BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

THE HUMAN FACE OF LOVE
MARY RUDGE, EDITOR (ALAMEDA)

The Human Face of Love, edited by Mary Rudge (Xlibris Corporation, CA: 2010), 130 pages, $19.99. ISBN 978-1453596203.

Reviewed by Judy Hardin Cheung (Santa Rosa)

    At first glance, this 130-page, perfect bound book promises an exploration of some realms of human understanding not always presented in a poetry book. From the introduction of accolades by famous people to the end which gives biographies of the contributors, The Human Face of Love fulfills the “first glance” promise. The first pieces are written by a mother with a schizophrenic son, who describes her love and the difficulties in receiving such a gift from God. It continues to give descriptions of life as seen through the eyes of people with mental problems.
    A wide range of ages and ethnic origins are represented in these quick, succinct, unique glimpses of life through eyes that do not see the world as the “rest of the world” sees. It also has poems about friends and family members who must deal with the frustration of trying to find help in a bureaucracy that promises aid, but offers little assistance in receiving that help.
    This book can be quick reading, but it is not easy. Each entry draws you back to re-read it with a different slant. Everyday events take on sometimes bizarre and even scary perceptions and interpretations:

. . . Were the white butterflies the animae of
nameless dead and dying flying past?
Alone, in a sea of butterflies I wandered. . .
***
. . . Sometimes I think
the ward would be a world like any other.
***
     I believe being a caretaker for a family member is like watching someone you love drown…knowing you’re the only life-line keeping them afloat. . .
    The Human Face of Love lacks the drama of a psychotic novel, but it does have the intensity of real people living with biochemical and neurological differences, and the emotions of the people who love them and try to help them lead safe and satisfying lives. The Human Face of Love is a “must read” for anyone dealing with any aspect of mental illness.

THE TAKEAWAY BIN
TONI MILOSEVIC (SAN FRANCISCO)

The Takeaway Bin by Toni Milosevic (Spuyten Duyvil, New York City: 2010), 78 pages, $14. ISBN 978-933132815.

By L.J. Moore (San Francisco)
(Reprinted with permission of the author from examiner.com)

    Any archaeologist will tell you that you learn the most about any culture by what it throws away. In her new book of poetry, The Takeaway Bin, Toni Mirosevich takes the odds and ends of our post-analog language and sends them through a mystical generator inspired by Oblique Strategies, a dilemma-based game invented by Peter Schmidt and Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (aka Brian Eno, godfather of ambient music.)
    Writerly gamesmanship, in the hands of a lesser poet, might alienate the reader--offering a wink and an ironic jab to the hopes with which many readers approach poetry: to be compelled, surprised, expanded in some way. But Mirosevich is more than worthy of the task: handed a dilemma, she neither plunges her head into the sand, offering up easy but empty salvos, nor takes the academic chicken-exit, barricading herself behind impenetrable and inaccessible word-play.

     What Mirosevich does is demonstrate that there is a sweet spot in poetry where wit, defiance, warmth and irreverence embrace:

     No one told the bird dogs. Their eagle eyes spot the morning dove and they start up. The neighbor yells “noise pollution!” and before you can say Jiminy Cricket someone else joins to pollute the argument. “You’re polluted,” she said to her hubby when he returned from the bar with six pints in him. She’d been fuming in silence on the couch, waiting for the big shebang which never came. The neighbor calls for her orange tabby, Fluffy, Fluffy, and when that doesn’t work, screams Fluffy, you prick! and the holy night is broken.

    But Mirosevich isn’t just playing just for play’s sake: beneath the wit, beneath the snappy turns of sentence, arch reversals, and tumbling teases, the rumble of deeper workings can be felt. The Takeaway Bin arises out of an ultramodern language aftermath: the fragments and shards of language we are curently left with in an age of verbal foreshortening, where Photoshop has imploded the failsafe idea that “seeing is believing,” and Wikipedia has shifted the idea of fact into the realm of a constantly updating consortium. This melee of reference points is The Takeaway Bin’s fuel, and the profound palsticity of modern reality is the engine Mirosevich harnesses:
     Even though it would be nice . . . to go buck naked into the world . . . there are veils and shadows and shadow puppets in tehe firelight glow, someone’s hands all over the strings, ghosts who manipulate . . . the past is clearly no longer of use . . . yet what is no longer serviceable clearly persists, like a cough, or a mangle.
     Mirosevich has a bat-girl-worthy toolbelt, hung with sing-song sayings, back-woods phraseology, drunk-uncle slurrings, pop-lyric retorts, nautical arabesques, down-home clichés and uber-intellectual tongue-twisters; each of which she snaps, skins, and tosses into Eno & Schmidt’s machine, which is really a helmet the poet dons in order to unthink the norm.

     . . . somehow a slight infraction became an infarction, we turned one cheek, then the other, and soon we were spinning, face forward, then butt ugly. It’s a vertiginous life, said the prophet, a guy who’d lost his footing more than once. Before we could stand upright someone stepped on our knuckles, shove came to shove, and we went ape over the debate, creationism versus crustaceanism. You say you want an evolution, well, we all want to change the world. “He was a cretin,” Eve, said, after her first date with destiny, “a fumbler, a stumble bum.”

