Jack Foley The Dancer and the Dance. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $19.95 (280p) ISBN 978-1-59709-094-0

I think that many critics are into duplication, willing to accept, meekly, any orthodoxy. Jack Foley is a maverick. His not being tied to any institution gives him the freedom to explore aspects of American culture that others are too timid to dwell upon. As a result, his ideas are original, whether they be about the music and life of Cole Porter or the novelist, James Joyce. He’s always teaching me things…Jack Foley’s contribution to American culture will be lasting.

Mitchell Douglas Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $19.95 (112p) ISBN 978-1-59709-140-4

Cooling Board, Mitchell Douglas' debut collection, is a labor of love and gives expression to poetry's most intimate function: to save what we love. Beyond moving Donny Hathaway out from a corner and in toward the center of what came to be called soul music, this "long-playing poem" honors the essential mystery at the heart of one who heard voices–sometimes bedeviling ones but more often perfectly pitched angelic ones, to which his music points. That mystery is like the hole at the center of a long-playing album, a metaphor that gives shape to this beautifully conceived collection. Douglas knows where the grooves are, and with the delicacy and precision needed to set the needle down between tracks, he has honed then sequenced each poem, mindful of the advice given by Miss Martha, the gospel-singing grandmother who raised Hathaway: "Circles, baby. In circles." In his complex circlings in and through the difficult facts of Hathaway's life, Mitchell Douglas has succeeded in the nearly impossible task of surrounding the sublime ache for the ineffable with sound.

Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century Blase Bonpane. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $16.95 (272p) ISBN 1-888996-56-0

Your new book is an absolute jewel. The commentaries on everything from Haiti to Falluja are outstanding, and I found the interviews valuable. Also the book has been beautifully produced. I hope it has a big impact.

It would be wonderful if our country would today think of your Common Sense as a proper sequel to Tom Paine’s original.

Congratulations!

The Common Fire Shelley Savren. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $12.95 (88p) ISBN 978-1-888996-96-8

Winner of the 1994 John David Johnson Memorial Poetry Award, Shelley Savren is the recipient of nine California Arts Council Artists in Residence grants, two National Endowment for the Arts regional grants, and two artist fellowships from the City of Ventura. The Common Fire showcases this remarkable talent and will aptly serve to introduce a whole new audience of readers to a storytelling poetry of life and family, joy and grief, pleasure, and pain. Summer Days: In a triangle of afternoon light my daughter/Talia stretches across her bed,/knees bent back, feet crossed, hair winding/down to her shoulders, soft and blond.//Her skin is like peaches, the smell of steamed milk/rising. She leans into her Teen Magazine/the way a tree leans toward sunlight,/sways to headphone music, like a breeze.//She is searching for a boy who will take his hand/from a pocket and hold hers./She will paste his picture on her notebook/and dance with him in the school gym.//She tosses the magazine and I iron a dress,/pull it over her head. Static lifts her/as she steps outside, the dress clinging and sizzling./And for a moment, she is queen.

Cold Angel of Mercy Amy Randolph. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $11.95 (72p) ISBN 1-888996-55-2

A nature-touched spirit penetrates Amy Randolph's book of thirty-eight poems. These poems are filled with dreams of a new beginning after divorce, heart-felt emotions of grief and love and experiences of life, good and bad, of death, divorce, and loss. Randolph conveys a down-to-earth attitude with a respect for nature and immense understanding of life.

Randolph starts the book off with a poem entitled, "Angel":

I go back to January, back to the farmhouse

with its soft golden eyes, the dog pens

and fallen fence posts gloved in snow.

In this first stanza Randolph personifies the farmhouse, which gives a feeling of untended warmth. In the second stanza the idea of a death that is relived every night consumes the poem, as it would consume you with grief to live a death every day:

This is where a woman gets buried late at night,

over and over, under the blindness

of stars, wind clapping in the ears. There are lanterns,

picks and shovels, the crush of heavy shoes.

