / that my rawhide flesh refuses // And for twenty dollars an hour I purchase / like contraposition of a professional mourner / Substitution for services I can’t supply”.

Lockie told me that, “FINISHING LINES focuses on the endings of things--people, animals, places, relationships, seasons of life; and death is of course the ultimate ending. I’m fascinated with endings. We all deal with small ones on a daily basis--the ending of a day, for instance. Then as we reach middle age, we increasingly have to cope with endings. Things, animate and inanimate alike, just wear out. It seemed to me to be a universal topic for a poetry collection. Many endings create beginnings, and this intrigues me too. I allude to, or straight-out address, this aspect in many of the poems here. It’s a cycle. Thus, the foreword T. S. Elliot quote, “In the beginning is my end.”

This theme is most clearly visible in Lockie’s poem “Liberation”. Here is an excerpt, “I hatch slowly / Each day cracking / lost wonders / Ice cream and oatmeal / for breakfast /English for Chinese neighbors / Lunch with an editor / An afternoon rest home visit / A cat-in-heat night // Hello sunshine! / I’m 54 years old / at Disneyland / With the rest of my life / to take rides / I follow famous sisters / through Tomorrow Land // At 60 Colette opened / a beauty salon in Paris / Jackie O became a book editor // Margaret Mead said / The most creative force in the / world is a menopausal woman / with zest // You haven’t seen anything yet / Margaret Mead”.

If I had anything less than glowing to say about this collection, it would be Lockie’s overuse of alliteration. I knew it wasn’t an accident and wondered if it was a result of her work on children’s books. Here is what she told me, “Alliteration is one of my favorite poetic devices, yes, and my use of it is purposeful. I like the musicality it creates, especially when reading out loud. Also, I often use it to achieve continuity between lines. You’re right though--too much alliteration gives the same kind of sing-songy effect that rhyme can cause. But I guess “too much” differs from reader to reader. I’m careful not to let alliteration get in the way of what I want to say--another possible pitfall the device

shares with rhyme. Whereas picture book writing isn’t responsible for my use of alliteration, it is responsible for the structure of almost all my poetry. In fact, I call this structure “Picture Book Poetry”, and teach a workshop on it.”

Technique is written all over these poems and while my tastes lean toward less developed work, I found Lockie never left me wondering what she was trying to say. Her narratives never became secret code. But beyond using precise language, she also structures her lines with complete intention. She does not use commas and periods, and I asked what she was trying to accomplish by this. Here is what she told me, “I didn’t do away with commas and periods; I never used them in poems (except for prose poems). They defeat my main purpose for writing poetry, and that is to be completely free when I write. Punctuating in poems makes me feel like I’m in poetry prison. Also, putting a period or comma at the end of a line seems a little redundant to me. The line break already signals a slight pause. I use capitalization at the beginning of a line to signify that an extra pause is needed before beginning that line (like for a period), and this makes sense to me. I use a fair number of sentence fragments so if I punctuated prose-properly, my poems would all be littered with commas. Also, writing without end-of-line punctuation forces me to work harder on clarity and syntax. Poetry has never completely followed the rules of prose anyway. Look at all those capital letters at the beginning of each line. I think that’s useless and out of date. “

So indeed (and thank God), Lockie did not just drop out of the heavens unformed and begin to write great poetry; she’d spent a life time acquiring her taste for language. But, still, I wondered how long she’d been writing and where did she get that great name of hers. Perhaps everything is revealed in her reply, “An elderly poet in a black beret whom I met at my first poets’ reading in Berkeley, asked me the same question. I told him that my given name was Ella Loraine, but that my mother’s first name was also Ella and that I didn’t like not having my own name. So in the second grade, I combined my two names into Ellaraine, wrote it on the top of a school assignment and announced to the teacher and classmates that it was to be my name from then on. The Berkeley poet said, “My dear, you are not a beginning poet; you have been a poet since the second grade, because that’s what poets do: they condense in a creative way.”

I would have to agree, and say that while Lockie has been writing ‘poetry’ for a short time, she has been a work in progress her entire life – and it shows.

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5 SPEED
by Klyd Watkins
24 Poems / 49 Pages / $6
Published by:
The Temple Inc.
P.O. Box 1773
Walla Walla, WA 99362
www.thetemplebookstore.com

Review By: Charles P. Ries

Word Count: 1,334 (not including titles and reviewers bio)

Well regarded small press editor, publisher and poet, Charles Potts doesn't publish just anyone. So, why did he publish a guy named Klyd Watkins from Nashville, Tennessee? He told me, "I published Klyd Watkins' 5 Speed because it is poetry that deserves a wider audience and more attention than his work has hitherto received. It has some things in common with the work of other poets I've published. For instance the absence of formal requirements other than musicality and pertinence allows the poet to focus on the substance and a style will innately be established. I promote poetry that has intellectual rigor, emotional resonance, and high artistic intent." Over half the poems in this collection are either about or mention Watkins favorite place for poetic reflection, Radnor Lake, Tennessee. About this Potts notes, "More particularly I have learned the value of re-considering the same location, scene, or set of circumstances, under different or slightly altered conditions, from Klyd Watkins. Different time of day, different season of the year, different frame of mind, yield mutually supporting but distinguishable results, completing the view or poet's vision."