    What comes out is heartfelt nose-thumbing. Flippant and sincere, showboating and shadowboxing, sincerity and shrugs: Mirosevich is sifting through the rubble and word-noise of language and cultural legacy and coming back with a hollaback that though all thought seem pre-thunk, though all feelings used, all insights, conclusions and hopes at times seemingly mass-produced, all words only rearrangements of the same few letters, and therefore all meaning seemingly mere rearrangements of the same few words--the key is in remembering who is steering this juggernaut:
     Question what is handed down, deconstruct, then sand it down . . . Toss aside the roof, the joists, the rafters . . . Sweep the darkened closet clean: of moon boots, bow ties, leisure wear . . . all garb in which you cannot move.
     At the heart of The Takeaway Bin is a twinned idea: that reclamation and invention are not opposites, but arts of the same process, that all that distinguishes junk from jewels is the process of seeing anew.

--L.J. Moore can be reached at editor.moore@gmail.com.
*Clarity Digital, LLC/Examiner.com

 
MYSTERIOSOS AND OTHER POEMS
MICHAEL McCLURE
(SAN FRANCISCO)

Mysteriosos and Other Poems by Michael McClure (New Directions, New York, NY, 2010), 144 pages, 85 poems, $15.95. Book design by Amy Evans McClure.

Reviewed by Jack Foley (Oakland)

“Michael stands on my back / growing wrinkles”
—Michael McClure, Plum Stones: Cartoons of No Heaven
“I’m an old man made of wheels of spinning flesh”
                           —Michael McClure, Mysteriosos

     To read a Michael McClure poem is to bring ourselves back to something; it isn’t so much a specific recollection as it is a reminder of something we may have forgotten. “I AM AWED / by her demon face,” he writes of someone he calls “the secretary of deceit.” The tone here is political, ironic and momentarily judgmental. (He will later insist that he himself may be as bad: his own “trembling spirit is capable of everything”: “I will kill, torture, and maim Palestine / and tease it with fire.”)  But the word “awed” is important, and it is to be distinguished from the context of “shock and awe”: “awe”--astonishment--is at the heart of this amazing septuagenarian’s work:

THE
ELEPHANT
CHARGES,
shrieking in rage,
and our aged guide,
the Anglo-Indian colonel,
shakes one finger
out the car window.
“Stop!”
he shouts to his “old friend”
and she does
and she stares
short-sightedly
from wrinkled eye bags
AND
SHE
TURNS
AWAY
from us,
then swings back
and bellows
her jaw-shaking trumpet blast,
and shuffles
away sideways
into the swinging branches.

     McClure’s world is a constantly astonishing place--a place full of, to use the title of this book, “mysteriosos.” “Mysterioso” = “having a mysterious nature or quality; enigmatic; inexplicable.” It is usually used as an adjective or adverb but may also be used as a noun. McClure is thinking of the term specifically in connection with Thelonious Monk, the great, constantly questioning jazz pianist who released an LP, Misterioso, in 1958; the cover of Monk’s LP is a painting by the Italian Surrealist Giorgio De Chirico: The Seer, or The Prophet. McClure makes no such specific claim for himself--“I still long to be Shelley,” he sighs at one point--but he insists that his poetry “demands the tearing down of what we are and letting our energies and bodies of meat and nothingness rebuild themselves.” This biospiritual process happens over and over again but never in a straightforward, “logical” way: “NO MATTER--ANTI-MATTER--DARK ENERGY”; it too is “mysterioso.”
     At 78 McClure is neither resting on his laurels nor kvetching about the loss of his powers. Mysteriosos is as challenging and demanding a book as he has ever produced. But differences can be noted. I wrote this about his extraordinary 1970 book, Star, which McClure himself described as “a blast of my poor brain splattered over Hell and Earth & Heaven”:
     Star enunciates a moving consciousness which is constantly thrust towards both intellect and the flesh and which dizzyingly but illogically perceives intellect and the flesh to be simultaneously identical and painfully split apart. McClure frequently quotes with approval Mallarmé’s statement that poetry is the language of a state of crisis. The crisis of Star is that the very conditions of thought and utterance are constantly at war with each other, constantly generating the most painful of oppositions—and yet silence is not even a remote possibility: speech is the poet’s only salvation. . . Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid are less “characters” than they are huge metaphors, almost Blakean figures, by which McClure can express his constantly shifting ambivalence.
     Here, in this book of “the truth of shifting / complexities,” McClure says, “Old age or childhood, it is all renewable, / reversible, delivered with a warranty / that nothing is there in the nothingness”; “I am a flowering.” Sounding a little like John Donne, he writes, “My mouth / with your nipple in it / is the rising of thought.” McClure’s vision is essentially the same as the one he had forty years ago--“Knowing in all possible directions”!-- but it is considerably calmer these days. It is as if the Harlow figure who haunted his young manhood with its “SEXUAL ADDICTION” has “morphed”--the word is an important one in this bookinto the apparition he calls “Dear Being”:

WHAT I HAVE GIVEN MYSELF
                is this love, invented for you.