Randolph gives you the feeling that the memories of the dead woman are overwhelming, and yet there is a hint that she is not actually dead. "I love the ones who do this to her," provides the insight that she is a knowing participant of death. In the final stanza Randolph reveals that the death is that of herself and not another woman, to bring the poem to a close:

I name her "angel"

or "self." Beyond the fenceline, a thin sheet of snow

rises like a bride's veil. This is home, such grief and unfolding.

Not all the poems showcased in this book are as eye-opening as "Angel," but they do make you stop and think about the little things in life, such as nature, which we often take for granted. Randolph's poems entitled "Small Breakthroughs," for example, makes you appreciate these little things in life that you sometimes let pass you by, without notice.

Two hackberry branches

Float downstream.

Cutting ants carry late summer,

piece by piece

into the earth. Hours slide deadbolts

behind us.

The idea that the hours that have passed are locked away really brings into perspective that every minute is important and that you can't go back and change what has already been done. As time passes we will not be able to get that time back so we must make the most of it and enjoy the little things that surround us everyday. One such important moment in life is the realization of the want and need for love.

Randolph captures the moment in her poem "To Robert, Waiting in Greece for His Bride":

Even then, I knew I wanted

hands like yours " the turning of pages, the graceful finger-tracing

of backbone and thigh " to wed themselves to me.

In this poem Randolph gives you the sense that she knows who she wants and there is a longing for love from this person. This longing is portrayed as something that had been overlooked in the past but now is very dominant in her life:

Every hour is a crossing over, from the old lives

rotting

in their basement rooms, the old lives chewing on nothing

but empty space that once held them upright.

I walk dry pastures that stretch on until they fall into the earth. I

Walk

barefoot,

across silvers of bones that must have been me.

In the last stanza you get the feeling that it is only after she cannot have this person that she realizes how important he was to her.

Throughout the book Randolph shows growth and encapsulates major life lessons, which help define what it is to grow up, live, love and to experience loss. At some point in life almost everyone takes a step back from their beliefs and tries to figure out if faith is really what they want, need or even believe in. "Moving Out" uses faith and the idea of freedom to symbolize personal growth:

Remove him. Detach, and let him rise

above you, a cadence of flight

just below the yellow wheel

of lamplight.

And some hours are pure lapses

of faith.

In the first stanza Randolph refers to "him" as God, so with this stanza she is writing about removing God from her life. That is a normal part of growing up; he idea that God is not there for you and that you should just stop believing, most often comes with the loss of someone close to you. Randolph relives the first loss as that of her mother, and then of others whom she was close to. At that point the detachment is not from God but from those people she loved:

A death is being sung now

within the circle of daughters.

Detach and sing with them.

The last stanza brings this detachment full circle and reinforces the idea that is is time for her to be removed and detached so that someone else can feel the loss.

Randolph's natural writing style, along with her life experience, help bring a sense of familiarity to each poem in this book. She uses line breaks, her word choices, and a constant voice to guide the reader on a journey of life through her poems. The common words that fill the pages do not overwhelm readers yet bring them back to their own hopes, dreams and losses with ease.

Cartographies Maurya Simon. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $18.95 (104p) ISBN 978-1-59709-387-3

Maurya Simon's resume reads like that of a literary superstar. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and the Pushcart Prize in 2004, she has held residencies, won awards and has been granted numerous fellowships both domestically and abroad. The author of eight volumes of poetry, she has been published in a host of anthologies and has written in such publications as The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Pegasus and The Georgia Review.

So it is with much disappointment that her latest collection, Cartographies: Uncollected Poems 1980-2008 arrives as her latest contribution to belle letters. It's not that the book lacks substance or that the poems contained within are lacking. In fact, overall, it is just the opposite: Simon's commitment to formalism and her depth of insight are prevalent throughout. However, the book is uneven, with some extremely powerful poems juxtaposed against others which, despite their formal elements, are weak and sometimes uninteresting.

"City of Angels" (p.78), for instance, a dark poem written in rhyming couplets, strikes of discordance with its sing-songy rhythms.

Night beyond our wooded deck is murderous.