Here are two examples of Watkins reflections at Radnor Lake. This a concluding excerpt from his poem, "Radnor Lake, Second Observation Deck January 9 2000": "I think I am thinking this to justify / a description of the maple on the water / because reflection rules / here again today like it did / the time the waves flipped my image and showed me / to the clouds. / Again my horizontal maple's / gone aggressive - leafless / this time - bobbing on the water. Its folded / wave whipped shape bounces hard as if / the waves are trying to throw form off the water / into flight / like some kind giant last cousin / to a water spider thrashing to spring free / of maple mambo on the water and rise / into dissipation's multiplication of light"

And this poem entitled, "Radnor Lake, Otter Creek Road February 6 2000":

"They fly so low - the buffle head ducks -
their shadows race them across the waves
the speed inverts my eyes
and it seems those shadows
cast the whispering wings up off the water
into shallow air instead of the other
way round"
PAGE TWO

I asked Watkins to tell me about his writing process, in particular his reason for spreading copy. He told me, "I like to be free to try any notion that enters my mind. In doing that, I destroy the previous draft, and since a lot of my impulses toward change turn out to be wrong, I need to be able to backtrack. Since word processing files take so little space, virtually none, I save, or "save as," all the drafts. I'm one of those poets that fights with punctuation. If I'm going for momentum, and often I am, a comma (in verse, not in prose) seems a conflict of interest, but you can't get rid of all of them. Despite all my revision, I agree that, when the muse is generous, the first thought is the best thought. I definitely write long segments that I know better than to change." About his spreading copy he says, "Pace is important to me. And when I get to rolling I tend to use complex syntax. I find that with complex syntax I can use very simple diction that works, and plays, really hard. I use lines, partial lines, the sweep of the eye, multiple margins, to control pace, and use pace (or attempt to) to help the reader thru the complex syntax. If the reader is hearing the words inside her mind at the right speed, the sentences may be involved but they are not hard to understand, I hope." This technique is used well in his exceptional eight page poem entitled, "December 31, 1999". Here is an excerpt from that poem:

"Oh indeed there shall be
dramatic
discoveries Sure not because
it's the millennium because awe
at nature yielding her secret's
part of what's
always there but
should scientists
find
soon perhaps among
the winking of coincidence
herself
which
I hear
fascinates some of the now but
somehow
the acrobatic mimes in scientists minds
will detect
something new let's say
a force or effect
counter to entropy which indicates
the universe may be not winding down after all that maybe
the big bang was a big sneeze clearing a breath way"

PAGE THREE

There is a wise, whimsical center to these well crafted poems. It is apparent that Watkins not only has a natural grace for words, but is also well schooled in their use. He told me he received a BA and MA from Vanderbilt in English in the late '60's. I wondered whether he felt his schooling helped or hindered his progress as a writer. "I don't know for sure. I suppose if I had been completely independent I should have dropped out of college to read and write full time on my own, supporting myself with simple, part time work. I had two sons by the time I was twenty-two and prepared myself to support them. I not only studied, I taught. A decade at a community college in Kentucky. The classroom can be a wonderful place to read poetry. When you have three, five, a dozen, good readers going over a text together-John Dunne or William Carlos Williams or Chaucer-and they all get to putting their insights on the table, and the jocks or whoever may be there only for credit begin to glean that there is really something there of a value so energetic it goes beyond getting a grade, what's wrong with that? I had to turn down a fellowship to Iowa Writer's Workshop when I was twenty-four and had three sons. If I had been able to go to Iowa, would I now be even better or even worse?"

These poems exude kindness and compassion - wisdom. I noted that many of his poems are reflections, meditations on life - the moments before our gaze. I suggested that he sounded a bit like a southern philosopher, and he told me, "I am not particularly well read in philosophy (or anything else, except perhaps poetry). It is kind of you to pose that as a neutral statement, even a bit of a compliment possibly. When my friend Hugh Fox states a similar opinion it sounds like an accusation; he says I "turn into a combination of Richard Morris, Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas," and most of my poet friends hold the aesthetic position that it is incorrect for a poet to be philosophical, a position that is itself either philosophical or unconscious. Since I became aware, as a teenager I guess, that we have the freedom and the duty to craft our own lifestyle, not take it ready made from anyone, I have wanted to be both free and responsible. Perhaps the tension between freedom and responsibility forced me to become somewhat systematically thoughtful."

This depth of thought and rigor of thought is evident in each poem in 5 Speed. Here is a wonderful example of his ability to take a common moment and raise it to philosophical reflections. It is entitled, "June day at the Y": "All the tanning young mommies // and that's not even the same / lifeguard / lord there are too many goddesses // and I myself tho I am most surely / a mortal man // that is not all I am, that is not even / what I am. My eyes squint / to climb / sun splashes over the red bathing suit / and phenomenal legs and arms of the lifeguard / knowing in my head there is / something higher something / we climb /inward into something whose / unending beauty / we / in our doomed flesh reflect."

I want to thank Charles Potts and editors like him who bring us voices like Klyd Watkins. He's a wonderful writer and southern gentleman whose poetry is precise, lyrical and luminous.
________________________

Not: Readers wishing to learn more about Watkins early work with the spoken word recording in the early 1970's can do so by following these links:
http://www.volcanictongue.com/news.html
http://www.volcanictongue.com/tipofthetongue.html
http://www.volcanictongue.com/poetryoutloud.html

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The Wrong Side of Town
by A.D. Winans
21 Poems / English with Russian Translations
$10.00 ISBN 0-89304-787-2
Cross-Cultural Communications Edition
239 Wynsum Avenue
Merrick, New York 11566-4725
www.cross-culturalcommincations.com

American Poets-in-Russian-Translation Series #1

If you travel the hundreds of print and electronic magazines that populate the small press, you will meet a handful of poets whose work finds its way to just about every venue there is for publication - A.D. Winans is one of them. These authors tend to be not only prolific, seemingly able to generate hundreds and hundreds of poems over a short period of time, but they are persistent. And if reputation is as much a function of ability as it is of longevity and persistence, then A.D. Winans has rightfully earned his high status as a small press poet.