     The phrase refers specifically to the poet’s wife, Amy Evans McClure, but it extends beyond that to a feeling of acceptance and love for the whole of the universe:

WE HAVE THE JOY OF HERETICS
By simply being here, drinking from footsteps.
No pleasure, no shame, no guilt, just as life is. . .

WE DID NOT CHOOSE IT--WE ARE HERE. . .

PERFECT. Perfect. Perfect blotches
Hanging together in undreamed causeless systems.
No time anywhere--like smears on fingers.
Inspiration changes tiny strings to thick
Frequencies of matter. Hear the clatter
Of a megatherium family by the water hole.

   These lines are taken from a remarkable long poem, “Double Moire for Francis Crick”--the discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule and a longtime friend of McClure’s who lay dying as the poem was being written. The poem, which Crick never saw, begins with a moving reference to the endurance of “the Middle Way” of Buddhism and to the possibility of the new--of liberation-- even at such a moment:

THE CHANTING IN TIBET HAS NOT CEASED
--IT IS AS IMMORTAL AS MEAT--
it sings of the Middle Way.
Put out the fires in the eye
there is another style besides hatred and heat.
Let the soul go, build a pliant strong heart. . .
nowhere to go but
halfway to freedom. . . .

     The most remarkable stylistic device of Mysteriosos is probably rooted in what McClure refers to as his explorations into “buddhist hua yen thought.” (Garma C.C. Chang’s The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism is one of the poet’s favorite books.) According to hua yen Buddhism, an individual entity is not limited to an individual point of view. Every thing includes the whole--includes Everything. Hua yen asserts the mutual containment and “interpenetration” of all phenomena: one thing contains all things that exist.
     McClure tells us explicitly that the poems of the “Dear Being” sequence are “born from earlier books, repeating opening lines of poems to begin new poems” and that in “Double Moire for Francis Crick” he “worked with an earlier poem…titled ‘Moire’ and used each line to begin a stanza in the new enlarged poem”: “Like an organism, ‘Double Moire’ began to be free in time and place, and to exist in the oneness of everything.” What he doesn’t tell us is the extent to which these poems constantly repeat lines, phrases, words as they “morph” from one poem into another--as aspects of separate poems interpenetrate one another.

I
T

I
S

all

QUICK
!!!

on page 35, for example, shows up as

It is all
QUICK

in a quite different poem on page 65.

     Similarly, “Mist and a star in his antlers” on page 40 shows up as “MIST AND A STAR IN MY ANTLERS” on page 60. Indeed, the word “antlers” may be a morphing of the word “anthers” on page 44. If everything is everything, if all things inter-penetrate, then the poems themselves cease to be self-contained, individual entities: words and phrases from one poem might just as easily be a part of another poem. Life repeats itself in various configurations--all simul-taneously moving together and apart, all “QUICK.” This, in a way, is McClure’s version of what Jack Spicer named “the serial poem” and which Jack Kerouac practiced in Mexico City Blues--a primary text for McClure.
     A poet born in 1932 might well dwell upon his memories and his--to use a word that shows up prominently in this book--“gone” friends. There are some wonderfully elegiac passages in Mysteriosos as McClure recalls some of the famous poets who have been his companions:

                                                                 I’m
    introduced, “Michael, this is Robinson Jeffers. . . ”
         And I mumble something.
                                  In his salon among
   walls of books in wooden apple crates, and pastels
          of Morris Graves, Kenneth Rexroth reads
             a new poem in a nasal, grating voice.
                                With crossed eyes, and hair alight
with genius, Robert Duncan sings songs from his Faust Foutou [sic]./
        It is exactly like the play of the dark, pouncing weasel/
          in the abandoned corral under the buckeye trees,
or Kenneth Patchen’s bulging eyes looking down at the waves of the Bay/
          where seals haul up on the mud to sleep beside traffic.

     McClure does not deny his age or his aging (Mysteriosos has beautiful elegies to Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia), yet the central message of the book is not elegy but the sheer aliveness, the wonderful, dizzying, endlessly interesting, “myriad” complexity of life itself:

AMINO TRIGGERS IN SPACE: in ponds
on ripples, and among the moons of Saturn.
Everything burns for the eyes that will
come into being. The twisting shapes
are hunting their forms, the big ones
grow and shrink and in themselves are the answers.

WE ARE ACTIVITY. . .

     Surprisingly to some perhaps, love and marriage are primary themes of this book--though, speaking of marriage, McClure remarked on my radio show that people are afraid to say I love you, “and they’re probably right: if people aren’t inventing love, they shouldn’t talk about it. Love has to be invented. It’s not a ghost that floats around in the air that you snap up when you get married or something. It’s part of soul making.” As always in McClure, you make your life: it isn’t something that’s simply given.
     One of the most beautiful small poems in Mysteriosos is an “Epithalamium” the poet wrote for my son Sean and Sean’s bride Kerry Hoke. I’ll end this piece with that sweet, short, active poem, in which--as with all the poems in this wonderful book--the universe makes itself known in no uncertain terms:

PLUMB LIVES FROM MOMENT
to hour;
carve lives from week
to year.
Plume the spines with touches
and smiles;
o
b
e
y
your hearts
in whirlpool of foment.
It’s time to be growing
crowns on your heads.
Erase lines from nightly beds.
It all happens
with sun and with stars.
Love
at the start of your life.

