Candescent

By Linda Parsons
Iris Press, 2019
ISBN 9781604542578
91 pages

Review of Candescent

by Rosemary Royston

Candescent by Linda Parsons is a collection of poems that succeeds in what its title denotes: to glow from within. Is it not a great achievement in this life to shine from our core, amidst the travails and tragedies that life brings? In these poems, the speaker documents her wrestling matches with grief, from watching her father fade away, the pain of  broken marriages, to the tedious yet natural act of aging. Within her collection, where there exists a healthy mix of Judeo, Islamic, and Christian imagery and practices, Parsons poems show both the sweat and the gain that discipline offers, allowing the speaker to be present in life through all its moments. Furthermore, Parsons masters sound, diction, and imagery throughout these poems; it is evident that she has practiced and honed her own craft.

The first section opens with “Smudge” where the speaker lights “…sage bound with thread from my grandmother’s / sewing box. Smoke rise, melt of burden, bellows nearest my heart, my length, woodsy / sweet.” The speaker walks through her home cleansing the “odd things he left behind…” The “he” being her partner of over twenty years, with the final image capturing the solitude and sudden singleness of the speaker,

                       

As for me, I’ll root in my little Eden,

                        a bowl of ashes to catch the new moon,

                        crow feather on the sill, the remains

                        flapping off, mateless.

 Yet our speaker is not totally alone. She has a good shepherd in the poem of the same name. In “The Good Shepherd”(and several other poems) Parsons captures the grace of having a loving canine in one’s life. Her “good shepherd” shadows her from “counter to couch, / Naomi to my Ruth, wither going or staying / in the barley fields, finally the shelter of Boaz.” It is in the fur of this “last man of the house” where the speaker buries her face in grief, and it is with this loving animal that she finds comfort, “Eyes ghosted, nose works the air // of what dims but blooms still, keeper / from whence cometh my help.” The comparison of “Naomi to my Ruth” will be familiar to any reader that has been raised in the Christian tradition, and the solace this animal provides is revered through the diction in this poem; this good shepherd is a faithful servant, a gift from the Divine.

Family, whether it is a father, granddaughters, or former husband, all make appearances in the collection. The speaker has reached that point in life where enough time has passed to welcome back a first husband as in “Confluence. ” The poem opens with the metaphor of two rivers joining -- the Clinch and the tributary Powell, just as this once estranged couple now shares a meal, “the rope less taut between us -- / knot by knot, he mends memory’s seine” with the layered meaning of seine performing much work in such a small space, as Parsons does throughout the collection.

As opposed to dodging grief (which is often our first reflex), the speaker in Candescent turns towards her grief, absorbs it, and reckons with it. In “The Only Way,” with an epigraph from Rumi, “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” the speaker “[Honors her] grief with ragged breath and privation / in the body’s dark cell despite how the blithe / word cries enough.” The assonance of “despite” and “blithe” force the reader to semi-howl, slowing the line and making us pay attention. And the redemption is that the speaker’s practice pays off, both literally and metaphorically. In the final poem of the opening section, “The First Night Pain Doesn’t Wake Me” the speaker notes the ongoing “ache in [her] hip” is suddenly gone not due to only the “ice, yoga’s cat and child, / tai chi’s white stork…” but because

 

…I scraped my bowl

empty of longing, until I sat in the dust

busking my tarnished tune and bowed

in gratitude for ache, for moan, for loss

at the hot marrow…”

 “The First Night Pain Doesn’t Wake Me” is a prayer with its musical sounds and deep gratitude for staying with the pain, “until I invited the hours to the side porch / for oranges and ginger tea, no longer / friendless and warring.”

In section two of the collection we find the speaker on her own “Damascus Road” where she is lost in thought “thinking of / Judy Blue Eyes,” and jolted back to the moment after reading her neighbor’s written complaint about the speaker’s “burning bushes” that block her view to the road. After all, it is a life and death issue, as her neighbor has almost been “T-boned three times.” The speaker, “swaddled in grief and remorse” has neglected the burning bushes, allowing them to grow too big and block the road. It is in this poem where she compares herself to Saul turned Paul, “…who am I but my own weary / traveler transformed, blasted new into traffic // without looking both ways?”

