Dungy's first poetry collection offers a number of ways to look at what is considered to be a part of nature, whether it is a part of the plants or the people that inhabit a place. Some of these poems undulate with sexuality, especially in lines like, "Desire is the flesh, the fruit you cry for every night" from "Sinner, Don't You Weep." One of the poems swelling with such bluesy desire is "Black Spoon":

won't give me more than the music of your fingers

strumming my slip's strap your chest sings

to my heart's ear while your wicked wisdom works

its secret privilege but you won't give me more

than your body tuned for walking out my door

hush now I'm the one done let you in (40).

Dungy does not remain content with exploring the nature of desire. Instead there is an exploration of cycles–pursuit, conception, birth, life, conflicts and death. Each poem tells an ongoing story of the Dungy family accompanied by poems on incidents of the time. "We Were Two Rooms of One Timber, But I Left That Place Alone" describes one such incident by speaking in the voice of a 31-year-old widow named Sara. She recalls how her husband Henry built their 2-room home filled with life, and how all that living changed:

There is a kind of hunger that feeds on life.

They carved into him with a banquet of knives,

made stew of his skin and stirred it

with his own bones. My Henry served: The meat

and the pot to cook it in. And there was no charge

against the men who made that meal. (48)

This tension of living close to passion and death simultaneously creates urgency in these quiet poems. They are not boisterous and full of outlandish syntax or a range of poetic forms, but the range of stories about gifted tailor grandfather and a worldly teacher named Thornton and other family members are unearthed by the granddaughter who discovers the history that is absent from textbooks. "Contraband," which is the last section, serves a reminder that black people in America were not allowed to have or do certain things. Contraband seems to resonate closely with this reminder in "Book Smart," the only poem in which Dungy mentions the term: "To worship with intellect, /where intellect was contraband, proved faith (70)."

Such figures might be considered modest by people who would expect poems about musicians and artists, such as John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Muhammad Ali or Kevin Young's Jelly Roll on Jelly Roll Morton and To Repel Ghosts on Jean Michel Basquiat. Dungy even juxtaposes O.J. Simpson against Jack Johnson by comparing their urge to speed in two poems. In "How It Happened," Simpson seeks to run with "disappearing legs and arms more secure than God's." Jack Johnson pays a $50 ticket twice in "Here's $100, Cause I'll Be Coming Back the Other Way." He is speeding upon arrival to his destination so he pays another $50 in advance to speed back home. "There are men you can stop, some you can slow, but I'm neither (53)," Johnson insists. Instead of making well-known characters the focus of her book, there is an impression that these characters were brought up in the conversations of the family household, and like this family, O.J. Simpson and Jack Johnson attempt to circumvent the limitations imposed by race.

Most of this book consists of variations on sonnets by using 14-line poems in a varying stanza breaks and no traditional rhyme schemes. Some formalists might argue that there is not the sense of control to call these sonnets. Upon close reading, such a staunch critic would clearly see that there is a tightly woven basket that holds the burdens of racism that told successful black people to "stay in their place." Such a place was presumed to be pre-ordained for black people. When Dungy closes with the title poem, a crown of sonnets shows how all of these poems are vines of the same plant, rooted in varying soils of the American landscape.

In the final sonnet, the speaker states, "only now, in spring, can the place be named." Such a line eloquently points back to the title that poisonous, nutritious and restorative plants can be found in the same forest. In Dungy's What To Eat, What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison, spring returns to reclaim lessons that can be gleaned from history to find what is lovable, healthy and admirable about the past.

–Tara Betts, Pembroke Magazine

Sholeh Wolpe's Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she ruffles. Her righteous aversion to male oppression is as broad as the span from Tehran to LA, as deep as a wise woman's heart. This is a powerful, elegant book.

–Richard Katrovas, author of The Years of Smashing Bricks and Prague Winters

In Sholeh Wolpe's Rooftops of Tehran, an unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God's eye view "hovering above a city / where beatings, cheating, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color's shades." Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe's poems are at once humorous, sad and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.