--Reviewed by Jack Foley (Oakland, host of “Cover to Cover,” on KPFA-94.1 FM Radio and a longtime Bay Area poet and critic. Foley was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Berkeley Poetry Festival in 2010. His most recent masterwork is Visions & Affiliations.


DROWNING LIKE LI PO IN A RIVER OF RED WINE:
SELECTED POEMS 1970-2010
A. D. WINANS (SAN FRANCISCO)

Drowning Like Li Po in a River of Red Wine: Selected Poems 1970-2010 by A.D. Winans.

Reviewed by Sharon Ramirez (Bend, Oregon)

San Francisco poet A.D. Winans is best known for his poetry about the invisible amongst us; he speaks for those who have no voice of their own, for the downtrodden abused by society and its uncaring institutions. His poems come from the heart, not from some workshop assignment that cranks out the stale academic poetry he so detests.
This limited edition of his latest book is a comprehensive selection that includes poems from his early Carmel Clowns and some of his outrageously entertaining Crazy John poems.
Ive been an A.D. Winan admirer since I first met him at a poetry reading in the early seventies in San Francisco. I liked the emotion in his voice, that slight tremble that gave authenticity to his plainspoken words. Here was a real poet, I thought; not one of those hip, slick, cool academics trying to impress female students. A.D. is a poet of his convictions who wants justice for the people. Were lucky hes stuck around this long and is still feeding our souls.
A treat for those of us lucky enough to own a copy of this limited edition collection is an introduction by the author himself. He calls it A.D. Winans on A.D. Winans. As we would expect from his poetry, he writes out of a sense of loneliness, sadness, and anger. He tributes the love and humor in his poems to the late Bob Kaufman. A.D. states that he wants to be remembered as a poet of the people, and he considers his poems as the wife and children he never had. His poetry and prose have appeared in over 1,000 magazines and articles. In addition, he published The Second Coming Magazine and Press for 17 years.
Part of his charm as a poet of the people is his easy use of the ordinary spoken language. His words give us commonplace images that can be appreciated by all, especially city dwellers. He shows us one yellow-stained wash basin and empty shoes/sitting under the bed and single light bulb rooms sealed/Like tombs. And then theres the shocking image of a Panamanian hooker: Naked legs spread open/Labia lobster red. Winans stark images stay with us.
A.D.s disdain for pseudo-intellectual poets, as opposed to his respect for blue collar poets, comes through in his condemnatory lines in Coffee Gallery Blues:

I heard one of them say
poetry isnt for the masses
its been raining intellectual
snobs all day

Yuppies dont fare any better. In How to Spot a Yuppie we read: they look like they want something/ and are willing to kill/to get it.
Its interesting to see the poet and his poetry mature over a forty-year span, during which time the poet continues to write about the agony of seeking love and of aging in existential loneliness. As an old soul suffering the angst of a godless universe, Winans gives us tender irony in Trying to Let Go:

Tied to deaths umbilical cord
That refuses to let me go
Knotting itself like a noose
Around my neck
Too tight for comfort
Not loose enough
To set me free

He gives us more angst in City Poet:

You walk her streets a hungry vampire
Lapping up your own blood
On nights when blood transfusions
Are not enough.

The smell of death lingers in yet another startling image: Death crouched low/Like a sprinter waiting the/Starters gun.

A.D.'s poem "The Old Italians of Aquatic Park" holds much rich imagery, with the refrain, The old men of Aquatic Park, echoing the title, while lending a sense of timelessness to their bocce ball games. A.D. writes lady death striking them down/like bowling pins. And from the same poem:

the bocce ball rolls slowly
along the grass
coming to rest like a hearse
parked next to an open grave

A.D. has an uncanny ability to summon meta-phors that work so well in context. In Old Joe he conjures up Vietnam when he writes nightmares that "whirl inside/His head like helicopter blades." He ends with: "Left tired withered/Like an unattended/Kansas grain field," leaving no doubt that Joe was a Kansas farm boy before Vietnam. And now hes a homeless drunk in the big city.

