Monday 28 July 2014

Lacock, Wiltshire, 27 July 2014


My dear friend Lynn Corr was visiting this weekend, and Sunday we took her to Lacock. We began at Lacock Pottery, which sells Trevor's work, took a lovely walk through the countryside that gave us some lovely views of Lacock Abbey.



A hidden grotto





Lacock Abbey


 


Typical housefronts in Lacock

 

A street in Lacock

 

Wednesday 16 July 2014

Imagined Sons chosen for Editors Select in Notre Dame Review

Imagined Sons has been chosen for the Editors Select feature in the new issue of Notre Dame Review, where the book is described as "extremely moving."

Tuesday 15 July 2014

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's The Heat Bird (Burning Deck, 1983)

Visiting Providence in April (a city I love more with each visit), I visited a wonderful bookstore, Paper Nautilus Books. Because they stock both new and used books, I was able to find an out of print, early collection by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, The Heat Bird. It's an impressive book, and the passages I quote below are less powerful out of context, but nonetheless compelling. 

The book is a single long poem in four sections composed of short passages which feel like independent poems in their own right. The first section is "Pack Rat Sieve":

       
              ...the horizon is just a change where
from going deep you go wider, but go

*

                                                            All this time
she was trying to recede until things would resemble
each other, as she had imagined the void to be a room
of fog, so the figure of a man or a house on stilts
should clearly loom from its field.

*

              There is a woman who can whoop with laughing 
like a wolf at the stars, one to one, without
any bridge, but she is not that woman

*

...an urge to go look at the plain, your back to the town
and the ferris wheel.


The second, much shorter section is "Farolita":


                  Toward town, in low sun, she sees light
in flapping laundry. It was just movement at first. She has
heard the processions walk by. At first you think their
singing is a moan in the wind.


The third is "Ricochet Off Water":


The only quiet place was in the well where they
kept the melons. There she could hear most distinctly
people's cries in China.

*

The big hill is solid in dim light. A lit cloud
rolls down behind it. She was standing in the dirt yard
trying to decide between them.

*

Then she steps across what she can't remember.


And lastly, the title section, "The Heat Bird":


                                              Stepping
across stones in the river which cover
my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle
the meadow to gain height. There is a din
of big wings. A crow loops over and over
me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing
by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird
I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called
an eagle to myself.

*

                               Twice I am not sure if light wings
between some bushes are not light through crow feathers
but then I really see the expansive back swoop down
and circle up to another cottonwood and light
It's a buzzard with a little red head. You say
that's good. They're not so scarce anymore. It sould
have been more afraid of me

*

Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so
I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass
of death might put on the air, which is sometimes clear
with yellow finches and butterflies.

*

Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
of fear to the horizon.

*

                                           In an apricot tree
were many large birds, and an eagle that takes off
as if tumbling down before catching its lift. I thought
it was flight that rumpled the collar down like a broken neck
but then as it climbed, it resembled a man in an eagle dress
whose feathers ruffle back because of firm feet
stamping the ground in wind.

*

                       If I am far from you isn't the current
of missed events between us an invention of potency
like a summer storm at night, or when I see you

*

When I touch your skin, or hear singers in the dark, I get
so electric, it must be the whole dam of my absence pushing
I think, which might finally flow through its proper canyons 
leaving the big floor emptied of sea, empty again
where there used to be no lights after dark

*

                                                               The eagles'
wingbones began to stretch open with practicing, so
luminous space in their wings showed against the sky
giving each a great delicacy in turns



You can learn more about Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge at The Poetry Foundation by following this link.

 


Wednesday 9 July 2014

Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire (Norton, 2012), second selection

So much of the experience of this book lies in the whole over the parts, such that I feel a little awkward posting passages. Take it from me that the book's strength can't be surmised from the piecemeal.



I'm a titbit, a dollop easily bored,
a trolloping doer, I loll and gag,
fired from the tear gas factory, the denture factory,
now the heart-ticker factory.

from "The Engineer of Vertical Frontiers"


the sitting room is quiet, sprayed
with air freshener the flavor of aged
             card catalogue

*

           a sea full
of whales huge as ocean liners
singing the call-note of our
relieved tears.

from "Ready-Made"


When your former employer let you go,
they said, you are now free to pursue what you want to pursue.
So here you are.

end of "Who's Who"


I hail an aerocab,
turn up my personalized surround sound
track: wistful to anthemic
to voice
              recognition,
a song strains after a longed
sweet spot of identification.

beginning of "The Quattrocento"


I see too much

yet go, go into the unknown,
             smell the salt, rancid
scent of water, seagull,
blades of grass and listen.

from "Get Away from It All"


The sheer sapphire cliffstone towered so high,
the whole ocean seemed frozen inside it.
Under its shellacked panes of ice were marblings of color
I'd long forgotten: tangerine, topaz,
canary and rose.