Just because the speaker finds her way through the pain does not mean that life is free of suffering. In “Enough” we watch as the good shepherd, “the dying dog” brings the estranged couple back together for the beloved dog’s final breath,

                         …our redemption impossible

           

                        on the flowered rug, his bag of bones

                        flown or sunken wherever the spirit lights –

 

                        even that of a dog is holy, my crook

                        and shepherd unto the psalmed hills.

Again, Parsons’ use of diction conjures the holy, regardless of religious tradition, forcing the reader to see the Divine in all aspects of life.

 In section three, the practice of meditation is artfully joined with place in “The Art of Meditation in Tennessee,” where we learn that “Ah invites the Divine, om gives thanks / to the Divine.” Whether these terms are familiar to the reader or not, any reader from the South will recognize these sounds and images, “Heat bugs deafen the understory, blacksnake / twines in honeysuckle, crawdad pinches / till it thunders / leeches suckle shin, river / mourns and bleeds…” The practice of breathing in and out, of the “om and ah,” leads the speaker to the knowledge, “..In the end, all is left, all Divine. / Breathe in peace, breathe out joy” – which is impossible not to do with the music and images that Parsons provides us in her poems.

The ability to breathe, to be present, also allows for joy to flow, and the love the speaker has for her granddaughters spills forth in the playful diction and rhyme within “I Love You Like a Dragon,” I love you:

 

…In mountain’s toes

 

that scoop earth’s foes, scales raging blustery

skies slice down to burning questions---chocolate

 

or apple pie? In hot breath, crafty yellow eye,

I set the meatiest afire. I love you bold and bolder…

The passion of “I Love you Like a Dragon” leads into one of my favorite poems in this collection, which is more or less a manifesto, “Stand Up.” It is here where the speaker reckons with her former, docile self who was a “walker on eggshells, the biter of lips, the please pleaser,” who turns into a woman who is neither silent nor meek, who

                         …sings without

                        pause, the unturned cheek, the unshut eye,

                        who digs her heels in this wide-awake

                        moment and lets the mother tongue fly.

 “Stand Up” is a poem that every woman should read aloud and often, with gusto. For it is in this poem when the speaker fully comes alive into her Self – the Self that is referenced in “Oracle,” where the enjambed line joins the first and second stanza of the poem, “Though nothing is fair in the dream of life, // our waking akin to a dream, said the Buddha, acceptance of what is, our only magick wand.”

The closing poem in the final section, “With Me” encapsulates the collection. While we opened to the speaker cleansing her house with sage, this final poem has the speaker carefully building “the home of myself,” acknowledging “bones of contention,” and the “entre chien et loup,” or time of the day “between dog and wolf, world and otherworld, my dusk,” – the time of life which the speaker now inhabits. She has witnessed and felt the loss of relationships, the loss of her father, of her good shepherd of a dog, but simultaneously knows the gift of discipline, the joy of granddaughters and the sounds and beauty of the South, and her upcoming “last ecstasy” will pass “into blessing, into hard surrender.”

These poems invite the reader to return to them, just as one turns to her most comforting scripture or to the daily practice of meditation or yoga. Layered with imagery and allusions, deft diction, and a love of sound, this is a collection I will keep close to my bed; a bedrock for when things do not go my way, but instead a reminder to embrace “acceptance of what is, our only magick wand.”