As I read poems from The Wrong Side of Town, I found most to be content rich and stylistically flat or transparent. I asked Winans about this and why he didn't use more metaphor, simile, or as a friend of mine once called, the secret-code-writing of poetry. He told me, "I think it was William Carlos Williams who encouraged poets to write in every day language. Poets I knew and hung out with like Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski took this message to heart and so have I. My poems and my life are one and the same. They simply can't be separated. There is no secret code. I consider myself a blue collar poet writing for the working class, in a language they speak."

Winans direct language works well in describing the downtrodden and dispossessed who are often the subjects of his reflection, such as the city scene in, "Saturday Night Happenings": "The air has the stale cigarette smell / Rancid as spoiled meat / The men in blue working the crime scene / Laying down yellow tape and chalk lines / That circle the corpse riddles with bullets / Swiss cheese street justice." And again in, "Outside A Boarded-Down Jazz Club": "an old man stands in the doorway /of an abandoned building /shoulders stooped, Jesus beard / ragged clothes, hands outstretched / begging for his supper / a tote of wine / his prayers unanswered / spittle on his chin / holes in his shoes / Walt Whitman's forgotten child."

Noting how prolific Winans has been over his career and the often flat one-and-done quality of his work. I asked him about his writing routine. "I don't have a routine. I write whenever the inspiration hits me. However, I write more in the day hours than at night. I'm capable of producing large amounts of work in a short period of time, and then writing little or nothing for a relatively long period of time. I have only in the last few years done any rewriting of note." He focuses on this very issue in his poem, "Choices": "I know this academic poet / who spends months editing / a single poem / wants each line to be as tight / as a young virgin's ass / chop chop chop is his motto / although I think / he borrowed that line / from Ezra Pound / Only trouble is / he never gets invited to read / never has enough poems / Last I heard / he got himself a job teaching /bonehead English / at a small Midwestern college / assisting the football coach / specializing in tight ends."

In describing his work stylistically and thematically he says, "Some people have called me a street poet or identify me as a meat poet. I don't like labels. I have been writing for more than forty years, and my style continues to evolve. The subject matter ranges from social commentary to humor, haiku, and even surrealism, but the form and technique I use is not always the same." A bit later, Winans noted that, "The late William Wantling and Jack Micheline influenced me greatly. Wantling showed me that some things in life can't be clothed in metaphor, simile, or inner rhyme. The late Jack Micheline was the closest thing I had to a mentor, and his love for the downtrodden and the dispossessed is a common theme in my own work."

The Wrong Side of the Street was the first in Cross-Cultural Communications, American- Poets-in-Russian-Translation Series. Winans told me, "Jack Micheline's son, Vince Silvaer, wrote and said that Aleksey Dayen wanted to translate some of Jack's work into Russian and wanted to know if I had heard of Aleksey. I subsequently wrote Aleksey, and sent him some of my own poems, which he later translated into Russian, for publication in a few Russian magazines. He later introduced me to Stanley Barkan, the publisher of Cross-Cultural Communications, and the rest is history."

This collection also focuses on personal loss, the end of love, and Winan's unhappy childhood as in, "Family Man": "Conceived in the womb of an indifferent marriage / I seemed to remind you of the anger the failures / Until childhood became a series of gothic nightmares / An 18-year sentence at the Alamo / All eyes fixed bayonets the tongue a sharp dagger / That awful black leather strap that chased me / Around the dinner table with its sadistic whisper /Caressing the air and me a constant reminder / Of a Depression Era marriage that took you / From your world of music into a life you wore / Like ill-conceived clothes on a hunchback / No room for me in your life no room for a pacifist/ I tried writing blood-stained poems / To make you proud of me / Joined the military became a government worker / Tried every trick there was / To erase the scars that you left / Like a branding iron inside my heart."

I asked him about the reflective nature of this collection of poems, "The themes I write about have always been important to me; however, much of my past was not written until recent years. I didn't have a happy childhood, and it took me thirty years after my father's death and several years after my mother's death, before I was able to sit down and write SCAR TI SSUE. And a book I have yet to send out for publication (This Land Is Not My Land) about my military days in Panama took me over forty years to write, so painful were many of the experiences."

As I read these poems a second and third time, I began to feel a deep sense of compassion for this writer toward the subjects of his poetry. And I realized that this is the talent of great writers - to illuminate in words a moment so completely that it becomes transcendent making the poetic observation not just owned by the author, but everyone who reads his work. The Wrong Side of Town is a wonderful collection of poems - a complete and compelling picture of one of the small presses most prolific, talented, and searching poets.

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I had to work hard to get through the thirty poems in Peter Magliocco's fifth book of poetry entitled, This Junkyard Heaven. It is an intense, highly focused set of poems created in a very large and well-schooled mind. In a recent Books & Authors interview with Magliocco he notes no fewer then eighty-eight favorite writers, listing among them: Mailer, Kerouac, James Purdy, Boll, Grass, Sontag, Beckett, George Sand, Sartre, Camus, and Chekov. Magliocco's literary interests are as rangy and challenging as the poems in this dense and intellectually rich work.

