Tag: Book Review

Iolaire by Karen Clavelle: Book Review

Something small and dark was rolling in the waves, in and out it went, what’s that, what’s that. And then stayed a sailor’s hat come right to my feet (18).

Iolaire is a hybrid telling of one of Scotland’s worse maritime disasters, a story of an island’s grief, a woman’s loss, and by the end, a new (though haunted) beginning.

***

The sailor’s hat (of the initial quote, above), echoes throughout Iolaire by Karen Clavelle. The hat, washed up on the shore, becomes a haunting reminder for Is (short for the Gaelic Iseabail) that her love has gone missing in the waters off the Beasts of Holm. He was lost in the early hours of 1919 when the HMS Iolaire broke apart on the Beasts, the rocks at the approach to Stornoway. New Year’s Day was to have been the joyful homecoming of sailors to the Long Island (Lewis and Harris) at the end of WWI; instead, it is the saddest day.

The bride, Is, becomes a widow, a woman who writes letters to her missing love, letters that she bundles and puts away in a drawer. But the book-long narrative is told not only in the epistolary form, which allows readers to access the thoughts and emotions of Is, but the lyric also includes actual excerpts from newspapers, and transcripts from the navy’s inquiry, folkloric prophecies, the poet’s interjections, and poetry.

The first time we’re given a look at the poignant folklore is shortly before the disaster:

Now, at that time of year it gets dusk in the afternoon, and if you’re going to be seeing anything, that’s when you’ll be seeing it — at dusk. And that’s when he did — he saw the stag, him and his sisters. Standing in the path in front of them, it was, and it turned its head and it looked right at them, and then it was gone.

… And sure enough, the boat wrecked that very night. The sister’s husband, he was lost… (50).

Clavelle also uses her voice to interject observations and insights about the village where she lives during her research, and we readers time travel between then of the shipwreck and now. For example,

In the dream or out of it, I am absorbed in a village that boasts a school, a ceilidh house, a historical society, churches, a cemetery, and a tiny community shop, (the) Bùth, that besides offering groceries and hardware, houses the post office where Dorothy franks the mail with a date-stamp she changes daily by hand, and in the windows posts funeral announcements and community events (46).

Besides the village, Clavelle comments on the ship’s Gaelic name — iolaire sùil na grèine — sea eagle, a name in which irony brims: the boat named for the bird that foreshadowed war and disaster. Haliaeetus albicilla, its Gaelic name in the Seann-sgeulachdan (mythology): fior eun, the eagle, ‘the true bird’… (47).

Besides creative, lyrical, and factual prose, untitled poems also flow through Iolaire. One of my favourites is:

the tide bell rings

and I call for you in the heather and the thrift by An Cùl Beag
in the low tide from the caves from the
shadows of the stacks at Cala Ghearraidh

I call along the endless length of the Tràigh Mhòir.
beneath the slopes of the sand-cliffs, the scarred hills,
the tide pools; from the red seaweed I call
from black-sinewed strand where in grace in death gannets lie
feathers spread as though in flight, their eyes and bones picked clean
                                                  and burying beetles labour their days

I call from the blanket bogs, through the mists and the wind
from the shelter of the marram grass
where summer blues the forget-me-nots on the machair
     where the greylag geese and hoodie crows, and
          the ewes call in their own
           so strong the pain of separation (98)

Iolaire is a poetic narrative weaving fictional letters, nonfiction articles, as well as documentary notes into a lyrical tale of love, agony, and grief. Cavelle uses many strategies to unravel the heartbreaking tale of the ship’s break-up on the rocks, the desperate attempts the sailor’s made to reach shore, the lingering anguish of the people from over 60 villages mourning 205 deaths (only 82 sailors survived).

This New Year’s Day (2024) marks the 105th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Iolaire. It is a good time to read Iolaire by Karen Clavelle and to remember one of the saddest moments to ever mark a military homecoming.

Available through your local bookstore or online: Iolaire by Karen Clavelle (Turnstone Press, ISBN 978-0-88801-611-9)

Galestro by Bruce Hunter: Book Review

In this life, we are visitors no matter where we go / on this earth, the headstones remind us.

— “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” (98-107)

Galestro, of the book’s title, is the name of the mineral-rich and stony soil of Tuscany. It’s the hard till that nurtures the Sangiovese vines and the Chianti that flows through poems like love. Smooth-flowing Chianti and stony hard till are wonderful metaphors that thread throughout the collection. Perhaps it is for this “flow” that Bruce Hunter has arranged the poems without distinct sections. However, the poems have been carefully organized. In the initial poems, Hunter reflects on his youth and working years; the middle section celebrates Tuscany and love; and the last poem circles back, exploring a theme introduced early on. Individual poems are constructed on a framework of details, which of course creates the pull of authenticity, but we also find allusion, together engaging both our love of facts and our love of fancy.

One poem that reflects on Hunter’s young years in and around Calgary surprised me with the flavour of a Patrick Lane poem. In no way does the poem mimic Lane, which makes it hard to put my finger on what exactly made me sit up in my chair when I read “Skyhooks” (30-33). In the poem, Hunter begins by describing kites:

Each of them angling for light, 
strung between existence and dream
trolling for skyfish or errant angels
lost in the lure of clouds.

But then he quickly moves to a tough work scene, the stuff of early Lane (and of Tom Wayman, too), before he brings humour into the poem. A complex juggle of tone, beauty, and grit.