Pandemonium erupts in static bursts:

The radio's high voices pitch themselves in waves

Of terror through the nervous house, and we, adaze,

Can only shake our heads in disbelief, certain

That before evening's curtain drops its tattered hem,

The city of angels will have fallen hellishly to ash

Each palm and signpost flaming like a giant, struck match.

Against the poem's rhymes, both full and slanted, lies a discourse that meshes hope for the child who appears a little later in the poem and whose future is unpredictable and fraught with uncertainty. The subject matter of this poem seems very much out of place with its formal structure, its cadence and its unambiguous rhyming distracting from its bleak message.

Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps Simon wants us to experience the innocence of childhood despite the doom and gloom of the real world. Yet the rhymes (waves/adaze, collapse/lapses, comfortlessness/blessedness) and the meter distract from the poem rather than add to it. And these same elements are repeated throughout the book to the same end in such poems as "Second Born," "Simon Says," "On Our Twentieth Anniversary" and "Revival.

Contrast these poems to those such as "Waste Management" and "Trees" where formalism informs rather than distracts. Here is the first stanza from "The Woodpecker" (p.63):

sounds like a donkey braying

or a madman laughing

from the depths of his grave.

Hee-haw, hee-haw, he says.

Here, the slanted end rhymes are far from distracting and, in fact, stir interest in the reader. The lines are at once descriptive and imitative of the woodpecker's incessant hammering, and the preponderance of the "h's and the two trochees and one iamb in the last line of the stanza break away from the rhythm of the first three and add to this onomatopoeic quality.

Likewise, in "Waste Management" (p.62), Simon uses language to imitate the effect of a lumbering bear rummaging through garbage for his next meal. Here, she makes use of long lines and words with sounds that weigh heavily on the tongue, such as "forage," "fragrant" and "trudging," to further her characterization. Quatrains balance the poem out, preventing the use of such rich language from encumbering the reader and, when Simon does employ end rhymes, they are almost unnoticeable.

One wishes that the entire book was made up completely of such poems and that the other, less interesting ones could be done away with. This would have made for a more solid, more interesting collection. Perhaps the weaker poems were included to round out the four sections of the book" "The Soul," The Self," "The World : Mountains," and "The World : City," though that would hardly be valid justification. The book could have been a lot stronger had they been eliminated. Overall, however, Cartographies is worth reading and leaves one hopeful that the next collection will fully exhibit Simon's mastery of her craft.

— Mike Maggio

Burning Tulips Diane Payne. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $15.95 (156p) ISBN 978-1-888996-89-0

The terms 'memoir' and 'novel' are not as easily blended as PB&J; nor do they make half as good a sandwich. But when it comes to literature instead of low cuisine, these two forms of creative expression are hardly mutually exclusive; making fiction out of one's own life is nothing new. There are many examples of work that blurs the line between nonfiction and fiction, memoir and novel, upright citizen and bastard child.

The only question anyone who reads such an admixture should care about is: Does the author transform the highly personal into something universal?

For the most part, Diane Payne's memoir/novel hybrid Burning Tulips does.

The books only flaw is the putrid, one-note character of the father, who not only is the Vietnam War-loving stereotype of the union thug and domestic tyrant, but just happens to sexually molest his daughters, too. There may be such monsters in real life, but, at least in this instance, it doesn't make for compelling fiction. After a few run-ins with him, you're already desensitized. It's not that the author should have included some sappy detail about his secret hobby of raising orphaned bunnies, it's just that once you get to the chapter where he's in the garage slaughtering rabbits you're already so saturated with his malice that all you can do is chuckle and say, "Ho hum."

The father, though, is really nothing but a foil for the main relationship of the book between the terminally ill mother and her bridge-over-troubled-water daughter.

When Dad touches me, I can tell that he doesn't hate me, and I don't hate him. I don't hate him until he gets out of bed and starts screaming at my mother before he goes to work, once again making me invisible, forgetting that he was happy just moments ago.

The mother and daughter cling to each other like two tourists who've been abducted by a terrorist long enough to start making excuses for him, exhibiting the classic symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. In the chapter titled "The Trash Bin", the mother admonishes her daughter to not think too harshly of a vagrant bum who copped a feel. It's as if she's indirectly apologizing to her daughter for ignoring her husband's incestuous ways.

