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Alan Catlin TOTAL IMMERSION By Glenna Luschei Presa S Press, PO Box 792, Rockford, MI 49341, 2008, 95 pp., $15. Glenna Luschei is a poet noted as much for her output as a writer as for her activism for the Arts. Her service includes: past chairperson of COSMEP, editor of Cafe Solo magazine and literary panelist for the NEA. Her first collection with Presa S, Seedpods, was memorable for its concision: brief, luminous poems that demanded multiple readings. The current title is far more personal and expansive but equally rewarding. The "total immersion" of the title refers to the practice of river baptism, an apt point for opening and concluding this collection. Recurring throughout are water images, strong connections to place, exodus and return. Still, no matter where the poet settles, there is always a snake in paradise. Yet Luschei celebrates the simple joys of a long life fruitfully lived, whether lingering over her first root beer float in sixty years, or reflecting upon the natural world with a keen eye while soaking in a hot tub with a friend: "Trust in the wooden wall," the oracle at Delphi said. I have trusted wood since I was a child and kegs of blue nails like sapphires, and spiders and their webs. I trust the word in the desert. I trust the arc of the snow goose. ("Snow Goose") The snake is waiting nearby, never far from her thoughts, in the form of the worst kind of a tragedy a parent can bear: Stitching that quilt now in memory I pulled in yarn my loss and rage, reaching home on the Anniversary of my daughter's death from AIDS. ("Abandoned Monastery") Thus ends the first of four sections of TOTAL IMMERSION. The second begins with a wonderful, darkly humorous poem "They Do Death Right" (in the South). No matter how peripatetic the poet's life and the migration of her ancestors, the poet is drawn to the South, and its customs. It is a place that holds her like no other. "They Do Death Right" is elegiac but celebratory, a kind of jazz requiem in words. Of particular note in this section is "Surfs Up," a poem both surreal and horrific, enraged and empathetic: The surfers here in Carpintcria shock me. There is a surfer with only one leg, one with both arms missing. The lifeguard tells me they are Iraqi vets in therapy. The final sections continue the poet's vision of the ongoing cycle of life. "Wake Up! Talks with Kabir" encourages the reader, as it does the poet, to engage more fully in the process of life, while "Feather's Everywhere" presents an amusing lesson in the basics of sex. Inundation returns as the primary focus of the concluding section. There is a strong sense of a Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained, in this continuum of life, as the work comes full circle in the concluding four poems of the collection. That sense is of the poet's sustaining, abiding faith in Family, History, Art and Nature. But it is not a Faith without the snake, a curse and a blessing. "Now I am old enough to understand/ the loss that brings us to poetry." ("August in Lithium Park") <> ___________________________ |
C. Natale Peditto black pony, red moon By Roger Taus Split Shift, 2008, 79 pp., paper, $20. Let me start by mentioning that Roger Taus lives around the block from me in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. I first met him in Elysian Park when we were walking our dogs. I didn't know he was a poet until we ran into each other some time later at a Downtown jazz club and I began to realize we had mutual interests. I mention this because the proximity I share with Taus as a friend and neighbor is also evident in the kind of relationship he tends to establish with the readers of his poetry. As a poet, he operates in a local environment to reveal intimate personal moments, like an unknown piper down the hill whose haunting refrain you catch on quiet empty nights ("lone yard bird/ of echo park/ yr 1 a.m./song swings")". His latest book of poems (he has at least five others to his credit) is a fine little perfect bound volume that takes its title from lines of Lorca's "Song of the Rider." The Lorca-inspired title for this collection suggests the heartfelt intensity of Taus's imagery, but it is William Carlos Williams who serves as the poet's guide and true mentor, along with a host of jazz artists playing in the wings. Is Taus a jazz poet? The inspiring artists he consistently connects with and pays honor to are part of the territory of classic jazz, a familiar timescape when the visual, musical and literary arts shared serious interplay in formal arrangements. Taus's poetry relies on minimal imagist statement rather than the long drawn musical line; his idiosyncratic wordplay with linguistic variants of multiple tongues (perfectly foreign in L.A. ) is a rhythmic jazz riff of quick illuminations. Emblematic of his approach is the poem "Winter Equinox": I Franz Kline is Monk of art moderne Rothko John Coltrane II Watt Antanieta cant licking Lorca like it was Andalusia '35 III New York Beiroot same plaize Of course, in this case the poet has taken license with a seasonal event in the title of his poem to create equivalencies. black pony, red moon has no table of contents, and often enough the poems are untitled, some of which when read in series suggest a trail of revelations. The poet opens with a dedication poem, "To Jack Hirschman," then provides a short poetic mission statement that derives from W.C. Williams, the poet in the process declaring his own commitment to "invention and justice." It is local poetry, too, (see the neighbors and the hood). Whatever