The primary subject of the first sixty-five pages is the geography and people of Hunter’s childhood in Calgary and his adult life in Toronto, although there’s a wide range of themes and metaphors layering the poetry.  Then, to celebrate his actual retirement, Hunter travels with his wife to Italy. It is here we gain the benefit of Hunter’s apprenticeship as a gardener and arborist (as he tells us in “Lost and Found in Cortona,” p 90-93). This deep knowledge creates the details that make the Italian poems so fascinating. It is also here, in these Tuscany poems that we see Lisa as lover-muse. For example, in the title poem “Galestro” (p 76-83):

I learned to read soil in my apprenticeship,
and sky and wind, on the highest point of land,
where rain is made, and wine,
somewhere between alchemy and prayer,
reverence and ritual….

Hunter is sensitivo in his knowledge of gardening, but there’s been a subtle switch and suddenly Lisa, his wife, is sensitiva:

…the woman who teaches the heart,
who reads my eyes, who calms the animals, heals the beloved.

This is Bruce Hunter’s tenth book. His writing apprenticeship has led to multi-layered poems that offer at once a clear, straightforward read and, if you sit with them, a complex understanding of life, love, and endings. Much of my recent reading has included single-theme collections and book-length poems. Reading Galestro has forced a re-think. Hunter’s voice, as you can see, is wide-ranging. I’m breaking free of my mold.

For another example of Hunter’s versatility, “Ligurian Poppies” introduces the poet as witness:

Bomb cracks in the University of Bologna.
The missing towers of the Castello.
Neptune can hold back the sea
but not the vile will of hard men.

The collection is all metaphor.

In “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” (98-107), the final poem in the collection, Hunter reflects on a visit to the far northeastern edge of Scotland, Caithness, the Tomb of Dunn and of Hunter’s forebearers:

The tomb’s open now, pillaged.
The plank lid torn off and left where it landed.
Vines cover the chapel’s window-less walls.
The roof long ago gone….

//

And there’s an alder sapling between their graves.
Seeds from the ancient forest brought up by gravediggers.
One day the alder will crack the stone.
Trees stronger than stone in their kinetic lift.

When we search for the ancestors, for what are we searching? Hunter takes us on a journey through language and naming, through mythic and physical places, concluding the poem and collection with: and if I had one wish: / I be that tree, / stronger than stone in its lift. / And that my friends, is the gist.

What is there to say after that?

Galestro is a big book (8 x 10 inches, 122 pages) of poetry by Bruce Hunter, translated from English (on the left page) into Italian by Andrea Sirotti (on the right). It is a pleasure for word-lovers to see how the words fall and follow, a treat to compare and imagine how they sound and what they evoke in the second language.

Galestro, Quaderni del Bardo (2023) by Bruce Hunter

Available through your local bookstore or online: ISBN 9798376256602

The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky by Amy Dennis – Book Review

I know // I know / nothing // of Armenia 1915 – “Admission”

In The Sleep Orchard, Amy Dennis reaches deep inside the life and myth of Arshile Gorky. She enters his paintings and photographs, reaches into the Armenian genocide’s impact on one man. She explores Gorky’s place in the history of art. And in attempting to understand Gorky, Dennis crosses borders of time and place.

In “On Waking,” the first poem in the collection, it is clear that Dennis has absorbed Gorky into her life. She writes: My lover says I have called out….

… I don’t remember.
But know after waking I’ve scavenged

old papers to find antique recipes for ink, hungry
for a hallowed liquid to write about Gorky. In dreams
he is tall and looks into me.

Every morning his paint rattles my thin grasp
on language.

In the second poem, “Greenware,” Dennis writes: …I’ve never before slit / my fingernails into this // wild apple and pistachio / where his mother wipes her hands. Gorky’s mother, who died in his arms when he was a boy of about fifteen years, becomes the monumental loss that haunts his paintings – and Dennis’s poems. In my reading of the collection, mother is at the root of the art connecting artist and author like the mycorrhizal network of tree roots. The theme begins with Gorky’s mother (Shushan der Marderosian), continues with his wife (Agnes Magruder, called Mougouch) who is mother of his children and, woven into the collection, is Dennis’s impending motherhood. Mother: a threaded root. Evocation: Mother. Armenia.

Arshile Gorky was a man who reinvented himself (his birthname was Vosdanik Adoian). In “Marny George at 36 Union Square,” Dennis writes: You were a Russian portraitist // Georgian prince, nephew to Maxim Gorky. Prodigy / who once studied in Paris. Gorky also reinvented art. Dennis traces his artistic lineage. For example, in “Shards,” she writes: he locates / shapes in these famous canyons:

Matisse’s Red
Studio, Miro’s Still Life
with Old Shoe, Picasso’s Plaster
Head, The City by Léger.

Gorky penetrates / where these artists end / and he began…. He became known as the father of abstract expressionism, paving the way for Pollock and Rothko and Gottlieb and de Kooning (“Ambiguous Spaces, Seemingly Random Angles”).

Although Dennis’s poems place Gorky in the spectrum of art history, it is context, neither art history nor art criticism. Although Dennis describes paintings and photographs, the ekphrastic nature of the poetry is not the only technique Dennis applies to reach the heart of her subject: “A Response to Arshile Gorky.” The Sleep Orchard contains poems in which Dennis writes of his mother, where she inhabits Mougouch, and where she writes to his daughters. But this collection is not a biography. Dennis writes of her own experiences during the writing of The Sleep Orchard, but it is not memoir. She claims to know nothing about Armenia – I know // I know / nothing // of Armenia 1915 (“Admission,” the third poem), but the collection bears witness to the impact of that genocide. The Sleep Orchard is all of this and more. The collection is tapestry, the colours of Armenia, a search for Arshile Gorky.

