BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

God of the Jellyfish
Lucille Lang Day (Oakland)

God of the Jellyfish by Lucille Lang Day (Cervena Barva Press, 2007), 37 pages, $7. www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.

God of the Jellyfish is Lucille Lang Day’s seventh poetry book and tenth book-length publication. A poet, scientist/naturalist, and publisher of Scarlet Tanager Books, Day has been publishing to critical success for over thirty years.

The title poem sets the tone for a weighty topic explored with a light touch. “Jellyfish” introduces us to Day’s aesthetic and worldview that a higher power exists in the natural world, a higher power that does not “expect worship or even praise“:

the iridescence
of their umbrellas will suffice.

In “14 Stations,” the centerpiece of this packed chapbook, Day uses the metaphor of the Stations of the Cross to explore death and resurrection. Inspired by the art installation of the same name, in which artist Robert Wilson abandoned traditional iconography to open the story of the fourteen stations into something more universal, Day explores womanhood, fear of living as well as fear of dying, the banalities of daily life, and the transcendent moments. Always accessible, the accomplishment of God of the Jellyfish is Day’s ability to be both lighthearted and profound at once.

Dressed in white
like an angel or bride,
she is larger than life
like Alice, or a mother,
seen by a small child.
What can she offer?
A kerchief to wipe
sweat from a brow? A
week’s worth of ironing?

Day’s themes are the unceasing search for answers surrounded as we are by the detritus of life—domestic life and furnishings, the natural world’s rhythms and constraints. In “11. Bed Pierced by Light” our protagonist experiences enlightenment, but only just for a moment before:

Bookending the long poem “14 Stations” are an homage to her father, a meditation on the color red, and “Heaven on Earth,” in which Day tells us it is good to be alive, fully inhabiting the moment, reveling in the natural world.
                                                                     —Reviewed by Joan Gelfland

Joan Gelfland is the author of two poetry collections, the recently published A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams and Seeking Center. She is president of the Women’s National Book Association and can be reached at www.joangelfland.com.

23rd street poets

23rd Streeet Poets (H.H. Imaging, San Francisco: 2009), 53 pages, 30 poems, $12. Cover design by Sally Anne Frye. Contact: alicerogoff@yahoo.com.

Vibrant poems by five poets, Eileen Malone, Alice Elizabeth Rogoff, Sally Anne Frye, Tressa Berman, and Cesar Love, shine in this volume. The brief, spirited autobiographies of each poet explain a happy relationship to the 23rd Street group. The poems are refreshingly personal and glow in the excitement of the moment.
   
Eileen Malone’s “Let Me” is a sensual excavation into the imagination. The reader is pulled right into the s\Spirit’s cape as the poem begins:

I place myself in the occasion of sin
wait for a stranger, a new lover, an archeologist
to whisper in my left ear which is the entrance
to my right brain (the receiver of the erotic):

let me open your gold line sarcophagus

wake the germ of yourself from its deep sleep
where you have slipped and risen
to all levels of dream . . . .

“The Seder” offers Alice Rogoff a canvas for a simple and powerful juncture of the feast day celebrating the exodus of Jews from Egypt. Here is the entire serene poem:

    The last child to fall asleep

             sees Elijah

   — like a wisp of stone-grey smoke,

Elijah through the door

  crossing the table

his pomegranate red lips
 
 sipping the wine away—

    Elijah reclines in the last child

to fall asleep’s eyes,

    prophet Elijah,

 the last child to fall asleep

   carried to bed

in Elijah’s secret grace.

Cat poems are my favorite since to me cats are the most important inhabitants of this planet. Sally Anne Frye shares the dauntless, independent spirit of a feline in her poem “Cat.” Here is the first and last stanza:

White with dust clinging
to his undercoat of fur,
the cat stalks
in the angel afternoon
and when human hands
reach for his softness,
the hairs detach and
float in the breeze,
weightless, gathering.

*****
Night falls
and moonlight finds
an iridescent cat
lurking still
free from sleeping hands.

Tressa Berman finds herself “Alone in the Studio” and shares that understanding, both ravishing beauty and quite terrifying, with the reader:

The snow reshapes the morning
Fallen flakes knit the woolen white caps of street lamps
The claws of branches scrape
Against the door
Begging for leaves
As if they will never come again
Outside the sleeted glass window
The stillness is alive
Like the inside of a half-filled heart
Its empty space recalls another
For now, just this bare wooden floor
Faces me like a dancer’s mirror
Soon, there will be movement

23rd Street Poets concludes appropriately with Cesar Love’s poem titled “Party’s End.” This minimalist masterpiece covers the subject and truly says it all:

The glory of ravished plates
The wine bottles’ last splash.

The lyric of late night good-byes
The feast of hugs.