Rosemary Royston, author of Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line Press, 2014), resides in northeast Georgia with her family. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Split Rock Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, KUDZU, NANO Fiction, and *82 Review. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at Young Harris College.   https://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/

Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse

By Valerie Nieman

Press 53, 2018

ISBN 978-1-941209-89-9

78 pages

Review of Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse

by Rosemary Royston

I’ve had the chance to meet Valerie Nieman on a couple occasions, as we both live in write in Southern Appalachia and have crossed paths at various conferences and readings. I was delighted to have the opportunity to review The Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse. Two of the dominant temperaments working so well together in Nieman’s collection, as Gregory Orr so aptly described them, are story and imagination. The title lets the reader know she is about to embark on a life of a woman known as a “Leopard Lady,” and curiosity alone lures the reader to want to know why someone would have such a moniker. While the setting is clearly in Southern Appalachia, the final poem, “Ghost Riders (Coney Island Museum, 1980)” is the clue to what triggered Nieman’s imagination to conjure this collection of poems that are in the voices of two characters: the Leopard Lady (Book I) and the Professor (Book II), both of whom find themselves in the same traveling carnival. While the setting is certainly non-traditional, the themes are universal, and sound, diction, and image bring these poems to life. 

We are first introduced to the Leopard Lady in the opening poem where she is not yet named. What we learn, though, is that she is orphaned at birth – her “red-haired mother died” during childbirth and she sees her father “only in that mirror” that she holds up, her “skin as brown as a nut.” A mixed race child in the South in the mid-1930s, she is given over to the Gaston family (“grown old as Abraham n Sarah”), named Dinah, and sent out to earn money by helping to make sorghum. While the Gaston family proclaims to be a godly family, their true nature is revealed in “No More Haints” on how they see Dinah’s purpose in their family,

            The Gastons would send me out for wages,

            learning and earning they said, and they leaned on the latter,

            once I had grammar enough to read the Good Book,

and a body strong enough for chopping and toting.

However, the manual labor grows old and Dinah, who has since become pregnant and been sent to a root-worker for bitters to drink to purge her body of a fetus, finds herself jumping off a boxcar and starting a new life with a traveling carnival, honing her natural gift of second sight and learning to read palms. “The Hunt” offers in its final stanza a description of palmistry,

           

                        The hand is a forest

                        cut through with paths.

                        Along them runs a soul

                        like deer to water.

Dinah moves in and out of towns with the carnival and in and out of roles within the sideshow. And while her lifestyle is very different than that of most readers or the “rubes” who attend the shows, there are universal themes that are inescapable. No matter where she goes, Dinah is marked by the color of her skin. Her options are limited in society due to her mixed race, and once her palm-reader mentor, Mrs. Elderia, passes away, Dinah takes her place. But her name “ain’t strong,” according to the lot manager. It needs to match her dark skin so it should be Egyptian. Offered up are “Queen? Oracle? Sibyl?” and it is the Sibyl that Dinah takes as her palm-reading persona. This additional self is no different that the many selves the reader takes on in daily life, and Dinah’s personas grow as she does. In fact, we learn the etymology of her final name, The Leopard Lady, in “The Leopard Lady at the Market,” where she ponders over the two people who created her: a Black father and an Irish mother who is,

                       

                        …working to get out, though,

                        showing herself.

                        That white woman what left me

                        is taking me back,

                        inch by inch.

While never explicitly named, Dinah likely suffers from vitiligo, where the pigmentation of her darker skin fades, turning white, leaving her spotted, hence her next carnie act as the Leopard Lady. But before she reveals her changing pigmentation to the carnival goers, she continues to tell fortunes, using her second sight, often spooking the farm boys who enter her tent. “The Leopard Lady Finds Lost Things” is a prime example of the power of diction that works throughout this collection, as the reader can both hear and see this scene, “So the wicker chair crick-cracks. One sets an overbig hand / on the crystal; a streak of sweat shows and gone.” // “It’s my watch, he says, I lost it but he got another question / under his skin like a warble-grub about to burst.” This farm boy, who has lost his watch making love to his girl at Alder Branch, “gapes like a catfish” when the Leopard Lady (now also called Lady Panthera due to her changing skin) tells him that, “Time secretly moves. / Bends the alder branch. / Seek under stone over sand.”