Dennis’s collection is sensuous, passionate, lyrical. Her skillful writing draws readers inside, always evocative. My favourite poem in the collection happens to have one of the longest titles: “Meditation on White (traced Backwards), Response, to Charred Beloved /, 1946.” You can see her skill, hear her poetic voice:

Named after lilies, his mother Shushan warmed
her infants in cradles lined with sand, grew daughters
to face east and hail Mary. Each November, string-tied
from ceilings, she dried pears, their skins distilled
with rippled sugar and the deathly

look of withdrawal, the fruits
parched as embalmed songbirds or small raptors
swathed in Egypt. Her once son, his voice-

box drowned with balsam, would not speak
until he was six, until six spoke only with birds. This,
a small sacrifice for the close studies of such wings, white
doves he let roost in his breaking.

You do not need to know a thing about Gorky’s art or ekphrastic poetry to be drawn inside the emotion of the poems. Dennis brings Gorky and his work to life, opening a door for readers to enter his world – and hers – whether or not you are an art afficionado. Art is the vehicle, but there is much more to The Sleep Orchard.

The Sleep Orchard (Mansfield Press, 2022) is available through your local bookstore, the publisher, or online (ISBN 978-1-77126-280-4).

You may also be interested in my review of Mechanics of a Gaze, Branka Petrovic’s poetry collection about Gustav Klimpt and Emile Flöge. (Mansfield Press, 2017). If this interests you, please also see The Painted Kiss (Washington Square Press, 2005) for my thoughts on Elizabeth Hickey’s fictionalized novel about Gustav Klimpt and Emile Flöge.

Everchild by Gwynn Scheltema: Book Review

This clementine skin is thin / clings fast, is old. — “Naartjies”

Everchild by Gwynn Scheltema. Aeolus House, 2023

Everchild by Gwynn Scheltema is a collection of poems by a practiced writer. It has earned the praise of Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer who writes, “Compelling and heartbreaking. The poems filled with longing, pain, a sensuous observation of a journey looking to repair itself.” Antony Di Nardo says, “[She takes] us into the heartland of Zimbabwe. There’s a lifetime in these poems, stories to be told about people and places and the state of the human heart, whether grieving or skipping to the beat of its own music.” E. Alex Pierce writes “Gwynn Scheltema writes from every aspect of her wide-lived life with every facet of her bold, courageous, female voice.”

Scheltema’s poems explore absence, loss without nostalgia, in their search for home and identity. They ring with authenticity, a truth richly lived. We find ourselves within the Zimbabwean child-heart that remains alive within the woman she has become. Flowing throughout the collection this thread is strong and constant.

The collection is laid out in four sections: Breathe, Ignite, Ebb, and Be. The prologue poem, “Moongate,” establishes what will follow:

            she breathes
            treads lightly

            on what was

            what will be—

From the first poem, called “The Old Swing,” the reader is placed in time looking back: “After layers of years / the tall metal swing frame stands /                  still.” And we understand that a kind of resolution if not acceptance will be found in the poems, despite the pain that inhabits them. The swing’s chains may be too rusty to achieve the sky of childhood, but it will rise in “song-birthed words.”

One of my favourite poems celebrates Nomvula, the woman of the cover art (a painting by the poet) in whose care the child lives:

Whimpers wend like wind spirals
from the child swaddled on her back who whispers
with spirits she does not want to know
a mother gone that no one speaks of
 thula, thula, hush hush.

The song, almost anthem, stirs.

Nomvula…

removes the sandals with brass buckles
removes the dress with itchy white lace
gathers her to her breast
skin to skin
white to black
 thula, thula, hush hush
ngilapha, I am here.

The mother is absent, an unspoken presence.

In the third section we meet the stepmother, and who wouldn’t think of fairy tales?     

the only hug
my mother ever gave me
I was six

…

I wonder
if I had hugged her back—

While I have omitted the crux of the poem, these words convey the sense of longing for what might have been, as well as a lingering self-doubt that haunts the collection. But do not misunderstand; there is no blame of self or other.

The final section, Be, brings poet and reader to what is, the place past memory, a place of now, a place secure. Scheltema writes, “What matters

            flies home right now from Saskatoon
            warm, wanting flesh inside cold steel
            ornery no doubt from his knees cramped to chin
            airless heat and stiff sandwiches
            but his heart still soft

            …

            our quiet walk in the blossoming.

While Everchild is a first full-length collection, Gwynn Scheltema’s fiction and poetry have been published in journals, magazines and anthologies. In 2021, Glentula Press released her chapbook, Ten of Diamonds, a “constraint” collection of ten poems. She has earned many accolades over the years, all culminating in this exquisite collection, a collection that at its heart is one poem.

***

For more about Everchild and its author, visit https://gwynnscheltema.com/.  A Kindle edition is available through Amazon.ca. For the print edition, order from your local independent bookstore, from the publisher  or get a signed copy by contacting the author.

“Poetry of Witness,” from Sarajevo with Sorrow and Poetry is Blood: Book Review

For whom were these poems intended at the time I wrote them, during the shameless Bosnia war and the siege of Sarajevo? …The lines I wrote were written in the belief that, when compared with the cold newspaper reports which would be forgotten with the start of a new war elsewhere, only poetry could be a true and decent witness to war. — Goran Simić, Preface to from Sarajevo with Sorrow.

from Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simić, translated by Amela Simić. Windsor (ON, Canada): Biblioasis, 2005.
Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian. Toronto (ON, Canada): Guernica Editions, 2018.