Here are two examples from This Junkyard Heaven. The first entitled; "the hallowed cave": "what rings off the soft shell / old pain we hoped to keep inside / beyond clinical flesh-resurrections /medicare doesn't pay for / or any stay in Hotel Heaven /depicted in a Bosch crowd scene /with computer-colored enhancement /your tan legs kick in a spam god's brothel/ time won't spasm between us /our stem cells in love's test tube /a crystal bukkake the drunk drink /as a wonk midwife spirits our progeny/from lantern-lipped crevices." And this one entitled; "nirvana": the entrapment of fallen stars / brandishing what corporate insignia / time-tattered reliquary indisposes / our blood seeps / into silent rain // sometimes, in effigy of sleep / the morning's a far-off vestibule / -cloistered by brightly colored paintings - / waiting for our entrance // while / keening for our presence / Blake's tigers maul / throats of Vegan magicians / revealing what elixir of bodies // our bones whiter than pale rabbits / inside divine top hats, / cats spring born again / squealing with animal faith / intimidating our human tread // (waking from a dream / mother's spindle / turns us around / to glimpse other planets / or the first time) // & crawl on all four again / away from manacled stock brokers / on the once sacred ground of Wall St. / a red sea of humanity skittering / into heaven's / eternal // liquidation."

I don't know about you, but poems like these often leave my mind cross-eyed. I could only read three or four in one reading, and then had to let my mind rest before jumping in for more. I asked Magliocco about the complexity of his work. "What is intuitive and crafted appeals to me so far as writing poetry goes. I don't feel my writing is "complex," just not as superficial as much floating around the small press ethers. Perhaps the ideas in my poems are what strike you as complex. I certainly believe in examining intellectual & artistic ideas in poetry, whose meanings aren't readily clear always while writing…and that's one reason for writing them, since the ideas are also a search for meanings in our lives." He went on to describe his process, "I don't do a lot of extensive rewriting, but sometimes I take things from bad or failed old poems and merge them with incomplete newer work…a poetic transmigration of sorts. The things taken can be whole lines, a few words, and content totally rewritten in a different form. William Burroughs used to cut-up his writing and paste it into a totally different context, though the results verged on irrational dream associations sometimes. I try to insert the free-feel of what you refer to as "stream of consciousness" with more structured and thought-out lines. Our unconscious mind has to interact successfully on a daily basis with our conscious one: the two have to be brought into harmony, in art and life."

I had two strong impressions come over me while I read Magliocco's work. One, he has a signature 'voice' in the small press. It is the unique collision of academic and street poetry. Two, poetry (as displayed in Magliocco's writing) is a great laboratory - it is an art form short enough, with boundaries wide enough to mirror many of the aspects we find in visual art. I asked him about his influences. "In the small press there is only Bukowski even though he's been gone and I can't think of two poets better, though I like Alan Catlin. I like e-zines like UNLIKELY STORIES and THE ORACULAR TREE. And Jose Saramago is the prose writer I like."

Many of the poems in This Junkyard Heaven are highly visual rather than narrative. The total creates an impression rather than brings the reader to a conclusion. He frequently uses metaphors drawn from visual art and historic events. This made me wonder if Magliocco had been schooled in three dimensional arts and he said, "My frame of historical references isn't that shockingly scholarly or erudite! I had some art history courses years ago at California State University at Northridge, where I picked up a B.A. in 2-dimensional art. I use things obviously from my educational baggage, from my own study too. The names you mention are chiefly from well-known artists and poets: Peter Paul Rubens painted his wife Helena, William Blake's tygers burned bright; Apollinaire was a French poet who died fighting in WWI. But yeah, some readers probably will find those references in the range of limited curiosity only. "Words and metaphors" are what it's all about, I'd read something by Nabokov to really have a work-out with the dictionary."

Magliocco is also editor and publisher of the small press magazine ART:MAG (P.O. Box 70896, Las Vegas, NV 89170) which features many major voices in the small press. I asked him about ART:MAG, "I started it in 1985 by hand-lettering short poems with colored pens and pencils -- it was a logical extension of creative ideas from art school days, I guess. Having discovered the small press, I wondered if I could merge art forms with literary content. Those issues were called "original series" because I included actual original bits and pieces of my sketchbook drawings in them…not mere copies. That changed over the years for a number of reasons, since nobody seemed thrilled by these experiments and the small press mag-sensibility is hard to change: many want the poem to take precedence, not the artwork."

The title poem of this collection is a visual wonder, here is the opening stanza of "This Junkyard Heaven": "(after a non-existent painting of Eva Hesse) // I have wanted to convert you to beauty / like an elemental force of nature / you can do little about, but must / learn to live with as a power / beyond our real reach , for we sketch just / its outline, its rainbow shimmer / across this junkyard heaven / called life with its cities / tenebrous & densely impacted / by flesh, metals, trees, earth ions / for all condemned lovers to cling to".

As I read Magliocco's collection, I most admired his depth of his mind. His writing is rich and complex. He shares his soul, his fears and passions in a unique collection of poetry - as good as any master painter could write.

