Reviews - December 2012

The poetry of re-formation

A review of Jefferson Carter's 'Get Serious'

After eight collections of poetry, a poet usually arrives at a point when a “new and selected” is a natural, a given, if not something of an earned entitlement; a milestone in any case. This is no less true for Jefferson Carter’s Get Serious, a gathering of the best of a poetry that is as original as conditions of originality permit, so much so it seems to stand alone, like a night club in a cemetery.

'To drown well is art'

A review of Anthony Lynch's 'Night Train'

Night Train is Anthony Lynch’s first book of poetry, and it comes with a small list of weighty names in its acknowledgements. This promises to be poetry that has been carefully hefted, sifted, culled, and considered. In addition, Anthony Lynch is not only a fine short story writer, but is himself a professional editor and a publisher of poetry. To know what you are doing can be a dangerous starting point for a poet and for poetry, so it is with relief that I found the last line of the first poem suggesting “To drown well is art.”

This first poem has the openness of free verse, the kind of short-lined free verse where missteps are quickly exposed. It has the formality of three-line stanzas and a faintly self-mocking tone as it takes us through references to a Mandelbrot set, a climatologist’s beard, the after-rain songs of birds, and a brief theory of puddles via a dog (summed up in the phrase above). The lines are beautifully paced down the page, sometimes in a phrase so expertly handled you have to stop (“on a nub of hill”) and the whole carries a voice that’s interesting already. The first section, “Topography,” introduces the reader to landscape, weather, animals, and a faux-scientific vision that either accepts drowning “well” or aspires to that condition. This poetry can walk us vigorously across a farming landscape, alert us to the slaughter that is part of farming as well as those compromised versions of nature that go to constitute farming country (foxes, rats, genetically modified canola, hares, invading bees). The poet is there with us, simply, and we trust him, while the poetry continues in its steady short lines that pace themselves with steps that don’t stretch the breath but feel alive mostly because of the liveliness of the mind that subjects itself to the compact diction of the poetry: a sheep unplugged by a fox; a mop squeezed out in the sky; an octopus of hose; dumbstruck shirts on the clothesline; a pelican that “jumbos over the bay”; and in a train, “upon reflection, the dark windows clone you.” These images I have almost randomly chosen, for the arresting moments are so frequent that it takes more than one reading to catch them all.

'Besieged by grief'

A review of Rachel Tzvia Back's 'A Messenger Comes'

In Rachel Tzvia Back’s collection of poems A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012), the poet, like a biblical Deborah bearing a torch, arrives to illuminate the dark, devastated, and devastating space of grief.

'The architecture and ambience of the maze'

A review of Marie Buck's 'Amazing Weapons'

Let’s find our way out of this maze, the title of the opening poem in Marie Buck’s Amazing Weapons, draws an etymological fact to our attention, the relation in English between the noun maze and the verb amaze. All the maze words stem from old Germanic words referring to labor.