BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

INDIVISIBLE:
An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

Edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa,
and Pireeni Sundaralingam

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam. (University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, AK: 2010), 300 pages, 141 poems, $24.95. Cover image by Erik Dreher and Summi Kaipa; cover design by Ashley Piediscalzi.

     Three remarkable Bay Area women set out to complete a task of Mahayana epic proportions, to bring together over 100 poems from 49 poets of South Asian birth, ancestry, or heritage, following the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Why is it significant that their energies coalesced after 9/11, when those who had fomented that horror were of Middle-Eastern and not South Asian origin? To answer that question, the editors provide an 11-page introduction, articulate, provocative, and inspiring to any American who will purchase and read this book.
     These are poems by American immigrant poets, whose parents or grandparents came in earlier decades or who themselves arrived on our continent in the past few years. They are first and foremost poems of that tug-of-war that is assimilation: the giving-and-taking of cultures learning to blend, not melt, together in some kind of harmonious stew.

     There is no way to do justice to all the poets whose work is represented in Indivisible. Of course, I have my favorites, but there are so many poems to choose from, any reader is bound to find words that please or open the mind, that comfort, invoke dismay, or sadden. . . all to the good.
      As with the poetry of many American “new-comers,” there are poems of nostalgia for the “old countree” as well as poems of criticism and disappointment with the new. This is a prominent theme in American cultural poetry, going back to at least Phylis Wheatley’s Pope-inspired lyrics that contain African landscape imagery and a longing to be restored to her home continent.
     America will always be a place both full of promise and flaws as we stumble toward national identity and living up to our national potential. On each extreme of the political spectrum, there are questions about how we miss our mark, fail to achieve our dreams of equality, liberty, prosperity, justice. After 9/11 some of the best and worst of American pride and attitude came to the fore. Yet, the 9/11 assault was immediately blamed on brown-skinned foreigners. Few of us wearing lighter skin tones felt instantly under suspicion or afraid of a backlash while the first to lose his life in a post-9/11 revenge killing was a Sikh man in the mid-West.
     Indivisble is quintessentially a volume of American poetry with a twist because the immigration experience, and the imagery it encompasses is of a relative recent wave of peoples from the South Asian continent. Here are poets with diverse South Asian ancestries: Tamil, Nepalese, Indian (with its many many ethnicities), et al.  I am grateful for this volume and look forward to reading and re-reading the poems presented on its pages.
     As I surveyed the poets in the book, it is clear this group of writers are mostly highly-educated and professional, with over half working in the academic sphere as public school or university instructors. Another large group are professional journalists, and two (or more) are translators. A few work in the sciences or medical spheres and a significant number are involved in immigrant projects, cultural and community organizations, and other arts.
     Most hold graduate degrees in creative writing, which may simply say something about their devotion to writing and their accessibility as writers. It is much more difficult to track down writers who are working in the cubbyholes of corporate skyscrapers, soldiering, parenting, or running small businesses. But this fact about these writers does not at all imply a limited vision. The poems run a complete gamut of contemporary life in America and leave little out, including our overwhelming choices in “freedom fries.”
     I had to confront my own stereotypes about South Asians (and truly I lack any kind of sophisticated experience of, or education in, South Asian culture, history and politics), and I deeply appreciate the book being a gentle guide into the minds of hearts of my fellow Americans who have the good fortune of this particular heritage. I envy their fluidity with the signs and symbols, literature and mythology, and pop cultural milieu that is their good fortune to inherit. The writers move in and out of two cultures, sometimes many more than two.
     I found tremendous humor and passion in these poems, along with an intriguing range of styles and forms. Some poets reveal their MFA’s a little more than others, with more artificed poem structures.
     Anthologies often leave us looking for themes and organizational principles. Here the editors kept the collection wide open, not grouping poems by theme, ethnic background, or language. Each poet is introduced with a brief paragraph providing literary credentials that rarely tip-the-hand as to the content of the poems themselves. Frequently, I was surprised by the poems and any expectation I might have had was continually challenged. If I found any common thread at all, and I was looking for one, it was that the poets seem very much concerned with finding or denoting the nature of truth.
     This subtle theme is woven in poems about what America is or says that it is and what it is not
what constitutes a genuine identity where can one find the truth when information is so readily available but often misleading what is the truth in families separated by moves and cultural shifts?
     So many of the poems hinge on geography, a sense of place that may or may not be one’s true place. There is both affection for, and alienation from, the places the poets settle in. This must be aggravated by the need to keep moving to keep working, particularly when the academic field is so turbulent and noncommittal that teachers roam the country seeking a secure position.
     There are poems about the Ganges and Washington D.C., Detroit and Battery Park, Independence, Iowa and Evanston, Illinois, San Francisco and Vermont. When you think about this extraordinary geo- graphical range, you realize the term “bicultural” is in itself a limiting one trying to get to the multiple nature in the migrant experience, which is the American experience. Sometimes it leads to fear and closing in--what leads to Fox News--and sometimes it leads to an incredibly rich--dare I use the stale old metaphor of “tapestry”?
     As to the poems. I will leave you with a sampling of lines that I found exhilarating or poignant or evanescent or evocative of some simple experience or beauty, and exhort you most heartily to find and buy this book. You will discover new poets to love and learn from. Thank you to the editors for their renewed faith in this country and their hope in universal humanity, in the midst of post-9/11 zeitgeist which took us to war and to war and . . . .