When it comes to lovers, Dinah chooses to ignore signs that are right in front of her, signs that she should easily see, and she loses the man she loved the most – Shelby, who always called her by her given name, “And so I broke my heart / and shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” It is this loss of Shelby that leads the reader into Book II: The Reveal, which opens with “The Ballyhoo,” where it is claimed that the Leopard Lady, “

Abandoned by her lover, she called on black arts

of voodoo, summoning Erzulie of the heart,

unholy Mambo Madam of love and vengeance,

to trade her suffering for a beast’s indifference.”

However, Petey, who was the previous spiel-giver of the inside show, left the carnival “high and dry in Shinnston,” and was soon replaced by a pale, book learned man named Jonathan, who is introduced in “Arrivals” and who becomes an equal voice in the second half of The Leopard Lady. A friendship and a platonic love grows between Jonathan aka The Professor and The Leopard Lady. While Dinah has read the Bible and Shakespeare, Jonathan has read these and more and they often discuss Bible verses and views, with Dinah holding her ground and not feeling any less than, even without the benefit of Jonathan’s formal education.  Jonathan’s ability to preach, which he is wise enough not to share, allows him to give an impromptu and very successful spiel for how Alfredo the Amazing Frog Boy came to be in “ The Professor: A Voice to Speak” – his “homiletics class/ had given [him] the gift to winnow out / ideas from the air with a sieve of words.” It is this speech that gets Jonathan hired to be the inside man for the carnie show.

Another universal theme that crops up in this collection is that of a class system. Whether we are in traditional society where race, gender, and economic status dictate a bias, there’s also a class system in the carnival. As captured in “Fearfully, Wonderfully,” those “shaped by God’s thumb” or the “born freaks” are at the top of the class system. Because Jonathan comes from outside and has an education, it is not until his own weakness is made visible to his colleagues that he gains their respect. In “The Professor: Abracadabra” he magically becomes one of them once the “spectacular scar” from his heart defect is revealed when he passes out:

                       

                        …Their eyes are softer, now

                        that they have seen the scar. I am no more

                        the one who has the words, the Inside Man,

                        but one of them, stricken and marked.

This acceptance of Jonathan by his carnie brothers and sisters is the type of acceptance we all yearn for, as we all wish to belong to community. In the carnie system and in these poems we find acceptance no matter what our born defects or our self-inflicted mutations may be. It is easy to understand the appeal of traveling with a group of people who accept one another no matter the oddities.

Images are prevalent in Nieman’s poems. From the leopard spots on Dinah’s skin, the Professor’s scar, crows, and root working, one that stands out and ties together both the spiritual nature of the poems that runs through the collection and the limitations of women is found in “The Professor: Fairy Stones.” The poem turns on the image of a stone that the Professor keeps in his pocket. Once spotting it and asking what it is, Dinah “strokes its quartered arms / with nothing less than humble reverence.” The cross-shaped stone has two evolution stories, one scientific, the other more mysterious. Either it was formed from molten rock or, it was formed when “woodland sprites / cried at the news of Jesus’s death, their tears / freezing as crosses.” The fairy stone was a gift to the Professor from his Aunt Edwina, who wished “to be a priest herself,” yet, like Dinah, being a woman severely limited her options, with Dinah’s options being even more restrictive due to the mixed color of her skin. The collection is rife with Bible verses, allusions, and traditions from Southern Appalachia of making bitters, using yarbs, to the “gift of prophecy.” As superstitions go in the region, a bird flies under the carnival tent in “See You Down the Road,” predicting a death the next day, which happens to be that of Jonathan. Prior to passing away, Jonathan has given Dinah his fairy stone in “Gift” and tells her of the Buddhist theory of life as a wheel in “The Professor Tells about the Wheel,” where Dinah ponders, secure in her Christianity,

                       

I know my soul is sealed

                        and glory-bound,

                        but I would surely like

                        off this earthly wheel

                        of sadness.

It is in Jonathan’s passing that he is able to liberate the Leopard Lady. Leaving her his savings, she merges into both her carnie persona and her true self as Madame Dinah, having the means to purchase a home and earn a living as “Madame Dinah, Palmist and Seer.” It is a sad irony that it takes Jonathan’s death to liberate Dinah, but The Leopard Lady is finally free to live on her own and support herself through her gifts, secure both financially and spiritually.

