Review of The Verbs of Desiring

The Verbs of Desiring. Renée Ashley.
Fort Collins, CO: New American Press, January 14, 2010. 42 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9817802-5-2

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The Verbs of Desiring is Renée Ashley’s sixth collection of poems. It won the 2009 New American Press chapbook contest. This is a collection that stretches in multiple directions at once. It reminded me of other poets like Edgar Bowers and George Oppen who not only address their topic but create a language that embodies the complexities they find in the world.

The opening poem, which is the title poem, declares, “How tired the self is of the self, its earth twirling in the air and/not-air.” It is an appropriate opening to a collection that not only explores desire, but finds the self blurred in a simultaneous becoming and unbecoming state. That is, identity is a verb and not a noun. We tend to think of the self as a fixed object, something that means one and only one thing in our head but “There are more ways to mean/than you can make note of.” So there are “A panoply/of possibilities.” Even the absurdity of “all those bears pirouetting in your penthouse!” But it is all transition, nothing actually is, everything fluctuates as potential. So the poem concludes, “Oh if it or they were only./Or if you. And, or if I.” It is a magnificent linguistic concentration of all that wishes to be by playing on the fact that “were” is both a form of the verb “be” and is the subjunctive mood.

Ashley allows for some humorous consequences in exploring how “this is becomes unbecoming.” For instance, one poem opens “I cannot put my mother in the freezer and neither can I store her in the attic.” This is not literal, of course, because the poem is about thinking or reflection as the title is “I Have a Theory About Reflection.” The double-entendre clearly falls on “reflection,” because it is about the atavistic rise of our parents or ancestors in how we think. So Ashley declares of her mother:

“I am a match and every time we speak – and sometimes when we do not – she strikes me Even in the bend of a spoon I can see her reaching”

In every place and in every way the primordial soup out of which the creation rose is still very much with us, every place you find “the single/imperfect discourse of an unfinished world.”

Sometimes Ashley will twist a familiar phrase as in “thrown to the away” rather than “thrown away.” There are parentheticals as in, “She’s not ready to swap (she’s lying) the slender skill of being alive” or “Here/is the hand that knows subtraction. (Cut it off.).” Or a poem will have no punctuation. These are not simply acrobatics, mere dazzling displays but rather efforts toward a kind of fluidity, simultaneity, permeability in how we often, in our desires, contain paradoxes, assertions and their denials. There may be moments these unusual shifts confuse, but working through them to the kernel of her work is rewarding, for Ashley is not just pulling us along in a display of language but she is giving us a language of the phenomenological, and I mean that in the philosophical sense that Husserl put forth. That is, we are looking at consciousness and the structures that appear in it. Thus the poem “Bodies in Increments Bodies in Wholes” concludes “observation dilutes images It must I can do nothing more than this We are the indefinite article.” Here the lack of punctuation heightens the connection between observer, observed and the act of observing.

The nice clean boundaries we like to define our world by become porous, with bits of us mingling with bits of the things around us as we look on the world. This is a poetry that is simultaneously in tune with the physics of our time and the Buddhist doctrine of the Visuddhimagga. The former in more recent times defines atoms as mathematical probabilities in time and space and even says that we literally share atoms with the things and people around us. And the Visuddhimagga says,

Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it."

In such a world of dancing atoms and permeable selves, the movement of the universe in concert is the only reality. It is no wonder that the last poem, “Wine Not Water Fish Not Frogs” concludes itself and the collection with this wisdom, “I’ve/learned not to find truth in a world. I’m trying to go on.”

Notice this says “a world” not “the world.” The world or any world is the creation of our mind, our desire and all worlds are passing away because the dance doesn’t stop. As the poem prior to this asserts, “You are building the mountain you fall from.” The only way to live is not to construct a world but simply “to go on.”