Note: To find Books and Authors interview with Peter Magliocco please go to: http://www.booksandauthors.net/Interviews/PMagliocco.html

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Note: Proceeds from Things About to Disappear will be used to support Don Winter's son, Dylan Coyle Winter

After reading Don Winter's first book of poetry, Things About to Disappear I now believe some writers are born and not made. They are the lucky ones who come into life with the grace of words. I asked Winter when he began writing; thinking poems this well crafted were from a poesy veteran. He said, "In 1998, I went through a divorce in which I lost everything that gave my life meaning: my son, my wife, my real estate business, my home on Lake Tuscaloosa. I think shit happens to everyone and you kill yourself or you make changes and go on living. I have been writing on and off for around 5 years."
Winter told me he has no formal training as a writer. He said, "I have degrees; however, I find that where writing is concerned, well, it can be encouraged but not taught. In other words, I taught myself to write. You can't teach someone to write, so I think school is irrelevant. I don't do many rewrites. I don't think you should make changes just because others suggest them, or you risk losing confidence in yourself. I think you should only revise what sounds untrue or imitative in your work; I sense as a writer you come to recognize when you are using your own voice (being truthful) and when you're not." Yet, despite his late start (or maybe because of it) his work has appeared in close to four hundred print and electronic literary journals. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and he is the Assistant Editor of the Alaska Quarterly review.
His poems are alive and heartfelt not just because he had a shock to the system - great themes don't necessarily make great poems. This collection works because the writer is perfectly centered on place, structure, and pacing, as in these opening lines from, "Silent In America": "If you were fifty-five / and your speech had been crushed / by factories and divorce / to a single vowel, you might drift, / as he did, transient as a dream, / beneath the random lettering / of a broken marquee, beyond / all bittersweet efforts to connect, / to make sense, to endure."
Winter told me that, "I want the reader to experience the frustrations, the dehumanization, and the small victories of ordinary, work-a-day people." As for influences he says, "I'd have to say some of my influences have been "whats": managing Burger Chef in Niles, Michigan. Managing a real estate company on the mean streets of Birmingham, Alabama."

There is a yearning sadness to these poems, a hole-in-the-head as well as the heart immediacy that I greatly admired as in, "The Dream Home": "Traveling north to hunt deer / you take a wrong turn / and stop for directions / at a house you've never seen. / A woman, fat and wholesome, / awaits you on the porch. / She smells of freshly baked bread / and when you ask her / for directions she leads you inside / to a clean white table, / a cup of black tea. // This is more than you ever imagined before. / A plate, a knife and a fork are already laid out. / You pretend you're not starving, / take a sip of the hot tea, / place the napkin in your lap. / Three girls, each under 5, / hold their shirts / as they walk down the long stairway / into the room. They smile at you, /and you smile back. // After supper the woman asks / if you might tuck the girls in / before you leave. As you tuck each on in / you hum nursery songs / under your chest. // After they're asleep / the woman invites you/ to the back porch/ to watch the sun go. You do not refuse her / when she opens your red flannel shirt. / You need love like all of us. / This is not dream, you think, / No dream. In the wet grass / you try to match your breathing / to hers."
To have the ability to convey such sentiment with balance and at times, brilliance after just five years of writing is amazing. As in, "Bone Lonely": "Some nights, I wake with longing / for nothing I can name. / I drink one beer after another, / watch the traffic lights change, / a late bus pass through. / Someone's window goes black. / All the old questions / have their way with me, / like why are life's gains and losses, / the greatest romances fleshed / with failure. I keep turning up / the radio: hearts are cheating, / someone is alone, there's blood / in Tulsa. / Something like that. / This of course wakes her. / She opens the bedroom door / with a slightly ruined look / at me. / I pour myself one / shot of whiskey, look at her, / pour her one and say, "so."
It's renewing to read poets with Winter's skill and sentiment. I asked him who the two women are standing with him on the inside jacket of Things About to Disappear and he said, "My sister Betty is quite ill---wanted to get a picture of her with me into the chap. The other woman is my sister Lynn. If my sister Sherry had been around, I'd probably have lassoed her, also." This picture made me reflect on why poetry, perhaps better than any written form so effectively reveals the inner world of its author. For Winter this world is the shock of his divorce and entry into poverty. It is his sisters and the son he rarely sees. It is the hard luck life he lives. He reveals himself to the reader with deceptive ease and transforms intimate catharsis into word art.
Maybe - thinking about it again - writers aren't born or made, but rather created. For Winter it has been the ups and downs, the loves and the losses that have given a born writer the need to speak his mind and do so with perfection.

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New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1:

The Babarians of San Francisco - Poets from Hell

Copyright 2005. Alan Kernoff.

Anthology issued by Trafford Press.

323 Pages / Price: $23

TO ORDER GO TO: http://www.zeitgeist-press.com/

ISBN: 1-41205270-X

This review first appeared in POESY.

Context, talent and emerging form are the co-parents of art movements. When these three aspects of great art collide (as they seldom do) a child is conceived. A creative voice so unique in its character that when it is seen, heard, or read it guides the reader unmistakenly back to its place of origin.

As I read the thirty-two poets whose works comprise this expansive anthology entitled, New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1: The Barbarians of San Francisco - Poets from Hell, I welcomed the raw honest energy I found in these long narrative poems. I felt as if I was there with them, listening to them. They called themselves the Barbarians. Every Thursday night from the mid-late 80’s through about 1994, their home was a tiny wine and beer tavern located on twenty-second and Guerrero in the Mission District of San Francisco. For just under ten years it was the home of a perfect storm - a Thunder Dome in which spoken word poetry of high emotion, insight, and humor was delivered and refined. This excerpt from David Lerner’s, “Mein Kampf” addresses the objective of their collective efforts, “all I want to do / is make poetry famous // all I want to do is / burn my initials into the sun // all I want to do is / read poetry from the middle of a / burning building / standing in the fast lane of the / freeway / falling from the top of the / Empire State Building // the literary world / sucks dead dog dick //I’ll rather be Richard Speck / than Gary Snyder / I’d rather ride a rocket ship to hell / than a Volvo to Bolinas.” And indeed this desire to raise poetry above its lost status as a mainstream literary art colors many of the poems in this collection. These writers wrote and spoke words that could not be confused. They were metaphor lit and smash mouth rich.

