Book reviews written by cherylsnell

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Flower Half Blown (New Women's Voices Series)

by Cheryl Snell
- Rated 4 stars
“Cheryl Snell brings us Flower Half Blown a 25 page chapbook of varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives.

--Comstock Review”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
Epithalmion

by Cheryl Snell
- Rated 5 stars
“Cheryl Snell brings us ...Epithalamion (Little Poem Press, 2004), ...a 64 page collection with an unusual binding. Inside it’s vintage Snell but more surreal, and with more Hindu content and themes. Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
The Satires of Horace

by Horace
- Rated 5 stars
“The Satires of Horace
Translated by A.M. Juster
ISBN: 0812240901
University of Pennsylvania Press
160 pg, $34.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell

A.M. Juster's accessible new translation of The Satires of Horace combines elements of the English light verse with a close interpretation of the Latin text. Juster wanted to write a version of the satires faithful to the Latin, but one that was “fun to read” --one that brought out the true spirit of the poems. Fairclough, Alexander, Mueke, Rudd, Matthews and others had tried, and some would say, failed in various ways. So Juster took on a formidable task; he set about contemporizing the idiom while retaining rhythmic and formal patterns. He found cultural equivalents in the crossover of languages. He struck a conversational tone that captures the wit and enduring charm of Horace. And he did it in rhyming couplets.

On his choice of heroic couplets, Susanna Braund notes that “When we read this translation, if we find ourselves thinking of more elevated poetry in the same meter—for example, Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid or Pope’s translation of the Iliad—this means that the translator has succeeded at duplicating the effect that Horace’s hexameters must have had on his contemporary audience.”

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.) wrote two books of satires. They are not what we think of as satires today: there are no blood-thirsty political or personal attacks. These verses poke gentle fun at man’s foibles and vices, and the tone swings between elegiac and comic. The satire usually deals with one type of vice at a time, and the satirical attack is framed as an argument or a debate. Topics range widely, from greed and envy (1.1), to lust (1.8) to ambition (1.10—“I did make comments, undeniably,/stating Lucilius's poetry/stumbles on clumsy feet.”)

Book I opens with three “diatribe” satires which are like sermons carefully calculated not to offend those in power. They are didactic and dramatic, with well differentiated voices. A theme introduced with humor is often illustrated by a series of antithetical pairs before a second theme emerges. The Horatian persona mocks human failings, while an adversary eggs him on. In 2.1, Trebatius plays the role of such an adversary. The poem begins with Horace saying, “There is a group who claims my satire seems/too harsh... Others call it ‘slack’…” and he asks, “Trebatius, how should this be addressed? Decide.” (In his Notes, Juster explains why he chose “decide” over others scholars’ “tell me, “give me advice,” and “give a ruling”).
The difference between the Horatian persona in Book 2 and Book I occurs with the reply, “Give it a rest.” This advice, urging Horace to write a different type of poem, in praise of Caesar, perhaps, doesn’t appeal to Horace. He does not think he has the “motivation.” He will follow the example of his predecessor Lucilius, and write in only self-defense.
The Horatian persona’s reaction to Trebatius shows a change in him. He’s less self-assured than the narrator in Book 1, and from this point on, his self-deprecating humor reveals the same flaws in his own character that he once satirized in others. This opposition and contradiction, the balancing between extremes, is a typical strategy in Horace. Author and critic Michael Coffey calls 2.1 a “fundamentally frivolous piece,” but it does illustrate some of the pitfalls of writing satire. It should be sharp-edged and witty, but with its claws sheathed, or it might be misunderstood, with deadly results. Horace humbly suggests that that is his goal.