This is a collection for those who find wrestling with complexities and subtleties a pleasure, the kind of challenge that is fun. It is full of intelligence and wisdom, music and quirky revelation. It is a kind of dance. Let yourself glide across the top of these poems, rapid as a stone skipping along a surface of water, a philosophically insightful surface of water. Dance and mingle with the images and ideas, enter and emerge and you will find after that plunge, you feel reminded of so much it seems you once knew long ago.

Reivew of Temptation by Water

Temptation by Water. Diane Lockward.
Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, May 15. 2011. 90 pages,
ISBN: 978-1-936138-12-8


Temptation by Water is Diane Lockward’s fourth collection of poems and as I did with her previous book, I marveled at how well she puts a collection together. Better than any other poet I can think of, her collections are balanced between the power of each individual poem to stand on its own and the way the poems work together to develop related themes. Temptation by Water focuses not only on the heart and the disappointment or fulfillment of its desires but also embodies a struggle toward remaining vulnerable, to braving loss and pain so as to still be willing to take the risks of truly living. Throughout the collection self-exposure and self-preservation ebb and flow like water, the heart pulses with reaching out toward beauty and the world, then pulls back into itself, elements of passion crystalizing inside it while others are discarded in the wake of new influxes. It is a complex collection of subtly explored emotions, penned with humor and wit, craft and experimentation.

In these poems technical skill and playfulness combine into a subtle yet casual voice. For instance, in the poem “Pleasure” she concludes with an uncommon rhyme called an amphisbaenic rhyme. This is a type of slant rhyme where the words are reversed. Lockward rhymes “sleep” and “peels.” She also creates this rhyme phonetically with “slurp” and “pearls.” Only a truly deft writer could create such pyrotechnics in a poem that sounds completely at ease in its tone, which Lockward does not only in the poem “Pleasure,” but in the other poems throughout Temptation by Water.

The opening poem and the title poem of the collection “Temptation by Water,” prepares us for the difficult and daring world we are about to enter. In it a woman wades into Henri Matisse’s painting “The Open Window” where there is

. . . here and there a splash
of black, like shadows foreboding something
she cannot name.

She floats inside the frame,
like Alice free-falling down the hole, enters this
other world. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The sea
like liquid emeralds, a kind of paradise, not one
human in sight, not one person she can name.

This is a kind of paradise, but not paradise. We are about to enter a world of poems that is similar to Alice’s Wonderland, a place that has dangers, a place that is not static but where hard lessons are learned and growth is a little frightening. The rabbit hole here is the human heart, its desires, its realizations and disappointments and all it does in response to both. The first poem in the first section, “Weather Report” closes with

. . . a slip of the tongue can change
desire into disaster, how desire and water
can sweep us away, and how we are all
looking for someone to push back
the waves, to grab hold of us, and keep us
here, pressed to the earth.

Of course, that desire to hold back mortality is impossible. No matter who we love, they too are mortal. That fact is confirmed 2 poems later in “Leaving in Pieces,” which is a humorous poem with a serious theme. The speaker’s husband loses his hair, the very thing the speaker says she married him for. Over the course of the poem, she kicks her husband out of their bed and replaces him with a dog, “his liquid eyes, his lustrous hair.” But the reason for it is that the husband’s bald head was always there

forcing me to contemplate
weighty subjects I preferred to ignore,
like my own mortality.

Love and desire in these poems is not just intimacy and acquisition but a battle with death. But that can’t be conquered and it comes “in pieces” or a little at a time: an aging mother’s ever stooping figure, winter taking over a garden, a lover lost. These reminders of mortality intimidate the heart that wants to do nothing more than withdraw into itself. So there’s the centipede who is a

Lucky little arthropod,
without our human flaws.
He has no poetry, no art, no songs,
but knows no fear when darkness enters a room.
. . . . . .(“What He Doesn’t Know”)

It’s a double-edged sword or a tongue-in-cheek conclusion, but either way it’s a metaphor by which the heart can guard itself. In another instance, a woman is “done now with ripeness, the mess of juice.” Or again, Humpty Dumpty is imagined as a cookie among others

. . . baked by his mother,
his grandmother, a procession of women in aprons,

their slippers padding into the kitchen,
women greasing pans, pre-heating ovens,

their hands dipped in flour,
fingers kneading butter, sugar, and eggs,

women filling and enfolding him,
bringing him home, wrapped
in the unbreakable dough of their arms.