Music and laughter
Seek their pillows

Sleepless
The tiny bell of bliss.
        —Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra

GARE ST. LAZARE

We’ve both seen the postcard in museum gift shops,
two trains wreathed in smoke, dark figures
swirling between, almost smoke themselves,
the roof resting on nothing but air.

Behind the trains you see three more carbarns —
foreshortened, gothic — and a tall building as weightless
as the sky. And the sky, blue-grey like the steam floating
above the trains. Everything volatile, gaseous, about

to evanesce. When I think of the train station
in Madrid, not the Atocha, but the smaller
one to the north, this is what I see, hopelessly
romanticized and out of date. All the pain

of leaving you made pretty and whole.
Everything in flight, even me. Even you.
                              —Lee Rossi (San Carlos)

LUCK
Marc Elihu Hofstadter (Walnut Creek)

Luck by Marc Elihu Hofstadter (Scarlet Tanager Books, P.O. Box 20906, Oakland: 2008) 118 pages, $16, with cover image of a 2nd century Roman statue by Jason Coyne and book design and composition by Dickie Magidoff. www.scarlettanager.com.

For a book by someone who claims he is “not a believer,” Luck is testimony to what is the best and most treasured in a life that tingles with Soul. Page after page is a revelation that—though ephemeral and punctuated by loss—individual and collective realities can be infused with transcendence.

This is the best that lyric poetry can offer to us. It is not about Greatness or Conquest, the way the Bards of old constructed their epics; it isn’t even about love and its elusiveness, the way Troubadours and early sonnetteers depicted. The “simple” lyric, formed as free verse or in a more formally structured setting, is ultimately a poetry of moments caught and moments held in yet another moment of our passing lives. If the lyric is truly doing its job—and there are more failures than successes—then it engages the reader on several levels and begs you to come back, beguiles you to come back, or dares you to come back to read it again.
   
Marc Hofstadter’s Luck is an exemplary of what a lyric can and should do, particularly in the first section of the book. The poems are disarming, with subjects familiar to all: sexual awakening, lovemaking, downtowns and their goings-on, the body and its failings, tea shops and grocery stores, art and music.
   
Nothing especially writ large or obviously called in to exemplify profundity, but then, that’s the magic: a few words on a blank page, and voilá, a trip to an art museum (the Guggenheim in New York, in this case) becomes a place where secular seekers are treated to more than a casual afternoon of looking at Klees and Kandinskys:

I’d perch on the top
and look down
at tiny worshipers,
or stand in the well
and gaze at God’s light
suffusing the dome
like milk.

The first section of the book, entitled “Not Yours,” is what weights the entire work, with its references to illness, intimations of death, grapplings with the mind’s processes and challenges in getting a grip on our often unsteady relationship to spirit:

The Rational Man

I am the blossom of all I hate.
In me the sensible man annuls
dreams of Orpheus or Ra.
The scientist in my cerebrum
divides the world into suns and stones.
The New Critic residing in my gut
sees the poem as a word machine.
In me the whole of Skepticism
raises itself on its heroic elbow
and looks down condescendingly
on everything holy.

The section culminates in “You,” a poem that rails with the best in the Romantic spiritual tradition and calls God down from on high in the spirit of Job or Blake:

I’m your servant child brother who obeys your commands
here in beds bookstores offices You screw me
like an overpowering ardent lover I submit
I’ve known you forever and don’t know you at all
You set the great cymbals crashing the lightning
forking that illuminates the narrow path
through vines fronds savage blossoms
and the cities littered with rubbish and bodies

The passion is wholly/holy that of the speaker/poet and yet, reading it, it is easy to get swept up in the urgency at needing answers, needing to know. Yet, the poet has a softer side, an accepting, Buddhist que sera sera at times as well:

Shall I speak in whispers and half tones?
I traipse along the obscure path,
swallows dipping low above my head.
Then it’s fully dark.
The owl hooting in the branches
reminds me it’s time to head home.

Hofstadter has accomplished a book brimming with poems that draw our attention to the music as well as the meaning. How often I long for that which gives the lyric its name: “lyric” as in words to a song! At readings, too many poets drone in dull prose broken into lines that seem to arise from a tin ear. It is sound and rhythm that make our memorable poems. Listen to this by way of contrast:

I strode there once where live oaks
scratched the sky and indigo lakes
trembled with light, trod loamy paths
past fern, moss and lichen, heard
deer rustle in the bushes, rose high
over forest, cliff, and creek
to breathe the freshness of the mist,
built a fire and heated beef, ate
with my hands, and drank river water
clear as diamonds, and made love to you . . .

For several lines, we have no idea where he is going with this “stride” but when the language is so alive, most readers won’t care: strode, scratched, past; live, sky, light; there, where, fern, heard. I could continue to point to the music at work here, but you get the point. Drop down any place and you will find it; then you get to the line “made love to you,” and in flat contrast to what has led to this point, you get something solid, stopped, complete.