The Horace of 2.1 shares some traits with the Boor in 1.9. Both men describe their social-climbing plans with similar phrases. The doubling and self-parody does not make the narrator a less sympathetic character, though. He still delivers his moral with a quickness of line and pitch-perfect tone. In 1.9, when the Boor wants Horace to introduce him to his patron Maecenas, his imprecations cause Horace to react physically, another of satire’s trademarks. “…streams of sweat cascade onto my feet” and “I drop my ears like sullen donkeys do.” (referring to Horace’s nickname, Flaccus). There is irony in the difference between the language and the vice dramatized by the Boor. In satire, as Northrop Frye has said, irony is militant.
In 2.6, Horace pits the idyllic qualities of a country retirement against the chaos of city life. Maecenas had given him the Sabine farm, and this poem is a thank-you. It ends with the Aesop-like fable of the city and the country mouse, and the moral that life in the country is better. Contrast Juster’s opening to this poem, “These are the thing I hoped my prayers would bring:/some land, a kitchen garden and a spring/that’s always flowing by a house below/a modest stand of trees. The gods bestow/on me far more and better; I am content”, with Fairclough’s version--

This is what I prayed for ! -- a piece of land not
so very large, where there would be a garden, and
near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and
up above these a bit of woodland. More and better
than this have the gods done for me. I am content.

…and you can see how Horace’s ancient wit and charm becomes fresh and immediate, concise and fluid in A. M. Juster’s hands. This work stands out. With meticulous scholarship and skillful poetics, Juster has given us a translation accessible enough for casual readers and intricate enough to interest classicists. The book can be ordered at Amazon, University of Pennsylvania Press website, and the author’s website http://www.amjuster.com/

”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
Circe, After Hours: Poems

by Marilyn Kallet
- Rated 5 stars
“ Within these pages, we find ourselves in the presence of a modern day Circe, a many- faceted, singer of deeply nuanced songs. She is not afraid of turning taboos inside out, whether it’s phone sex (Trout), her own youthful pretensions (Great Poet), or post-menopausal crushes (It Can’t Happen). The element of confession is woven into the lyric narratives; images and startling comparisons turn into and against each other, often coupling the everyday with the epic—“Dear Orpheus, listen;/Euridice sings too. She knows more/about dark sweet earth,/how to plant deep and sure--/more than the strumming boys do.” (Heartland, Revisited)

We consider the puzzle of poems bound by their own rules as Kallet experiments with flexible nonce forms, pantoums, and free-verse narratives tweaked with edgy, outspoken observation--“Jews don’t do mummies. Who has time?” in “Cat Mummy” for instance. Original characterizations and painfully accurate revelations abound. Scorpions are likened to Rockettes, and about her mob-connected father, she says, “A shame he never got the chance to vote.” Sometimes the twist that makes a subject new is experimental, as in the poem “Where Identity Doesn’t Rest.” A meditation on memory, the poem’s aesthetic tension of traditional narrative moves against a stylistic innovation that recalls Brenda Hillman.

The book’s three sections entwine geography with history, the global with the personal. Contradictions cohere in a space where lessons surface in dreams (Circe, Did You?), loss does not mean giving up or giving in (Out of Silence, for Sister Wendy), and melancholy is cast in unexpected images (Jealous). Intellectual scope, both deep and broad, a command of craft, and ease with both colloquial and formal utterance mark the work.

Kallet embraces all flesh and blood experience. No subject is off-limits, and humor often thwarts the reader’s expectations, in the best possible way. In “No Sale,” the poet brings together blues, love, and religion when she asks, “How would a Jewish girl/sell her soul to the devil?/Reformed don't believe/In Beezlebubba” and goes on recap the tale of Robert Johnson, selling his soul “at the crossroads/for a lifetime of hot-lick guitar./Shot by a jealous husband/at the roadhouse, he died on his knees/they say, drunk, barking like a dog./ When she ends the poem with a segue into the personal-- “Odd, for a nice Jewish girl/to fall on her knees./Years though, that's how/it was. Me shot down,/baying at the moon/for a lick of you”, we feel the empathetic tug that is a hallmark of good poetry.

She may banter in opening poems such as “No Makeup” --

I'll have to rely on poetry,
won't I?
And how, at fifty, I love
nakedness
in my face and lines,
and in your hands, dear reader.

---but pulls in to an elegiac tone in poems on the Holocaust in the third section. Kallet, a Lindsay Young Professor of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, draws from her deep well of literary and historical knowledge for these stricken poems. Under the poignant heading Breathing Daughters, this sequence singles out one survivor from the author’s family, Hedwig Schwartz, who, though “Nearly blind./you bore witness.” In this work, researched with fragments of letters, historical records, and other documents, the living must speak for the dead, as the past with its fragmented voices bodies forth Hart Crane's lines: "It is blood to remember; it is fire/to stammer back."