A.D.'s range of theme is broad; theres the suffering of others caused by an uncaring universe, the commercial poets whom he sees as sell-outs with ideas as sterile as surgical gauze, and theres the love-seeking, lyrical A.D., who writes of "The falling away of our clothes and inside the heart where/all language stops." One of my favorite images is from "Audience of One":

a love affair so fragile
it was like trying to thread a needle
in the teeth of a storm

A.D. tells us in his 40th Birthday poem that "america is no place for/a poet to grow old in." In 2006 he writes, when he was 70, that "Having escaped the nursing home/Is a small victory in itself." Because of A.D.'s intensity it might be easy to overlook his wry humor. In his "Dick Tracy" poem, he writes about a transvestite dressed as a cowgirl taking Tracy home:

In the morning when
Dick Tracy wakes up
He isnt sure which side
Of the law hes on

Here's a favorite of mine about a dog's dream:

a fire hydrant
a buried bone
Snoopy defeating the
Red Baron
Over the skies of Paris

Several poems honor dead poets, including Charles Bukowski, Kenneth Patchen, and Jack Micheline, all of whom he admires. Of Micheline, he writes:

Spinning words that
Hung in mid-air
Like a humming bird
Drunk on the
Pollen of life

The poet struggles against the tides of time throughout this dynamic selection of poems. He gains comfort, not from nature, but from his beloved city streets and its denizens. ''For Kell,'' from his 1997 collection, A.D. promises us:

Still fighting
Still scrapping
Like the rest of us
For whatever time
Is left

Long may this poet live. No one else can replace the genius loci of the San Francisco beat.

Sky=Empty
JUDY HALEBSKY
(SAN FRANCISCO/TOKYO)

Sky=Empty by Judy Halebsky. (New Issues Press: 2010), 46 poems, 83 pages, book design by Nico Curtis.

Reviewed by LJ Moore
(San Francisco)

Judy Halebsky's Sky=Empty presents a series of poems that range in subject from the comedy of family idiosyncrasies to the quiet befuddlement of recognizing how the past and the present are constantly battling to reconcile into a sense of truth.

Inspired by her study of the Japanese language, Halebsky draws on the malleable nature of picture-based kanji, as well as the writings of other poets attempting translation from one language to another, to reflect the confusion we feel trying to translate meaning out of the layering of experience that makes up our history.

The pleasure of reading these poems comes from Halebsky's fearless sense of curiosity and play-fulness. This book isn't about translating someone elses work from one language to another; its about how the act of living is a continuous re-translation of the self.

We learn our mother tongue by practice, by constant reinforcement, by talking, by reading. Like learning to swim, language becomes an automatic expression. Only when we are struggling to formulate words for some-thing we haven't heard or read, do we find the automatic system shutting down. Like a moment of panic when you become aware of your own breathing and feel you can't get control of it, or like when you repeat a word over and over until it no longer makes sense, moments of new attention to familiar things are an opening into new experience. In learning a new language, Halebsky was launched into new territory where no part of communication was automatic: rather than seeing this as a collapse of meaning, Halebsky uses that freedom, that mental space, as a tool. She unhinges and explores the meaning of words, allowing them to re-form, to make room for another way of seeing, pointing out that there is an inherent act of discovery contained within the act of placing words beside one another:

a water heart
means how to swim

water people:
what you tried to carry
water voices:
the sound of water
water people talking:
a love song

oboeru to remember
also means to learn

Halebsky then carries that insight a step further by showing that, like placing image-words next to one another, we form and re-form our sense of self (and one another) by the experiences we keep amassing by living: stories we assemble and re-assemble, tell and re-tell, to find our way to who we are, or aren't:

There were people in restaurants, there were bars and cigarettes
there were summer nights in parks where the lamplight made
shadows over the trees and people were kissing and summer
dresses were thin, there were people who went to concerts and
danced in high heeled shoes who groped strangers who drank too
much who woke up in the morning and had coffee with cream
and crepes and told outrageous stories of the night before

Sky=Empty is about how the act of creating language is an urge toward connection on every scale: on the individual end, language unlocks ourselves from ourselves and creates a living connection between isolated minds; on the collective end, language is inextricable from what it is to be human. Putting words together, whether it be as direct as a grocery list or as abstract as expressing an emotion for which there is no single word--is an act of translation, an act of storytelling:

we remember--we remember things we never saw or never knew
if you hear the story enough times
you start to make the pictures, find the details:
the stoops of apartment buildings, leaning doorways, crowded
trains, starved hands through bars, hidden basements, the alleys
the dark windows . . .

Each of us in a sense is no more or less than a living story: story is how we see ourselves, story is who we are, and story is always changing. Halebsky reveals that language, our tool for translating ourselves to one another, is also inexact, but this imprecision is not a weakness, it is a flexibility, it allows for interpretation.

Translation may in fact be one of the most basic and universal aspects of being human--thoughts are the translation of ones senses, language is the translation of one's thoughts, story is the translation of self:

these are your pictures . . .
a searchlight, a fair, a lantern . . .

--LJ Moores 2008 book, F-Stein, tangles science, family, pop culture, and the paranormal into the structure of a replicating strand of DNA. She lives in San Francisco, and is the Tour Director for The Armada of Golden Dreams, a surreal audio tour forthcoming in 2011.

REVIEWS BY

REBECCA FOUST

Reviewer Rebecca Foust of Ross is the author of Dark Card (reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra in BAPSRs Spring 2009 issue), and Moms Cano (reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser in the Winter 2009 issue of BAPSR). Foust recently published All That Glorious Pitiless Song and God, Seed.