There is humor in the book as much as there is darkness:

My friend Larry’s pee-pee was fat as a worm
but, when we played, became a rocket ship.

The poet has a real masterpiece on his hands with Luck. Published by Scarlet Tanager Press, one hopes that the volume will be entered into some kind of contest or another. It deserves recognition. Hofstadter deserves a broad readership and will reward all.
                                                                                           – Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

Black sky’s aswirl with stars.
I’m young, afraid of everything.
I fall to my knees in the cloistered plaza,
in the thick forest, on our front lawn,
and swoon at the sight of so many
fires blazing in such vast space.
Kneeling, I pray to the myriad lights,
the vault, whatever it is holding all this
so far above my jellied eyes,
until I’m just one more small fire
sending out my tiny spark of light.
                 —Marc Hofstadter, from Luck

 
Edward Mycue
(photo taken by Elizabeth Wahl O’Connor)

Mindwalking 1937–2007: New and Selected Poems

Edward Mycue

(San Francisco)

Mindwalking 1937–2007:  New and Selected Poems by Edward Mycue (Philos Press, Lacey, Washington: 2008), 68 pages, 63 poems, cover art by Richard Steger, book design by Jo-Anne Rosen, $12, www.philospress.org.

What an intense pleasure to encounter a book full of poems that breathe: each one radiates with life! Edward Mycue is a true lyric poet. There is none of the current and vapid “I forgot to close the screen door. Flies talk too much,” lyric dribble. Mycue takes his proper cue and is right there in his own world and his own moment: singing his life out. They are songs we want to hear.

The book covers the poet’s entire life. Not surprisingly, poems often deal with life’s journey and offer tribute to significant people in the poet’s life.

The tribute poems are so real and true to our dubious human path. “Word Thumb” is an ‘in-the-blood’ ballad presenting the poet’s father:

Sin and simple pleasures, reality and symbols
person & personification, allegory & metaphor
fables taught me about looking over a four-leaf
clover, 3 coins in a fountain, about loving you
eternally, and about loving a sailor’s bellbottom

trousers and coat of navy blue and a lot of other
songs my brother David sang and my dad sang
and that I learned to sing and my little brother
Peter and sisters Margo, Cookie, Janey, & Arda

learned to sing, too. But not our mother Ruth
Daddy (Jack) crooned his high baritone to her
and us (he said “tenor” —tenors get the girl!)

took us to movies with Rita, Ava, Veronica
(Hayworth, Gardner, Lake—and Judy Garland)

brought us a radiance of life’s simple pleasures

I carry in me a singing man my father gave me.

“Futurism” is delightful and poignant, an un-tribute poem. If only a 1930’s sparkling cigarette girl in short skirt and low neckline could appear in a puff of smoke and hand out this poem to any person experiencing this inevitable moment, how bright life could be. The poem begins:

Forget Bob. Blood
is thicker than
relationships.
Bob could have done
better by Bill.
But what has been
done is now done.
Forget Bob. Let’s
get on with it.
Encourage Bill
to do likewise.

Life’s journey is truly a bitch. Mycue’s journey poems are so head-on and up-front that they truly take one’s breath away. They recall Audrey Hepburn throwing the scarf around her neck and walking away at the end of the “The Children’s Hour”—my favorite moment in all of motion pictures. Being a gay person is impossible at best and this poem, “OOO human RED grease DOUBLE axe,” is such a valiant expression of that journey. From the heart of the poem:

When you later stutter and flush and have
needles drifting up from inside you and can’t
tell man, mom or dad or any other kids it

When later you’ve said goodbye to a mother
and to a father and to a brother and even a
white cat named Obidiah and wept an ocean

When your sads, glads and festering oughts
smell sweet, sweaty like the memories of him
the last thing to turnaround is your promise.

My favorite poem in the book, “Saving Generous Untethered Seacoast,” recalls that refreshing journey anyone blessed to spend a chunk of life in the Bay Area can take. Only in California can you find the bizarre and sacred Buddha’s Hand citrus: Both reality and metaphor:

Yellow squash
White peach
Browning orange Buddha’s Hand
Hot in the valley
Fires in the hills
White cat Obidiah I remember you
It happens to you: nobody is left
Sunshine over San Jose
Cloud cover San Francisco
Snow up near Tahoe
Hope is not the last to dip
Economic and emotional
Needles drifting from feather pines
Say goodbye, Gracie
“Nighty Night” to the ocean
Everything has had its day.

—Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra

LAST WORD
i try to be as clear as i can in my poemreports but i realize i am translating from a language that doesn’t have a reestablished vocabulary
or syntax . . . —Edward Mycue