— Tony Barnstone, award winning poet and translator, author of The Golem of Los Angeles

"A stark and wondrous journey through and beyond the worlds looming on top of the aching roofs of Tehran, the poems in this collection are as vibrant as they are brave. Sholeh Wolp's poetry proves to be rumination, prayer, song. This book is an irresistible unrest. "

–Nathalie Handal, author of The Lives of Rain and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond

Perhaps there is no present, and existence is built of the alterable past moving into the alterable future, and then through the opaque door of death. Or perhaps there is neither past nor present, as if the person were a ship on a journey through the perpetually mutating future. Kurt Brown"'s collection of poetry, and the title poem, "Future Ship," highlight such convolutions of time. Brown is tormented by time. In the title poem he writes, The way out is the way in, and The deeper we move into the future the more we disappear into the past. Aware of the memories that travel with him, unshakable, he writes of family and friends, whole neighborhoods, villages, vast cities, or hunks of them" People haunt him. Like the deceased grandmother in "Grandma"'s Rye" who is still demanding Get me my rye! It"'s not a warm loaf of bread that she wants.

Read more.

“

http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2007/04/leslie-heywood-proving-grounds.html

MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2007

Leslie Heywood: THE PROVING GROUNDS

Leafing through the work in Leslie Heywood's premiere book of poetry, The Proving Grounds, one quickly becomes accustomed to uncovering sometimes uncomfortable and intimate details about the lives of the personae, often obviously representing the poet, in each piece's personal narrative. In the process, readers discover a compelling cumulative effect created during the series of revelations by the poems' speakers about private moments and close relationships. Indeed, Heywood, who includes among her previous publications the autobiographical Pretty Good for a Girl, presents in her first collection of poetry a set of mostly confessional poems that taken together resemble a series of memoirs.

Poetry in The Proving Grounds mostly chronicles dramatic moments during various stages of one woman's development from a young daughter in a troubled household through years as an athlete to her lingering difficulties as she assumes the role of mother toward her own daughter. Chronologically, the initial poem opens in 1969, a year of tragedies, including "Altamonte, / All those shootings"–and the narrator is pictured at the age of five with her two-year-old sister, part of a family finding themselves trapped in their own tragic circumstances: "We four caught here in a passion / Of paradise starting to break" ("Pixels").

The poet focuses on a father whose angry violence threatens the other members of the family and eventually creates an estrangement between him and his daughter. Even when remembering scenes one would hope to be tranquil, the speaker recalls: "alcohol in your blood / Was on the rise. And in its rise your rage" ("Canadian Geese"). By the time of the poem "1973," the daughter now about nine–"the oldest, always first"–leads her sister to rescue their mother from a drunken and bullying father who declares: "If you want to get her / You're going to have to go through me."

In another poem, readers learn the extent of the father's ferocity as he believes the "mother, his bosses, / And everyone else had failed him, until the doors / My mother locked to keep him out / Were shattered by his fists. The year / He broke her bedroom door six times / She decided to leave" ("Repair Shop"). Years later, the distance between father and daughter is revisited in "Telescope," where the speaker believes she always had disappointed him: "Me, your daughter, // Never tall enough, smart enough, a rag mussed up, / My skin and voice too rough. You look at me from the end // Of a telescope lens, miles away in that cool gaze."

A second poem that references 1973 (also the year of Secretariat), "Triple Crown" recounts how the speaker discovered her interest in running, physically and metaphorically: "Nine years old, I lowered my head, / Began to run." As she grows older and stronger, the narrator lengthens her runs and gains an ardor for the sport, as well as a desire for the local attention she receives from "newspapers, / Cameras, local news." "But not enough," she reveals and repeats the phrase a number of times in the piece, as her passion becomes obsession and turns into an opportunity for a college scholarship.