There is no stammering in this book, but plenty of blood, and an unquenchable fire that make Circe, After Hours an exceptional, many-layered book.

”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
ThirstPatrick Carrington
Thirst

by Patrick Carrington
- Rated 5 stars
“Thirst
by Patrick Carrington
Codhill Press
www.codhill.com
ISBN 978-1-930337-26-8
32 pages, $10
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell
In this chapbook, winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, the title announces the theme; the poems locate it in the personal. Patrick Carrington touches on several kinds of “Thirst”—for communion and connection, for a deeper understanding of faith and the way it operates in daily life.

“Learning History in Nursery School” opens the collection with a tender scene—a father watching his small son fingerpaint on a rainy day. “He didn't repeat the world's mistakes./ He made the sun yellow, the sky as blue/ as a new boy…/” When a rainbow appears, signaling a moment of transformation, the speaker observes, “The sky was copying him, siphoning/ off the street some long forgotten oils. //
The father and son relationships are drawn with care in this book. In “Finding the Sound of Oak,” the narrator recollects climbing his father like a tree, and wonders if the dead “ever leave at all?/ Maybe/it’s a trick, slipping into dirt/like a root.” He returns with his regrets “to these woods with no tongue/and barefoot. To walk quietly,/listening for his risen bones.//
Other portraits of grief are equally affecting—memories of lost love locked “In the Cedar Boxes of Our Souls,” “… a wooden place/that hurts, but understands/the mathematics of the morning after/ and in “The Smoke of St. Anthony,” where Carrington balances simple language with complex thought, the personal with the spiritual, building a poignant portrait of loss:
I used my last match and lit the candle,
watched smoke curl up to—where?—

Her, I imagined. A vain act of love
but full of sacrifice I thought,
as badly as I needed a drag.
And faith, as hard as days finish now

without her. They end stiffer than the wood
the sisters used to beat belief
and the blood of Jesus out of me. Yet I

come back for more. I called her name,
louder than I meant to. I heard it echo
in the rafters. The roof was higher
than her uncle’s tobacco barn
where we lit our first cigarette,
where she always went to disappear
as quiet as a prayer.

I lit candle from candle, until the smoke
was thick. I just can’t shake the hope
or kick the habit, the notion
she might be hiding up there,
waiting for me, swinging
her legs from the crossbeams.
This is sensuous, tactile work, alive and vivid. Although there is an elegiac undertone in some of the poems, reminding one of Frost’s observation, “The poet rubs his fingers along old wounds, makes them burn,” humor breaks through. A “…wife just knitted/ a wool sweater for their toy poodle. /Overkill, he told her. It already has/ a coat/” in “The Logic for Improving a Neighborhood” is one example of how the poet incorporates different tones in the same poem, and balances them all.
The way the poems are organized is another subtle delight of the book. The poet develops sequences of imagery, tone, and theme in “A Heraldry of Hands,” for instance, which opens out into “First Lessons in Grace,” threading the motif of hands through both poems. Repetitions like this build resonance and make the separate poems cohere. In “Searching for Things to Worship,” the speaker’s spiritual quest is once more reflected in a gesture:
Sorting through fluttering debris
of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle
browned with our absence,
I remember how you cupped
water at Cedar Creek,
your hands a chalice. And flowers
you planted near the bank
to make it your church,
somewhere to sit in the greening
comfort of a private prayer.
A place one might see God
and not be surprised.
Along with the lyric depth and philosophical sophistication, well-honed craft is evident in this work, the use of sound to control cadence and syncopation, assonance and consonance. Whether there’s sometimes too much sibilance depends on a reader’s taste; there is much to admire in the line breaks, with the last word in a line creating multiple, or sometimes half- meanings, displacing the expected and opening interpretation to a new circumstance created by the language.
W. H. Auden defined prayer as “to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.” With its reverence for nature and its embrace of what it means to be alive, “Thirst” has that quality of prayer. This meditative, attentive volume by a very thoughtful writer stands out. It is a thought-provoking read.
”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
Multiverse

by Cheryl Snell
- Rated 5 stars
“ Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