On a day like any other day,
like “yesterday or centuries before,”
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore--
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before--
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
    (from “The Disappearances,” by Vijay Seshadri)
***
Seventeen, but we breezed right by the bouncers--
Me and Jill in tight tee-shirts and Levi’s, flannel shirts

wrapped at our small waists. We danced together,
(never with boys) never drank, even when boys

offered to buy. Once, after I refused a beer, I heard
one say, “You know, them Asians can do

all those bendng things.” And I wondered what
bending things, what this had to do with taking

a sip from a cold bottle I didn’t purchase.
(from “Mr. Mustard’s Dance Club: Ladies Night” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil)
***

If you love your country, he said, why are you here?
Say, you are tired of hearing about
all that wonder-that-was-India crap.
It is tea that’s gone cold: time to brew a fresh pot.

But what wouldn’t you give for one or two places in it?
    (from “Remembered Village” by R. Parthasarathy)
***
Always the sound of knots tearing,
the scratch of hair against metal.
Those summer evenings when I’d go by

Anu’s apartment on the floor above mine,
#406, and watch her mother tug at her hair
with a steel-toothed comb, their room

smelled of coconut oil and meat
left over from dinner. She can’t cut it--ever.
And so, every night is a tug of war

with her mother, whose brown fingers
pull and rub, spreading it out like a sheet
against her back.
    (from “Hair,” by Vandana Khanna)
***
It is Paris, Berlin, New York,
    it is any one of countless cities, any one
        of endless lands in which we find ourselves.,

our careless hurrying through crowds
    cut short, silenced in one moment

by the sight of teeth and hands and jaw,
    by the familiarity of bone.

These are the faces that reflect our own,
    the eyes of exiles that will search

and search again for patterns in the skin,
    kinship in the bones,
        history in the hand-shape of strangers.
(from “Language Like Birds,” by Pireeni Sundaralingam)
***
And here is one final, full poem, by Aryanil Mukherjee:

after promise

Probably nothing follows promise
White flowers of crab-apple in the left hand of spring
some spill, lay below
to grant us the much needed scent
that makes us eat well, ask well,
mend our minds so we look up to the cracker flames
hanging above the city’s skull
lanterns rekindling the violets

These plateaus didn’t occur like a soulful country
On the contrary, we borrwed from them
light breeze
fields, forests and figs that abscond from time to time
Lincoln park--too crowded this afternoon
The leaves are dead, instead flags of a million countries flutter
                      -- Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

AMERARCANA   

 
AMERARCANA 2010: A Bird & Beckett Review. (Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco, CA. 94131: 2010), 136 pages, 46 poems, stories and essays. $15. www.amerarcana.wordpress.com

Reviewed by Ken Saffran (San Francisco) 

   
     The inaugural volume of Amerarcana, published by Bird & Beckett Books, is a welcome addition to the City’s literary scene. The 18 contributors reflect the incredible diversity in style and culture to be found in Bay Area arts.  
     This volume is dedicated to Bruce Conner (1933-2008), a multi-media artist of international reputation who lived for many years in San Francisco’s Glen Park, just around the corner from Bird & Beckett Books. His friends Michael McClure and Diane Di Prima (current Poet Laureate of San Francisco) have dedicated poems to him. In “The Artist,” Mr. McClure says of Bruce Connor:

In the blackness of his face, spider webs and lichens
are matted together making a waterfall that splashes
down to the chin.
        His head tilts down, staring into the vision.
        The glow of his consciousness
                     is an aureole.