A total focus on her sport requires sacrifices. As a high school athlete, she and her teammates "were the girls / Who never went to the prom." Instead, in "Prom Girls," she reports how they prepare for a meet that would lead to making "Nationals." Even when seriously injured and told she'd "never run again," the speaker quickly overcomes her "spinal cord compressions" to win an invitational competition "four weeks later." The persona fears a loss of the recognition attained by winning races, perhaps even displays anxiety about a consequent absence of personal identity: "As soon as you stop / You are discarded / Like the bodies of Christmas trees / Dragged to the edge of the street" ("What Scares Me").

However, at nineteen this runner's body begins to fail. She experiences a series of fevers accompanied by other recurring symptoms: "The joints of my hands, knees, frozen / Like an old machine ground to a screech/ And then a stop." Nevertheless, despite "Mixed Connective Tissue Disease," the speaker needs to continue, since the activity has become her life and livelihood: "I ran like I breathed, / Ran because it paid my tuition and rent" ("Runner's High"). Even as a runner, the speaker in Heywood's poems attempts to please an older male, her track coach: "I ran for him. I'd do most anything he'd say" ("Burning My Virginity by Wendy's"). Nevertheless, she seems destined to fail and to feel she let him down, as she slows when she finds her "steps starting to stutter and shake." She is abandoned again when the older coach drives his "Ford Fairmont" off in disappointment and anger: "I watched its tailpipe shake / As he burned out of the parking lot / Into the street across from / The Jiffy Lube and Wendy's, like the violence / Of anyone's first time."

Later, the poetry's persona switches her physical obsession to power-lifting weights and bodybuilding, training with "the men, the studs, the boys" ("From the Bench-Press Meet"). In some sense, the desire to enhance her strength and compete with men seems a logical extension of an ongoing inner conflict evidenced by some speakers in Heywood's poetry, a struggle concerning feelings of inadequacy with self-esteem due to instances of apparent disregard by others or inequality in treatment because of her gender.

This difficulty begins with an inability to please her father, even as a child proudly bringing home high grades, when he responds to his daughter: "anyone who takes such easy classes would certainly get all A's" ("Telescope"). On the other hand, at school her teacher reinforces feelings of discomfort by publicly using the good grades by her "to mock the boys" ("How I Learned World History"). The lesson taught in her history classroom becomes one about a society in which boys are often informed they should be embarrassed to be outperformed by girls: "losing to one of us / Was the worst kind of shame." At times, Heywood chooses to move beyond personal experiences in her poems to address public situations with similar issues, as she does in "One of Us," a piece concerning the well-known news story about s female kicker's problems with the University of Colorado football program. A lengthy epigraph containing an excerpt from one CNN report of the circumstances precedes the poem, although such work usually lacks the impact of The Proving Grounds' more intimate poetry.

In fact, a group of personal poems near the close of the volume that relate the speaker's loss of a two-week-old infant son are among the most compelling in the collection. Heywood starts "Ethics" offering plainspoken lines filled with intensity: "I am waiting for him to wake up, / I am waiting for him to die." She confides that she "never wanted children really," didn't want "motherhood"; however, later in the poem, as the persona recognizes the baby's dire physical condition, the speaker concludes with an emotionally painful resolution: "His weight, his still face, / His open eyes on mine, I knew" / Knew for the first time that I wanted him / And knew I wanted him to die."

Appropriately, Heywood follows these poems with a few final poems that reflect her eventually, and perhaps at first reluctantly, assuming a mother's role. In "Caelan at One" the poet confesses a tendency to be absent from her young daughter's life: "Ever since my daughter was born / What I seem to do best is leave." Readers even see a parallel to the pattern of poor parenting exhibited by the poet's own father earlier in the book. Indeed, in "Ecology" the speaker acknowledges a similarity: "My mother said / I was just like you." At the same time, she confesses that as a girl she felt abandonment from her father: "you'd left us again, or really, I thought / You'd left me." In the book's last group of poems, Lesley Heywood looks back and also gazes forward. First, she mentions about her distanced relationship with her father: "Friends say I need to call you / Sometime before you die" ("Bringing in Wood"). Then, she re-examines the growing gap in her relationship with her daughter, ending the book with these final lines from "Caelan at Two": "I promise you / In all the ways people do / I will try not to leave."