"I really like this chapbook from MiPO. Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems: first in the scent of violets, then to "Fight or Flight" and the heart's leaping, and the "Risk" with its phobias. A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."
--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Multiverse

Cheryl Snell has collaborated with her sister, Janet Snell to bring forth an astute and staggering blend of poetry, science, and art in her Multiverse collection. Cheryl probes the evolving understanding of the physical world. Mulitverse, the title, is some what of a clever winking pun. It suggests the layers in poetry relate to the layers one finds in the scientific Multiverse concept. Multiverse, in essence, is a new theory claiming there is not just one universe but several, and some Physicists now think that there may be as many as eleven dimensions co-existing at once. In Multiverse Cheryl Snell pulls the string theory from physics and applies it to poetry. With the dramatic visual accompaniment of Janet Snell’s artwork, Cheryl takes the reader on an unexpected journey through the “The Natural Order of Everything.” This first poem of the sequence begins:

“It’s a trick. The sun aims wide-eyed light/though gauze breezes to filter out the truth”

Grounding the scientific concepts in concrete imagery the dimensions of existence are “filtered.” As light and dark can be measured mathematically and quantified in physics, so too can poetry measure light and dark in an attempt to quantify the affects of both. In her first poem, Cheryl attempts to “filter” out the truth of the light and the dark by using the metaphor of the predator the prey. She finds that words alone can fathom only part as she states, in conclusion, “I see there is no help for any of this/ I may as well start over.”

In trying to grasp the elusive meaning of nature and ones place in the natural world, Cheryl also explores relationships and the layers within those relationships. In her poem “Thermodynamics of Cooking Stone” she expresses the friction of co-existing as individuals in the binding construct of marriage. Rather then ending in a black hole she gives the reader a more hopeful image of togetherness:

“They’ll begin to satellite each other like shepherd moons/herding the rocks of Saturn’s rings/ around the low blue hum of heaven.”

The imagery Cheryl uses throughout this collection is startling and evocative. For example, in “Fight or Flight” Cheryl dares to tread the oft trod path of the “heart.” I have to say I approached the poem with prejudice having not read a poem, no, not one contemporary poem, with the word “heart” in it that I would say I felt was a successful poem. This poem, in my view, succeeds. Turns of phrase such as: “The tongue, stiff as road-kill…it also let’s the heart believe it can leap through the throat to freedom,” rejuvenates the bleeding heart cliché’ and turns it into something new.

On the intellectual side of things, one can see the influence of the concepts of physics in her poetry. In “Flicker Vertigo” she references the beginning of the universe and man’s attempt to comprehend his experience within this universe. She concludes with the mind bending statement “The brain fills in what’s missing, the blanks/ between light and light, a corrugated sky hanging over the theater’s false ceiling.” The impression of reality being a “corrugated sky hanging over a false ceiling” leaves me wondering what reality is. If the brain creates the missing blanks is this life a “false theatre,” a creation in our mind, or is the “false theatre” the existence outside of the mind? Cheryl’s collection is if full of such constructs which provoke exploration and discovery.

As a whole, Mulitiverse is a collection that satisfies both the intellectual and spiritual aspects of poetry. Cheryl Snell uses language with sensitivity and an intelligence that is as refreshing as it is profound.

---Mel Huber ”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink )
Prisoner's Dilemma

by Cheryl Snell
- Rated 5 stars
“ Reviews

"Richard Lovelace defiantly proclaimed that 'stone walls do not a prison make' but the implication is that we make our own prisons and they can be anywhere: a car, a house, your own body, a sunlit street. Cheryl's poems are letters from prison, from all these prisons and more, but the book is not confining. Over and over again, we are given hints about how to make the most of our stay. I spent a good deal of time wondering just what the 'prisoner's dilemma' might be. I never found a definitive answer, but the book left me with a strong impression that the dilemma is whether or not to accept one's sentence. Do you become Houdini or King Rat? Typical of a poet, Cheryl wants to be both at once, and in these pages, it seems almost possible."
---Don Zirilli, contest judge

Cheryl Snell’s book: Prisoner’s Dilemma is a gorgeous, wrought book, complete with haunting artwork form her sister, Janet Snell. The book chronicles pain and dilemma, how to get through pain, what pain is. Her poems evoke mystery, reality, lyricism and in-your-face longing, hurt, tragedy an almost unstated questioning of how to get through it all. While reading this book I felt an uncanny connection to everyone: that surely, there must be others out there who have lived lives scripted mostly by loss and unspeakable hurt.