The final poem, “Ghost Riders (Coney Island Museum, 1980),” let’s the reader know where Nieman found the source for these poems and characters, and it also reminds the reader of the essence of Carl Sandburg’s “Cool Tombs,” where death is the great equalizer. In its final stanza, Nieman so beautifully shows the harsh reality of the ending of the cycle of life:

                        Down at the edge of the beach

                        sand and salt keep gnawing

                        at the other. We are none of us more

                        than a handful of spit and dust.

                        We live and then we are melted into air.

Rosemary Royston, author of Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line Press, 2014), resides in northeast Georgia with her family. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Split Rock Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, KUDZU, NANO Fiction, and *82 Review. She’s a lecturer and VP for Planning and Research at Young Harris College, where she teaches the occasional creative writing course. https://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/

Interview with Francesca Bell on her poetry book Bright Stain

Francesca Bell is an American poet and translator. Her work appears widely in journals such as New Ohio Review, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives with her family in Novato, California. Red Hen Press will publish her first collection, Bright Stain, in May, 2019.

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Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019) is not a book for the faint of heart. In Bell’s debut work, the reader will need to brace herself not only in regard to subject matter, but also to Bell’s deft lines, images, and unexpected narratives. Through her well-crafted poems, the reader hears from a variety of personas, from the prison-worker, the rapist, to the victim of an abusive Catholic priest. However, most predominant is the voice of a female speaker who transforms from puberty into raw, joyful sexual abandon, to a mother who embraces her aging and wonderfully sensual body.

The body is a living thing in this collection, and both its joys and its ugly parts are on display; nothing is held back. Woven throughout the poems is the packed image of the snake—a snake whose “generous jaw and steady squeeze” free a frozen mouse “into the great, gliding goodness of snake,” to snakes found in a worship service, to the snake shedding its skin, not unlike a woman “who slips from / the stockings between / her and pleasure.” Playing underneath Bell’s poems is a repositioning of what is holy and what is not through the mix of the erotic and the ugly, the reverent and the profane, always asking the reader to look again. I’m both drawn to and in turn wide-eyed at Bell’s poems. The collection is best summed up by the ending of the first stanza in “Woman Singing in Church,” “we are pummeled by it, laid open / on the blade of its loveliness.”

I had the pleasure of interviewing Francesca Bell after reading Bright Stain, and below are her responses.

—Rosemary Royston

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RR: I clearly remember the first poem of yours that I read, “I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand.” — I related, I laughed aloud, thought how bold then logged onto Facebook to see if you were there so I could friend you. In one of our earlier email exchanges, you shared how you were having trouble finding a press, as your work is, well, bold! Tell me how long it took you to find a home for your collection — how you stayed true and did not dilute your work — and share any advice to other writers on the process.

FB: I’m so glad that you asked this question. It took me a long time to find a home for my collection. I circulated a different version of this book for five years. It had several titles, including this one, and it contained some of the same poems. It was a finalist or semi-finalist several times in some big contests and came very close to being accepted during the open submission period at a top press. Because of these near-successes, I didn’t change the manuscript much for those five years. By the time five years had passed, I had a second manuscript put together, but I was bone-weary from five years of failure and decided to scrap them both and start over. I printed both manuscripts out and literally threw the poems all over the floor until they were completely mixed together, and then I started to pull together something new. Kate Gale at Red Hen Press is the only person I sent this new manuscript, and five months later, she accepted it. That was a little over two years ago. From the time I first submitted a full-length manuscript to the moment when I hold my finished book in my hands, almost eight and half years will have passed.