These are examples of the heart contracting into itself to avoid the breakable world. But no real living is done there either and it slowly must find a way out of its lifeless securities. Sometimes it’s in taking a photo of natural beauty, as in “Capturing the Image.” Or, as is often the case with a Lockward poem, it’s a moment of the sensual pleasure in food as in “Onion,” or “Love Song with Plum” where the speaker takes the plum offered and concludes by confessing

. . . I want to stand at the perimeter
of this plum-luscious
earth, sink a plumb
line for balance, then plummet
like a bird on fire, placate
all my desires, my implacable
hunger for the ripeness of my sweetheart’s plum.

This is the renewal of the heart after the poem “Woman with Fruit” earlier in the collection declared the speaker “done now with ripeness, the mess of juice.” The collection affirms the growth of the heart’s struggle to risk living fully, and to accept the pains and loss that come with passion and love, with growth in a life that is fully lived. The final poem in the collection, “Seventh-Grade Science Project” affirms the risk of a girl catching butterflies and how it was worth it:

. . . . . . . . . . . . The pin-pricked fingers, wasp

. . . . . . . . . . . . stings, and blood on my arms
. . . . . . were what I paid for my first
A in science. All that summer

I ran like something wild and left
. . . . . . my multi-colored fingerprints
. . . . . . . . . . . . on everything I touched.

To go for that A, to live life passionately, requires accepting the bruises and losses, the “blood on my arms,” it is to be marked by the world and in turn to leave a mark. Temptation by Water is an affirmation not only of the temptation to plunge into the changing tide of life but a seduction, a masterful collection of poems you will not soon put down or soon forget.

A Little in Love a Lot: A Review

A Little in Love a Lot. Paul Hostovsky.
Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, Aug. 2011. 96 pages, ISBN: 978-1-59948-303-0

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I first discovered Paul Hostovsky’s poetry when he was published in the now defunct online journal Jellyroll. I was immediately struck by the playful associative leaps his poems made. Since then I’ve come across his poems in many other journals both print and online, and have read his most recent collection, A Little in Love a Lot. The very title implies his poetic technique. A Little in Love a Lot is a dance with many partners, a desultory romp of affections. Sex and love are, of course, the subjects of many of these poems. But so also are the uncomfortable differences between men and women, young and old, even two individuals, and the way to bridge those gaps by an unrestrained embrace of all those differences.

The opening poem, “Uncanny,” says, “everything rhymes a little,” and as you somersault through the associative dances of Hostovsky’s poems you will dance into unexpected meanings and insights, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, but always engaging. In the poem, “The Debate at Duffy’s,” a man and woman argue over the root of the desire for sex. The woman says it’s a spiritual yearning and the man says it’s a compulsion of the body. The woman pours them another drink and the man

. . . drank deeply, felt the spirit
fill his cup. Then he looked into her eyes and saw
that she was beautiful, sexy and at the bottom
of the 9th, suddenly, surprisingly, irrevocably, right.

Of course the poem pivots on the wry double-entendre of “spirit.” The difference in opinion gives way to an agreement by a play on words. And we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss that conclusion because it’s wordplay, since it’s also a way of thinking. We are following a train of thought not just a trail of words. Inherent in it is the playfulness that allows children to find joy and riches right where an adult sees nothing but “dead meat” and a “sad/parking lot ringed by a handful/of gimpy trees.” That is from the poem, “Poetry at the Burger King,” where the adult hating the scene because he’s “not poet enough/to call forth its riches” is redeemed the moment two children come in “very happy to be here” and

dancing to the song of the associate
which wasn’t a song until their dancing
made it so.