Context: The back room at Cafe Babar. A tiny performance space of only about 30' x 30', with wood bleachers and corrugated aluminum siding stretched over the walls. At critical points, the poet could hit the walls and the entire small room would vibrate. Often, there were 75-100 people stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder, crowding the halls and every spare inch of space, hungry for what the poet could do. "The Babar crowd was pretty merciless," says Zietgeist Press Co-Founder and Café Babar regular, Bruce Isaacson. "There was no polite applause or lukewarm response. If they loved you, they let you know, and if they didn't, they really let you know: hoots, whistles, heckling. Even beer glasses would sometimes get tossed at the stage."

Talent: In the forward to this anthology, co-editor Alan Allen described the odd mix of tribal members to this scene, “The barbarian poets were broke. Won the west-coast slams but couldn’t afford the tickets to go East to compete. Lived only to write, to perform, to read. Many were without jobs (with notable exceptions), or disabled, or addicted, or worked in the sex industry. Most struggled to pay the rent, or eat well, wore thrift-shop clothes. IQ’s were the highest, hearts the biggest, poems what mattered most. Was all about feeling their voices, their words, their lines, their lives.” This collision of wild and diverse poets, writers, musicians, and performers created the ethos of that moment including: Laura Conway, Joie Cook, David West, Eli Coppola, David Gollub, Vampyre Mike Kassel, Kathleen Wood, Zoe Rosenfeld, Sparrow 13 LaughingWand, Q.R. Hand, Alan Kaufman, and numerous others who would go through the baptism of fire that was Café Babar. These writers and many more are featured in this exceptional collection of poetry.

Emerging Form: Richard Silberg in his introduction to The Babarians of San Francisco - Poets from Hell says, “As opposed to movements that have centered on magazines, a college, a writers group, the Babarians have forged their work in a performing space.” He goes on to say, “Barbarians focus on that performing voice. The Barbarian voice goes for personhood, somewhat like the voice of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, or a comedian’s voice, or the voice of a TV newsman. Emphasis is shifted from the page to performance. The poem on the page is more like a script or a score.” Berkeley Poet Laureate Julia Vinograd told me, “This period was an explosion of poetry and Café Babar was at its epicenter. The work was unlike anything that had been done before; we fed off each other. New things were being said in ways that were forceful, serious, and funny. The best of the young poets of their time read there along side total unknowns.”

The November 4, 1992 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian described the poets reading at Café Babar as, “The Best poets working in America today. The cradle of the American avant-garde tradition. Formed in the crucible of real economic despair & political threat. Poets of lowered expectations & political rage. Café Barbar is the symbolic crucible of the spoken-word scene where gather the keepers of the flame – the poets doing poetry before it caught the public eye.”

All the poems in collection were written to be heard and grasped quickly. They speak to the world in which the writer lived. Here was a tribe and a moment in time that personified what is best about poetry – raw, straight forward revelation. Emotional honesty delivered in a manner that demands attention.

Here are two short excerpts from The Barbarians of San Francisco. The first is from “I Was a Teenage Godzilla” by Vampyre Mike Kassel. “When I was ten / I was hit by a very small nuclear warhead / which slipped out of a torpedo tube / while my cub scout pack was visiting / the Navy submarine U.S.S. Caligula / on a field trip. / The incident was hushed up. / The other cubs perished / but I mutated into a Teenage Godzilla / just like in the movies. / Only I was still only five feet ten inches tall / Just a friendly li’l two legged radioactive Komodo dragon / It wasn’t so bad / My parents were pissed / but the government paid them off / and they just had to kind of live with it.” And another from Sparrow 13 LaughingWand entitled, “Larry Said”: “Oh the filthy chalice of his skull / blown apart in New York / Oh, his razorback heart and his lead sugar mouth, / Larry said his mother died in a house fire / while he was in the joint / Larry said it was political. / Larry told / the dumbest arrest story I ever heard / how he broke into a liquor store and got too drunk to escape. / The Nevada beauty of his tomcat ass could / scratch your eyes out. / Larry said he was an honest thief. / Larry said I wasn’t queer / because he love me. / Thanksgiving we had lentils under my tarp / in a storm at Davenport. / Larry wasn’t a queer / because I really wasn’t a man.”

They stood stripped naked before a crowd of true believers and had to sell it. They had to make it real, and they had to make it work or they were shouted down. Posers were persecuted at the Café Barbar.

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Chasing Saturday Night
Poems About Rural Wisconsin, by Michael Kriesel
23 Poems / 39 Pages / $10
Marsh River Editions
M233 Marsh Road
Marshfield, WI 54449
ISBN: 0-9772768-0-5

Let me cut to the chase for all you poetry review skimmers our there. (You know who you are.) Chasing Saturday Night by Michael Kriesel is one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. Go out and buy it right now.

