BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

8 Student Nurses and Other Dead Girls

by Patricia Edith (2009) 30 pages, 11 poems, $8,cover design by Genie Scott, www.instantpublisher.com.

Blood Honey

by Chana Bloch (Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, PA: 2009) 96 pages, 60 poems, $14.95, with cover art by Kate Cheney Chappell and text and cover design by Kathy Boykowycz.

In everyday American speech and everyday exper-iences, Chana Bloch forges a book that is both a thrust forward into new subjects for the writer as well as a commemorative of that which once belonged to the present but is now owned by the past. Here are some sample Americanisms:

“I’ll try anything once.”
“If you catch it early.”
“Another slice of pie?”
“I don’t want to alarm you, but”
“We were drinking coffee”
“This is a free country.”
“You’ll know where to find me.”

Here are some of those experiences:

- a woman performing her monthly breast exam in
the shower
- a friend is diagnosed with a brain tumor
- a dying friend’s request for touch
- a suicide
- making love
- sitting on the sofa with kids.

At the heart of Blood Honey is the truth that while much of our daily experience is eased by beauty and connection, it is also punctuated by violence, tragedy and loss. The casual way that illness and death drop in on us is part of her theme. The book begins with a sly shocker:

My uncle killed a man and was proud of it.
Some punk with a knife came at him in Flatbush
and he knocked the sucker to the ground.
The sidewalk finished the job.

By then he’d survived two wives
and a triple bypass . . .
(from “The New World”)

Coping with the impact of violence is also the subject of “The Dark of Day,” ostensibly a poem about a domestic situation that suddenly, in the breath of one stanza break, takes a turn toward lives spun out of control:

My friend’s father was killed
in a car crash. She hated him,
hadn’t seen him in years.
When the police called, she drove to the ditch
where his wrecked Chevy waited for the tow-truck.

The body was gone. On the dashboard, broken glasses,
an open notebook splotched with his blood.
Then she was crying, not knowing why.
She tore out a stain on the mottled paper,
his ragged last breath,
and took it into her mouth.

The book’s title, Blood Honey, is taken from the Bible, Judges 14:5-18: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness . . . . What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?” It appears in a late poem about a friend who has just received a diagnosis of having a malignant brain tumor:

Overnight a wall sprang up around him,
leaving he rest of us
outside.

As though we lived in Franz Kafka’s world, the narrator describes the friend’s medical condition as if it were a court sentence. However, there is no attacking of a vengeful God here, or even of an unjust legal system. Instead, what truly creates the havoc of life is the fallibility of our bodies:

If he’s guilty
we must be guilty; we’re all made of
the same cup of dust--

It’s a blessing, isn’t it? To be able,
days at a time,
to forget what we are.

If we could truly forget “what we are,” perhaps it would go easier on us, but Bloch doesn’t ever let the reality of being dust escape us. What she does offer, and this is in her Biblical reference, is the honey pulled out of the carcass; the title poem continues:

A man lies alone in his body in a world
he can still desire.
Another slice of pie? he asks.

As long as he’s hungry
he’s still one of us.

What I especially love in these new poems by Chana Bloch is their earthiness. We’re never far from the body and its decline, but also its pleasures and insights. The people in the poems are not abstracted thinkers and concepts are rooted in flesh and blood. Certain images recur: trees, the color green, sky, memory, the past. In particular, the images of sky and trees, seem linked to a belief, not in an afterlife--at which the author scoffs, “Arrogance! Ignorance! Wishful thinking!”--but in the small resurrections embodied in our awareness of the earth’s multiple minor miracles:

I love the bare trees that let me see them.
In winter I know what they are,
the articulation of the branches
down to the smallest twig.

Let the frozen pond
keep its secrets to itself.
The trees are open, full of sky, the forest
finally visible
(from “On the Shortest Day of the Year”)

The author’s other main subject matter is relationships, with old partners and new lovers, friends and acquaintances, parents and children. She writes beautifully of parenting, capturing the gleeful moments in the household as well as the fear for the kids going out the door. “Brothers” is delightful:

When I was the Baba Yaga of the house
on my terrible chicken legs,
the children sat close on the sofa as I read,
both of them together
determined to be scared.

Careful! I cackled, stalking them
among the pillows:
You bad Russian boy,
I eat you up!
They shivered and squirmed, my delicious sons.