On three occasions, I received feedback from presses where I had submitted my manuscript, and all three times two things were criticized (sometimes sharply): my subject matter and my tone. One press suggested that they would like to work with me if I would heavily revise the manuscript to address my subject matter and my tone. These three critiques served to stiffen my resolve immensely. They helped me come to terms with what it is about my poems that makes them my poems. I think that a writer has to beware the danger of revising herself right out of her work. My weird, dark subject matter and my bold, harsh tone are the traces of DNA that I leave in the world when I write. What I bring to the literary table is my willingness to look at and write starkly about things that make other people uncomfortable. Not everyone likes it, but that is my gift.

My advice to writers on the process of trying to place a book is first of all to manage your expectations. You are playing what for almost everyone is a long game. There are some people who fit very well into the current styles and trends in poetry, and their books are sometimes quickly snapped up. But there are many more people who, like me, need to settle in for a years-long campaign. Second, I advise people to learn to recognize what in your work is inherently yours and to mercilessly stand by it. Third, I wish that I had known, when I was drowning in manuscript rejections, that someday I would be filled with gratitude and relief that no one accepted my book during those five years I submitted it. Because I ended up with exactly the right press and exactly the right editor at what feels like exactly the right time. It may take you several years, as it did me, to find the press and the editor that feel like home, that literally change your life.


RR: In “In Plain Sight,” the speaker states, “I believe in brazenness,” and while there is always a separation between the speaker and the poet, I believe it would be safe to say that you, too, feel the same way, due to the subject matter and themes within this collection. Talk about what inspired you to write the poems that specifically mix both the erotic and the ugly, the reverent and the profane and/or poems whose speaker is not one with which the reader will feel sympathy toward.

FB: Ever since I was a child, I have been very interested in the concept of opposites like goodness and badness, characteristics we assign to people singularly, as if a person can be wholly one thing or another. I believe that if you are human, you have the capacity for goodness, but you also have the capacity for badness. In spades. One thing I enjoy about writing persona poems is that it allows me the opportunity to explore human darkness intimately. I believe that one cannot understand what it is to be human without looking at the darkness and violence and hatred and fear every human carries inside them.


RR: As I reflected on your poems (i.e. “In Due Time”) and who your literary ancestors are, I immediately thought of Robert Browning, specifically his dramatic monologue, “Porphyria’s Lover,” where the speaker strangles his lover with her own hair. I also think of Anais Nin (and her no-holds-barred diaries), although not a poet, and the poems on motherhood by Beth Ann Fennelly. You, Nin, Fennelly, all dive deeply through your work into what it is to be a woman in this world, specifically in both sexual and sensual ways. Who would you say your literary ancestors are and why?

FB: I had never read “Porphyria’s Lover.” My God, what an astonishing poem!

My literary ancestors (most still living) are Anne Sexton, Marguerite Duras, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux, Ellen Bass, and Len Roberts. These are writers I return to again and again, writers whose work has felt like a granting of permission to me.


RR: I have to ask this, do you have pet snakes? Snakes are a common image in your collection from the opening and closing poems, to being metaphors for much more. Talk about this juxtaposition of the serpent — a harbinger of evil in Christianity, but far from evil in your collection.

FB: I am not currently living with any snakes, but my son, who is grown now, is crazy for reptiles. While he was growing up, we shared our home with too many creatures to list, but here’s a sampling: anacondas, false water cobras, ball pythons, a Dumeril’s boa, beaded lizards, a carpet python, a blue-tongued skink, a 4-foot long Argentinian lizard called a tegu, multiple cockroach colonies, and various kinds of tarantulas. I was a very active and enthusiastic participant in (almost) all of this husbandry. One of the most moving experiences of my life was watching my son’s ball python incubate her clutch of eggs.

I believe that our human tendency to associate snakes with evil likely stems from a deep-seated, survival-enhancing fear of envenomation. Humans and our ancestors have co-evolved with snakes for millions of years, and those who were vigilant enough to avoid a deadly or maiming bite would have produced more offspring. So, although I have a fascination and fondness for snakes, I can certainly understand people’s almost inherent fear of them. What fascinates me about the Christian notion of snakes being evil is how closely it is tied to the Christian notion of women being evil and particularly of women being the source of sexual evil, whether a woman is herself sexual or whether she is to blame for inspiring sexuality in a man.