–A HUGE WHOLE THOUGHT in all its myriadness
         is what he grasps for.

     The glow of consciousness and the myriadness of the search is an apt description for much of the work to be found in Amerarcana. Mr. McClure ends his poem for Bruce Connor with this lovely image:

Foxes circle around it all
and they bark
in honor
of the softness of mulberries.

     In some of his work Bruce Connor could be political and playful at the same time. Diane DiPrima celebrates this with her poem "Anthem," in which she makes fun of the politician’s need to be all things to all people:

They’re baking cookies
For you and me!

We’ll walk in the thunderstorm
& never get wet!  

     Although she has always had a playful side, her poems for R.D. (Robert Duncan?) and David Meltzer are anything but playful. They are fierce celebrations of the relationship that each of them has had with poetry.
     Fierce celebrations could also characterize the work of some of the writers here. Ammiel Alcalay presents a heady mix of poetry and politics in his opening essay.  Jack Hirschman provides us with, among other things, a remarkable recreation, in language, of the music of avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew in "The Cardew Arcane." Barbara Jane Reyes closes the anthology with her powerful mythic incantations.    
     What is missing in Amerarcana?  I wish there was an artist statement and/or bio for each contributor. I dislike doing these things myself; they are a sort of biohazard, but I wanted to know more about some of the writers whose work was not familiar to me. And not to include an introduction to a new review is an interesting choice. Why are the contributors presented in alphabetical order? What is their relation to the Bay Area and to Bird & Beckett? Why start a review now and, more tantalizingly, what can we expect in the future?  I can hardly wait.

Ken Saffran grew up in the Midwest but always had Far West sensibilities so it was inevitable he ended up in San Francisco. You can find his poems in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and at the artist Elizabeth Hack’s blog “Peace, Hope & 9/11.”



RISING AT 5 AM
MARC ELIHU HOFSTADTER
(WALNUT CREEK)

Rising at 5 A.M. by Marc Elihu Hofstadter. (Latitude Press, Pittsburg, California: 2010), 97 pages, 70 poems, $14.00. www.rawartpress.com.

At last a poetry suite with a title that means what the collection is: RISING AT 5AM! Dedicated to his mate David, the title poem proclaims the poet sharing every moment of his life with clarity and delight. He doesn’t miss a thing if he can help it. How lucky a reader is to hold this book!

I exchange high fives with a Giants’ fan
in Starbucks, joke with his green-eyed
girlfriend. A white-haired man crossing my path
salutes me as I let him go. Is that the sun
lifting its elbows above the gray table
of clouds? I exchange a word with the
bus driver taking me downtown, throw
a crumb of bagel to the junco
darting around my café table,
tell you I love you
when we talk on the cell.

RAINBOW names the first gathering of poems: every color of a poet’s path in this world. “Old Baudelaire” is alone and befuddled until he remembers:

. . . one of his own lines, Hear, my dear,
hear sweet night approach,
and he smiled a smile
that slowly broadened
to take in the room,
the city,
then the world.

Hofstadter takes this ‘Thornton Wilder-after-a-good- breakfast’ approach to life throughout the collection and it is much appreciated. “Cat on a Piano” makes another profound understatement:

The cat tinkles the piano keys by steeping
gingerly, each paw sounding a black or
white note. So by simply acting in the
world we make music we do not intend
that reverberates throughout the house.

The gathering UTTER LOVE does just that. The poet’s amorous life reach begins at age eight in a New York City barber’s chair in “The Razor:

. . . The high point
was when he’d lather up my neck,
sharpen his razor on a strop,
and pass the sharp blade over my skin.
I was a sparrow gently held.
Years later, when I finally had sex,
the sparrow flew around the room, freed.

The poet’s amorous world becomes an interesting and rather complex planet in the rest of UTTER LOVE and throughout his honest collection.

JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S MALE NUDES is a gathering that depends on a fresh, lusty response to a series of paintings. As “Figure and Trees” concludes:

. . . You’d like to embrace him,
But for the moment you
Let him blossom in tans and browns.
You don’t want to spoil him with your touch.

More to the point of the brush, on your next visit to the De Young Museum find John Singer Sargent’s “Trout Fishing in the Tyrol” and marvel how closely his brush strokes carrying a line of dazzling light resemble those refreshing lines of Marc Elihu Hofstadter that sketch moments captured forever.

HEROES gathers five noble and eccentric personages: Whitman--supreme consumer of American life, Ginsberg, Koch, Schoenberg, and especially the spirit of the Russian literary mafia standing as inspiration for Hofstadter whose grandfather and grandmother lived and worked in the countryside near Minsk.

DAYS AND YEARS tries to gather the poet’s life through the intriguing years: a school boy comforted by a couple who ran Bosworth’s: a neighborhood store, a little boy out of place at “Camp Regis”:

I liked pussy willows, zinnias,
scarlet tanagers. While the other boys
punched and tackled, I made
my bed as neatly as a nurse.
I preferred to be alone, or joking
with my favorite counselor Stan
whose arms were lighting fuzzed with down. . .

the “Hypochondria” of finding a place in this world--(that poem begins,

I was sure I had epilepsy
Like my idol Dostoyevsky:
My arms and legs twitched,. . .

And that poem ends in wisdom,

. . . I realized
after a year of contemplation,
I was neither epileptic
nor Dostoyevsky.)

Several poems reveal an incredible sensitivity to History, both of the world and of this poet. “Paris, 1966” grasps an innocent world before HIV and other social twists. “Who’s Child-Eyed Now?” walks with the poet into an open door to join managed groups of adults dancing wildly to every beat of the living. “What Love Tells Me” for David concludes this fresh as the best morning of your life collection:

Is that some things go deeper than thought,
Quince blossoms, your lips on my cheek,
a line of song flowing on and on. . .
What can I wish for except what is,
since it includes your shoulders, your mild gaze?. . .                   -- Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra (San Francisco)

 NIGHT DUTY
DAVE SETER (PETALUMA)

Night Duty by Dave Seter (Main Street Rag, Charlotte, North Carolina: 2010), 31 pages, 19 poems, $10.00.

      If you thought you knew it all, think again. Night Duty makes Walt Whitman look like a closet elitist: you want real, not tainted by the sensational or the morbid, you get real. In my experience this stalwart collection is truly one of a kind. The cover is a bit misleading: the reader might think that Detective Noir is on the way. On the way are the best reflections of the American life edge you will ever find.
     The poet roars through the landscape often in a company repair truck or a rented car. “Gasco” chronicles two lucky employees sent out by the gas company to shut off the juice for delinquent customers, here we go:

We curbed the van, stashed it on a side street,
Fast food wrappers blew past and a few unwanted
french fries attracted ants. Stan reached
his greasy hand into the bin overflowing
with threaded steel pipe fitting, elbows,
valves, and other junk. He rattled around,
showed me a big wrench. Said we’d be needing
that, to turn off Dobermans. . . .

      Nothing is as fast as a fast food wrapper and nothing pulls the reader into the poem quicker. You are there: a real treat. The usual problem is the reader isn’t there in the poem because the poet isn’t there.
     “Traffic Delay, Bay Bridge” serves the American what the American faces every day: a jam and a wait, in this case for coins at each end. The poem begins:

At the toll booth’s concrete bunker
I make my offering to leave this earth:
Bay silt on the Oakland side.

      The poem wraps around the reader’s mixed emotions:

Word spreads that the man was shot
in flight from a crime, riding a getaway
bike with a shotgun strapped to the frame.
Suddenly our necks aren’t rubber
but veined with quartz;
we feel the blood pound.
Another Icarus has tried, succeeded
at leaving this earth, too poor for wings or a car.
We quiet and wait. Up ahead, cop retrieve
shell casings bright and spent like coins.

