Tag: Kathryn MacDonald

What I am reading: Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz

Only the squelch of her footfalls, / slap of small waves, wind ruffling. Still / Corot was with her and took her up…. [“A Woman in a Painting but Not So,” 17]

Earlier this fall, I reread The Sparrow: Selected Poems by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2018) in preparation for an opportunity to join the poet and a small number of others to discuss our poetry, a wonderful privilege provided by Third Thursday Reading Series (Cobourg, Ontario). That evening Al Moritz read from his newest collection, Great Silent Ballad.

I had read a review by Colin Carberry that was posted on The High Window blog (August 1, 2024). I have now read Moritz’s newest collection more than once. However, I’ve decided to share The High Window’s review because I can’t do better than Colin Carberry. Even the poems that he discusses as favourites are also favourites of mine. Nevertheless, I would like to mention two additional poems.

Great Silent Ballad contains a section that reflects on social issues (Carberry discusses “The Tawer” and the idea of exploitation and restitution.) Another poem from the section of that name is “The Tradition” (115). I like the poem for different reasons on different readings, always with an undercurrent of sadness that haunts. It suggests to me the impossibility of rising above subjugation and of Isobel Wilkerson’s book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents.

The Tradition

He descended to the dead,
wrapped an old towel around his waist,
cooked the soup,
manhandled the huge tin vat to the trestle table,
ladled into bowls,
handed to hands,
listened to lappings and suckings,
watched sad eager lips.
So my grandmother did the same.

I’ll mention one more favourite that Carberry doesn’t, “Would have Taken Up” (107-108). Like other poems at the end of the collection, the poet reflects, writes a lament. It begins: “I rise, the sun too. / It passes over and I work. / I work and it passes farther.” Time goes on. The poet asks, “What have I done”? And at the end:

…O if I’d written her
what I wanted, everything
that composed itself
in my heart, a sung world
as glorious as this one
in a moment of thought,
it would have taken up
my whole day. Sweetly,
And then: sleep. It would have
taken up
all my life.

It’s a pensive and thoughtful poem on many levels, while suggesting that while one focuses on work other things are missed. As in my previous review of still arriving by Bruce Kauffman, Moritz is a poet of a certain age, and perhaps this reflection (even if imagination and not a personal experience) does come through in the collection. What I haven’t mentioned is the boyhood section of Great Silent Ballad: buy or borrow the book and give yourself a treat.

Great Silent Ballad is a pleasure to read. The collection is Moritz’s twenty-second. These poems demonstrate craft, passion, thought, and so much more. Enjoy.

Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2024) is available through your local bookstore or online (ISBN 978-1-4870-1296-0).

Book Review: still arriving by Bruce Kauffman

i’d like to believe / that when we leave / this world / we do it without / breaking stride
[“the final exit,” 68]

Still arriving is Bruce Kauffman’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, which earned an honourable mention in the Don Gutteridge Poetry Award (2022) competition. In addition to his full-length work, Kauffman has published four chapbooks. But writing is not the sole reason for the widespread recognition of his name. For those living in the Kingston area, Bruce Kauffman needs no introduction. In 2020, he was presented with the Mayor’s Arts Champion Award; his work in the community as a poetry booster was featured in The Queen’s Journal (April 2, 2021).

I met Bruce in 2011 during the launch of my first poetry collection and more recently know him as a poetry editor for Devour: Art and Lit Canada, an online journal. Our paths crossed again at the Northumberland Festival of the Arts (NFOTA, September 2024) where he read during the WOW! Words on a Wire event. That is where I found a copy of still arriving, drawn to it by Bruce’s reading and by the quiet pensiveness of the cover image.

The poems have a haunting quality to them, yet feel immediate. In the Queen’s Journal article, Kauffman is quoted as saying, “A lot of my work seems to be sort of nature-drive, sort of Zen-like. Where I get inspiration is in a process called intuitive writing […] I find it important to not think. That’s the first step.” In this sense, the poems are experimental, if not in form. It is easy to accept that some of the poems, such as “unfinished notes from a journal #15” (43) were written using this method. They are reflective, a bit like notes-to-self.