STEPPING THROUGH MOONS
TONI L. WILKES (SANTA ROSA)

Stepping Through Moons by Toni L.Wilkes(Finishing Line Press 2010), 40 pages, 22 poems, $14. Saddle-stapled with cover photo by Kathan Brown. www.tonilwilkes.wordpress. com/to-purchase.

Another elegant Finishing Line Press production is Stepping Through Moons, Santa Rosa resident Toni Wilkes's debut chapbook released in late 2009. Here, the book is made with heavy, acid-free paper that feels good to the hand, the cover in highly textured ecru reminiscent of slub silk.

The cover image is a drawing in what appears to be ink and watercolor, a modernist image that includes an indigo shadow, a set of stairs and a pale lemon-yellow full moon. I wondered if the author was the artist and wished there had been attribution for it in the book. Arresting and beautiful, the image somehow manages to be representational and abstract at the same time.

It is a good metaphor for the poems found inside the book22 of them in 40 pages, most less than a half-page in length and none longer than two-thirds of a page. The poems are tiny, fiercely precise, and rendered with a painterly eye that evokes a world of associations, in the end constructing its own mysterious myth.

Like the book's cover, the poems strike a balance of opposing elements, being composed of minute details that combine with other elements swollen with ambiguity and portent. Composed in unmetered, unrhymed free verse organized in most cases into symmetric stanzas of lines of equal length often ending in couplet, the poems also mediate between form and formlessness and between stereotypical notions of traditional and modern poetry.

We are aware, throughout this book, of the poets careful, deliberate choices. Stepping Through Moons is organized into four sections, three of which take their titles from a poem or a line in a poem included in that section. The exception is section two, entitled "Diptych," which in naming exactly what the section enactstwo ekphrastic poems linked in theme, subject, and tone turns out not to be an exception at all.

Art is an important theme and leitmotiv in this book which includes four clearly ekphrastic poems clearly based upon a work of art, and many others feel as if they are based upon a visual image. In The Birthday Party 1952 for example, we can almost see the photograph in which Remains of white-frosted cake/and pink icing drop from Depression/glass plates.

Some characters in the poems are artists: the mother who hides sketchbooks and makes creepy flower arrangements in "Rift," her son with his own sketchbooks and journals in "At the Orchard's Edge" and "Walking Through Myths," and her daughter (the boy's sister) who daubs paint on apple crates in "Lakeside1948."

Another poem, "A Study in Gray," does with words what an artist might do with pigments on the same subject. "Blue Shadows" makes explicit what the reader apprehends on some level in nearly every poem in this collection, that poetry is capable of being a visual art:

where we write
of osprey
of fog
of breaking oceans.

The poems are subtle, spare and strongly imagistic. Because expression is so restrained, other elements like character, plot, and point of view are foregrounded. This is particularly true of the poems in section one where Wilkes's use of cinematic techniques reminds us of her experience as a screenwriter and film story editor.

Rendered entirely in the third person, the poems in this section take as their subject a man whose boyhood family has been monstrously shattered by some event that is never fully revealed. We are introduced, to be sure, to the cast of characters: a disturbed mother who lives a surreptitious life in sketchbooks sequestered in her night-table; a father whose submerged capacity for violence reveals itself in the way he shoots a mare and skins a rabbit; a sister who is one day taken away at dawn without explanation and never returned to the family. We learn enough to know that something is very, very wrong but the details are withheld, resulting in a narrative that remains open. Readers are left Walking Through Myths (the name of the last poem in the section) and must build their own bridges between the disparate parts of the story. The process is one that is akin, perhaps, to Stepping Through Moons making a path from and between lunatic fragments.

Section two is also told in the third person, but here the point of view is that of an omniscient narrator whose function is more descriptive and elliptical than narrative and plot-suggestive. The subjects tend to be things rather than people: stories, a stain, the wind, baleen, whales and whalebones. This voice will return in section four, but section threes poems are a departure in that each contains some version of the more intimate first person point of view.

The way the first person perspective figures in these poems is parabolic, with a delayed introduction in the first poem (halfway through, via the word us) and a quicker introduction of the pronoun we in line two of the second poem:

Its still here, the hammock
we called old more than
a decade ago.

The third (titular) poem in this section brings us the first person perspective even more quickly, with we appearing in its first line:

Summers ago when we first began
stepping through moons by the sea
a harbor bell would thump against itself,

The penultimate and most intimate poem in this section, "From Here to There," starts outright in the first person singular: "I can still image the white threaded shadow / draw its way across your belly's white navel line."

Beating a retreat from intimacy, section three's last poem opens in description, withholding the first person speaker until the fourth line. The book ends with poems spoken again from the more distant perspective of an omniscient narrator who takes as her subjects, variously, the sea, fall, a dog, and a Ghost Surfer.

Robert Frost's observation that in a book of twenty-four poems the book itself is the twenty-fifth poem has special resonance in the case of chapbooks, in which the elements that give any book coherence and power must be present, but in significantly fewer pages. The best chapbooks do the work that these three do, combining compression, and thematic unity in a form with its own value and integrity. You can enjoy all three in an afternoon, and then you can enjoy them as I have, again and again.