In my poetry, I concern myself often with badness, both real and perceived. Hunger is often feared and perceived as badness, particularly sexual appetite, particularly female sexual appetite. Snakes, with their ability to swallow whole prey of astonishing girth, make a fantastic symbol of great, frightening appetite. But they also make a fantastic symbol of joyous, freeing appetite.


RR: Concerning form, your poems have no fluff, utilize alliteration and imagery in compelling ways, and are sparse yet full of details, often in narrative form. Tell me about your revision process — how one of your poems looks early on, and how it arrives at its final iteration.

FB: My poems tend to look on the page, early on, similar to how they look when finished. Not that I don’t revise—I revise quite a bit. But I tend to start by thinking about something for a long time, then riffing on it in one or more free writes in my notebook before I ever sit down to make an actual draft of a poem. By the time I am drafting, the form of a poem seems to be already pretty clear. I adjust and alter, but I rarely make a huge formatting change from what takes shape as I finally write my draft. As to content, my revision process and actually my writing process rely heavily on me reading things out loud over and over and then adjusting what seems to snag me. I adjust for clarity and specificity of meaning, for sound, for what I think of as turning the volume up on tension and drama. When I write a poem, I am trying to find a way to craft the poem in order for it to have the greatest and most powerful access possible to readers’ emotions.

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Rosemary R. Royston lives with her family in the foothills of the Southern Appalachian mountains. She holds a AB in English from UGA, and an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Split Rock Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, STILL, KUDZU, *82 Review, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook, Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line Press), and a county representative for the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She teaches poetry courses in both the college setting and in the continuing learning setting. Her review and interviews here focus on poetry that is grounded in nature, the grit of life, and often the experiences of women (with a slight bias towards the narrative). Previous book reviews have been published in Prairie Schooner, Appalachian Heritage, and STILL.

What We're Reading Now

Flickr/ Stewart Butterfield. Creative Commons (CC by 2.0.) Some rights reserved.

We're always reading fine works of poetry. This month on Poetry Matters, instead of an in-depth review or interview, you’ll find three quick posts about what books have captured our attention: 

• Barry George on Yosa Buson's haiku
• Anthony Fife on Rita Dove's American Smooth
• Rosemary Royston on Angela Jackson-Brown's House Repairs

So take a look—you might find that next great book of poetry or a poet whose work resonates with you. And friends, please do share with us what you're reading. We're always looking for good books!

Barry George on Steven Carter's Translations of Buson's Haiku

Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology
trans. Steven D. Carter

Stanford University Press, (1993)

ISBN: 978-0804722124

Currently I am making my way through Steven D. Carter's ambitious Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991). Here as elsewhere, one of the poets whose haiku I enjoy seeing in fresh translation is Yosa Buson (1716-1783), the second after Matsuo Bashō in the line of generally acknowledged Japanese haiku masters. Buson's haiku are clear, unified portraits which often pivot on a specific appeal to our senses, as in the following translations by Carter:

A stonecutter
stops to cool his chisels
in the clear water (393)

and

A camellia falls,
spilling out rain water
from yesterday. (399)

That Buson was as accomplished a painter as he was a poet is evident in the visual and compositional qualities not only in the above poems but also in this well-known haiku:

Spring rain falling—
and talking as they walk along,
a raincloak, and an umbrella. (396)

Buson employs the traditional elements of haiku—a kigo or seasonal reference ("spring rain"), a caesura, and the effect of karumi or lightness—while using the figures of speech "raincloak" and "umbrella" to add a pleasing subtlety.  