 

Poetry of Witness

What is “poetry of witness?” you might be asking. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe looks at the Latin root of the word experience: “ex-periri, a crossing through danger.” In her essay, “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art: To hell and back, with poetry,” Carolyn Forché writes:

In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.

The horror and the dead can live on, carried by survivors, across generations. This is the way that I’ve come to think about poetry of witness, and this has informed my reading of from Sarajevo with Sorrow and Poetry is Blood.

In these two collections, Goran Simić and Keith Garebina share the experience of war: Simić bears witness to the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995 Bosnian War), Garebian bears witness to the generational trauma of the Armenian genocide (1915-1920).

from Sarajevo with Sorrow

77 from Sarajevo with Sorrow

Simić’s “The Face of Sorrow” begins with a metaphor and an image:

I have seen the face of sorrow. It is the face of
the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers
glued to the street by a puddle of blood…

In “A Common Story,” the images intensify: When they brought him to the hospital, half his / body missing….  By the time we get to “Love Story,” we’ve travelled from the particular and immediate experience of the poet to the political reality of murder and the mythologizing of journalism and war. The poem brings us back from romanticized news to the ugly experience itself, as well as the unaccountability inherent in war:

Love Story

The story of Bosko and Amira was a major
media event that Spring. They tried to cross the
bridge out of Sarajevo, believing their future was
on the other side, where the bloody past had
already gone. Death caught them, in the middle
of the bridge. The one who pulled the trigger
wore a uniform and was never called a murderer.

[…]

My friend Prsíc, a Bosnian soldier who guarded
the bridge, watched each day as maggots, flies,
and crows finished off their swollen bodies.

 […]

This is a story that you may recall, but a different story than the one splashed across news channels, this witnessing elicits repellent emotion in the reader, removing all remnants of romance, and we are “marked by the encounter.”

Finally, in the last stanza of “Spring is Coming,” Simić addresses what remains after the siege:

Spring is coming. On crutches.
The time of medals is coming,
when children from freshly whitewashed orphanages start
       searching for family albums,
the time when big flags cover this landscape of horror
in which my neighbour, in the basement,
holds a child’s winter glove in his hand. And weeps.

This haunting aftermath is where we enter the poetry of Keith Garebian.

Poetry is Blood

77 Poetry is Blood

Keith Garebian did not experience the Armenian genocide of 1915-1920, but he bears witness to the continuing trauma left in its wake. (There is a relatively new psychology that supports the idea of historical or inter-generational trauma. (Please see “The Legacy of Trauma by Tori DeAngelis, American Psychological Association, February 2019, Vol 50, No 2.) Garebian is the son of a survivor and, along with his father, carries the scars, scars that find expression and witness in Poetry is Blood.

The collection begins with an image that echoes throughout, and the poem sets an emotional tone that reverberates across individual poems:

April

A month bequeathing poppies,
compact red explosions.

 Insomniacs found bones
in meadows of ordinary light.

In addition to the echo of “poppies,” the father is embedded in the collection. We come to feel the distance between father and son, the incapacity of the father to touch or be touched. The father is more shadow than flesh and blood.

In one of the early poems, “Okra,” Garebian writes: Did he know the leaves were heart-shaped? / I was searching for his heart but he never knew. In “Songs of Nagash the Ghareeb,” he writes: How long, how long / the song of exile leaping from his mouth? And in “Tell Me Why,” he begins with the plea: Tell me why you are drawn to sad music, / old dull pains, scars that linger generations. / Why your sleep is a struggle deep in a cave. It ends with the pain of the distanced child, now man: Tell me why cruelty gets in the way of love, / like wind knocking the heads off flowers, / like time bruising your shattered heart.

In a long poem, “The Pilgrimage,” the poet visits the lost homeland, the site of genocide and he writes: I walk in my orphaned / father’s shoes, their footfall / imprinting his voicelessness. The poet, like his father is essentially orphaned, lost, seeking.

We become steeped in the lasting impact of genocide, see blood in the explosions of poppies, witness the vacuum where love should reside, and experience almost more loss than can be borne. But Garebian continues to search for resolution. Near the end of the collection, in “Elegy” he laments the father and so much more:

My father’s ancient tribe writhes
on my written page,
groaning under a sullen sun
in a landscape of cadavers
so ghostly real
I can count their groans,
even in this harsh north
where introspection freezes
while birds flee on strong wings,
their cries waning in geometric wake.

[and by the conclusion we learn]

The earth moves on
and light dances
as I shelter the dead,
give them refuge in my words
so they may dream of themselves
preying on us as we once did on them.

Conclusion

These poems by Goran Simić and Keith Garebian are not anecdotal, neither are they confessional. The poems in these two collections bare experience of the collective, of cultures so harmed that the weight of destruction seeks voice, seeks listeners to hear and to also experience the trauma. Like the Latin from which experience derives, they cross through danger. from Sarajevo with Sorrow and Poetry is Blood are among the best contemporary examples of poetry of witness.

For readers who want to explore further into the genre, read Anna Akhmatova, as well as the Nobel Prize winners Wisława Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz.

We have come through a century of war but seem to have learned little. Newspaper headlines come and go and now false news clutters our minds. The poets, however, write words that not only sit on the surface of the page, but they write words between the lines, words that resonate psychological and emotional truth, the truth that lingers both individually and collectively. The truth that invites us into ex-periri.

 

Available through your local bookstore or online: from Sarajevo with Sorrow and Poetry is Blood.