It’s as if Bloch has taken the advice of a Rabbi mentioned in “The Messiah of Harvard Square”:

Years ago he’d been taught, If you’re planting a tree
and someone cries out, The Messiah has come!
finish planting the tree. Then
go see if it’s true.

In Blood Honey, you become aware of the passing of time, of our lives, and you don’t waste them troubling over the truth that the lion is dead; instead, you reach in and grab whatever honey amazingly appears in its decaying carcass. 

--Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

In a film class years ago, I was taught that you will get enough imagery and sound in a movie’s first four minutes to deduce the themes and tone for the rest of the picture. A beautiful color close-up of smooth-rough stones by Sherry Bloom graces the cover of Berkeley poet Tracy Koretsky’s new book, Even Before My Own Name. Between the title and the cover image, and the complexity of earth-tones in that image, many of the book’s themes and tone is revealed in that wonderful poetry-way of not telling but showing.

The image of stones provides the leitmotif: stones are a central image turning up as nature’s pebbles, manmade gravel, artist’s marble, or grave-markers. Koretsky tips her hand with the gorgeous cover image, but like Andy Goldsworthy’s acrobatic nature-sculptures, Koretsky turns her raw materials into art as she takes the reader on a ride through her specific life journey yet invites us to turn over our own boulders along the way. She provides heft and uplift as she claims her physicality and comes to grips with its inevitable demise.

The main subjects deal with childhood loss, of a mother, of innocence, of friendships. And, indeed, the book has a trajectory of recovery and healing as the poet/narrator moves into adulthood. But, I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that this is solely confessional work. The difference between a book of healing, which is mostly for the author’s sake, and a book that lifts into the realm of Art, is the craft and shaping of the material; this is the psychologically-oriented author’s challenge and responsibility if she wants readers to discover their own connections to the material in order to warrant a second, third or multiple reading.  Koretsky accomplishes this in spades.

Enough is told to entice a reader into believing that he grasps the full story; enough is left out as well so that you cannot walk away with that thud of satisfaction that arrives when you feel you have had all your questions answered. Koretsky gives you just enough to keep you returning to suss out clues and nuances, the way a novelist seeds early chapters with careful foreshadowing. When this is done skillfully in a book of poetry, the poems echo off of one another.

Koretsky experiments and accomplishes mastery in a variety of forms. I had tremendous good fun figuring out her variations on sestinas, prose poems, near-sonnets, and poems that use space or typographical tricks to push them close to iconography. In "fade to white," a devastating poem dealing with the tragic death of a child, the poem is presented in narrow, justified columns of text that push your reading of it downward in tense enjambments, thereby echoing the narration and heightening the emotion:

I do not ask for details. I

do not want to know, and

besides, I think it is prob-

ably none of my business

anyway. A boy. Ten. The

son of a friend.    Another

boy, also ten, best friends,

next-door-neighbors, sliding

full of wind down, down,

a snowy hill faster, gasp-

ing, now breathless--god,

too breathless--now dead.

One dead. Not my friend’s

son, the other--an asth-

matic. Dead on a hillside

in the blinding glow.

              (from “fade to white”)

The form continues pushing the story for several columns of dense on-rushing type that raise questions about tragedy, shock, and shared grief.  This poem is only one of Koretsky’s showcase pieces. As counter-weight to poems of emotional tension, Koretsky offers others that are beguilingly spare. At one extreme is “The Day I Suffered from Temporary Incapability“:

i am folded

filed

forgotten

behind

the ticking of the clock

stuck

in pockets

like fists

against the

freeze

in Pittsburgh

Even Before My Own Name deals with difficult subject matter, mostly on an intensely personal scale: mother-loss at a young age, incest or premature sexual advances, the pleasures and pains of childhood friendships, growing up and dealing with unhealed wounds.

The book is divided into five sections. As you proceed through them, you see the writer’s increased sophistication and emotional evolution as they relate to the same subject matter over a lifetime, refocusing, and, as she puts in a late poem “When The Call Comes: Notes Toward Revision,” revising. Her poem “With This Book,” a near-sonnet, with fourteen 10-syllable/4-beat lines, expresses a welcomed release from the past:

Once, were I asked to weave my tale

I would have spun from lines of loss

a loose net, twice-torn, bound to fail,

and what was caught, no sooner tossed

from open palms to jagged roads

while mourning my own soil to send

roots deep. No place to reap, to grow

nor plant; no hay to safely spread

and warmly weave a dream called home.