--Reviewed by Rebecca Foust (Ross)
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GOLD LEAF ON GRANITE
WILLIAM KEENER (CORTE MADERA)

Gold Leaf on Granite by William Keener. (The Anabiosis Press: 2009). 32 pages, 19 poems, $10. Saddle-stapled with cover art by Richard Kent Thompson, design by Nina Lisowski. To order: bill.keener@comcast.net.

Winner of the 2008 Anabiosis Chapbook Contest, Keener's book is an example of the art of the chapbook at its unpretentious best. The book is slim and staple-bound with a high-quality paper cover bearing a handsome drawing of Yosemite's El Capitan. An unusual design detail is the use of a vibrant saffron color for the blank, textured opening and closing leaves. Because these pages are translucent, the book's black-printed title is just barely visible below the first one, a literal re-creation of the gold-leafing referenced in the books title. Inside lie 19 poems rooted in the natural landscape of the poets home turf in northern California, poems that are also meditations on the nature of language and written expression.

The opening and titular "Gold Leaf on Granite" takes place at the top of Yosemite Parks Glacier Point where:

The sun reaches out
with its last glinting hammer
to beat gold leaf on granite.

Given the goldenrod page just turned to get to this poem, the reader is put immediately in mind of other kinds of leaves, such as the kind that make up the pages of the book in hand. Other leaves figure in "Late October, High Sierra," where the speaker:

knows he has walked too deep
in the aspen grove
when he discovers gold
surrounding him with light.

He is put in mind of his father who, in wonderful paradox, loved this shade of light. But:

now it is the (poet) son
who cannot go on without
clutching color to his heart,
lifting leaf after leaf,

. . . and we are led back again to language. Just as Burmese pilgrims gild a sacred boulder, and the rising sun sets stone ablaze, Keener uses language in ways that transcend the black-and-white text and make them glow on the page.

"Take This Page," the last poem in Gold Leaf on Granite, engages directly with the issue of language and poetry:

Look past
the distraction of words
our endless procession
of letters

the speaker admonishes, look into the materials that make up the book itself: "the textures/of felted fibers,/ cotton and flax" and then deeper, past the paper's watermarks into the materials from which a book's paper is made:

the cellulose in its slurry,
the wood chips, sawdust,

. . . all the way back to the tree, and then finally its constituent elements:

the billion leaves
they gird on every year,

their green machinery,
the sugars in the sap,
oxygen, carbon, lignin,
every molecule made

with heat, the photons . . . .

After having literally pulled us into this, world we enter/through a book, Keener pulls us back out so that we end where we began in this book,/this volume of light. Volume has more than one meaning, designating not only a book but also something more abstract: quantity, depth. Whether we envision a book of light or instead some amount of space of light, the image is equally arresting.

So the book begins and ends with light, and fills in between with a series of poems that pay homage, sometimes ecstatic homage, to the most homely imaginable details of nature, caterpillar feces, for one. But the poems are nuanced, too, balanced with a sense of transience and loss, from the death of a beloved father to what seems an utterly senseless killing of a wild beaver found by the speaker in "Skull":

That bit
of premeditated metal
theres your seed
of death.

Nature in all her brutality is present in the unforgettable image in Flounder of a fish caught in the talons of a hawk, for a moment apparently swimming high in the branches of a tree. The wheel of life turns again and again in Keener's poems, moving from father to son, from element to tree to paper and back; death is cause for sorrow but also the seedbed of life. "The Man Who Would Be Compost" does another kind of deconstruction, exploring ways to dispose of the human body after death:

Let me work my way down,
where the bodys slow fires
meet the seep of the rain,
where larvae and nematodes
unstitch the skin, unravel me. . . .

Let me grow upland and wild.

Keener's poems are rendered in spare and elegant free verse, evocative of Asian art, evocative in fact of the verse of Shikibu, the speakers name for the Japanese Maple growing in his yard. The lines here speak their own delicacy and poignancy:

Trees can feel the coming frost.
Its time to send their sap to roots.

She chose her words with ink and brush,
listened to the struck bell of her heart
until every sound was written down.

These lines also provide a good example of the subtle music that buoys Keener's poetry, illuminating it with a kind of auditory light. Notice the four strong beats per line and a prevailing iambic rhythm effectively inverted in the line holding the remarkable image of a struck bell. Subtle end rhymes like past/frost and shade/ face/gold/said reinforce the music. And, like a struck bell, the poems last sound, ground resonates with other end words occurring earlier in the poem, all the way back to complained, the word that ends the poems first line. Listen to how finely the poet tunes his lute in the last stanza of Mariposa Lily:

Lily, I drink you with my eyes
to satisfy my appetite
for gold, for white, for violet light.

I first read Gold Leaf on Granite at the top of Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park on a day in apex spring, with torrents of water in the falls, and tangles of columbine, California poppies, lupine and wild sweet pea in every rocky crevice. Warmed by the same gray granite kindled to a sunrise blaze in the Keener's book, I read it from cover to cover. Ok, I thought afterward, what book wouldn't seem like magic in that setting? So I hiked back down the mountain and then allowed the book to age on the shelf for a few months before reading it again, this time in the more mundane confines of my office. The magic was still there.
--Reviewed by Rebecca Foust (Ross)
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WHEN THE HOUSE IS QUIET
KIRSTEN JONES NEFF
(NOVATO)

when the house is quiet by Kirsten Jones Neff. (Finishing Line Press 2010), 9 Poems, $14. Saddle-stapled. Cover Art by Kathy Dennison with design by Raymond Galang. www.finishinglinepress.com/KJneff.htm.

Finishing Line Press does a great job with production of its chapbooks. Winner of the 2009 Starting Gate Award, this books cover is stylish and hip, with the title and an interesting, abstract flower design picked out in beige against an unusual rust-colored background and finished with a narrow brown ribbon tied around the spine.

In this slender, tastefully produced volume, Novato resident Kirsten Jones Neff probes the inner and outer landscape of a young wife and mother living in contemporary suburban northern California. The husband is beloved, the children are beloved, Bay Area nature in all its glorious beauty is beloved. The speaker is exquisitely attuned to and grateful for her many blessings, and yet. . . . And yet is the space in which these poems dwell, as the speaker moves beyond celebration and gratitude to acknowledge the darker themes that shadow any examined life: mortality, parents inability to protect their children from harm, and the worm of transience that infects the core of life's sweetest moments.

In "Pine and Dust," for example, the speaker wakes in her grandmother's summer bed, an image that works on several levels. Presumably from a summer house used by the grandmother when the speaker was a child, the bed is also the repository of her grandmother's summer, a time when she was vibrantly alive to the grandchild who in this poem switches places with her and waits for her own progeny to climb in beside me.

Although the poem begins in the sensory memories of the speaker's childhood, screams of jays and two pieces of bacon, toast and a fried egg, Neff refuses to allow the poem to dwell in nostalgia, nudging it toward melancholy and even irony in preparation for the gut-punch of the last line: "I have never felt so certain I will die."

In "Regret," a dear friend is dying, and the speakers agonized awareness of this fact permeates herand the readersentire experience of the Vashon Island wedding they are attending together:

That whole weekend
as you sat next to me in the church,
as we walked uphill under a row of liquid ambers,
as we turned out chairs to watch the first dance
you let me know that you would die.

The speaker is sorry about what is happening to her friend, but she regrets at least as much her inability to comfort or help her. Let's do this again next year is all she can muster, unable to have that conversation. In "Equinox," perhaps the epitome and yet poem, Neff balances a moment of pure, Zen joy on the knife-point of her speakers realization that no perfect moment can last.

The poem opens in medias res, in the rough-and-tumble rush to get three kids out the door and onto the school bus. In the moment of sudden silence following the buss departure, summer stands barefoot among the first curling leaves of fall. Neff acknowledges the moment and allows the reader to bask in its benison while at the same time shading it with her ever-present awareness of mortality:

I step inside,
carrying the dry scent
of the equinox, not knowing how long this light,
this blessed light,
will last.

There are moments, as in "Bone," when the speaker feels lost, trapped, powerless and even just plain perplexed by where shes been put down. In "Spin Cycle," she reveals a fear of becoming less and less, " just a manager / of meaningless stuff and worse, of disappearing like a stain." Thus, are poems of gratitude modulated by an awareness that every beauty has its ache, with every experience chastened by the:

lonesome feeling that I have never loved enough,

never tasted, nor smelled, nor listened without reservation.

Neff's style is plainsong, using unmetered, unrhymed free verse in most cases organized into regular stanzas (quatrains, tercets, couplets), but sometimes without stanzas and in one case (Nebraska) adopting a full-page prose poem format. The poems are quiet and reflective, almost austere in their restraint. Some would call them accessible, and indeed, they can be enjoyed as the musings of a young suburban mom experiencing a few moments peace after getting her kids off to school. But, as noted above, Neff's writing operates also on a deeper level, expressing the despair trolling beneath the sun-drenched surface of the life of any happy Marin family: intimations of mortality and a clear-eyed awareness of life's inexplicable tragedies and cruel ironies.

In one poem, a grandmother hoists her 43-year-old daughter from a wheelchair to a car; in another, a chiropractor-father is powerless to heal his child's broken spine. Neff expresses rage at the failed promises made by a popular culture, grief at the exploding of myths, and quiet sorrowing over the death of a chicken killed by a fox in the night.

Tribute is paid to a marriage of 25 years in the same poem ("Wedding Present") that acknowledges how the years have exacted their toll, leaving the speaker tired now and aware of all the work it took. Moments of bliss-in-nature and bliss-in-motherhood turn out to be the sun-and-pollen dredged surface of water troubled by darker, more turbulent depths for readers who take the time to dip beneath this books lovely surface.
--Reviewed by Rebecca Foust (Ross)
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Grizzly Marsh, located near Suisun City, photo by Jannie M. Dresser