 

Review of A Breeze You Whisper in In A Fragile Moment: A Landscape of Canadian Poetry

Whispers and Flames in Kathryn MacDonald. A review of some poems by Kathryn MacDonald in A Breeze You Whisper (Poetry) (2011) Hidden Brook Press. Canada – p. 131-134

Surprises are wonderful, especially when they involve a review of your book in a collection with poets such as Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, and Al Purdy among others. I’ve received the publication notice by email and the book is on its way. More about the collection to come. In the meantime, here is a bit of blatant self-promotion of my collection, A Breeze You Whisper.

51yj9Pt49nL._SX348_BO1,204,203,200_

First, from the press release:

In a Fragile Moment: A Landscape of Canadian Poetry is an insightful collection of essays and reviews, written from the poetic heart of Professor Olivé. The authors covered in this astute critical study are treated with heart felt respect:

Milton Acorn, Merle Amodeo, Margaret Atwood, Katharine Beeman, Allan Briesmaster, Patrick Connors, James Deahl, Antony Di Nardo, J. Graham Ducker, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Katherine L. Gordon, Kimberley Grove, Richard M. Grove, Don Gutteridge, Lala Heine-Koehn, Keith Inman, Bruce Kauffman, Donna Langevin, John B. Lee, Norma West Linder, Kathryn MacDonald, Lisa Makarchuk, Bruce Meyer, Colin Morton, Marvin Orbach, Deborah Panko, Al Purdy, Sarah Richardson, Linda Rogers, Glen Sorestad, Anna Yin.

The review:

“Whispers and Flames”

My nights are good ones. Besides friends, family, sharing and joy, poetry books flood my bed and my mind before I go to sleep. It is a wealth found nowhere else. Last night it was not The Voice of the Land, or the People´s Poet. Last night it was a whisper in my ears, a dance of words and flames before my eyes: Kathryn MacDonald.

If I had to choose one word for her poetry, I´d say “sensuality.” It overflows the book´s margins shipping fruit and fire that crackles in its pages as I hold my breath caught in the delicacy of her phrases or gaspingly sigh marveled at their attractiveness.

I went through some of her poems. “A Breeze You Whisper” entwines, with simplicity and smoothness, two major themes at the core of poetry: nature and love. Neither the book´s title nor the poem´s has a comma, but its single stanza includes it in the first two lines (“A breeze, you whisper. A bird, you soar and hover”). These pauses are dictated, and intended, by the poet as a mindful pointer of serene procession towards something – provoking, soul-diving, engaging – prompted by the nature-sent, photo-like proposal.

The “You” mentioned in the poem is sensitively attached to nature; but in a quiet association – as if paving the lovers´ way to intimacy – that is set free, no punctuation in lines three and four, to yield the lover to her: “… into the nest hidden within my tossing limbs.” It is a pas de deux from contextual meanings (lines one and two) to figurative meanings (end of line two through three and four). “The nest” strikes a euphemistic chord, which empowers the sentence with sky´s-the-limit interpretations by the reader.

“Blueberry Picking” is play with meanings in cross-contextual insinuations only to be perceived by the mind. Fruit – flavor, colour and look – is the main star in a poem that creates allegories of berry-blue sensuality. The reader climbs – rung by rung – down the poem from “Lake of the Woods, round and placid like the heavy rocks from which the prickly bushes seemed to grow” to “… the sweet berries with my tongue.” Mind-blowing juggling with “I fondled the sweet berries with my tongue” as a prelude to a suggestive “mood.” Situations and characters´ status dribble sensually. The coda modifies the tempo of the poem, its atmosphere.

Kathryn can´t and won´t give up her incursions to nature in “One Woman” for describing/comparing: “Your laughter… geyser filling me with love” or “Exuberant you… deep in life´s river…” She uses metaphors to depict setbacks too: … “welcoming flotsam tossed up in turmoil…,” and optimism again: “glowing like sunrise.” The three lines before the last one (“a surprise hug manifesting joy and rampant passion”) lead to the poem´s essence: “all wrapped up in one woman.” Uncomplicated words, deftly chosen, concise: expressive love and admiration.

“Avatar”  is a proverbial narration of the creative act, its tumultuous process preceding the ultimate phase of artistic conception until the time “to brush across canvas.” It starts explaining somehow the artist-poet strings and the urges/feelings rifling through them, binding them, nurturing them: “her soul tremoring through fingertips / her tears creating rainbows of release.” The image “rainbows of release” confers both painting-related chromatic breadth and cathartic burst to the stanza and the poem.

Stanza two is the vertex pulling in the cosmos and maelstrom of art (“She turns through her nights / courting images / and exaggerations / that revolve / like the moon / through her / seasons and / from the pinnacle of her / rotation / she spirals / like / the dream shattering”), which culminates in “the dream shattering.” This shattering is laden with meanings beyond the notion of shatter that we have, a shattering that creates. Stanza three is the ultimate stage, the artist´s “big bang.” It lays down “across canvas” all of the furnace´s burning embers of the artistic produce.

Read these lines from the poem “Pleasure”: “Your fingers touch the buttons pushing them through each hole creating a V in my white nightgown.” Notably, the poem is homage to the person who has given the poet transcendent moments of pleasure, her companion, her lover: “You pleasure me and more.” The repetition of “and more” as a stylistic device is a key for readers to open divergent doors into their comprehension of the poem: a sensuality bordering eroticism, which is competently molded by the poet. We also feel the defining balance found in the rare gift of companionship, understood as closeness of two beings: the unfailing, necessary presence (“Have done so for half my life and more”).