      “Fallen Caryatid” “After the sculpture by A. Rodin” is too noble not to quote in its entire melancholy reality:

The darkened bronze reflects the realistic slump
of a figure a doorway. She could be that modern.
Rodin’s older version carries an urn and wars a robe.
Mine cradles a paper cup of coffee, models a newspaper shawl,
Similar stories. Hard labor built these coffee houses
and banking institutions, built the Greek temples
where caryatids carried rooflines, tonnage, entablature,
mostly fallen now. Rodin’s example’s classically       muscled,
mythically strong, visionary. She sees the future,
because the future repeats. She shoulders the run, it’s her job.
Whether she’s fallen from the sky or Plato’s bed
is hard to tell. Her history’s hard to find in most
history books, but here it is on the street, beneath
the streetlight, where the newspapers scatter,
where traffic signals wink, and go on winking all night.

      “Growing Tulips” in this poem means the dramatic irony of growing tulips in a rough and tumble neighbor filled with grumbling, old war veterans. The poem finishes off in bloom:

I don’t fault the foot soldier, lieutenant,
aviator, for defending the honor
of bullets and bombs, but I prefer
the explosiveness of spring.
And what will the neighbor men say when they see
my new recruits—their soft helmets parting the soil—
as they join the ranks of standard carmine red
and old gold tulips, then open to reveal
black petals, the color of absolute night?
Will they deferentially drain their beers
when midnight hits, or infiltrate my lines
strongly armed with cold steel pruning shears,
to capture that dark beauty of tulips?

      “Rental Car,” whether or not intended by the poet, is a remarkable metaphor for life: parts of it don’t work, especially the trunk with no keyhole and a remote trunk button that “like a spouse sleeping on a couch, won’t obey my command.”
    “Stacked Deck” is quite a dazzling three stanza mosaic tribute to the unreality of elections. We have heard this before, but obviously not often enough. Hold onto your ballots as the poem wraps.

His face washed of meaning and bias, the contender
campaigns for survival, trusts his gut that folks
dislike intellect, denies allegations he was ever
a PhD candidate, slams back a shot of Jack Daniels,
slaps a mechanic’s back. Election Tuesday we have
a date with democracy, voting machine, oxymoron.
No bright line between truth and lies, the elect
will oversee the production, fiction of our lives.

      “The Wakeful” makes a superb statement for the rare son who understands his father, just dead in rural Minnesota. Here are the two final stanzas: perhaps I should not quote so much, but I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t share this amazing writing.

Dusk falls; a time for going home.
I drive a rented sedan into town,
past an oversized northern pike
guarding Erskine proper, past the graveyard
tilled for morning. Tomorrow our dad completes
his journey; returns. Tonight his casket
is flanked by mums in urns. The wakeful gather
at the mortuary: aging farmers pass coffee cups
and kind words; the pastor interrupts
with a sermon, says we’re ants before God.
Some words are kept, some said,
some hauled across the Dakotas in sacks.
One door opens, another closes.
The mortician sneaks outside to smoke,
my dad’s spirit on his heels. He didn’t
particularly like mums or sermons,
but like to share the silence of stars
with someone who would listen
nights when the light completely failed.

                    --Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra



THE SPACE BETWEEN
J.R. BRADY
(ST. HELENA)

The Space Between by J. R. Brady. (Beatitude Press, Berkeley, California: 2010), 38 pages, 12 poems, $10.00.

     J. R. Brady’s pen writes from a timeless zone near that illusive and resplendent place called the Collective Unconscious. The astute, minimalist cover is divided by a broad horizontal line. What worlds will the reader delve and explore between? ABOVE THE WATER, the first section, strolls through attempts to exist in the so called everyday life, but the reader can’t help noticing the wily universe between the lines. BELOW THE WATER, the second section, wanders into the world of mythic understanding. What treasure the reader shares with every human being in the blink between myth and experience! The Space Between wraps this brief, but powerful, collection calmly stating the unexplainable.

     ABOVE THE WATER first offers some “Bat Sense”:

     “Generations” explores the surprising focus of each individual in each point in that individual’s life. The grandmother has moved to the desert and has, at last, found a satisfying mate in the dark night constellations.
     “Doolin” is a signature poem for Brady: jammed with questions about who the Hell are we anyway? Just what void is between each human anyway? The speaker in the poem is on a bus tour about rustic Ireland and an old woman in her bookstore reading with her cat. The speaker ponders:

     “Commuter” sketches the common dilemma. The poem sadly concludes:

When I was a child, I used to say
I wanted to live with the birds
now I ride home through tunnels
more & more I ride through the tunnels/
it is faster. . . but sometimes. . .