In this manner, the collection–which began with a five-year-old daughter's perceptions of her parents' marriage collapsing and the consequences for her relationship with the father–comes to an end with a new beginning, as the girl has grown into her own motherhood, vowing not to repeat the mistakes her father made. Thus, Heywood's book provides a hopeful sense of closure, though the word "try" in the volume's final line appears realistically tentative, reflecting the speaker's lingering anxiety and evident uncertainty.

Although The Proving Grounds, like almost all poets' first books, is uneven at times–some stanzas slip in more prose-like lines one might find in a memoir, and a couple of poems are harmed by slightly awkward phrasing, "My lover was a better shot than me" ("Splitting Skeet"), or trivial inaccuracies, "The dialogue on Sex in the City" ("Calaen at One")–this collection's cumulative effect proves to be one of persuasion deriving from a powerful and convincing sequence of poems. As Leslie Heywood's memoirist poetry in The Proving Grounds proceeds to disclose a somewhat confessional narrative, both unique and identifiable, following a deliberate arc from page to page, readers come to comprehend a conflicted woman who even as a young girl had sought in a number of ways to prove her worth to her father and others, but who gradually has begun to gain a greater sense of self-esteem, to understand how valuable she may be, especially as a mother to her own daughter.

Heywood, Leslie. The Proving Grounds. Red Hen Press, 2005.

POSTED BY EDWARD BYRNE AT MONDAY, APRIL 02, 2007

0 COMMENTS:

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"In the debut collection from Kentucky poet Nickole Brown, readers experience the pleasures of poetry "the illuminated moment reverberating" as well as the pleasures of the novel–the narrative unfurling, driven by complex central characters. . . . Rich with images, brave with difficult truths, and restrained enough to avoid melancholy, this is a collection readers will enjoy."

"If you feel that high emotion and unalienated confession is not art, as Slavoj Zizek might assert that it cops to the System where the individual is valued for trying to be different–this books asks the question: what do you do with specific experience you never chose and from which you must try to recover? In the end, Brown blows all up into an awful beauty of size, color, and sound. . . ."

"Brown's awareness of the book's form, its how in addition to its what, allows for these poems' rich complexities. The order not only forms a linear narrative, but layers experience. . . . Such raw and beautiful imagery is just one of the many threads that pull this book together. The moments result in nothing short of song. Each poem develops a scene the way a photograph reveals its occasion as it develops, ghostly at first beneath the chemical liquid in the dark room, sharpening into gradual, undeniable, and vivid evidence. Such evidence must answer the speaker's final question in the poem "Tintinnabulation," "sister, did you feel loved, ever, / by me?' In Nickole Brown's care this journey is an honest one; the sensation is only and always compassionate and sincere."

"The strength of Sister is in the details, some of which are constructed through Brown's diction, which is gently infused with a southern dialect but resists caricature. She writes of cutting her finger then blood "pollacking the paper with red' or of "fried comfort' or when her sister came home "bawling, colicky, dispositioned / bad, a mess of black tar meconium.' In each phrase, the particular word from the South captures a precise detail, making Brown's poems visually, as well as aurally, rich. . . . The interplay between girlhood and womanhood for the narrator's mother is another theme carried through the entire collection and explored among the three central characters of the book: the mother, the narrator, and the sister. This trifecta of women is brought to life with great pathos through Brown's artistry. Resisting sentimentality . . . Brown's narrative poems are vital. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in its insistence to look at and capture the realities of women's lives, Sister is a strong debut collection."