Finally, “Winter Storm” poses a question to the reader: Why this title? I can only guess. This poem is an erotically wrought piece sublimely elaborated on by the poet. She kneads structure and the way stanzas are set on the page, which contributes to the poem´s mood and atmosphere. It tells of a lover´s subterfuge to win back a woman´s favors (“while he tugs at her memory”). A mind-poking, “blackmailish” foreplay that screens graphic memories: “when motion was joy when their bodies easily skimmed white powder”). The woman “marks distance with care measuring her path” while “he tugs” and she gives “slowly” in.

There is no doubt she has been re-conquered. Now I could explain the title gathering from here and there words, details, under and overtones, and tessitura. One clue is “now she inches slowly downward feeling sleet on her forehead…” Sleet says it all, watery snow, and the fact that it is on her forehead is a sign, for me, of mental “weakening.” A storm is approaching her winter, a storm that spells anticipation, desire, straightforward, concrete come-ons: “She sees his blue eyes his hand reach feels it cup her small breast.” She seems to be awakening from her wintery slumber, defrosted by “his blue eyes.” While the first poem commented here in my review was a breeze and a whisper; this is a latently raging storm of words and love-making. I melted.

Six poems and lots of sparkles in whispers and flames is what I surmised from this tender, sensual author. I am glad her book came to me. Thank you, Kathryn.

 

Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias is an Associate Professor at the University of Holguín, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Education, Major in English, and a Master’s Degree in Pedagogical Sciences. He is also Head of the English Language Discipline and a member of the Canadian Studies Department of the Holguín University in Cuba. Miguel Olivé is also a member of the Mexican Association of Language and Literature Professors, VP of the William Shakespeare Studies Center. Professor Olivé is Editor-in-chief of the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance (CCLA) magazine The Ambassador, also Assistant Editor of The Envoy newsletter, and CCLA President in Cuba.

Professor Olivé has been teaching for over thirty years and writing reviews, poems and stories in Spanish and in English. He has written and published numerous academic papers in Cuba, Mexico, Spain and Canada.

Hidden Brook Press is about to publish his first solo full-length book of poems, in English and Spanish, Forge of Words (2019). SandCrab books will also publish These Voices Beating in our Hearts: Poems from the Valley (Spanish-English) in ebook format, of which he is Editor, but also features poems of his together with other eleven Holguín poets. His themes are about women, people, life, family, love, nature, and human values.

Available from your local bookseller or online: In A Fragile Moment: A Landscape of Canadian Poetry

For more about A Breeze You Whisper, please go to this blog: Three poems: excerpts from A Breeze You Whisper, to purchase visit your local bookseller or online: A Breeze You Whisper (in Canada: A Breeze You Whisper).

River of Hidden Dreams by Connie May Fowler: Book Review

This island is far more full of life than I had thought. Animals I cannot name are beginning to make themselves known. I hear twigs snap, and cries filter now and again from woods to sky. I wrap up tighter and try to concentrate on Mama and Mima. I think of that day Mr. Sammy decided he had turned old. His sudden despair and Miss Raison’s drowning weren’t the only life-changing events in the forest hideaway that stormy afternoon. Mima conceived my mother in the middle of all that lightning and rain (186-7).

I often buy used books from volunteers staffing “Friends of the Library” shop at the entrance to Belleville’s library. This is where I found River of Hidden Dreams by Connie May Fowler. (Purchases support our public library and often great finds can be made.)

I picked the book up because of the cover – a photograph that I might have been smitten to take – an egret in long, marshy grasses. The narrative, which identifies as fiction, is dedicated to two women who seem very much like two characters in the story. However, the blurb on the dust jacket almost put me off – romance (the romantic, not the historic variety). Nevertheless, I was drawn in.

Fowler’s book reminds me a little of Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (2018). What the two books share is a boat on a river, water that hides mysteries and danger, and consciousness more surreal than real. Johnson’s story is far more complex and more beautifully executed…and much more surreal and daring. But Fowler’s story was published 24 years earlier. Johnson’s story centres on the intricate relations of a mother and daughter; Fowler’s focuses on a woman’s memories of her mother, grandmother and grandfather who tell their own stories. To my mind, the intervention of Carlos and a mummified baby spoil what might have been a much more interesting tale.

River of Hidden Dreams fought with me (or I with it). I threatened to toss it aside. Then I turned the page again. The orneriness of the grandmother and granddaughter parallel became a bit too much…but then I continued reading. The handsome, perfect, prince-charming Carlos is polar-opposite of his miserable, mean Mamacita/Saidie. Perhaps someone told the author, “you’d better include a love object and sex.” Still, the pages kept turning.

What works: Mr. Sammy, the trawler, the river, the Everglades, and the ancestors speaking their own stories for the eerie, jarring, sensuous impact. Fowler’s descriptions held me enchanted. I slipped into her river-world where time became untethered. The story may have happened last century or last year; it doesn’t matter. I felt its immediacy, its reality in a surreal kind of way.

River of Hidden Dreams by Connie May Fowler has earned my toughest review. Now that it’s written, I’ve checked what others have said…and everyone loved everything about it. Now you might want to read the novel and make up your own mind. Do let me know…please.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: River of Hidden Dreams

(The hardcover is listed for Cdn $248.72 – you may want to visit your library to borrow a copy.)