Cut

I start with the curls,
snip the dark with the silver,
somersaulting to the floor.

If I drop the scissors you’ll say
that one of us is unfaithful—
but I’m not superstitious, and I know
the quirks of scissors: twin arms
easily uncoupled; better together
though crossed as swords.

What is splendid about some of the poems is what could lie beneath the words. In the above poem the author never says why the hair is being cut – the poem focuses on superstition and a coupling of two people. Always, to my mind, the cutting of hair in writing and life, signifies something else – renewal, betrayal, anger, hope, envy, viciousness.

In the poem, Eating Beauty, there are meanings each reader would interpret differently, I suppose. My favorite line is:

Since there is no one here to forbid it,

As if beauty, itself, is forbidden, should be hidden, not “right” or moral. And this conjures all sorts of political and women’s issues. Aside from the sheer “beauty” of the line.

And the collection itself is beautiful. Make of that what you will.

--Nanette Rayman -Rivera
OUTWARD BOUND

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” *

But for mystics, the disabled and convalescent, those in enclosed orders, those dedicated to fulfilling their genius, those in jail and those who exist in a mental straitjacket, whatever the cause, there is always a conundrum:

Does the elusive Truth exist on the Inside or Outside?

Hostages like Brian Keenan, Anne Frank, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all attested a life of the spirit and the imagination that would not and could not be limited by physical and ideological constraints.

So does narrowed focus confer a sharper and profounder vision, offering its compensations? Or is Freedom only to be found upon the exterior, in the prolix toil and muddle of human activity where opportunities for discovery abound? Even where choice is possible, aren't these states mutually exclusive?

Cheryl Snell in a new chapbook, Prisoner's Dilemma, explores this theme in situations concerning many kinds of effacement. Each short poem is offered like a remnant of woven fabric placed under the microscope so that the colours, slubs and knots and arabesques, can be appreciated. The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope. The images juxtaposed in Snell's phrases cleverly release new flights of meaning as, for example in Dirty Laundry:

Tumbling from the fold

of a fitted sheet – balled-up

silk, some foreign lace. Things come

and go in this house. Last night, an earring

tangled in the wrong colour hair, everything

gone bloodshot and damp.

The man's non-sequiturs circled the drain

of his stranger's ear: Let lovers go fresh and sweet

to be undone. How else to go

with a come-on like that – innocent as soap,

pink bubbles bursting like an alibi

on the verge of coming clean.

The collection as a whole hangs together with the shape and atmosphere of René Magritte's surreal painting The Empty Mask and, in miniature, I don't doubt is as accomplished. Cheryl Snell ably demonstrates that Richard Lovelace was right!*

RJC
(Rosy Cole)

Chapbook hauntingly illustrated by Janet Snell. ”

cherylsnell wrote this review Saturday, July 4 2009. ( reply | permalink )
Dark Card