Besides a peek into his journals, Kauffman alludes to Greek mythology, reminding readers of Virgil’s Charon who ferried the dead across the River Styx. Kauffman’s “ferryman” (14) waits. There’s a sense of mourning the impending loss of the self:

quiet comes
the ferryman

the water
before behind
shows no trace of
ripple wave

From whatever references or allusions Kauffman draws, they are well known, needing no explanation. His poems are direct, intimate – as if he’s talking to you over a glass of wine in a quiet spot – accessible, written by a man of certain years and life experience.

Early in the collection, the poet establishes the season of his life and the overriding tone of the poems, as in “autumn” (11):

we all
in an autumn
of our days

not simply any autumn
instead perhaps
that final one
…

His meditative mood becomes an undercurrent running throughout the collection.

In “epiphany” (20) he seems surprised that his present view of life differs greatly from that of youth:

epiphany

for this poet
this late in life

a reminder that
lesser writ
those mourning and vibrant poems
              of youth
instead now
these evening and mourning poems
of and to
      the dead
      the dying

In “gone,” the mourning is for another. The poem begins: “this morning i packed up / the few things left of you / in a box,” and ends with “in the drought /       of a lifetime //       a last morning dew.” Although the book’s title looks forward, this elegiac feeling drifts across the pages.

Perhaps my favourite poem in still arriving falls midway between the book’s covers:

Zhivago, again

After Boris Pasternak’s novel, “Doctor Zhivago”,
with reference to a scene in David Lean’s 1965 film
based on the book

oh, Pasternak
                Zhivago
how you arrive again
in these days
and my dreams
to comfort     to haunt

we both     all
torn inside     outside
by family     place

yours and my
               fiction or not
different era-ed
distant but somehow
                parallel lives
either of us married to ink
as much as flesh

and this morning
dear Larissa
after I now too
have become
              the deserter
having crossed through blizzards
over frozen tundra
left my steed dead
              along the way

Despite Kauffman’s attempts to put a positive light on aging, “Zhivago, again” captures disquiet, loss, regret, the toll of being “married to ink.” This despite the theme suggested by the title and his neighbourhood walks, coffee in a corner café – the things that occupy the “intuitive” poems. This tension in the collection makes it interesting, but it also feels at odds, portraying a conflicted poet who wants a Zen-like life and death, but one who is living and facing it with some trepidation. Still arriving is a thoughtful collection written by a skilled and sensitive writer.

Still arriving by Bruce Kaufman (Wet Ink Books, 2023) is available through your local bookstore or online (ISBN 9781989786819).

Openwork and Limestone by Frances Boyle: Book Review

I wish I’d had a lifeline to throw, / a silken cord for her safe passage back through time. – “Passage” (41)

 Openwork and Limestone by Frances Boyle is a collection of poems to be read carefully. Boyle draws on many sources for inspiration. Her subjects include history, family relationships, art, nature, time/space, and five fascinating poems about Lil. But thematically, the collection is not as scattered as the range of subjects suggests. A line in the prologue poem, “Inhumed,” attunes us to a key theme – posed as a question that runs throughout the collection: “What flows unseen beneath our lives?” – holds it all together.

I am always fascinated by the way poets structure their manuscripts. Structurally, Boyle’s collection is divided into four sections, each beginning with an untitled poem.

In the first section’s prologue poem, the narrator asks: Shall I too play the scientist, / study prehistory in stone… as she imagines time-travelling with Le Guin. And she does travel, imagining Kate, my finespun grandmother who is leaving Ireland with No promise of a quick return (“That Faraway Place”). This poem includes one of the most haunting images of the collection: Kate leaves in a mothdance of handkerchiefs.