I miss seeing things. . . in between

     “Justice” is a poem all over the map, just like its title. Each person, each animal is looking for a place to exist and tries to thrive in between.

Released. . . a canary sings
on a telephone wire
while the white cockatoo
heads for Miami
where the food is better
for his kind.

The rain forest was too far.

“Is it still there?” I ask
the bartender who
is studying to be a lawyer
on his days off.

     BELOW THE WATER gets serious as well it might. “The Priestess” ascertains that “There is great Loneliness in this space…between necessity…and magic.” “Two Women” living “between moments of fury…& despair” as they try to work their way through relationships and societal stratagems. “Persephone” tells her story with insight and love of a woman torn between mother and lover and never reconciled. This resplendent poem, transcendent both in image and reason, begins:

The pomegranate juice has stained my fingers,/
Its sweetness lingers deep inside my mouth./
In darkness I crave the taste of sweet fruit/
As once. . . I only craved the sun. . . and/
My hunger keeps me safe from rescue/
Deep in this place of unmentionable dreams.

     In THE SPACE BETWEEN “Loch Ness (A Pantoum for Two Voices)” quietly reveals the disconnect between the alleged scientific view and the myriad universe forever beyond understanding. We seek comfort somewhere between. Read “Loch Ness” aloud with a friend: one reading the “Scientist” and one reading the “Monster” for a truly unforgettable moment in time.

                --Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra (San Francisco)

SOME ODD AFTERNOON

SALLY ASHTON

(LOS GATOS)

Some Odd Afternoon by Sally Ashton. (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY: 2010), 58 pages, 100 pages, $16. Cover art by Chris Roberts-Antieau; book design  by Geoffrey Gatza. To order: http://www.blazevox.

Sally Ashton is a poet, writer and editor of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She has received an Artist Fellowship for Poetry, from the Arts Council of Silicon Valley and has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Ashton holds an MFA from the Benning- ton Writing Seminars. She teaches creative writing at San Jose State University and blogs at www.poetryonastick.blogspot.com.

Sally Ashton is a hoot.

It is rare to encounter a poet with a comedian’s sensibility. Ashton comes close to being a female Stephen Dobyns (one of my favorite poets, whose imagination outstrips most anyone writing today).  Thank you, Miss Sally.

But let us not suppose that comedy is all lightness and fluff. It is frequently born out of serious concerns, and as frequently contains its own heart of dark matter.

Clowns make me weep.
We have so little to go on.
    (from “Litany”)

Ashton opens Some Odd Afternoon with an ekphrastic poem inspired by painter Chaim Soutine’s “Woman Knitting.”

The definite. An old woman knits.

“The definite” sets us up for where we assume the writer will take us: we expect the kind of details that follow, a fairly representational description of the image, “an old woman knits,“ and an onomatopoetic “click and slip” of needles.

The second stanza surprises with: “Miracles fall from the needles/ which is to say too much.” Yes, that is saying a lot: miracles, after all, is a loaded word. The viewer/poet and the subject/knitter have somehow merged: we enter a place of the poet‘s invention, not the painter‘s. By poem‘s end, Ashton takes a complete leap out of the image and into her own world; a perfect conclusion for a poem that introduces the rest of the book:

From her hand stitches
plied knit upon purl in circular pattern
silent as yarn. Her lips move
as if in supplication, eyes saucering
toward something unbound.
    (from “Portent”)

That “something unbound” tells a lot about the book itself. Ashton presents her work in four sections: the “Prologue” leads to “What To Do With a Cello,” then a sequence of poems about what happens when the author “googles” her own name, then “Holding Up.” The book ends with an exhortation:

Don’t waste a feeling. Or a story. Or a way or worry. A minute. A birdsong. Not even one shade of green. Promise the crows anything. Remember the turkey vultures, how all spring they return one by one at dusk to roost in the eucalyptus trees. . . .