This ability to embrace that difference is the core of A Little in Love a Lot. In “Unlikely Love,” a man sees his girlfriend’s ex walking through a park. Watching the ex walk sadly and alone, the speaker of the poem says

. . . I felt
something for him, something in that moment
that I knew you wouldn’t understand if I tried
explaining it to you tonight when I saw you—
because I still don’t understand it myself—
it was something like pathos, but something more
like love, really—I felt a sudden rush of love
for this man whom you don’t love anymore.

Or in “Mozart in Your Armpit,” his aunt compares the phantom pain of her amputated legs to the speaker’s enjoyment of an opera even though he doesn’t know Italian.

You think you’ve taken care of a thing,
severed it from yourself for good—
then there it is again, what can’t be.
And feeling more like itself than ever.

Listen, you don’t need the words to know
when the music has changed; when the pain
has turned to pleasure; the pleasure
to pain.

It’s all vowels anyway—one
long dilating Italian vowel
sliding into another: orgasm,
agony, orgasm, agony again.

Sometimes the effort to embrace fails because it’s the effort and not necessarily the success that matters. It is where the poems express an unbridgeable distance between people that the pain of that divide is undercut by the playfulness and humor of Hostovsky’s voice, which make sense. If we are to fully embrace life, it may include embracing certain moments as being beyond us—moments when our efforts at inclusion fail. Those failure have to be included. For instance, in the poem “The Conversations of Men,” the speaker’s girlfriend wants to know the kind of conversations she would hear if she were a fly between two urinals. The speaker explains the last time a man talked to him while standing at a urinal, the man exclaimed “How about them Bruins?” The speaker could only say in response “Goddamn!” because

. . . he was trying to make contact
with his gender, and if I said I didn’t see the game,
or if I said I didn’t follow hockey or don’t
give a shit about the Bruins, he would probably
feel like he hadn’t made contact.

Of course, the man didn’t make contact. The speaker is sparing the man’s feelings, letting him have the illusion of connection. It is a kind of sympathy, a very good word for Hostovsky’s poems because “sympathy” means “to feel together.” A brief poem called “The Way Out” goes

The way out
isn’t under or
over or around
or even through.
It’s with. With is
the only way out.
In fact, out isn’t
the way out either
Out is a misnomer.

So here we all are. None of us are going anywhere because there is no “way out.” There is just being with each other in some way, and taking the whole vast space between you and me, East and West, orgasm and agony as a fact of life, and rather than narrowing the scope of our affections and loves to be for just this one thing, this one moment, this one person, this one activity, broaden it to as many moments as possible, as many people, as many worlds until you are A Little in Love a Lot.

Hostovsky is a refreshing voice in the landscape of American poetry because he knows how to dance and somersault with words and ideas, for him thinking is fun and the movement of a poem is a kind of acrobatic tumbling that ends in meaning. A Little in Love a Lot is a fun collection, an engaging collection, a collection that will both make you think and make you laugh out loud.

A Dark Earthy Scrutiny: John Engels' Poetry

John Engels was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1931. He was a professor of English at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont for 45 years and published eleven collections of poetry. Among his books are, Cardinals in the Ice Age, which was a National Poetry Series selection in 1986 and Weather-Fear which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He died in June of 2007 but left us a remarkable body of work.

His diction, never overstated, turns on a Germanic earthiness. It is palpable on the tongue. One can chew his words because they are full of things: talus, chestnuts, bean vines, salty stink, and what life there is the earth feeds on with a “dogged, voluptuous swallowing,” and the darkness “gulps.” There is a meticulous scrutiny about his images, as though they were chiseled. They are presented in such a way that lines continue to modify each other. His syntax is circuitous, hypotactic, not resting, but constantly moving toward another modification of the image and the underlying metaphysics of the witness. But finally, it all ends in the dissolution of the witness or his fear of oblivion. Memory and consciousness are merely like the natural forces he observes and, like them, have limits naturally imposed. Thus the witness witnesses within all of nature his own impending dissolution:

. . . I hear
The burgeoning tumor
That will measure me.
(“Terribilis est locus iste”)

Or

. . . only season lacking source
Rolls round and round until in my turns I fall
Forever back, clutching my stone, my gun, my light.
(“When in Wisconsin”)

Or

. . . the light began

its long reach, even now,
long afterward, still
rising, widening into the body of the sky,
into the last huge widenesses of the last
meetings of light beyond which I remember this
or not, beyond which
even then fearing my life
I wished to burn.
“(At Night on the Lake in the Eye of the Hunter”)

In this, he tries to scrape away layers of false comfort and face the bare terrifying fact of imminent death, the dead raging animal desire we all feel to howl against the abyss. “Bullhead” is an amazing example, the poem’s central comparison pivoting on a gaping catfish writhing for hours in his bucket after being caught and his own desire to “cry out/into the blackness beyond/the dumb immediate blackness” his own breath like a hook “snagged/in my gullet, the tongue/in my mouth like a worm.” Since, as he says, the agony of this end is connatural, he is dumb, mute—we are all mute against it. But there is also a heroic aspect of facing the danger for the beauty of the fleeting natural world, as in “Aurora,” “Earth Tremor, the Sky at Night; or “At the Top of Blood Mountain.” Although this last poem has ambiguities of lineation that leave one wondering about the nature of the fixed still point upon which the end pivots.

There are some excesses in his poems. Sometimes he overly explains things, not allowing the implied connections to remain implied, as, for instance, in “Barking Dog.” He doesn't do this every time, but it does happen. Occasionally his syntax can become winding and treacherous, overextending lines. Sometimes he splits complex subjects and interjects prepositional phrases, such as in “The Hunters” or “Anniversary.” It sustains the movement of the poem, although, occasionally, at the cost of clarity.

Ultimately, in spite of any shortcomings, I would recommend him for his images and diction, his sharp insights and affinity for what he observes. He is a poet deserving of much more attention than he receives. The force of his themes punches you in the metaphysical gut while his linguistic textures are as delicious on the tongue as a piece of warm, buttered bread. His poems are constructed from the same dust of the earth from which man was made.

What Matters: A Review

What Matters. Adele Kenny.
New York, NY: Welcome Rain Publishers, Nov. 2011. 62 pages, ISBN: 978-1-56649-079-5

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What Matters is Adele Kenny’s twelfth poetry collection. Its poems are a beautiful balance of music and thematic sensitivity. The collection is composed of 3 sections, the middle one being that in which she confronts the difficulty of surviving cancer. The 2 flanking sections, “Where Memory is Holy” and “We Don’t Forget,” suggest that the power of memory and not survival is the main subject of this collection. Of course, the truth is that it’s the relationship between memory and survival that is intimately explored throughout.

These poems are a real pleasure to read. For the first time in a long time, I was struck by the simple enjoyment of an alliterated line, such as “At dusk, deer feed in a corner of the field.” Or “The sound rattles and rings—far from the/sea, from the stone circle” or, one of my favorites, “flung from the sun’s infallible fist.” There is also the beauty of internal rhyme such as “your heart skipped and flipped, lungs/strung like pebbles on wire.” Kenny, of course, uses more subtle techniques. She is clearly a poet with an ear trained to the beauties and subtleties of the music in our language. But she is also adept at articulating themes with striking imagery and keen sensitivity.

One is seized by the clarity of such images as “bearded yogurt,” or “frost burns the marigolds.” But what heightens these images is their service to exploring the difficult connection between memory and mortality. The book’s first section is a past, a childhood where memories are created, where life feels like “the world without end.” In the poem “East Rahway,” Kenny says, “The past is my first language, a speakable grace.” This grace has the power of resurrection, since in the first section as family pets die, as parents die, still, “you are with me because I remember.” Kenny also seems deeply aware, as I imagine most poets are, of the intimate ties among memory, imagination, desire and dreams. These are all expressions of a single faculty projecting itself in different directions: forward, backward, toward a person or an object or a goal. So in this first section there is a poem about the innocent desire in those who are too young to articulate exactly what is so stirring about the snake woman at the circus as “the snake slid/between her breasts and made its/thick descent along her thighs.” Or in “The Sap Bush” this faculty emerges as imagination when

. . . I imagine us there, called
back in middle age

to a language of stars that was larger than
logic and never quite lost.