"It won't look good to say my daughter was touched by an old man. From now on, stay away from old men. They get like that. Don't you go telling anyone what he did. " Some things need to stay in the family."

Adding to the ambiguous nature of this memoir/novel is the fact the chapters can also be looked upon as stand alone short stories, autonomous in their own right, even as they work within the larger frame of the book. In the story, "The Keyhole", the young girl spies on her post-mastectomy mother preparing to bathe.

Mom's skin is red and raw, crusted with wounds that will become thick scars. Blood drips from the stitches. She looks bruised and off balance, but not untouchable.

The daughter's impulse to mother her mother overrides her fear of being pushed away, and she opens the door and walks into the bathroom. Over the protestations of her mother, the girl picks up the soap and begins to wash her mother's back.

"You're too young to see this."

"I saw it through the keyhole, Ma. It ain't that bad."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

As the daughter hits her teen years, she becomes a self-described 'Jesus Freak' who in the story/chapter, "Tongue-Tied" tries to proselytize at a crash pad inhabited by bikers.

"You know, I was wondering if the Road Knights might like to get involved with my church. You know, start a club called Jesus' Mufflers, or something like that."

The big man spits out his beer laughing. Leaning over the kitchen table, he pounds another guy on the shoulder, the one who is waiting for him to get back to their poker game, and says, "Did you hear that? She wants us to start a motorcycle club called Jesus' Mufflers!"

Bouncing from tragedy to comedy and a little bit of in between, these stories casually intertwine to create a lushly colored, painstakingly-rendered portrait of a family, their community, and the unsettled times in which they live.

Books and Rough Business Tullio Pironti. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $20.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-59709-129-9

Tullio Pironti's Books and Rough Business is, on the one hand, a wonderful metaphor about the publishing world today. Indeed, it could be both the metaphor and the reality of both worlds, Pironti's and that of Italian publishing. Like Pironti's own life of bobbing and weaving his way out of the squared ring and into the world of book production, the publishing world is, to be sure, a place where head feints and body shots can mean the difference between success and failure. The challenges of surviving in the ring anticipate those of the mid-size Italian publisher who, with clenched teeth and sweated brow, not only makes it through the last round but actually ends up winning the fight. No editor, big or small, can boast better writers than those who appear in Pironti's catalogue. Books and Rough Business is nicely translated in a style that aptly replicates the author's voice, a book that may very well keep the reader on the edge of his (even her) seat rooting for the underdog.

Body Painting Jane Hilberry. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $13.95 (72 p) ISBN 1-59709-013-1

If this is the book of the body, its lineaments are those of not only erotic but spiritual desire. Here friends and lovers, mothers and children, intermingle as in the morning light and shadow of a forgotten room, and the source of that light is Hilberry's very distinctive lyric voice, constantly surprising us with its subdued wit and deep understanding of what it means to be human.

Bestiary Elise Paschen. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $16.95 (80p) ISBN 978-1-56709-131-2

The passionate, yet controlled, third volume from Paschen (Infidelities) pursues the likenesses between human beings and other sorts of beasts: Paschen watches domestic animals, visits zoos and backyards, and records the instincts that animate her, as lover, mother, daughter and citizen. Husband and wife "share a wedded habitat"; a mother breastfeeding her daughter "would like to buzz/ into the orchid of your ear," while a manatee looks to the poet like "a mistaken mermaid,/ on the brink of vanishing from sight." Paschen offers sonnets, villanelles and even a ghazal, in which butterflies in an exhibit "invent a sky beneath the dome." Readers might remember not the moments of pure description, but the difficult emotions Paschen describes in her poems about marital love, motherhood and finally a daughter's grief. The urn with her father's ashes dominates one poem, and her late mother's career as a ballet dancer takes over another: "Mother, when I was young, I watched/ you from the wings and saw the sweat," Paschen writes, saw "your gasp/ for breath. I thought it was your last." If we are animals, Paschen suggests, we are the animals who look hard at one another, the animals who remember and who mourn. (Jan.)