In the second section, we find tension between the blight-blasted and openings, and we continue to time-travel. In “Passage,” during the Solstice the family enters the passage tomb at Newgrange…

We squeeze along its length, shoulders brushing stone.
Reaching the chamber, see chevrons, sheaves, triple

//

spirals faint-carved on rock. Charred bone-bits, soot-
shadows. A tomb. Grave goods strewn on passage floor.

The daughter leaves; she couldn’t carry on. The poem concludes with …

I wish I’d had a lifeline to throw,
a silken cord for her safe passage back through time.

Are you reminded of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, the spool of thread?

In the third section prologue poem, there is a silent buzz / of hivemind hysteria and it is this section that we meet Lil. There are five intriguing Lil poems, and I want more of this fascinating character. As my mind went to Greek myth in the previous quote, here my mind leapt to Lilith, first wife of the Biblical Adam. In “Lil’s Rounds, She won’t be sucked under. She won’t drown. In “Singalong,” Lil reminds me of Yeat’s “A Crazed Girl” improvising her music. / Her poetry, dancing upon the shore.

Singalong
Lil was flotsam those years, never
quite sinking. Maybe she landed there
by happenstance; she wasn’t jetsam, no hands
delivered the overboard fling. When she flew

on her feet, whirled with spun eloquence
of fleet deer, she prefigured the bringing
of birdsong, commentary written
in runic, best executed in daytime,
accompaniment dipping at twilight to dirge.

In the final section, hope breaks through. In “Endurance,” Boyle writes: We’re hulking ships mired in frozen seas, / but spring is creaking open. The poems reconnect with earlier ones, as they do in “Tide of Limestone” in which the speaker crawls through caverns: The stuck place. / Dark matter filters us, / flows through our invisible nets. / We leave handprints, / scratches. Scant record. The final poem – “What Letting Go Means” – time travels through memory etched in glass. The speaker admonishes her sister to stand back from the fire, a plea (a hope) for the future.

Lacework and Limestone is Frances Boyles second poetry collection.

Available through your local bookstore or online: Openwork and Limestone. (Frontenac House Ltd., Okotoks, AB, 2022). ISBN 978-1-989466-43-8

Two books by Simon Constam – Domestic Recusals and Brought Down: Book Review

Poetry is wrestling with what lies behind the curtain – Simon Constam

I’ve been rereading Brought Down by Simon Constam since last fall, trying to understand what is layered beneath the obvious beauty of the poems. One middle-of-the night I scribbled on a piece of paper: These poems feel like Buddhist koans – a search for insight – tests. Or maybe, not to provoke “great doubt,” but to express both doubt and faith. It is with this idea that I’ve approached the review. The first poem is a good place to enter the collection, since prologue/first poems generally set the tone and subject for a book.

The first two lines of “Every Glory is Diminished by the Truth” establishes one of the issues nagging away at Constam: And do I flinch at the mention of Deir Yassin? / And do you flinch at the mention of Ma’alot? (The Glossary tells us that Deir Yassin is the site of a massacre of Arabs by Jews in 1948 and it tells us that Ma’alot is the site of a 1984 Palestinian terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of 25 hostages.) Brought Down was published in 2022 before the current war in Gaza; war is not what this collection is about. (Although it might be the backstory.) This collection is one man “wrestling with what lies behind the curtain.”

Writing in a “blurb” for the book, George Elliott Clarke says: “Constam appears as … a Seinfeld-mode Job, questioning God about his ‘masquerading as the dark.’ God is ‘arbitrary’ and we are fickle … .” A disquiet comes through Constam’s struggle, as in:

Simon Agonistes

I am hiding from Him,
like Adam.
Way down in the labyrinth
of Tokyo’s malls,
Eve knows nothing about it,
she thinks it is just a trip,
into the city.