The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson: Book Review

I find a kind of hope here, in this / homelessness, in this place / where no one knows me – / where I’ll be gone, like some / over-wintering bird, / before they even notice. (Beginning to Green)

The poet searches: for his shadow-self, for grief and guilt, and for life and meaning. In The Wrecking Light, Robin Robertson moves into the past, sheds light onto the present, and shape-shifts between reality and the surreal.

In the first section, Silvered Water, the first poem, “Album,” sets a tone that echoes throughout the collection. It begins:

I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.

(…)

A ghost is there; the ghost gets up to go.

The Wrecking Light is full of memories that include memories of others: the girl / with the hare lip / down by Clachan Bridge (“By Clachan Bridge”). And the collection ends with the personal memory of “Hammersmith Winter” when through the drawn curtain / shines the snowlight I remember as a boy, / sitting up at the window watching it fall. Mixed with memories is a sense of grieving, as in “Fall From Grace:”

My life a mix of dull disgraces
and watery acclaim, my daughters know
I cannot look into their clear faces;
what shines back at me is shame.

The theme continues. In “Tinsel,” in the woods: If you’re very quiet, you might pick up loss: or rather / the thin noise that losing makes – perdition. / If you’re absolutely silent. And with loss comes leaving. The very next poem, “Leaving St. Kilda,” takes us on a sea journey brimming with geographic details and clear images cut clean by departure. In this geographical catalogue: sea rhythm; progression.

But don’t get the wrong idea, these poems are neither nostalgic nor maudlin. In the skillful hands of this visionary, we are taken on a raucous ride with unexpected twists and turns.

In the second section called Broken Water, the first poem’s horror and the brutal honesty of rough island life and penance is laid bare. In “Law of the Island” Robertson paints a vivid description of island punishment and the casualness of its deployment. In this section, he gives us a back-and-forth of short poems with punch and longer, exploratory ones where he writes after Ovid, Neruda, Baudelaire, and myth to understand humanity’s weaknesses. Here, “Grave Goods,” is beyond surreal; it enters magic.

In the third section, Unspoken Water, the woods and forests of childhood again dominate. In “The Wood of Lost Things,” the vision is clearer and in its clarity, more haunting. Robertson writes: I have found the place I wasn’t meant to find (…)

Hung on a silver birch, my school cap
and satchel; next to them, the docken suit,
and next to that, pinned to a branch,
my lost comforter –
a piece of blanket worn to the size of my hand.

 You can see how he leads us. Like Narcissus he sees a face I seem to know. But unlike Narcissus, he isn’t struck by his beauty. Of course not. But he does give us a resolution (of sorts).

In The Wrecking Light, there is much of the sea, of woods, of love and loss, of searching. I return to the final poem, “Hammersmith Winter,” and the poet’s final plea: Look at the snow, / I said, to whoever might be near, I’m cold, / would you hold me. Hold me. Let me go.

Robin Robertson has written an intense, lyrical collection with movement as through dreams bordering on nightmare (I dare not use the word haunting again, although that is the effect his writing creates). This is Robertson’s forth book of poetry; I recommend you enter his world.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: The Wrecking Light

Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller: Book Review

In every real way, the ring was placed here / the ring of now pock-marked, planetary stone (…) but the landscape was first, the stones only our / attempt at echo and veneration. (The Ring of Brodgar)

Tim Miller collapses 30,000 years of archaeology into a poetry collection that feels the thrill of immediate experience. He stirs a bit of magic, weaving it into the facts of what we know from long-past history.

In “Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira” (France and Spain, 35,000 – 12,000 BC), Miller writes: Now we come to paint with light and fire. In this seven-part poem, we go beyond the images and enter the process of painting them:

A bison made with his hands, white hands dipped in red
And palms slapped on cold rock again and again,
Smacked hands turned or righted or angles
And his exhausted step back to see
The animal made only of red palms and rock,
Red like bison’s blood, stone vitality,
His awe at a heartbeat behind the wall,
And his hands red as a midwife’s.

The poet does not stand back, merely to look in wonder and awe, although the mystery inherent in that is present. He manages intimacy and time dissolves.

Lines jump off the page, lines like The sun sets into the sea and is doused / and rises with the sound of reborn flame / rolling into another red morning. The title, “The Sun Sets into the Sea” is incantatory, hypnotic. Doing the work of a chant, it carries us to the sea and the sun, which so many peoples worshipped.

The landscape, too, is revealed as it reveals burials of the long dead. In “Long Barrows,” graves become humps…in the landscape, / small rises like murmurs. The collapsing of then and now runs throughout the collection as it does in:

Horses and Cows on Orkney

Horses curled in the flaming spiral of sleep,
The huge immensity of their bodies
Belied by the blankets they wear, or the
Tight scroll they twist themselves into on the ground,
An enormity suddenly made small
Or at least passive, compact, the coiled braid
Of body closer to tree or landscape,
The tilted, chiseled head nearer to stone
Or to steel or something pulled from the fire,
Some monument to just how this place works,
That you do not escape the wind, but dream in it.

And this would not be a “prehistory” collection if the goddesses were not brought forth. “Female Figurines” begins with the urgency of poetic catalogue, an incantation:

Hum the words with me and you might understand:
Mammoth ivory, hematite, limestone,
Black jet, soapstone, antler and fired clay –
All of these become our bodies because
Our bodies are the place of becoming.