But here I braid strong strands of lore,

ends firmly tucked and neatly sewn,

at rest upon my smooth-worn floor.

Good-bye you stones; I’m off to fly.

Good-bye you loss. Good-bye good-byes.

This is a lovely poem; I almost want to use the word “pretty,” but that reduces it to its pure aesthetics. In the context of a book braving its kind of subject matter, the poem represents taking control over the past: it is what art can do therapeutically, yet here the subjectivity is transcended and the poem offers an enjoyable play-fulness and levity. I particularly love those closing lines, and near couplet (the plural of “good-byes” is not an exact rhyme with “fly”), which is just a wee bit unsettling to let us know that healing and release are never perfect in their completion.

The last poem, “Vespers,” is both death-song and epitaph, simultaneously expressing the redemptive power of an observed life in vilanelle form:

Let me be willing to live my death

and celebrate its coming.

Let me say good-bye to myself.

Let my withering fascinate,

my whitening enamor.

Let me be willing to live my death.

Let me stop before the mirror and say,

“You were something then, kid, Yeah, you were fun.”

Let me say good-bye to myself.

--Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

And Freddie Was My Darling by CB Follett (Many Voices Press, Kalispell, Montana: 2009), 115 pages, 64 poems, $16 front and back jacket art by CB Follett, book design by Jeremy Thornton, $16. Order through Small Press Distribution, www.spdbooks.org.

This new poetry collection, which appears to be memoir, is more about craft and cunning than personal history. While the author CB Follett is a well-known presence in Northern California as the former publisher and co-editor of the poetry review Runes, she is also winner of the 2001 National Poetry Book Award from Salmon Run Press for her book At the Turning of the Light, among other awards, and is the author of five previous books of poetry plus 13 chapbooks.

In Follett’s hands, the past--American life coming out of World War II--emerges as fresh as sea air and as familiar as cinnamon. No sentimentality. No serenading the “innocence” of youth pre-Woodstock. With young “Freddie” as a constant throughout her poems, we’re introduced immediately to first love and sexual curiosity that heat up years to come--accompanied by all the other baffling business of growing up.

We kissed early, hardly out of the womb, it seemed.
I found Freddie and he me, in kindergarten
and we’d kiss in the cloakroom, little rye-crisp kisses.
We’d pucker and peck and be in love forevermore.
            (--from “First Kiss”)
***
In those days
I could balance on one leg
like a heron in a swift moving stream.
I could bend
as in ballet and pause
above the pebble,
pick it up delicate as a mule
nibbles grass,
unwind, and hop on my way.

I was so good at hopscotch,
the other girls began to eye
my magical pebble as its source.
They made up rules such as--
winner gets to choose a pebble, or

no pebbles with stripes.
            (--from “Hopscotch”)
***
The buddy-boys of third grade
suddenly rumbled in our blood.
We began to learn
about moist hands and soft lips.
There were reasons now to stay after school.
New reasons for telephones
weekends, and diaries.
                          (--from “Flying Up”)

Each section of the book is a “slide show,” flickering from age to age. Freddy grows into Fred, and ultimately goes his way. He may be the heart of the book, but not its brain: the author gives us much more. The coy charm of her childhood grows into the wildness--or wilderness--of adolescence: lust and frustration, confusion, mayhem--in stories so apt, so tightly wrapped in their time, you suspect Follett has discovered an elixir for memory loss.

Her details conjure the smell, the squeal or the ache of scenes often told in the literature of that time: a white-headed grandmother’s floured apron, the war efforts of women, a single mother’s struggles, the fatherless upbringing, and that first and ongoing love. Yet all are unique, deft portraits, neither under- nor overexposed.

Grammy became dredged in flour, a virago
of pie crusts and cakes, dumplings and roast chicken
and together we went to the butcher,
See that it’s ground beef and not
horsemeat. I know you, Andy Henson.
        (--from “My Grandmother‘s Kitchen”)
***
Small as I was, I admired my grandmother’s hair,
the inward place she went when she brushed, the gleam
as it took on the shine of well-polished metal
like the silver-backed brushes moving gently
but intently through her hair,
embossed initials catching in the light.
        (--from “Women Brushing Hair”)
***
Germans in our town, once neighbors,
are eyed with suspicion. Mr. Schneider
who repaired our clocks and watches
peering squint-eyed through his tiny telescope,
now with no customers, takes his delicate springs,
crystals and watch stems, and retreats
behind his curtained window.
        (--from “1943”)

In tone, concise detail and cadence, Follett delivers more than the image she’s conjuring; specificity secures memories of a childhood vastly different from today’s. Out of the last mid-century come nouns with nuance like Crinoline . . . cloakroom . . . war effort . . . along with string saving, rationing, the terror of polio. Readers of a “certain age” (I don’t go quite so far back!) will both smile and twinge in recollection.