Not to belabour the struggle aspect of the poems, I also want to quote from “HaMakom” (a name for God, also meaning place), and the struggle for place resonates across the decades. “[T]he mind wanders,” the people wander, the book is a jail daring the heart to accept. Finally, I am left with the suggestion of the diaspora.

HaMakom

We meet in a small place, a shel shul,
beneath a tallis’ embrace. There is a book
in my hands, but I do not need it.
The text is a jail. Behind its black bars
the mind wanders. Behind the music
of the words, the meaning is obscure.
Some say the words themselves are
Prayer. Some say the emptiness behind them
is the God who deigns to meet you there,
dares you, some say, dares
your heart, to be without meaning,
to come unrooted as a tree would give in
to the wind and a leaf would float to the sea.

Before turning to Domestic Recusals, let’s look at the title poem, “Brought Down,” the final poem in the collection. It begins: Blood is a river that will not stop and toward the end Constam writes … Everywhere we look, / there is an explanation of who we are and / who they are and what we might become. / In every room we gather, we see certain things / about ourselves but never speak them. We see how they [the ancestors] have suffered // and humanity suffers, every beautiful child / who came from long, long ago … .

There is beauty in the writing; there is pain in the struggle. Brought Down is poetry with subject, tension, music, and craft.

The poet’s conflict, found in Brought Down, continues in Domestic Recusals, but it is different. Simon Constam writes that the poems “come from experiences in and out of marriage, in and out of depression, into and out of different ideas of how men and women operate in relationships.” In these poems readers will find the seriousness cut with something close to humour:

Billet-Doux

Walking out this evening,
wrapped against the snow,
when I see
the idea of home
in the eyes of passersby.

I miss you deeply.

And when I am warm again in my rooms,
my footsteps are alone.
But I lie down with you.
Listen, the future comes calling ceaselessly.
I cannot keep even your absence
Here for long.

The poems in Domestic Recusals are love poems with a twist of angst and self deprecation, although that might be too strong a word. But argument and God are still present although limited, as in the short poem “Certainty.”

Certainty

With certainty, we subdue the inexactitudes of God.
With certainty, praise of Him comes easily.
With certainty, no one, not even God disturbs us.
With certainty, we’ve won the argument
with ourselves.

In Constam’s writing, he argues with his loves, within himself, with his God, and with the forebearers who carry the weight of religion. His self-questioning even flows through the more earthy, lush, sensuous poems that run throughout Domestic Recusals. Consider the titles: “Come to Bed with Me Tonight, Solo Traveler,” “Little Black Book of Scars,” and “Seduced.” Constam’s undercurrent of arguing with himself is his voice, the voice that remains constant regardless of his subject. I am captivated by the way it holds me.

I admit that my first reading of these collections left me uncertain (not unusual for me) and so I returned again and again. The more I read the poems, the more certain I’ve become that Simon Constam is a poet to follow.

Available through your local bookstore or online:

Brought Down by Simon Constam (Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2022). ISBN 978-1-6667-3435-5.

Domestic Recusals by Simon Constam (AOS Publishing, Montreal, Quebec, 2024). ISBN 978-1-990496-47-9.

[…] by Fady Joudah: Book Review

You who remove me from my house / are blind to your past / which never leaves you, / blind to what’s being done / to me now by you “[…]” (69-70).

In literature, an ellipsis is a narrative device indicating that something has intentionally been left out of the narrative, or it might suggest the passage of time. An ellipsis might also be a symbolic doorway, a gap, a silence. There is no statement in the collection as to exactly what Fady Joudah intends us to read into the space. […] is not only the book’s title, but also the powerful title of a series of poems, suggesting a number of things including the passage of time during the on-again, off-again conflict in Palestine, the generational trauma of the diaspora, the war, colonialism and so on.

Joudah is a Palestinian-American, physician, and prize-winning translator and poet. He writes “witness” poetry, although his poetry is not from the “battlefield,” as was my “teaser” review of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk and the reminder of Goran Simić’s from Sarajevo with Sorrow that I published a few days ago. (You can read that review here.)