Tim Miller stirs the imagination. His narrative poems in Bone Antler Stone breathe life into the archeological past of Europe. Now my heart yearns for poetic translation of “New World” prehistory.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: Bone Antler Stone

A personal note:
Reading “Female Figurines” (Bone Antler Stone), I walked over to a display table in my sitting area and picked up a cast replica of the Goddess of Willendorf, a gift of my professor of Art and Archeology. In that course, Professor Leonard Kroon insisted we experience art. I did two things: first, I visited the petroglyph site at Rice Lake, lay on the shamanic rock and listened to the earth gurgling through a slanted crack (out of that experience came a poem, “Migration,” which is included in A Breeze You Whisper) and I carved a hawk from a block of soapstone. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the red-tailed hawk would become a motif in later poems. That aside, I cradled the Willendorf figure – both tiny as my palm and monumental – and felt magic through the rotund Lilliputian goddess before returning to Miller’s poems.

For more about my writing, please see “About”

Mechanics of a Gaze by Branka Petrovic; poetry review and reading/writing tips

Inside his studio, a woman awaits // her turn to be myth

In Mechanics of a Gaze, Branka Petrovic strips the paintings of Gustav Klimt—layer by layer—until only the male gaze is left. Petrovic’s interpretation of the man and his work is not flattering. The poems are irreverent, provocative, skillful and mature.

The structure of the book leads us from insightful—although sometimes devastating profiles—and ekphrastic poems to historical notes and interpretations by others. In the first section (“His Women”), we meet a selection of the women who were model, muse and sexual object. The poems unmask the erotic within Klimt’s studio, sometimes blatantly and sometimes more suggestively.

Whatever’s semi about this nude, it’s not
the way we enter the sketch,
her swift dialogue of the illicit.

Slipped between the poems are excerpts from postcards sent by Klimt to Emilie Flӧge over their long relationship. They continue throughout, presaging the final section and providing an insight into the Klimt-Flӧge relationship and his character.

Next, the focus is on Emilie Flӧge, the woman who was Klimt’s friend, sometimes lover, and lifelong companion. In a poem called “Gustav & Emilie, Petrovic creates a scene (perhaps from a photo taken at her family cottage at Lake Attersee) but then imagines:

If he were to paint you right now,
the vertical lines of your dress
would leak jonquil, mutate

into a metallic-gold,

backdrop; osmanthus sprouting

from your hands….

…

…Your air,

a brooding saint.

Petrovic at once captures the essence of Klimt’s art and sexual fecundity as evidenced in “osmanthus.” In another poem, she does this with “Calder,” alluding to movement. Petrovic demonstrates a close reading of both the paintings/drawings and the characters that inhabit (and those who created) them. And in five words defines Flӧge and the relationship.

The third section places the gaze on Adele Bloch-Bauer. (You may recall the 2006 movie “The Woman in Gold,” starring Helen Mirren, which takes the point-of-view of Maria Altmann who reclaims the painting of her aunt from the Austrian establishment.)  In one poem, Petrovic expresses the essence of Adele and Klimt as “a Wittgenstein riddle.”

In the fourth section, “Mankind Drifting,” the perspective broadens to include Vienna and the Secessionists’ art (late 19th through early 20th centuries). The Secessionists led the way from traditional-to-modern art in Vienna. The movement turned conservative values on their head, and Gustav Klimt was in the vanguard.  In this section, Petrovic switches focus from Klimt’s portraits to his controversial work for the University of Vienna’s ceilings: Philosophy; Medicine; and Jurisprudence. It is also here that Petrovic returns to Egon Shiele, provocative protégé (“Disabled Sex” appears in the first section).

The final part, “Catalogue Raisonné,” is where we come to found poems and collages, information gleaned from sources such as Wikipedia and the Internet to reviews and the press from The New York Times to The Montreal Gazette. Petrovic’s innovative structuring of the collection leads readers from her subject—the sexualized gaze—of artist and model to the political subject of Nazi looting. With this innovation, Petrovic pushes the convention of most poetry collections.

Branka Petrovic’s debut collection reinvigorates Gustav Klimt and Secessionists’ art. You will never look at the stale gold and mosaic looking greeting cards of Klimt the same. I find Mechanics of a Gaze as invigorating as was the poetry of Sylvia Plath in the 1960s. My guess is that we’ll be hearing more from Branka Petrovic.

 

Tips for Writers

  1. Relevancy: read the poems as a whole, thinking about their subject and relevancy (see Good News for Poets and Readers). As a poet, what role does relevancy to your readers play in your writing? Is relevancy important?
  2. Read each poem for its ekphrastic insight, asking yourself if Petrovic captures the essence of the art. Does the poem work as a poem?
  3. In 2017, I reviewed The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey. Like “Peter Schjeldahl on Gustav Klimt Part 1” and “…Part II” in Mechanics of a Gaze, I have changed my mind somewhat. In that review, I ignored sexual politics and the inherent power of the “gaze.” But after reading The Mechanics of a Gaze, and having witnessed the revelations of the last couple of years, I’ve reread the more sympathetic Kiss. It is Hickey’s fictionalized story of Klimt, written entirely from the point-of-view of Emilie Flӧge. Hickey seeks to get under the skin and into the heart of a woman of the last century. Yet it is all there: the sexualized gaze and acts. Bring your consciousness to Petrovic’s collection. Is Mechanics of a Gaze a feminist collection? If so, does “the message” inform or detract from the work as art?
  4. The Secessionists rejected the orthodox conventions of late 19th-early 20th century Vienna. Their art was rejected by traditional art galleries, so they established their own, a movement toward modernity. Should it be judged/reinterpreted against today’s standards or accepted within its place in history?

 

Available through your local bookstore or online: Mechanics of a Gaze

Also, please see blog 14 The Painted Kiss (2005): The Painted Kiss

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