by Rebecca Foust
- Rated 5 stars
“The twenty seven linked poems of Dark Card, winner of the2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook award, turn on the poet’s experience of raising her son, born with Asperger’s syndrome. The narrative arc travels from grief and white-hot anger, to Foust’s difficulty in accepting all aspects of her child’s disability, opening finally onto transformative acceptance-- a state of grace, perhaps. The resonance of recurring themes and images help mould this collection into an almost novelistic whole.
Foust shows us her gifted, afflicted child as he is. We learn about the syndrome’s manifestations, the child’s neurological deficits, the wrong-headed practices of institutions responsible for him. When, in the title poem, the boy creates a scene at school, we are shown the coping mechanisms of his mother, as well: she plays the “dark card of the idiot savant … /…It’s my ploy to exorcise their pitchforks and torches/… But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie/ a not-celebration of what he sees/with his inward-turned eye:/the patterns in everything---”
The poet’s emotions overflow the page. She rages against the possible sources of her son’s syndrome. Like a tongue to a tooth, the author worries “…that Gordian- knot neck-throttled curse, /that gene-encrypted, linked-chain curse,//that DES-taken-by-his grandmother curse,/that fumble-fingered-fool-doctor-shaped curse…” . She spits out her indictments in diatribes worthy of the name. Her anger hits its target in “Palace Eunuch”:
Don’t say you were trying to be kind,
you ball-less prick soft dick eunuch
cowardly coin-counting conservator.
You were practically pissing yourself
in your fear of malpractice,
you were shaking in your green paper booties.
These poems show the many ways in which the quality of life argument is entirely subjective. We see how the boy’s behaviors set him apart and make him singular, but we get a rounder view here than in disability poetry purely from the patient’s POV (The Hospital Poems by Jim Ferris comes to mind). In one of the best poems, “Asperger Ecstasy,” Foust observes the activities that make her son “vibrate with joy.” “It can be tying flies under a microscope, knot patterns / the size of this period. It can be cataloging washing / machine brands or the note variations in a symphony, / or committing to memory for joyous recounting / the entire year's schedule for the El-train.” As she makes peace with his differences, she begins to celebrate them: “He makes/ meaning from acorns,/ the sky,/knotted bits/ of string.” (The Visitation) We watch her empathy swell. She makes us believe her when she says that her son “loves who he is.”
Foust’s use of poetic devices is as expert as her emotional spectrum is varied. Her line breaks reveal meaning in fresh ways, and her use of sound is a mark of her craft---the sustained vowels throughout “Instrument,” the single word lines in the final strophe of “Firstborn,” echoing the child’s first thin breath; the compound words that heighten the passion in her teeth-gnashing rants. There are allusions to Emily Dickinson’s feathered hope and Temple Grandin’s empathy, and Foust raises the hair on the reader’s arm when she says about her baby, “You freeze my heart to stone/when I measure your foot with my thumb.”(No Longer Medusa).
The author reconciles the grim with the hopeful in Dark Card, and her voice never wavers in its fierce emotional honesty. And when, in the extraordinary final poem, the recurring image of her son’s Gordian knot “unravels with his years, unwinds, unfolds,/lets loop out in vast uncoiling spirals/whole archives of text,/found worlds,” we are moved. The poet has succeeded in making the personal universal. We close the covers, uplifted by Rebecca Foust’s courage and her compassionate song.”

cherylsnell wrote this review Wednesday, August 27 2008. ( reply | permalink )
The Kimnama

by Kim Roberts
- Rated 5 stars
“The Kimnama
By Kim Roberts
Vrzhu Press
ISBN 978-1-4303-1407-3
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell

In the lines of this book-length poem, Kim Roberts distills for us the essence of India. Braiding past and present with sensual detail, she summons up the contrasts-- houses on a narrow dirt lane sharing the wall of Muhammadpur’s tomb, men in dhotis squatting “like giant grasshoppers” near “a chandelier vendor,/his wares hanging from a tree//so the cut glass shimmered/where the sun/filtered through the dusty leaves,” her observations of the outer world complemented by inner realizations arrived at organically. “Despite the push, the rush,/the clouds of hovering blue-grey smoke/rising from the traffic,//there is all the time in the world.”

The book is based on the journal Roberts kept during a two-month stay with a host family in New Delhi. “It was strange to be so well taken care of, and so little in control of my personal decisions (such as what to eat: a cook delivered my meals). While much of my experience never made it into the book, some parts are taken straight from my journals,” she says. The Kimnama (the history of Kim) is a single, singular poem broken up into thirty-eight three-line lyric, imagistic stanzas that play against the long narrative. The language throughout is elegant and precise, and the short swinging lines reinforce the idea of passage, for me. Musical repetitions, the use of opposites, and the theme of connection, recall Whitman-- especially “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “Prayer to Columbus.”

In The Kimnama, the narrator is between cultures, speaking from the point of view of multiplicity; she is open to change, individually and as part of a community. “Awareness of emptiness brings forth the heart of compassion,” Gary Snyder has written, and Roberts treats blurred boundaries with respect and charity. “At the chai shop two women/join me on the bench/....I make a sign, asking,/can I take your picture?/..../The older woman asks for money,/....When I reach for my wallet/she laughs and pushes it away/what is she saying?/Mr. Singh translates/....she is teaching you/the word we use for friend.”