Joudah lives in the United States, a first-generation American of Palestinian-born parents. His experience of war is more like Keith Garebian’s whose subject is the Armenian genocide of 1915-1920. Garebian bears witness to the continuing trauma left in war’s wake. (In my review of Garebian’s Poetry is Blood, you will find notes on generational trauma, click here.) Joudah experiences the losses through his parents: “… What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget? / My parents showed me the way” (12).

As with Garebian, Joudah lives with “home” missing. His past a mirage, a source of loss, a source of anger. The poem quoted at the top of this review, concludes:

You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs:
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?

Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house.

Joudah’s poems are also poignant with the loss of mother tongue, a people’s language, as in “[…]” (6):

From time to time, language dies.
It is dying now.
Who is alive to speak it?

Another narrative technique that Joudah uses is dialogue as in “[…]” (24):

“Your oppressor,” they said,
“has suffered more than you have.”

“As have others,” you said,
… .

Finally, there is one more poem I’d like to quote from: “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams,” #5:

… At a traffic light an old man hands me a rose and says,
It’s for nothing. He meant, I don’t have to pay nothing

or sign a petition.
How our faces appear to him. Quickly
he walks away to let the weight

of the rose grow sovereign in my heart

to the extent it can
on the eve of a new war.

(Note: maqam is Arabic for place.)

Fady Joudah won the Giller International Prize (2013) for his translation of Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me and Other Poems. In the preface, he writes, “Ghassan Zaqtan’s poems, in their constant unfolding invite us to enter them, exit them, map and unmap them, code and decode them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and nonliving, the animate and inanimate, toward a true freedom.” This could be said of Joudah’s own writing in […].

Available through your local bookstore or online: […] by Fady Joudah. Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA): Milkweed Editions (2024). ISBN 978-1-63955-128-6.

Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian. Toronto (ON, Canada): Guernica Editions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-77183-279-3.

Books & Poems Published

Books

  • Liminal Spaces (a collaborative ekphrastic chapbook, Glentula Press, 2025)
  • Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (chapbook, Glentula Press, 2024)
  • A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2011). Review excerpt: please see here.
  • Calla & Édourd: Fiction. For an excerpt, please see here. (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2009)
  • The Farm & City Cookbook: Essays and recipes co-authored with Mary Lou Morgan. (Second Story Press, 1995)


FORTHCOMING:

  • “Wild Horses,” The High Window Press, forthcoming Spring, 2026
  • “Detroit River Jazz,” “Of Wine & Fire,” “The Sky and the River,” “April 7” have been accepted for the anthology Kinds of Cool: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, February 2026


PUBLISHED:

  • “Yellow Pottery,” Pinhole Poetry, 4.4, January 2026
  • “Flâneuse,” Canadian Poets on Music:: An Anthology, January 2026
  • “Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, forthcoming Fall, 2025 — The editors wrote: “Our reviewers enjoyed reading your poem, which highlights moments when opposing forces come together—whether in nature or within ourselves. We also admired the choice of words, the use of enjambment and punctuation, and the masterful use of meter.”
  • “Unmarked: A Lament for the Children Buried in the Unmarked Graves of Residential Schools,” Strong Hands Stop Violence poetry anthology, ONWA, Vol. 9 (December 2025)
  • “On that Forbidden Evening,” “Willow Dream,” and “Albinoni’s Adagio,” Live Encounters, Volume Four, 16th Anniversary, November-December 2025
  • “Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, (2025-09-22)
  • “Desire,” Spillwords (2025-09-07)
  • “I Could Melt,” Spillwords (2025-03-27)
  • “Blue without a Name,” Spillwords (2024-12-12)
  • “Yellow,” The High Window (Winter 2024)
  • “Actias Luna,” Uproar, Lawrence House Centre for the Arts (2024-11-18)
  • “Awakening” and “Turning,” Hill Spirits VI (2024-ISBN 978-1-998494-07-1)
  • “Cordivae,” and “Yellow: of Horses and Flowers,” Pinhole Poetry (Desire theme, July 2024)
  • “Wild Place,” Juniper (Vol. 8, Issue 1; Summer 2024)
  • “A Half-Golden-Inch,” Jerry Jazz Musician Poetry Collection (Spring-Summer 2024)
  • “Charlie Parker Plays Embraceable You” and “N NE E SE S SW W NW,” Synaeresis: Arts + Poetry, XXIV (June 2024)
  • “Moontreader,” “Follow Birds & Dreamers,” “Of Sages & Seas & Butterfly Wings,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal: Free Spirits, Volume 31 (Print, Spring 2024).
  • “The River Sings a Clear, Deep Song,” Humana Obscura (Spring 2024: print edition on Amazon & digital, page 95).
  • “The Mallard and the Crow” and “The Candle,” The High Window (Poetry, Spring 2024).
  • “Nostalgia,” Jerry Jazz Musician (January 2024).
  • “Moontreader,” “Follow Birds & Dreamers,” “Of Sages & Seas & Butterfly Wings,” Lothlorien Poetry Blog (December 2023) and included in the anthology, Lothlorien Poetry Journal: Free Spirits, Volume 31 (Print, Spring 2024).
  • “Lapedo Child,” and “Love Your Hat,” Stones Beneath the Surface: a poetry anthology (Black Mallard Poetry, November 2023, pp 108-111).
  • “On the Edge,” Dust Poetry Magazine (2023-10-28).
  • “She Sings Only at Twilight,” “Company of Wayfarers,” “A Blizzard Blows,” “Phantasm,” and “Beloved,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 28 (print and online) Sept. 30, 2023).
  • “Musical Invocation” poem profiled and read/recorded, Jerry Jazz Musician (September 2023).
  • “Foraging,” Pinhole Poetry 2.2, July 2023. 
  • “Beneath the Horse’s Hooves,” Room Literary Magazine, Spring 2023
  • “Skydancing” and “Legacies,” Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2023 (p 120-123)
  • “E/mergence,” Juniper, Fall 2022
  • “Sing Praises,” “Slant,” “The Shedding,” Hill Spirits V, Blue Denim Press, 2022
  • “Words are Wet,” “Rainfall,” The Story of Water – 3rd Annual Earth Day eChapbook, April 22 2022
  • “Night Flyer,” “Luna Cat,” Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits, Wet Ink Books, July 11, 2022
  • “Not an Edward Hopper Painting,” Jerry Jazz Musician (U.S.) Summer 2022 
  • “Don’t Ask this of Me,” “Passage Dreaming,” Jerry Jazz Musician, Winter 2021
  • “Kenya: at the end of the day,” Orbis: Quarterly International Literary Journal (England) #198, Winter 2021
  • “Making Soup,” “Quarantine Wishes,” Our Pandemic Times, Blue Denim Press, 2021
  • “Duty/Deon,” won Arc’s Awesomeness prize, January 2021
  • “Miles Davis Plays: ‘Blue in Green,’” “The Spaces Between: Miles Davis,” Jerry Jazz Musician, May 27 2021
  • “Apparitions,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada, #11, Summer 2021
  • “Willy Nelson Sings Stardust,” “Undersong,” The High Window (England) #23, August 2021
  • “Miles Davis Plays ‘Blue in Green,’” Jerry Jazz Musician (U.S.) Summer 2021
  • “A Dry July,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
  • “Wild Plums,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
  • “Of Hunger & Fire,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
  • “Shadows,” Spirit of the Hills (arts organization) website, November 2020.
  • “Quarantine Wishes,” Between Festivals: A Journal in Time of Pandemic and Lockdown, November 27 2020 
  • “City of Tulum,” Orbis: Quarterly International Literary Journal (England) #191, Spring 2020
  • “10 Panku,” Devour: Special International Edition (58-59) #5 April 2020
  • “Dockside,” “The Failed Search,” The Beauty of Being Elsewhere, anthology ed. by John B. Lee, (Brighton: Hidden Brook Press, 2020
  • “Tartan Lament,” Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), #10 June 2020
  • “Seduction,” Freefall, Fall 2020 (shortlisted for Freefall Annual Poetry Contest), ed. by Gary Barwin
  • “The Doves Seem to Croon Tippy Canoe Tippy Canoe,” “Making Soup,” Between Festivals: A Journal in Time of Pandemic and Lockdown, Summer 2020
  • “Honey Light,” Amethyst Review, August 2020 
  • “Daddy,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada, ed. by Bruce Kauffman, #8, Summer 2020, p91
  • “Alone,” “Song,” Jerry Jazz Musician, December 16, 2020 
  • “The Swing,” Jerry Jazz Musician, December 28, 2020
  • “Choreography,” Amethyst Review, 2019-09-24
  • “Past Midnight,” Amethyst Review, 2019-08-29
  • “Casting Off,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada (Issue 03, p. 42).
  • “Journey,” “Ashes,” This Wine into Water, a chapbook anthology (Forward by Lorna Crozier, Wintergreen Studios Press, December 2018.)
  • Earlier writing was published in literary journals including the Fiddlehead (#130 Summer 1981) Descant (#32-33 1981) and Northward Journal (#20 June 1981) as well as anthologies such as The Wisdom of Old Souls (2008), Grandmothers Necklace (2010), Close to Quitting Time (2011). (Some early poems published as Kathryn Deneau.)