This poem, entitled “How To” closes with a circling image, not unlike the rhythmic knitting figure in the first poem. Here though we have a natural--as opposed to an artificial--reference in the spider’s web:

What else is there to know? So much spills out and over. And the ceiling fan spins slow. The spider in its corner spins a secret and the atoms in every part of everything spin, spin the little wheels of our hearts, spin beauty and its waning, the spider’s finely wrought bundle silent, wound with silken thread.
                               (from “How To”)

This is just one example of how Ashton has structured her book so conscientiously.

One of the most significant poems in Some Odd Afternoon is the gift of a dyed-in-the-wool poet to her sympaticos although it is addressed to someone who has obviously nagged her to write fiction. The poet puts the “you” in his or her proper place:

. . . if I only concentrated harder I’d get the hang
of it, the full bang
for my buck, I’d make it, money
up the wazoo, achieve a commercial-sized
climax, spew a torrent of words
instead of this self-absorbed stroking
of individual syllables, my god you
could go blind and I could scream you wouldn’t
quite say when you did say what you did
about the fictions I should someday write.
                            (from “What You Want”)

The tethers that life and social expectation put on the poet must be torn asunder, stomped down, the imagination liberated. Ashton shows us the way. She plays with form, alternating short-line poems, aphoristic poems, and prose pieces that hang together.

Ashton is a breath of fresh air and proves herself unintimi- dated by narrative; rather than being con-strained by its natural linearity, she uses it to expand her vision and ideas. I sometimes think people step outside of narration because their imaginations are daunted by the logical progression of ideas in standard English syntax. They equate rebellion with disjointedness. Often, the resulting poems are “organized,” if you can call it that, around subjective associations; without shared experience, many readers are simply abandoned in the writer’s imaginative dust. Instead, Ashton lets her imagination explode vivaciously inside traditional narrative and preserves some “literal” meaning:

My dad didn’t die 25 years ago. He woke up, tied his shoes, and went to work as usual, thinking strange dream battered me last night. He wore an expression and his faithful heart toe-tapped strange-dream, strange-dream, and wouldn’t stop.
                          (from “Banjo Player”)

I don’t assume the “dad” in this poem is the speaker/ poet’s own father. And, I don’t assume that he truly died, or died and then rose up having had a dream. My need for the absolute literal dissolves in the confidence I have gained in the poet’s imaginative work because I’ve been given a place to stand when the poem begins.

When I heard Ashton recently,  I was ambivalent as she introduced a series of poems written after “googling” her name. She quickly won me over: these are far from the poems of a narcissist. The section’s 13 poems tackle the amorphous quality of personal identity especially  when we can find thousands of “ourselves” online:

There are many ways to find yourself. Two roads diverge . . . give your dizzy head a shake, undergrowth being; what: how it went. After some years I try a google search. Whom should I find. Who? Amazed. Mees. So many selves. So many Sallies. We are very busy everywhere. Swarmy. We are writers, we are dancers, face bookers and face lickers. Many are British and one of us--a slave, likely owned by an ex-pat Brit. We all assume. Names, and some someness the way everyone has or will. I am here to say Sally Ashton is up for grabs, whether you marry in or assume.

For all the fun the author has with the ethnic, national sources for our names, there is a serious undercurrent in these poems. Names are the result of marriage, of someone’s being fond of a celebrity, of nick- names, of family tradition, but they are not our selves. Yet, they may be the beginning of finding who we are, or a starting-over place for a new identity. The Buddhists would likely tell you that all of this name business is maya, illusion, that there is no Self as such. Ashton works this with characteristic whimsy and play.

The trick: don’t get caught in the open when cloud covers the sun.
Be home free.

Crimes committed against the imagination are a consequence of madness.

You’ve become a stranger, dumpster diving in each day hoping for a chicken to roast.

Other times you simply wait for the wash to finish.

This is one reason it took your whole life to discover constellations are configured differently elsewhere.
        (from “To my other self whom I originally chose not to represent”)

I have only touched the surface of the pleasure and profundity I find in Sally Ashton’s Some Odd Afternoon.“ It’s a lovely book, a meaningful book, may I add a magical book.
Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

REWINDING TIME
PHYLLIS M. TEPLITZ
(MARINWOOD/

SAN RAFAEL)

Rewinding Time by Phyllis M. Teplitz. (Far West Press, Mill Valley, CA: 2010), 128 pages, 89 poems, $15. Cover design by Ronald Teplitz; cover painting by František Chaun. Order  from         phyllisteplitz@comcast.net.