It is great because, like every seminal work of poetry, it is thematically rich, technically strong, readable, surprising, insightful and entertaining. Michael Kriesel drills for meaning in the middle of no-where-Wisconsin and produces a truly remarkable work of art.

I asked Kriesel when he started writing, and how the hell he got so good at just 44 years of age. “I started writing poetry at 16," he said. "It was an outlet for my emotional distress, and I was blessed with not one but two teachers who spent hours every week with me outside of class, critiquing my poems. And there was a small zine that started in my home town in '78, at the same time, and the editor & I became good friends. A classic example of when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The zine was Jump River Review, edited by Mark Bruner.”

I commented about the thematic richness found in Chasing Saturday Night with its subtle and economic use of words. Kriesel said, “Perhaps some of the thematic depth you mention results from the highly charged nature of some of the images used. For the last 7 or 8 years I've been studying a number of esoteric systems, part of which has involved working with symbols, archtypes-- studying the myths they sprang from, the purpose they serve in our collective unconscious, how we construct our own personal mythologies, creative visualization, striving towards psychological unity & self-balance. Things bleed through. Then you get that economy of words with revision. Tons. Each poem's at least 5 hours, often up to 20. In 2 or 3 hour work sessions each morning. With much strong coffee, a formica table, a picture window, an easy chair.”

Kriesel writes like the owner of a crystal shop must walk – with gentle, alert attention.

Here is one example of such a poem, “Drinking with Your Ghost After the Funeral”: “Sitting in a pickup in the middle of a field / the engine ticking down to nothing / windows filled with rows / of corn stalking into shadow / I drink until you’re sitting next to me / though we both know / you’re really at the cemetery / what was left of you after the accident concealed / by oak and bronze and varnish and miraculously healed / in everybody’s memory / still the whiskey / lurches back and forth between us in the muddy / light until the bottle’s dry / and dark as that smoked glass / we used to watch eclipses through / though tonight / there’s just a wobbly moon / and a few raccoons / stealing corn like no one’s there.”

His work walks poetry’s razor’s edge again and again, and never falls into maudlin soup on one side or excessive cleverness on the other. He is masterfully aware of the place he is creating. I noted the often fragile, forlorn and wry quality to this collection. How did he acquire this quality? He responded: “Harsh experiences I've had: from growing up with an abusive, alcoholic dad; from my decade in the Navy's paranoid environment, from my own tour of duty as someone who drank too damn much on a regular basis. Plus it's a common reaction to the way the world often is. Especially in the arts, where intelligent, emotionally hurting people often go to heal themselves.” What is marvelous about poets well-schooled in form and word is their ability to take the personal and turn it into a universal. Kriesel excels at this. His poems are as well calibrated as the best poems I have ever read.

Reading Chasing Saturday Night I could have extracted stanzas that describe place with such economy and beauty, it would have been quite enough for me just to read these stanzas alone. Such as these lines from, “Grampa’s Old Place”: “tar paper shines across the yellow wheat / the basswood siding’s gone // so soft your thumbnail could mark it / but it soaked up paint like sunshine." Or this one from “Communion”: “ It’s cool / the way a basement is in August / dark except for one small window / floating high above us / like in church / the bottom half cut off by grass // the only other light’s a bulb / tiny as a child’s night-light / mounted on a grinding wheel / bolted to a workbench.” Or this from “Saturday Morning”: “while between the fresh air and the sun / part of me starts to doze / my body grows light as sawdust / far away a chainsaw buzzes / like the season’s first mosquito."

I asked Kriesel about place. He said, “A friend recently told me, 'Everybody lives someplace and the work should show it. Homeless poetry doesn't interest me.' I got a good chuckle from that. All poetry is regional poetry, to some degree. Chasing Saturday Night is set in rural Wisconsin, peopled with relatives & farmers. But the poems deal with universal human themes since humans are the same everywhere at their core, despite differences in customs, education. I've also been writing minimalist nature poems for several years. Which have a long tradition in the Far East. And in even these, place plays an important role. Seeping through in an image or two. You see, we live in the world, much as some poets would deny this. Genius loci. The spirit of the place we live in fills us. People in rural environments know this intimately, living it each day. Their urban counterparts exist at a further remove from this. I grew up in rural central Wisconsin. Have always been more sensitive to my natural environment, sometimes preferring trees to people. That's changing as I grow more social. Also as a teen I loved the long descriptive paragraphs in H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction. Setting really sets the mood, personification of an aura or emotion, again that genius loci that that makes puppets of the players sometimes, other times just coloring our souls.”

He does not use punctuation and this only serves to accentuate the clarity of these poems. Nothing weighs them or holds them to the page – not even a comma. When asked about this lack of punctuation, he said, "I started doing this in '97 when I started writing short bursts of image-based spiritual poems that were trying to convey the epiphanies, the insights and breakthroughs I was having as a result of meditation & other disciplines. It was hard trying to verbalize these abstractions, ideas of a basically often nonverbal nature; so stripping things down, purifying the language seemed a good idea and did help. Now, later on down the line, it keeps my lines clean, pared. I'm writing longer narrative pieces without punctuation, and to do that you have to write clearly, clean.”