subjectivity is in play, Taus delivers as tangible psychological and emotional moment. His poems quickly travel to their mark, as image-bearing music: dog's slurp the water dish of music of palpate beat nite tragedy Part of Taus's subjectivity is obvious in his punning across languages (e.g., "There's the last lace/ of red/ over Sunset boulevard des dreams." Often he is mixing English with Spanish and French, and offers a peculiar, personal slang created by shortcutting words. However, in some cases you would have to know, for instance, that "the Bake" is the Jazz Bakery, and if you do, it works well for the poem. Otherwise, be resigned to the spirit of the poem itself, despite your confusion. This happens often enough to cause the reader's return to the poem beyond its surface, playing the tune again in your head. And as a whole, these poems are well worth replaying. Taus's final poem in the book is dedicated to the late Vincent Ferrini, whom he celebrated with the publication of a special edition of praise and poetry by various admirers (Split Shift #1, 1996) and paid tribute to in a special event at L.A.'s Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in the poet's final year. It speaks directly and respectfully to Taus's own objective: "no mirrors/ no smoke/ no shit." <> |
Nikki Stiller BLOOD TO REMEMBER American Poets on the Holocaust Revised, Second Edition, Edited by Charles Ades Fishman Time Being Books, 10411 Clayton Road, St. Louis, MO 63131, 2007, 637 pp., hardcover, $42.50, paperback, $27.95. This amazing compendium of poems is a testament not only to the power of the Holocaust over living memory, but also to the power of poetry. There is to be sure not one poem here about picking daisies, and, as I have written elsewhere, it shows Jewish poetry arises not from the pastoral tradition: it has historical roots, and history is one of its main preoccupations. It is an honor and a privilege to "review" such a book, and one handles it with almost the same reverence with which one would handle the Torah. One of the main themes of the poem is survivor's guilt, or, rather, the second generation's duty to remember; Menachem Z. Rosensaft has a whole poem about it. It is called "The Second Generation": true, we are the children of a nocturnal twilight the heirs of Auschwitz and Ponar but ours is also the rainbow: In us the storm meets sunlight to create new colors as we add defiant spark to an eternal fire. Not all the members of the Second Generation are so sanguine. Consider Hilary Tham's "Daughter of Survivors": She is screaming again. You stand at the bathroom door, shivering: you will her to stop, will it to go away. Your father's voice rises And falls with the burden of her name. There is a pretend normalcy to their everyday lives. From the same poem: "the daylight woman/ who bakes honeycake and brushes your hair,/ smiling, as if you are her good dream." That is one theme. Another theme is the impossibility of imagining the impossible. Even the inmates of Auschwitz probably had trouble imagining what was right in front of their eyes. How much more difficult for those who did not "go through it"; from Eliot Katz's monumental "Liberation Recalled": Sophie Scholl, student cofounder of White Rose Resistance, awaiting the Nazi firing squad, exclaimed with elegant defiance: What we have written and said is in the minds of you all, but you lack the courage to say it aloud." A common Holocaust survivor's refractive refrain: To understand you have to go through it- - you cannot ever understand yet you must understand. There are surprises here, including a bitter humor. Alan Kaufman writes in "My Mother Doesn't Know Who Allen Ginsberg Is," that he will read poetry at a festival in Berlin: ...My mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. She was twelve then. She's sixty now. She lives in Florida where every so often a German tourist gets shot To my mother that is poetry. There is an earthiness, a domesticity almost, that contrasts with the strange horror all about. In the late Enid Dame's poem "Soup", the narrator is first making soup in the Vilna Ghetto, then in the partisans' forest, and finally at home in Brooklyn: "...I lower the flame/ under the saucepan, the soup shouldn't burn./ You think it's easy to concentrate on details? Details, let me tell you, keep you alive./ Details. I thank God for them." It seems that almost every Jewish poet has written a Holocaust poem that is included. The overall theme of the book, it seems to me, is not only to remember, but somehow to keep alive the experience and the survivors' triumph over it. This is the blood that calls from the ground and makes them speak, as one of the epigraphs by Hart Crane remarks. There is an emphasis on names and more names, as in Annette Bialik Harchik's "Requiem": Your names echo In my heart Helena, Gill, Miriam, Kreindl, Echo vowels And consonants, naming the names, David, Nissum, Zukm, ShmueL And there is Irving Feldman's superb naming in "The Pripet Marshes": it is the moment before the Germans will arrive. Maury is there, uncomfortable, and pigeon toed, his voice is rapid and slurred and he is brilliant; And Frank who is good-hearted and has the hair and yellow skin of a Tartar and is like a flame turned low; And blond Lotte, who is coarse and miserable... Each is remembered, treasured, invaluable. I like to think the blood of the title is not only that of the dead ones, but the blood that binds the sisters and brothers in Jewry, indeed, in all humanity, in this great testament to calamity and the will to survive. |
Created on ... September 27, 2007