War is barely over
and we have sugar again.
No more Civil Defense tin hat,
no more black-outs, no more saving
string, and tin foil,
no more weaving olive blanket squares
on those little metal prongs.
Although Mrs. Greenly still has her star flag
in the window for dead Peter,
we have white bandages again
and chewing gum
and gasoline without ration tickets.
And sugar.        (--from “Twelve”)
***

Polio is eating children,
licklipping round our friends, while parents
rip our immortality with hot breath.
    Avoid crowds.    Don’t get over tired.
    No swimming.    Do your legs ache?
            (--from “Polio”)
***

“ATTENTION, PLEASE,” the loudspeaker squalls.
We startled from deep within, where we lie
curled around our certainties. “ATTENTION, PLEASE,”
from the webbed box high on the wall, above the clock,
I am happy to tell you that Roy Carter is out of danger.

Bricked in emotions explode the school in shouts, cheers.
Girls unstoppered, flow. Boys slap backs, punch the air.
Moments later, Mr. Kohler brings us down,
Can we return now to the Bill of Rights?
            (--from “Polio”)

These are moments composed as much as recalled. Not necessarily factual, but truthful in the emotions they convey and evoke. Memoir as art or art as memoir is a reasonable question about CB Follett’s book. A small note at the front advises the reader that “the ‘I’ of the poem is not necessarily the ‘I’ of the poet.” Follett dedi-cates her book to the real “Freddie,” a 50+year relation-ship. Most amazingly, though, a poem pops up near the book’s end called “Growing Up: False or True?” in which a string of confessions to teenage mis-chief are summed up: “And there are more, of course,/ many more, but how will you know/if they’re true, or not?” *

Driving home from babysitting, he’d park in a lane he  knew       
was near the home of the science teacher, and although we necked

he was furtive even as he loosed his tongue from behind those

square yellow teeth and pushed it into my mouth,

reminding me of Sunday slabs my grandmother served,  hoping I
would eat before discovering the source, the tubefeet like a starfish

***
I was a tease, endless tickle, an ache in the groin.
He was my test case.
        (--from “The High School English Teacher”)

Truth or illusion? Who cares?

Now I have to speak of the sheer beauty of her language, the agility of an imagist who stirs bright pebbles into her rock-solid stories:

It was the quiet smell of salt
and what tides do to a shore.
It was a clicking rustle of water

Note: We try to accommodate long lines as best we can within our format’s limitations, sometimes needing to break a line where it is not broken in the original. This is indicated with / to indicate that the previous line was a turnover, but sometimes we adjust the font.

over barnacles and clusters of
purple mussels on the pilings. It was
the chuggle of waves

slapping under docks and floats,
an applause of sailboats not yet hauled,
spanking down their bows.

Gulls wheeled, the air crisp as Winesaps,
and the black bell-buoy tilted
up the waves and down into the troughs

clanging once each way. Our sweaters were red,
our hair blond, our blue jeans cuffed a
perfect two inches--Libby and I

turning summer into fall.
            (--from “Shiners”)

***
I go to Kimble’s Pond,
let my feet crunch through new snow
blown into freezing
as the red tongue of the thermometer withdraws.

We’d been waiting
for enough cold to snap the last of autumn,
pull remaining leaves from maple and oak.
Now snow has fallen while we slept.

The faint crease of dawn pulls bare tangles
of branches out of darkness.
Too early for birds, those that are left.
            (--from “Kimble‘s Pond”)

In Follett’s poetry collection, each story stands alone as a telling moment, and for fledgling poets like me, Follett has demonstrated the art of expressing the heartbeat of an experience with particulars that give life to memory, real or imagined!
                                                                                      --Reviewed by Gail Peterson (Berkeley)

Gail Peterson, hardly a fledgling poet, won this years “Poets’ Dinner” Grand Prize for “Serengeti” (published in our Spring 2009 issue). She worked as a writer for Hallmark and the San Francisco Chronicle, and, for many years, published a monthly newsletter that reviewed children’s literature.