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.

Why Write a Chapbook? Plus Red Alders in an Island Dream by Christopher Howell

“What they say is / change / can bring you here.” (“Beyond the Dream Hatch”)

Fellow poet, friend, and blogger, Gwynn Scheltema, has recently written a piece about chapbooks — what they are and why we might consider publishing one. Here’s a short excerpt from Gwynn’s Writescape blog (with permission; thank you Gwynn):

Why publish a chapbook?

  • For the unpublished poet, it’s a chance to get publishing creds.
  • The process will prepare you for putting together a full collection.
  • A chapbook is a “safe” way to publish, because the work is not lost. You can publish it again in your collection.
  • You can take risks with a chapbook – give a chance to a new publisher, publish it yourself, create an artpiece.
  • A chapbook can keep you in the public eye in the time between publishing full poetry collections.
  • You need a home for perfectly good orphan poems that didn’t make it into a collection.

(To read Gwynn’s entire blog on Writescape, just click here: https://writescape.ca/site/2021/02/on-chapbooks/.)

***

This started me thinking about chapbooks slipped between full collections on my poetry shelves and to Red Alders in an Island Dream.

RED ALDERS IN AN ISLAND DREAM

… is an example of a 7-inch square, hand-stitched chapbook by Christopher Howell (Trask House Books, Portland, 1980). It was given to me recently by a friend who gifted it from his library. Howell has now published 11 books of poetry and won three Pushcart prizes among other awards.

This little treasure has been read many times. Just because it is small — home to only seven poems (one is in four parts, which sort of makes it eleven poems) — does not decrease its value. Actually, I like Red Alders in an Island Dream better than many full collections on my shelves. Don’t approach chapbooks in a condescending way. Sometimes the best things come in small packages.

The collection ends with the four-part poem “In Grey Water: The Day,” and these are the last four lines of “IV,” the final lines in Red Alders in an Island Dream:

Membranous and steady, like wind
moving in the darkening neighborhoods,
we seek the far shore. And window light
breaks from us
like the sound of oars.

***

For an interesting interview with Christopher Howell: http://true.proximitymagazine.org/2018/11/08/a-conversation-with-christopher-howell/, or just “Google” Christopher Howell poet.

Thanks for reading to the end. Please share your thoughts and this blog. Kate

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.

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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).