Like fluorescing cuttlefish,
the colors pulsed, swirled and bloomed
into contracting rings. The ice breathed.

*

One day, I decided to steal some.
I pocketed one grain.

The snow glowed bluely in my hovel.
My little lamp.
Then one night I don't know why I swallowed it.

And this is what I saw.

from "Fable of the Last Untouched Town"


At the date of posting, you can buy Engine Empire for 25% off at Foyle's for a mere £7.49 (it's worth it, it's worth it!).






Sunday 6 July 2014

Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire (Norton, 2012), first selection

I heard Cathy Park Hong read in Seattle during the AWP conference, and in my journal I wrote exclamation marks next to her name. After the event, I told her how much I enjoyed her work, but as her books weren't on sale at the event, I kept her name in my mind for later reference. 

Last Wednesday, I traveled to London to my first meeting since being elected to NAWE's (the National Association of Writers in Education) Higher Education Committee, and as it ended early and was near the British Museum, I found myself in the wonderful London Review Bookshop's poetry section, and there it was--Hong's latest book, Engine Empire. The first section is a narrative largely in ballads, titled "Ballad of Our Jim"; here are some favourite passages.




Day's gone immortal.

The bleached ruin of light lasts and lasts, no night
to repair our minds, no white clip moon to give us rest,
Only pitiless noon where our sleep-starved consciousness 
patters faintly behind our squinted eyelids. 

from "Ballad of Tombstone Omaha"


We stop speaking. Our lips curl back so we're just teeth.
Our Jim sings as if all his body's reed.
No thought flickers behind his linseed eyes.

from "Ballad Beyond the Forts"


We shuck our boots near an alkali pond
where no fish breathes its poison, only white alien worms
float like dander from a sunken
corpse turned angel.

from "Ballad of Arrival with Hatajo of Mules"


We scream: Do it, boy! Shoot!
He aims cold, slays them all, 
exciting us no end.
He says: I'm done finishing your games. 

end of "Ballad of the Rube Parade
with Their Quiver of Spades"


Jim sings: I'm tiring, I'm tiring.

His grim instinct wilting.
Dispiriting Jim, climbing hill's hilt,
drifting Jim, sighing in this lilting,
sinking light.

end of "Ballad in I"


He rides into a shadowed plain,
where a storm of grasshoppers
hoving wings to wind,
black the sky thick as larrup. 

beginning of "The Song of Katydids"





Thursday 3 July 2014

Oystercatcher Pamphlets: Amy Cutler's Nostalgia Forest (2013) and Alan Baker's all this air and matter (2013)

I've read two fine pamphlets this week from Oystercatcher Press. Amy Cutler's Nostalgia Forest (2013) juxtaposes passages from Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting with illustrations from dendrochronology manuals (i.e. tree reading) and hence can't really be excerpted. Cutler's intelligent and playful combinations of words and images render the pamphlet an unusually engaging and gratifying experience. You can purchase it directly from the publisher by following this link.

The second Oystercatcher pamphlet I read and enjoyed was Alan Baker's all this air and matter (2013), interweaving dailiness and an array of larger concerns about language and living. Some of my favourite passages follow below, and you buy the pamphlet from Oystercatcher here



and we, this morning,
as if the world were a place of healing,
and touch the ultimate cognition

*

should it be sign of something more
when the square of sunlight on the hall floor
takes shape again at dawn?

*

               doubt
           and certainty in abeyance

*

she will say that the sea
     rested on her shoulder
    and its surge was her heartbeat

*

woke to surfaces and the words
                      that make up the world

*

living, "the process of becoming alive"

meteorologically speaking
           occlusion and changeability

*

the pathways of sleep
   lead away from all that
              into the calm melancholy
      of morning:


  


Tuesday 1 July 2014

The Guardian's Poem of the Week, from Imagined Sons, with a splendid review

I'm delighted that one of my birthmother's catechisms is The Guardian's "Poem of the Week," selected by Carol Rumens, yet perhaps more moved by Rumens' overall account of the book, wonderfully appreciative and astute. Describing the Imagined Sons prose poems, she writes, "Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid." Of the catechisms, she says, "Etter reinterprets the form as both a psychological and a melodic device. The intense, same-question repetition pushes the speaker into a corner, where poetic self-defence may be disarmed, the creative play of the prose poems distilled to a barer essence." Concluding with her analysis of the catechism that asks, "Who do you think you are?," Rumens comments on the last line, "It's a cadence of renunciation, singular and resonant, in a text otherwise charged with restless energy and novelistic powers of invention."
  
Heartening and gratifying....