"To write of one's own conception, gestation, birth"to write convincingly of unknowable-yet-familiar moments: that is the power of poetry and the power of Nickole Brown's debut, Sister, a self-styled "novel-in-poems.' . . . It would be difficult for the book to flee the inevitable baggage of the Southern Gothic, yet it walks that high wire gracefully and never lapses into stereotype. . . . Sister is in no way limited; it does not limit its subjects, its language, its experiments with form, or its audience."

"Nickole Brown's poems marry an enthralling and tormented narrative with woven, specific lyricism to create a layered progression through a difficult past. Brown has immediate access to how the situations she evokes are processed by the mind of a child and can re-create that open and immediate seeing. . . . The aim here is not retribution, but getting it right. The speaker's addresses to her sister, which are spoken even before the sister has been born, and then as she grows toward the present, shape the book as a lesson in understanding how little one can understand about this world. However, the struggle for reason, even science, is beautifully wrought in Brown's hand."

"Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's Sister–an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book–undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to the arms of a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader down the rain-swollen rush of river where her past gurgles with the "sound of diesel," to reveal the pedophile–"a man who simply // cannot stop." These poems, always stunning in their clairvoyance, advise us to take such experience and "simply / bury it, but bury it / alive." I cannot imagine a world in which one could read this book and not experience the confluence of dismay and wonder.

"It would be easy to say that this collection is an indictment, but there is nothing easy about these poems. They are each skillfully wrought pieces about impossible subjects. . . . Though she speaks of "straddling a fence," of "switching all the time / between isn't and ain't" ("Straddling Fences"), there is no question of Brown's belonging to the literary realm. . . . Sister is at once memoir and confession, rebuke and invitation. These poems are of the hour between dog and wolf when neither creature seems particularly safe. However, the Preface' evokes light–battery-powered and not standing much of a chance against the darkness–but "light nonetheless," and this collection ends with that glimmer of hope, too.

"Brown's forthright debut opens with an intimate address to a sister: "I tell you this story because it is / the story we need / to believe our offal is divine." . . . . A striking collection. The strongest poems are those stripped of commentary, in which rough memories are offered as strange discoveries, as in "Jessica Meyers in the Corn:" "In puddles of seeping / groundwater, I plugged in electrical cords and her skin / burned black.' These are brave confessions; apologies and recollections lay everything bare: "I want nothing / but truth between us, but I am afraid.'"

Time Out London

Motel Girl (Red Hen Press) is the debut collection of New York writer Greg Sanders. Like many debut collections it draws material from a decade of writing, going back to two stories originally published by Time Out Net Books in the early days of the magazine's online activities. 'Lemon', about a peep-show addict with a sick daughter, and 'The Sculptor', which addresses mortality with the help of an artist who makes pieces that explode once they've been looked at a certain number of times, are as fresh now as they were ten years ago. Sanders' stories are occasionally Kafkaesque (the narrator of 'I Am an Actuary' begins: 'People often ask me what actuaries do. I say that they entrench themselves in bunkers made of paper') and often evoke the same feelings as Edward Hopper's cityscapes– lonely lives led in sixth-floor walk-ups. He writes incisively about the fumbling attempts of men and women, either at home in Manhattan or out of their comfort zone in upstate New York, to connect meaningfully. His best stories, such as 'Aesthetic Displeasure Unearths Lack of Marital Fortitude', in which a couple's sex act is witnessed by the unlikeliest of onlookers, inject an element of the bizarre into the everyday. Buy online from the US, until a UK publisher wises up.

—Nicholas Royle

“

John Domini Earthquake I.D. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $20.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59709-076-6

Des Moines author John Domini has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Meridian Editors Prize, and has had his fiction works published by Paris Review, GQ and the New York Times. His latest novel, "Earthquake I.D.", is sure to gain him some additional exposure as Domini tells the tale of Jay and Barbara Lulucita and their five children, an American family living in Naples, Italy. The Lulucitas are innocents abroad, who believe they can help townspeople ravaged by earthquakes, crime and an influx of African immigrants– but they can't. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the protagonists themselves could use some help of their own.