Retrospection collides with place in Chasing Saturday Night. We find a man at middle age looking back. I asked Kriesel about his childhood. “I lived in my head, and still do, pretty much," he said. "I was born in 1961 in Wausau, Wisconsin, a town of 40,000 in the middle of the state's dairyland. My father worked in pre-fab housing construction, and was a foul-tempered drunk. My mother was (and is) a saint, with a heart as big as a duck. But this was 1961, and women weren't independent like today. She was stuck at home with no job or driver's license. I was an only child until I was 10. My brother's a trucker. I was quiet and orderly. Read lots. Played by myself. I wasn't happy or unhappy. I didn't have much for playmates out in the country. But there were a few friends at school. When I discovered comic books at 12 it opened a universe for me. It possessed my imagination. If there'd been comic book teachers in high school instead of English teachers, I'd be drawing & writing Batman today, instead of versifying.”

Okay, now that all the review skimmers have left us, let me make this offer to you - the good, the true and beautiful reader of this review. You must have a copy of this book; so I will buy it for a few of you – or ten to be exact. That’s right; I will take money out of my pocket in order to put this book into your hands. Here are the rules: since this review will appear in various publications at different times, the first four readers who e-mail me their name and address in November 2005 will get Chasing Saturday Night free and delivered to their door. The first three readers in December 2005 and the first three readers in January 2006 will also get free copies - one per person. Reach me at: charlesr@execpc.com.

Sometimes a “reviewer” falls in love. Sometimes he gets off the fence and gets swept away into the poems, suspending disbelief and discovering a few hours later that he’s been Chasing Saturday Night.

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THREE SHORT REVIEWS

On a good day luck dropped three quality books of poetry in my mail box: MIGHTY GOOD LAND by Dan Powers, SHORTS by John Lehman and PLAYING TENNIS WITH ANTONNIONI by Alan Catlin. As I read these writers I was struck by what opportunity the poetic form offers us; not just for expression, but for experimentation. Powers, Lehman, and Catlin all write with eloquence, yet in styles that are quite dissimilar. They hail from different parts of the United States; one from the Midwest, the other from the South, and the other a true blue Easterner. These geographic distinctions can be heard in their poetry. In addition, each uses line structure very differently, but to good purpose. I liked all three of these books, but for very different reasons.

MIGHTY GOOD LAND
By: Dan Powers

52 Poems / 103 Pages / $12.95

Black Greyhound Media
P.O. Box 40367
Nashville, TN 37204

I found it hard to believe that this was Dan Powers’ first published book of poetry. These straightforward narrative poems are told with restraint and clarity. Mighty Good Land is all about the people and places in Power’s life; his wife, his father, his children, the farm, the church, the home. They mirror the reflections many of have as we look over the landscape of our life. This is an excerpt from, “Good Earth and Poor”:

The seasons and the planting of seed –

by nature the true work of our father –

who never owned the piece of land he wanted,

but it was near, past the end of our field,

and through the seasons he watched it fall

piece by piece into the hands of the subdividers.

And with the half-smile of given-up desire,

he would say, “That was mighty good land.”

And he would say it softly to no one but himself

while he held his hands dug deep into his pockets.

And another from, “Half-Light Off the Appalachian Trail”:

I drive home as if alone, blind in rain

and headlights, you far away in stillness

on your dark side of the truck,

the wipers slapping rhythm to the cold silences

piling up between us like a mountain

we can’t see over, can’t climb, won’t try

as long as it’s raining.

There is no secret code language or illusive imagery in these poems. The writer is personally revealing with words that are clear-spoken. This is a fine first book with poems reflecting a southern sensibility.

SHORTS
101 Brief Poems of Wonder and Surprise
By: John Lehman

101 Poems / 95 Pages / $11.95
ISBN-13: 078-0-9741728-2-8

Zelda Wilde Publishing
315 Water Street
Cambridge, WI 53523

The poetry in this collection is easy to read and assimilate – the themes are anchored in the Midwest, but the conclusions are universal in significance. They have a Haiku feel about them – starting the reader in one place and leaving them suspended in another. Lehman is the master of the understatement, as well as the third and most critical element of poetry – the ending. With great skill he takes a collection of common moments and elevates them.

Many Haiku poets choose to limit the quantity of the offerings in a particular book or collection, wanting to give each poem space to reverberate with afterglow. In Shorts, Lehman made the choice to pack them in - 101 to be exact. I feel the sheer volume may have diluted the overall impact of the book.

In his preface, Lehman notes, “Shorts is the first book comprised entirely of justified poems. This new form – which I originated – capitalizes on the dynamics between the spoken sentence and this intentionally-chosen line break.” I am always a bit suspicious when a writer says they created a new form. I realize poetry more then any other form of writing is subject to the art of formatting (shall we call it an obsession). But in this case Lehman’s form serves its function well and presents his work without the distraction of more ornate formatting strategies.

Here are two examples of Lehman’s justified poem (which I can’t quite do justice to because my right margins are a bit ragged-edged; his are not):

After My Son’s

Divorce

Clouds above mountains

form precipitous ranges

in the sky. Moss-headed

Salmon struggle upstream

to lay their eggs then die.

We head on motorcycles

toward Turnagain Point.

I wonder how far. And he

wonders why.

Another Sub-Zero Night

“Once there were birds,” I tell my pup,

“a sun to warm your face and amazing

things called flowers, that would grow.”

She shivers and urinates on the snow.

This expansive collection of short narrative poems is nimble and wise. Learned technique and keen observational skill make this an enjoyable read. One can almost visualize Lehman’s notebook crammed with quick descriptions of the life around him, which fall under his expert hand into Shorts.

PLAYING TENNIS WITH ANTONIONI

By: Alan Catlin
27 Poems / 62 Pages / $15
ISBN: 1-5966-021-2