In her journal, Roberts writes, “The other morning I saw that a street vendor had deposited a huge pile of red onion skins in the gutter, and there were three cows eating the skins--and it was such a moment of pure beauty, the cows with their noses deep in this rich reddish-purple color in the midst of all the traffic and the noise, as if they knew they were gods. It all passed by in a flash--.”

Here is the section of The Kimnama based on that journal entry:

A fruit market on spindly wooden stands
is built by the side of the road.
Next to the melons,

a barber lifts his knife,
his client’s face
full of white lather.

A clump of laughing women
in a rainbow of saris
crosses the street.

Japanese Maruti vans honk
past ancient Ambassador cabs
built like tanks.

A man clad in a bright pink turban
and an orange scarf
around his neck smiles without teeth.

The market vendor deposits
red onion skins in the gutter
and three cows gather,

push their noses deep in rich reddish-purple,
stopping traffic,
as if they knew they were gods.

The dualities of the poem, light and dark, beauty and ugliness, the modern and the ancient, all come together by imagining the whole. Czeslaw Milosz reminds us “how difficult it is to remain just one person/ for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, /and invisible guests come in and out at will.” Each guest is valued in the resonant, musical work that is The Kimnama.

Roberts is editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and a co-editor of Delaware Poetry Review. This is her second book of poetry. Visit her site at www.kimroberts.org

”

cherylsnell wrote this review Monday, December 17 2007. ( reply | permalink )
The Everyday Uncommon

by Terese Coe
- Rated 5 stars
“The Everyday Uncommon
by Terese Coe
Wordtech Communications
ISBN: 1932339612
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell

In The Everyday Uncommon, Terese Coe takes us to far flung places on the globe and in the mind. With an agile technique, she grants us entry into her formal poems from surprising angles.

The book opens with a verse letter to Virginia Woolf, written with clarity of line reminiscent of Housman, as David Mason has noted. Echoes of Frost can be heard as well, in “As Wild As We,” “The Whale” and wherever ordinary speech is cracked over strict metrics. The ghosts of Lewis Carroll and Anton Chekhov are raised in these pages; poems such as “Theseus and Ariadne” give us new views of old myths.

The poems un-spool smoothly, alert to nuances of voice that deliver characters and situations reaching toward the universal. Each piece leads into the next rhythmically and thematically. “Villain Ill” comments on writing, and precedes a poem “On the Question of Men.” Here the author speculates that

if I cried for a guy, like the weird Lorelei,
I might write him a damn villanelle.

“In Everything the Traffic Will Allow,” she points out the mechanisms of contradiction in modern life:

One weekend it’s Turn back the digital clocks,
another, Subtract the same hour--.
Spend it and save it and put it aside,
but it’s you, I fear, time will devour.

The poet observes nature with a keen eye, whether hell-bent (“A Year for Weather”) or benign (“Beneath the Boom”). In “Dashinkali,” she brings us to the site of sacrifice at a Hindu shrine.

In the oneness of the ocean,
in the ringing Khumjung mile,
Om was carved in stone and colored
in the wild Tibetan smile.

Family life is the focus in “Vivenne and Vita” and “Dolpo Dog,” and in a sonnet entitled “Ark,” Coe’s depiction of a flood –“The river’s up, we’re flooded, launch the ark!” reminds one of the drowning sea of domesticity. The author admits,

I couldn’t take more torrents and this growing
wilderness of wet things, oceangoing.

She calls evil by its proper name, especially in the 9/11 poems. It’s the subject of an interview in “Anthropos,” and “In the Lee of the Disaster,” she tells us

Now there’s disaster everywhere,
No windward and no lee---
It’s all one Earth, and all one air,
And all one felony.

The book ends with “And This Is What We Have:”

And this is what we don't know:
the reason for our living,
the price we pay for chance,
the sacredness of giving,
the grace of our own dance.

Terese Coe shows us that grace, with heart and humor, in this well-wrought first book.
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cherylsnell wrote this review Monday, December 17 2007. ( reply | permalink )