Being of a more worldly bent than the spiritual and earthy Basho, Buson ranged more freely about secular topics, such as everyday commerce:

At the house next door,
he's still talking away—
an oil salesman. (397)

This humorous sketch, incidentally, might today be considered more of a senryu (haiku-like poem focusing on human nature) than a haiku; however, that distinction had not yet become meaningful in Buson's time. Carter points out that although Buson "disavowed any ambition of becoming a poet of high seriousness," his work nevertheless produces "a tension that makes them much more than paintings in words" (390). Consider, for example,

A bat flits by—
and the wife from across the street
takes a look my way. (392)

In this suggestive and mysterious poem, we experience the kind of "drama hinted at....but never played out" (390) that makes many of Buson's haiku intriguing. Indeed, these translations, as well as the many—1105 to be exact—other literary selections Steven D. Carter renders in this anthology, show both his critical insight into the work of Japan's literary figures and his delight in the evocative power of words

Anthony Fife on Rita Dove’s American Smooth

American Smooth
by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton 

ISBN: 978-0-393-32744-1

I’d first read Rita Dove maybe seven years ago.  At the time it was her first and second collections, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983).  Since I started American Smooth (2004) a few days ago, I realized that, though about two decades separate this book from her first two, not much has changed in one very specific, marvelous way: Rita Dove’s poems seem to want to be read in exactly the way I want to read them.

When her poem pauses, I pause.  When she emphasizes or slurs, I emphasize or slur.  When she stops outright, or breaks line, I follow suit.  It’s almost as if I’m in control, but I know this cannot be the case.  And it not because her breaks are common or predictable, necessarily.  It’s just that when I need room to let something linger, swell or die, Rita Dove allows me that space.  My readings of her poems are the better for it.

This is a rare occurrence for me.  I can think of no other poet who writes (unwittingly) so completely to my tendencies.  It’s bazaar and more than a bit exciting.  

Anyway, American Smooth.  I like this one quite a bit, especially the WWI poems.  Be it Noble Sissle or James Europe, these poems are not only evocative of the era’s music and lingo, but also the cadence of their intellect.  Or so it seems to me.  Authentic or not, I believe it.

Rosemary Royston on Angela Jackson-Brown's House Repairs

House Repairs
by Angela Jackson-Brown

Negative Capability Press, 2018

ISBN: 978-0942544473

I first met Jackson-Brown in the Spalding University MFA program, where she was studying fiction and I poetry. I have since read Angela’s fiction, Drinking from a Bitter Cup, and have kept up with her through social media, which led me to her book of poems, House Repairs. There’s no mistaking the voice in this collection: it is bold, honest, and leaves nothing unexamined. The poems are arranged thematically by sections: House Condemned, House Demolished, House Salvaged, House Rebuilt, with the house being a metaphor for the Self – a Self that was damaged early in life, that lacked a healthy mother figure, and one that confronts what it is to live in America as a Black woman. Like the phoenix, Jackson-Brown takes the reader up from the flames as the persona in her collection redefines and rebuilds herself. An early poem, “A Midwife’s Lament,” sums up what occurs in this collection: “You gotta know you deserve to be happy. / So come on. Let go of all that you’re holding onto / and push.” Letting go of dead weight (in this case, a stillborn) is the metaphor for not allowing our wounds to “fester” and kill us, but to instead expel what is no longer living and birth a new self.

Some of the damage done to the persona in this collection stems from incest, and “Hush,”uses lineation and italics to convey dialogue. As a child tries to tell her mother about what her uncle has done, the mother continually shuts down the child, “Hush? / Hush. / Hush.” Being quiet and compliant is a theme also found in “I Must Not Breathe,” which captures the anxiety and fear when being stopped by the cops as a Black woman. The anaphora of “I must” shows the unrealistic expectations thrust upon the woman, and interwoven within the poem are the repeated lines,”I must not breathe” which equates to not even existing, mirroring the line, “I must be prepared to die.” But this voice does not die, nor does it comply to expectations projected by society. Instead, the persona flourishes, becoming her “own Ezekiel” in “Dry Bones,” by resurrecting herself, and clearly asserting how she chooses to exist, “I will not revamp my attitude so your fear / of my power will go away,” in “I Am Not Your Corporate Mammy.” This persona transcends all, “I am Spirit-Woman. / I am wind-storms,” in the celebratory, “Spirit Woman,” who “...cannot be studied / or understood. / I am life.”