The middle section, “Somehow the Angel,” is a door to pass through, or more strikingly, it is a fixed moment, as if within it, time slows or even comes to a stop. In fact, in two of the poems of the middle section, the last word is “through.” This section is the moment of trial, suffering and survival. We get through it with the poet, learning not just to survive, but to confront the nameless, as the title of a poem from the middle section declares, “No Word for It.” It is where “the surgeon says I have bad/news.” In confronting the cancer, the fear and the treatments, Kenny reveals how all our faculties become enslaved to the present. The poem “In Which” concludes

. . . I imagine a
stone, it’s slow wearing down, the
light in which it casts no shadow.

Here the faculty of imagination expresses itself as the focus on a fixed point, a stone—a gravestone? Perhaps but even if it isn’t a gravestone the focus closes the speaker off from the future and the past: memory fails, desire fails. The image contrasts with an image in the title poem from the final section when the survivor reaffirms her place in life and we are told

What matters is the quiet beak of a lark in the seed,
the dead tree’s shadow that stretches upstream.

One could understand these two contrasting points as being what’s outside time versus what dwells in it. Even for the dead tree, what matters is the shadow it casts upstream, i.e., into the past, which is a version of time. Thus there is a double-entendre in the title, for What Matters isn’t only what is significant but what is incarnate, embodied, what is alive in the sense that we know it here on earth. In an early poem of the last section where the one who has survived is renewed and reaffirmed in life, the poem “And Is” says,

. . . This is the world,
flung from the sun’s infallible fist, an
arrangement of light that praises the
wonder of substance.

This substance is present also in the middle section in its most ethereal manifestation: an angel. Even its presence has a terrestrial feel in the poem “Somehow the Angel” where, in the midst of the battle with cancer, considering suicide, in “taking all the pills,”

Always, then, the old angel wheezes in.
Not quite luminous, never on his knees,
his wings creak, beat at oblique angles
(all that flapping—it’s hardly celestial)
but his own

weight escapes him.

As we survive this confrontation with mortality, that faculty which connects us with all of life revives, even in the middle section. In the poem “And Nothing Less,” Kenny says, “her dreams want her back.” Surviving the cancer is not a sudden epiphany, as survival never really is, but a gradual return to the light, a slow dawning. The final poem in this section returns memory in full where the speaker looking at a jay making noises at a squirrel, “reminds me of when I was five and//something died in our drain spout.” Surviving means returning to memory, finding life echoing, resonating with other moments. That’s how survival contrasts with living. In the middle of survival, the moment resonates with nothing, there is no echo.

We enter the final section where “Life goes on.” Here we come to a realization, an insight on the other side, which is how intimately memory and death are connected. The poem “In Memory Of” says,

. . . There is always
a background (that far, this close), and what memory
does—like the dusky lines of a double shadow,
it multiplies loss.

And the poem “Coming and Going” says, “You count/your losses, the wounds that//are yourself.” Every moment that passes is a death that now is only real in memory and yet, that very memory makes us who we are. This inextricable bond means that in the end it is not forgiveness but grace that is our salvation. The final poem of the collection, “We Don’t Forget,” concludes:

Grace is acceptance—

all of it, whatever it is—as
in we live for this: love
and gratitude enough.

We don’t forget
how it feels to rejoice.

What Matters is a collection that confronts darkness and the fear of death without being ponderous. It offers hope and light without being insipid or sentimental. More than my brief review can detail, it explores the complex point at which memory and mortality, identity and death are intimately connected. And this is all accomplished with a music and imagery that will please any reader.