Phyllis M. Teplitz lived in Aber- deen, South Dakota, until she enlisted in the navy right after graduating from college. She has lived in Marin County since 1960. She taught second grade for 28 years, and after her husband died in 1994, she enrolled in a com- munity college creative writing work- shop taught by Tom Centolella and studied with him for 10 years; in 2005 she became a student of Stellasue Lee. Rewinding Time is Teplitz’ first book.

Phyllis M. Teplitz, at nearly 90 years of age, is a poet who finds the silver lining, the glass half-full. It’s not that she has lived a life of ease. The poems in Rewinding Time echo complex relationships and loss, an awareness of mortality and ephemerality. As a retired grade-school teacher, Teplitz was one of those angels serving on the front-lines of our crumbling culture trying to ward off the toll it takes on children: I’m sure she has seen her share of pain and sorrows. But maybe because she has lived a relatively long life, she has seen many patterns, and learned how joy returns in the unpredictable and natural moments.

Relationships provide much of her pleasure. The poems acknowledge a son, strong bonds with four sisters, marriage, the death of a loved one. A very important relationship that has provided inspiring sustenance is Teplitz’ experience of nature; the poet is a beautiful lyricist who finds nature as frequently in the domestic sphere as in any wilderness:

How far I have traveled
whipping round infinity
in my living room.

I wonder if a plain-looking pebble
here in the gravel,
even our air,

that eerie music I hear
just before dawn, travels
from an unknown nebula.

Our destiny, to tumble
through space
always fallling, turning.

Gone,
the idea of stability.

A myth
that we stay in one place.

But how to hold on.
        (from “Vertigo)

Teplitz connects the dots, or particles of dust and plumes of gas, between our earthly residence and the great beyond of stars and suns and galaxies. Her opening and titular poem swirls up the grandeur of the univese and the stories we have told ourselves to explain its beginning; but, the book turns as quick to a poem that finds the universal wonder in the specific “thing” in front of our faces:

A tree along the way     blooms
red-orange flames
disguised as butterflies.

Crepe Myrtles flare with scarlet berries.
Oak tree’s vermilion vies
with liquidambar’s bronze.

An acorn woodpecker drills holes
in a telephone pole and chickadees
call out their names.

This is the flora and fauna of suburban California, the trees we plant for their quick growth and beauty, the birds they entice to come from the woods, the poles of communication that connect us to friends and families.

It is fitting that a dominant image in the book is beading; crafters all Teplitz and her four sisters enjoy making jewelry, bonsai trees, and other art objects each time they gather from far-flung locations. This metaphor--beads on string--reflects Teplitz’s sense of feeling connected to life through those who share it with her, the very essence of relationship:

All day I watch one thought replace another,
the way each wave erases the last.

How after too many years we plan
another reunion, Sylvia and I

in Rapid City at May and June’s again.

And oh, when we last reunited
the necklaces we made, days spent
stringing topaz sparkles and amethysts
till our fingers knotted .
***
I can already hear the resident

meadowlark’s tumble of tones
that will peel back the waves--

the four of us still stringing
our lives together.
 (from “Beading With My Sisters”)

While one gets the sense that Teplitz, who came late to publishing, wanted to get her best poems into print, the book nonetheless has a structure and rhythm. She uses family photos, particularly those taken of her pack of sisters, to punctuate poems, like the one about sister Junee wearing a crown. She also relieves the reader who may be too “filled up” after a sequence of longer narrative poems by bringing in the occasional brief and elusive lyric done in a style to challenge the best T’ang Dynasty poet:

FALL

Birch trees’ highest leaves
    already yellow.        Maples

burn scarlet        orange
    maroon        Mallards

fly over on their way
    to summer.    Autumn’s

not supposed to come so soon
    go so fast.

Tomorrow
        dry leaves will fall.

The next day
        winter.

When I first read a book of poems, I use a checkmark to remind myself which poems “hit” me on contact, which left their mark on me. I’m some- times quite stingy with my checkmarks, but in this book there are so many I hardly know which ones to share with you to entice you to track down and buy this lovely book.
Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser