BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

WINSOME LONESOME
JOHN ROWE (EL CERRITO)

Winsome Lonesome by John Rowe. (Eventuality Press, Albany/El Cerrito: 2010). 46 poems, 64 pages, $10. ISBN 978-1-4507-3698-5. www.rowepoet.com.

BAPSR co-founder Marvin R. Hiemstra writes:
A lyric voice at its best, John Rowes ruminations are mind teasing, cool, and more satisfying than a play date with Plato. That voice speaks with the clarity of a shining dream: dazzling in its understatement. Like the mind turnings of Jorge Luis Borges, John Rowe poems are always a delight.

I too am a big fan of John Rowes work. He makes me chuckle, invites me see things afresh without being overly clever or sardonic. He never slips out of his humanity to place the work above the people or the moments he includes in his poems. And, he has the audacity to be silly in an age when poems have taken on such a degree of seriousness that an Ogden Nash would probably not find a publisher today.

I enjoy the feeling
of being one
with the air,
and when Im invisible
I need not worry about
combing my hair.
(from Invisible)

Nevertheless, Rowe has frequent and puzzling encounters with Ultimate Reality, and survival--both in terms of the physical body and the spirit--is often put to the test in his poetry:

ALL THIS WITHOUT SUNSCREEN

He left the desert for the desert
It couldnt get any colder this way
Some call him a naked madman, he doesnt care
With his back to a cactus, he fingers a thistle
Things will grow in the dry heat without rain
He wonders about the snake between his legs
and how it would feel to sit
his bare ass down on a scorpion
Maybe thats why electricity
was never needed out here
He has a pet vulture waiting for him to die

LISTENING: NEW & SELECTED WORK
CHARLES ENTREKIN (ORINDA)

Listening: New & Selected Work by Charles Entrekin (Poetic Matrix Press, P.O. Box 1223, Madera, CA 93639: 2010). 108 poems, 148 pages, $16. ISBN 978-0-9827343-5-3, www.poeticmatrix.com.

Charles Entrekin is one of our best, and most resilient, lyric poets who actually has something to say beyond the look at me, I feel intensely mode of many poems slip into that never move beyond a thinly veiled narcissism. Entrekins poems are concerned with others, often people from his past, lived in Alabama, a place most of us northerners hear little about, a place ravaged by time and old structures, by hard work and hard thinking that beats people down:

A DAYS WORK

For so little pay
to move all day with that weight
slung backwards and watch the dust
cover my hands like a new skin,
to stagger behind a black man who pulls
forward like a horse in harness,
so much power in his arms and back,
to lift that white substance from the plant,
that feeling of the seeds stuck in the center,
to stuff cotton balls in one smooth motion
without breaking stride
till its sundown beside the oak
beneath a red-varnished sky,
and an old man plopped down beside me,
wiping his eyes, face dust brown as mine,
saying, Damn wind done made me cry.

He tells his pieces musically, as the master lyric poet should, repeating consonants or vowels for masterful effect:

I know a man who, at birth,
was broken by a doctor whose hands
faltered in the too long and too hard delivery.
He grew up broken, his eyes crossed,
his legs withered, his head too large in circumference,
and his whole back scarred from neck to hip.
(from Cousin Dink)

Listening: New & Selected Poems is a treasure of poems you will want to read for a long time.

SUCK ON THE MARROW
CAMILLE T. DUNGY (OAKLAND)

Suck on the Marrow by Camille T. Dungy (Red Hen Press, Los Angeles: 2010) 30 poems including several with section divisions, 88 pages, $18.95. ISBN 978-1-59709-468-9. www.redhen.org.
Camille Dungy
Suck on the Marrow by Camille Dungy, now of Oakland, has got to be the hit book of the year, having won the Northern California Book Awards, and been nominated for the California Book Award, the NAACP Image Award, and Forewords Book of the Year. Aside from being gracious and multi-talented (see our profile of Dungy in this issue), the woman can write poems that strike the nerve!

The poems place us into the lives of 19th century African Americans, newly freed slaves and struggling for life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Yusef Komunyakaa writes:
This collection embraces the act of imagining acutely, whereby imagination becomes almost an action. In fact, Suck on the Marrow plots a path back to the Southern soil, to common people, back to a double-binding pathos of pain and beauty through language.

SURVIVAL

The body winnows. The body tills. The body knows
sows feet, sow gut, night harvested kale. The body knows
to sleep through welted dreams, to wake
before the night succumbs to morning.

Wheat, wheat, tobacco, corn: the body knows.

No stopping. No sinking down. Like a branch
floats on water, the body does not go under.
Like a tree seeded among dark rocks, the body
leans where it must. Or fails.

If you believe poetry should, from time to time, take you out of your comfort zone and plop you into someone elses skin--someone both very different in circumstance but very much like you in terms of human desire and suffering--this book of historically inspired persona poems will do you good! --Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

A SPLIT SECOND OF LIGHT
STEWART FLORSHEIM (OAKLAND)

Split Second of Light by Stewart Florsheim. (Blue Light Press, 1563 45th Ave., San Francisco: 94122: 2011) $15.95. ISBN 978-0-1421886053.
Stewart Florsheim of Oakland

Poet David Meltzer describes Stewart Florsheims new book, A Split Second of Light:

"Written with passionate precision, Florsheim's collection goes to the core of a wide range of intrigues and interests: the Holocaust, artworks, the mysteries of the everyday. Urbane and astute, his work is emphathetic and clear-headed. A rich offering.

For those who have read Florsheim's previous volume, there are no big surprises in terms of the material being explored. In Short Fall from Grace, Florsheim presented poems about his Holocaust, and here, we are invited to witness to his mothers death.

In Mothers room the breathing machine doesnt stop.
Listening, I try to learn a lesson about love.
Ill use it as long as it works
her concession to me because she would like to be done
with it, the three-month prognosis an eternity to her.
When Mother was about to give birth to me
the doctor was late so the nurse yelled at her
to stop pushing and keep her legs together.
Now I imagine being in that half-state--
Mother ready to release me: a room of first breaths.
(from The Machine)

Just as we witness family events, Florsheim uses the ekphrastic tradition to witness the lives depicted in great paintings. There is an ease with which readers can move in and out of Florsheim's poems, not that they are necessarily accessible, though mostly they can be understood after one reading, but there is an ease in the poet who easily projects himself into the lives of a variety of characters:

It appears the light is emanating
from the letter itself so the woman
must have reached her decision, in fact
shes so intent she cant lift the pen
from the paper as she glances
up at the artist, eyes aglow,
lips turned into a small smile . . .
(from The Decision)

THE HOMELESSNESS OF SELF
SUSAN TERRIS (SAN FRANCISCO)

The Homelessness of Self by Susan Terris. (Arctos Press, P.O. Box 401, Sausalito, 9496-0401: 2011) $16. ISBN 978-0-97525384-1-0 . www.arctospress.com

Elsewhere we reviewed Spillway, the literary journal that Susan Terris now guides. Here is Terris' own work in The Homelessness of Self. About the book, Cole Swensen writes:

'Sometimes safety is unbearable, declares one of these sharp, and sharpened, poems--its a theme that informs the whole collection, as its many voices, all equally sure, equally exacting and precise, take stock of the real situation of the women Terris sees around her. In her intimate social examination, Terris also does something entirely new with the confessional poem, opening it to previously unexplored territory with her vivid, idiosyncratic language and a hauntingly honest imagery. The whole is eye-opening and refreshingly frank.

In some lost universe where Innisfree
had a rock with an iron handle,

before e. coli or giardia,
we knelt at the edge of streams,

cupped clear cold water in our hands
and drank to quench our thirst.

Then, lake isles were still safe havens
for the young and unmoored
(from The Path to Innisfree)
***
Marriage is a cave with an underground river
and an unreliable torch.

The shadows on the wall are larger than I am.
Stalagmites, stalactites all that liquid limestone,
seeping, dripping endlessly.

Pech Merle cave near Cabarets, has
an ancient dotted horse and all around it
dotted hand prints that say: I was here. At home,
my prints on the walls, doorjambs, a little SOS.
(from Marriage License)

AT 24TH & MISSION:
POSIA LOCAL CON ESENCIA GLOBAL,
A BILINGUAL EDITION
MIGUEL ROBLES (SAN FRANCISCO)

At 24th & Mission: Posia Local con Esencia Global, a bilingual edition, by Miguel Robles. (Jambu Press, Studio Saraswati, San Francisco: 2010), 27 poems in English and Spanish, 96 pages, $14. Jacket and book design by Virginia Barrett, with photographs by the author and Barrett; cover art includes a detail of a mural by Mona Caron. ISBN: 978-0-9824673-3-6. www.studiosaraswati.com.

Since I cannot sleep
the ruins have conquered my white sheets
and my skin of ash

I am a ton of debris that night disperses
over a broken pillow under the burden of a dream
***
De no poder dormir
la ruina hace conquista de mis sabanas blancas
y mi piel ce ceniza

Soy un montn de escombros que la noche dispersa
sobre una almohada rota por el peso de un sueo
(from Insomnia/Insomnio)

WHEELCHAIR SAMURAI
LEE ROSSI (LIVERMORE)

Wheelchair Samurai by Lee Rossi (Plain View Press, P.O. Box 42255, Austin, TX 78704: 2011), 58 poems, 102 pages, $14.95. Cover illustration by Roger Shimomura; cover design by Susan Bright. ISBN 978-1-935514-15-2.
www.plainviewpress.net.

Wheelchair Samurai is Lee Rossis third book of poetry, and is divided into three sections, each with its own provocative title: Blood Litany, A Boys Gift for Error, and Recipes For the Afterlife.

Ruth L. Schwartz writes:
"Lee Rossi is a masterful tour guide through landscapes of the sacred and profane, a universe of moments both heartbreaking and funny, where fighting roosters are pit bulls with feathers, and the summer air is a minestrone of milkweed and pollen, . . . Rossi keeps us, his readers, straining for a glimpse of that body/its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own.

The poems are full of questions--stated or implied-- that momentarily shake us out of rote rumination.

I have lost sight
of the middle distance
a range of burning hills
dust rising like fog
across a highway

I offer my hand
to the emptiness
in front of me

A branch scratches
the roof overhead
Something is trying
to get into this small life
(from Myopia)

And the poems are widely peopled: even metal sculptures in a garden turn animate with life-force:

. . . They move, just more slowly

than we ephemerals. That family
with their large granite bodies

and tiny heads probably think of the rock
on which they sit as some kind of pet,

breathing and shifting at their own tranquil rate.
(from In the Sculpture Garden)

God, Seed
POETRY & ART ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD

REBECCA FOUST (ROSS) AND
LORNA STEVENS (SAN FRANCISCO)

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World by Rebecca Foust, poet, and Lorna Stevens, artist. (Tebot Bach, Huntington Beach, CA: 2010), 43 poems, 30 four-color images, 104 pages, $20. Edited by Mifanwy Kaiser, with cover art, Dandelion and frontis-piece art, Seed, by Lorna Stevens; graphic design by Stevens and Jeremy Thornton; author and artist photographs by Thornton. ISBN: 978-1-893670-47-1. Recipient of the 2008 Eco Lit Contest (Knock Journal), 2008 International Prize (Atlanta Review), 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize Finalist (North American Review). http://tebotbach.org.

It has become a rare event that a book is produced that combines art and poetry in such a luscious hold-able, read-able way. Give me this sort of lap-top prize over any battery-driven one any day. God, Seed, by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens, runs on its own electricity.

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World has already won several awards and received enthusiastic endorsements. What I will try to add is a response to the poetry specifically, with a grateful nod to the artist, Lorna Stevens, who provided the varied water-colors, pencil, charcoal-drawings and modified photographs-- lovely delicate, yet solid depictions of animals, plants and scenes of nature.

ROUGH HONEY

MELISSA STEIN

Rough Honey by Melissa Stein. (American Poetry Review, Philadelphia, PA: 2010), 44 poems, 112 pages, $14. ISBN 978-0-9776395-9-5. With introduction by Mark Doty. Cover photograph by Arielynnn Cheng. Winnner of the APR/Honickman 1st Book Prize.

Amazed at such new magnets
in the skin, in flecks of gold
caught in her hair (he wants to touch it),
in a fine scratch along the pigs belly
of her cheek, the tracing of blood
and a faint upwelling of flesh surrounding it
(he wants to run his tongue against it
for the salt, he is so suddenly terribly thirsty),
he turns to her and grips her upper arms, hard,
and backs her up against the barn wall,
wondering at the ease hes felt with her . . .
(from Noon Shadow)

Mark Doty writes in his introduction to Melissa Steins prize-winning Rough Honey that the author avoided organizing the book around a recognizable theme or chronology:

Of late many a young poet has chosen a controlling project for a first book. Im making these examples up, but consider, for example, forty poems in the voice of Sacajawea, or a volume centered on the history of tattooing, or one using a formal pattern, say sonnet variations, to establish coherence. . . .

Stein, whom he calls a formal polymath, leaves the character of Rough Honey open, letting in a variety of formal and free verse poems, and a variety of subjects. Doty goes on:

Coherence has its virtues, but perhaps a market economy in which a plethora of poets strives to be noticed tends to overvalue them.

For someone who works in academia, Doty is a bit disingenuous here. I, for one, would have liked Rough Honey better if I had a handle on how to enter it, could see more clearly a guiding framework. The book is split into sections noted, unremarkably, by Roman numerals (i, ii, etc.). This is a rich book, showcasing enormous talent, a keen intellect and amazing verbal skills but I finished it feeling a bit wrung out and wondering why I did not feel more nourished by such extravagant imagery and language.

The question is, of course, why do we go to a book of poems? And, there are as many reasons as readers. I was delighted by Steins linguistic pyrotechnics. As a polymath--Dotys words, not mine--she is inventive and intellectually gifted. She tackles difficult subjects. Yet, I felt many of the poems lacked a certain depth of wisdom. One poem, on the subject of rape, might serve as an example. This is always a raw topic; as a survivor of rape, I look at poems on the topic with a certain jaundiced eye especially as it becomes raw material:

Amazed at such new magnets
in the skin, in flecks of gold
caught in her hair (he wants to touch it),
in a fine scratch along the pigs belly
of her cheek, the tracing of blood
and a faint upwelling of flesh surrounding it
(he wants to run his tongue against it
for the salt, he is so suddenly terribly thirsty),
he turns to her and grips her upper arms, hard,
and backs her up against the barn wall,
wondering at the ease hes felt with her . . .
(from Noon Shadow)

As the poem continues, it is told from the attackers perspective (an interesting choice). The mention of struggle and a reported final petrified look are the only clues as to the victims experience. Alan Williamson, in his poem, Sandy, does this type of thing with incredible potency and emotion that forces the reader to get into the skin of a perpetrator. But, here, I found a flaw in the poems vivid detail and heightened awareness as it is portrayed on the part of the rapist, who, more likely than not, has a disordered consciousness. It just didn't feel honest to me.

The poems that moved me the most are those that seem to stem from the poets personal experience; it is hard to tell at times whether a piece is completely imagined or based on the authors life. The poem entitled So deeply that it is not heard at all, but, is addressed to sister, repeated as an apostrophe at the beginning of each line:

sister: let go of those children and come with me, out to the edge
of this continent and stare out to sea:
sister: until a barge arrives to take you to the gleaming other edge
where lizards crawl and the brush is yellowgold and snakes whip up the dust--
sister: pick up this paper and pick up this pen--
sister: turn your face to me: I want to see more than half.

With its pleading cadence, this poem hit me emotionally although it does not reveal much about the relationship. Another poem expresses the authors conundrum at being bright and word-awake yet still carrying doubt:

I can stare into the woods for days
pulling into that green blur
my own nonsense--feel
the trees on the outside of the stand
swaying while those inside are protected . . .

. . . I used to think naming was knowing.
(from White Mushrooms)

One of the best poems, New Dominion, achieves pro-found versimilitude through more liberal use of colloquial diction; in fact her mixing of diction fascinates me:

Its always seemed odd to me that at the vanishing point
of ugliness lies its opposite, that euphorias tenor
is that of despair. Maybe we are limited in our truths,
and Ecclesiastes had it right. Maybe the sun
ringing this pond and its black collar of trees
is the one bad habit I dont have to unlearn. Now
the kop-plunk of some silly fish calls attention to itself. . .

Sex is one theme in Rough Honey, one that Doty focuses on. For the most part, it wasnt sexuality but a disturbing violence that hinges on sex that Stein explores, and she is the rare poet to do so. There is a difference. Overhearing a sexually-charged fight in a neighboring apartment, the narrator cant escape through intellectualization or turning toward art:

. . . no beautys loud enough
to drown out rage and drown out sorrow.
(from Galileo)

Truer words were ner written, unfortunately. In Rough, opening lines juxtapose natures beauty against details of disintegration and sado-masochism.

Stars cluster, discarding light like garbage.
The stale air reeks of rain-soaked hay, the fields
slow ruin. I rock myself on the porch swing,
poulticed by crickets pulsing drone. Last week
it was against the fridge, long handle dug
along my back, another spine. He loves
an edge: railing, doorway. Hes made me kneel
in the gravel . . .

Whitewater, a vivid narration of being plunged out of a kayak into a tumultuous current, seems almost a metaphor for the book, except that what spins around the poet is the enthusiasm for word-play and description rather than the hearts synthesis and wisdom of reflection. In an odd way, I wanted Stein to have a bit more of the emotion recollected in tranquility exhibited by Light, Moving, the Carolyn Miller book previously reviewed, just as I wanted Millers language sometimes to be more energetic as I found in Steins. (Fuck me, the grass is always greener!)

Rough Honey will certainly be a book worthy of several readings, and more importantly Stein is a poet we all should watch. Out of the gate with intensity and brilliance, she promises to be a poet who will craft powerful pieces as she deepens her own powers of mental, emotional and physical integration. Id advise, though, against a career in academia which could tilt the sensibility even further toward the cerebral, and suggest working with the body and heart as the best ways to grow this poet. When these are in balance, watch out! -- Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

CITY OF STAIRWAYS
A POETS FIELD GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO

WRITERSCORPS EDITED BY MILTA ORTIZ

(SAN FRANCISCO)

City of Stairways: A Poets Field Guide to San Francisco by the Students of Writers-Corps, edited by Milta Ortiz; developmental editor, Judith Tannenbaum; copy editor, Nirmala Nataraj; graphic design and maps by Adrienne Aquino. (WritersCorps Books, San Francisco: 2010), with assistance from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Photography by WritersCorps Ida B. Wells High School students; other illustrations and art by Hong Truong, Annie Yu, Marcella Ortiz, and Adrienne Aquino. ISBN 978-1-888048-10-0. $14.95. All proceeds from the sale of this book go towards WritersCorps, a literary arts education program. Info at www.writerscorps.org.

Edited by Milta Ortiz, with additional editorial work by Judith Tannenbaum and Nirmala Nataraj, City of Stairways is a gorgeous four-color volume that up-grades the ordinary field-guide to the status of a most personable and attractive poetry-companion youll want to take with you on your next adventure in one of the worlds most beautiful cities.

WritersCorps is a unique program, supported by several San Francisco institutions, with the aim of nurturing young writers. Teaching Artists instruct and mentor the mostly teenaged participants as they work on a variety of projects. City of Stairways is a recent accomplishment and an exciting harbinger of other things.

It is always a welcome experience to view our world through the eyes and ideas of youth who are relatively new to its multifaceted complexity. Still capable of being shocked, these young poets often find the words to shock us into seeing anew:

grimy golden arches
harsh light plastic seats
the air stained with salt
a woman begs
for change
and hersheys kisses. . .
(from fast food for the people by Annie Yu)
***
. . . the driver yells
and you run to
the first seat you see
covered in graffiti
sitting there as
the bus bumps
up and down
through the hills
of san francisco
and doors creak
open and close
with the stampede
of people
(from bus 49 by Anna Lei)
***
DRUMS

Heroes in the shadow
villains in the sun
sand from the faucets
children in the slums
the killing come
population control takin its toll
one by one by one by
none
(by Robin Black)

The poets are also capable of showing a softer side, as in this poem addressed to a drifter on Valencia St., Valentines Day:

I love you like a bird loves its chicks
After they have learnt to fly
And dont need her
Any longer

I know you like my father knows
The creases of maps
(from An impossible love poem for an impossible person by Indiana Pehlivanova)

Alert and attentive is what you will find in the poets who have been selected to represent San Francisco; heres an insight about the Golden Gate Bridge:

The Bridge . . .
a beautiful sight, especially last night
while the city illuminated clear and bright
despite the little fog, the image of the
Golden Gate
seemed flawless
I never wanted the sun to come back up
I wanted it to be an endless night of stars and
golden red light.
(from The Bridge by Nicole Zatarain Rivera)

And, a thoughtful love poem for natives:

I have

seen the tip-top of
a small city with small streets
Silver fog blankets
rooftops
Lights murmur city secrets
Cars whip below
101

The heart beat of San Fran
simplicity
Not
Castro
Embarcadero
Pier 39
or
Ghirardelli Square
But a small bench
where the natives rest
and watch their city change
(from A Love Poem to a San Francisco Native by Marcella Ortiz)

I am in awe of the groundedness of these young people who know the places they describe with honesty and--quite frequently--an inspiring tenderness:

The clouds look like they want to cry
and Im freezing
the dang wind keeps on teasing
as it crashes past
(from Mind of a Child by Hong Truong)
***
Facing the sea
I continue reading my poem
and my lips taste the salt
that the breeze brings
a cold breeze that slowly
touches my face.
(from Facing the Sea/De Cara a Cara al Mar by Sandra Pullido)
***
The winds whisper
and feel by waves
born out of this substance
that can be contained
a calm emotion that intensifies
the world at its best
(from Ocean Beach by Geoffrey Simpson)

Kudos to the creators of this generous volume. For more information about WritersCorp, call 415/252-4655 or go to www.writerscorps.com.

MORTAL GEOGRAPHY
ALEXANDRA TEAGUE (OAKLAND)

Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague (A Karen & Michael Braziller Book, Persea Books, NY: 2010), 50 poems, 88 pages, $15. ISBN 978-0-89255-358-7. Design by Lytton Smith. Winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. www.perseabooks.com.

Alexandra Teague favors the two-line stanza in Mortal Geography. The lines are not couplets, or ghazals, formal reasons why two-line stanzas would have been chosen. Yet, 20 of the 50 poems in this volume have taken this route, with an additional five or six poems using a three-line stanza. The lines are mostly long, running to under an inch of the margin in many cases.
Why this is important, I'm not sure. Perhaps its the cover image, lines of a map transferred to a woman's body, the title mortal geography, the sense of line and groupings of lines being more relevant than in many books of verse. Perhaps its the faint whiff of call-and-response, of reaching out to another, of dialogue contained in the skeleton of 2-liners. . .
Two narratives shape the book: the poets impending and--then completed divorce; and, her work as an English instructor, working with non-native speakers. Poems about trying to convey the illogical intricacies of the English language to foreign speakers raise larger questions about the ordering of ideas and experiences:

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. . .
(from Adjectives of Order)

The students questions loom larger than what a syntac-tical discussion should warrant. Later, we learn that author/narrator was a precocious child who challenged her own teachers and we feel the twinge of some karmic fate being visited upon her. Language, and the way it is ordered, in sentences, lines, or on a page of poetry, does not easily yield its meaning. In spite of this--and the force of misunderstanding--Teague accomplishes a lot of meaning in Mortal Geography. She has written an accessible book capable of thrilling the ear even as it engages heart and mind. She mixes form, style, theme, and idea to hold the readers interest throughout.

Some persona poems narrate the history of the poets ancestors or figures from the American West, such as an imagined monologue of a Dr. Kane, explorer of Baffin Bay (near the North Pole) in 1854:

Within an hour, no open water showed itself for yards.
Wherever placed, our compass needle stood.
Land ice filling the leads,
we pointed the needle south and prayed

our absence was enough to save the rest from scurvy.
The Esquimaux seal hunters walked the sky for days.
(from The Whole Story of Winter)

If not straightforward personas, then many poems are imagined from within a subjective consciousness not ostensibly that of the poet, such as figures in paintings or a voice in a song. Even beyond this, the poet has a porousness and often speaks from the point of view of others with an uncanny believability:

Maybe Alzheimers is angelic possession,
the minds repetitive wings beating sense
for all its worth. God-damn talking bus.
God-damn talking bus, says the old man
at each announcement. And doesnt everyone
agree really, though our askance glances impress
that calls for silence ought to come in silence?
Please vacate front seats for seniorsGod-damn
talking busand the disabled. Each sing-song
echo more mechanical, we raise embarrassed
newspapers or drink from empty coffee cups.
(from Four Games Played While Riding the Bus)

The idea of games plays throughout Mortal Geography which includes: a poem about Dungeons & Dragons (maybe a first?); the poem mentioned above which includes a vignette of a couple playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and a vignette of a young man hustling card bets at the back of the same bus; and, a poem entitled Choose-Your- Own-Adventure Poem, a clever parody of the write- your-own-end popular in young adult fiction and video games. Its hard not to get hooked on the game:

To find a bird metaphor go to stanza twenty;
to find an ocean metaphor go to stanza six.

To follow the heroine through the jungle ruins
of Tikal, her camera loaded with the wrong speed of film,/

howler monkeys bellowing at the thunder, and the rain coming/
through the canopy like a vast lace umbrella, turn to the second couplet,/

although you may also arrive on that slippery clay trail, roots/
breaking apart the stairs
of civilization itself, if you start with a line . . .

There is a lot in Mortal Geography about taking things apart, from language to simple objects to surgery and the dissolution of a marriage. Near the very center of the book, on pages 42 and 43, there are two poems touching on this last subject, Broken Engagements and Bay Window, with Divorce and Pigeon. Particularly in Bay Window, the intensity, the ferocity of the poet gets released, something that doesnt quite drive the rest of the poems which are written in calmer, more orderly or contained structures. In this poem, a bird shatters through an apartment window, then crouches in fear:

Unbloodily alive, its iridescent feathers matted.
I wanted to kill it for surviving, messenger of the obvious/

flaws in the worlds construction: in loves shelter
we forgot the most luminous rooms have thin glass.

As the poet says in the opening line of another poem, Explanation to a Student, Even in Shakespeare, some words mean/what they seem, we are keenly aware that the opposite is even more true: many words do not mean what they seem, and it is our task, as teacher, writer, lover, member of society, to navigate that difficult distance between language as a vehicle for connection or as a tool for gaming and creating confusion.

INHERITANCE
MARGARET KAUFMAN
(KENTFIELD )

Inheritance by Margaret Kaufman. (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, CA: 94164), 48 poems, 96 pages, $16. Cover photograph by Abner Nolan. ISBN 978-0-9819816-0-4. www.sixteenrivers.org.

Margaret Kaufman has built a cohesive scaffold of a book with all parts working in mutual support: the cover image (a domestic still life bound by calming green), a title that precisely cues the reader, and poems that follow a natural chronology from childhood, to the loss of parents, to fears for ones own children, and finally to poems that take us into the poets world of neighbor-hood, work, nature, nation, and current events, including 9/11 and the last nine years of war.

The voice is intimate--sometimes to a fault as when we are unsure of who the personnel are in particular poems: names are dropped on us casually without identification of their relationships to the narrator. Patience is required; in most cases, the poem provides context and an individual steps forward:

I search for a word, stare out the window for it,
and suddenly youre there, Margery Farrar,
peppermint and liquor on your breath,
ruler in hand, stalking the aisles,
senior English, 1959.
(from The Place of Her Burning)

I found the poems about the poets father the most compelling, in part because we are given the picture of a man who had once been a figure of accomplishment who succumbs to age and death in the course of these pages. Kaufman details this demise with compassion and honor, but does not shy away from tension or unpleasantness, especially in her sibling relationship:

Before we drove out to the cemetery,
we were already divided over flowers.
I gathered some bronze chrysanthemums
spilling over the brickwork by the drive,
a few meager zinnias dusted with frost.
Tired, my sister thought, but didnt say.
(from The Meaning of Flowers)

The fathers death is signaled in a poem titled Tawny Avatar, with the juxtaposed image of the poet staying in a beachfront home while somewhere my father is dying. Whats different in this encounter with the other world, is the presence of a mysterious cougar that moves through the narrative as a harbinger of death or, is he simply, a cougar out of place? The poets subtle use of rhyme completes the poems dreaminess:

Back home my father is dying

but I cant get to him, leave the house,
not while the cougar might be hiding
down the hall or behind a mossy couch.
Hes left his mark he may be biding

his own sweet time, crouched downstairs,
tawny avatar, shadow of death enraged

After pages of poems dealing with loss, the book has a climax with an unexpected piece about the poets son and his brush with death. Although the poet has not displayed a strident spirituality, in this and a few other poems, there is a critical reaching for emotional support and assurance:

Could anything I ever said have made a difference,
a prayer I uttered often, Keep them safe,
or was it luck or chance they wanted
the Mustang engine, not his life?

Surely, I whispered to Whom I worhsip,
surely You understand this offering,
this heaping up of fruit.
(from On Seeing the Euphronios Krater)

Kaufman achieves significant musicality in many poems--her use of rhyme is deft and original especially in Section II. Overall, the tone of the book is subdued, appropriately for its subject matter. I may have liked a few pieces to break up the understated mood, but this goes back to my first comment, that the book is cohesive. Cohesion is achieved, in large part, through the poets choice to stay within a selected range of color, here it is subtly grey-green-brown. Nonetheless, I would enjoy hearing Kaufman's work in a larger spectrum, as I am sure she is capable of writing when she moves outside of the elegiac frame.

MY YOUTH AS A TRAIN
MICHAEL ROTHENBERG (GUERNEVILLE)


My Youth as a Train by Michael Rothenberg. (FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona, NY 14856: 2010), 16 poems, 80 pages, ISBN 978-0-941053-97-6, $16.Cover art, Enigma #4, by Jim Spitzer; cover design by Terri Carron. www.foothillspublishing.com.

Although My Youth as a Train doesn't particularly deal with the authors youth, it does recreate the experience of witnessing life through the window of a speeding train, as so much of what is written here has that telegraphic, dropped articles (a, an, the, etc.) urgency that Whitman and many of the Beats are known for. But the book also has something of the flavor of Vladimir Nabokov's amazing tour-de-force in Lolita as the author encapsulates an American panorama as his character Humbert Humbert takes his teenage concubine on a mid-1950s dash across the continent. Rothenberg does this an excellent camera-eye for telling detail:

Mirrors are where they should be
The same sunset in 200 motel rooms
TV bolted down to the dressing table
Sanitary wrapped plastic cup
2 X 1/8 inch soap wafers
(from Narcissus)

Yet, even as objects are flattened somewhat by this cataloguing technique, Rothenberg gives them various shapes and colors as he pushes each thing through his filtering consciousness; this extends beyond objects, to general subjects. Not all poetry books give you the narrator so splayed and etherized upon the table, but here Rothenberg really lets it all hang out: travel, relationships and problems with the opposite sex, national events or physical ailment:

so the urologist
gives me 2mg of Xanax
and runs a camera up my prick
A snapshot of the Bush Administration
and 300 million citizen-slaves

SOOO PISSED OFF

Nothing matters in America
Shopping aggravates the bladder
(from Control)

The poems are best described therefore as stream-of-consciousness, with stanza breaks or isolated lines occurring in no discernible pattern, recorded at the tempo of the authors brain, sometimes feverish sometimes more languid. This tempers the reading experience considerably, and is a kind of form, representing thought processes which cannot strictly be called chaotic but do tumble out in ways that form unexpected connections:

Yesterday I missed you, tomorrow I will not

Like Isle of Skye or Yosemite Falls
youre beautiful but I have no desire
to drag you around

So I escape to Hollywood Beach Boardwalk
4th of July. Maidens rollerblade
wearing almost nothing
but eyes

Steamed clams, kegs of beer
Licking dripping ice cream. Families
scream in surf

Church of The Sun King!
(from The Nine-Fold Path)

Poems are written in varying line lengths, using indentations or presented as prose epistles written to himself. My Youth as a Train carries the experience of reading the intimate journal of someone who tried to get down images and bits of conversation as if to ward off their being ultimately forgotten. This is, after all, a fundamental and valuable use of writing, as an aid to memory and for keeping a semblance of order on the flotsam and jetsam that life can fling our way. It is always fun to read someones journal that has been abandoned or left open, when the writing is as crisp and capable of idiosyncratically selected detail:

Toothpick, quarter, nickel, four pennies, red paper clip

No one to call
All heroes gone

Briefcase, calendars, fresh sharpened pencils
Business cards with another change of address

What did it mean when I said, Don't stop
and she said, I haven't even started.

Family photos

When will they bury me?

Puppet Shakespeare, stone crab claw relic, dead coral verse . . .

(from Day of Change)

In the final view, though, I would have liked more poems in the tighter lyric style of Whether a Moon or Vision of Peace. Perhaps the relative simplicity of theme lent the author greater control over the material:

Between huge blanket of black clouds
and ragged graymouth of cityscape
Eye of green morning light

Wind raking bay (thunder hum) thrashing voice
of branches & leaves

Storm blown away
for another more pleasant distortion
Not boredom
but interest in someone not found here

-- Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

ANGEL'S DESTINY
A NOVEL STORY OF POEMS & ILLUSTRATIONS
APRIL MARTIN CHARTRAND
(SAN FRANCISCO)

Angel's Destiny: A Novel Story of Poems & Illustrations by April Martin Chartrand (April Martin Chartrand, P.O. Box 14752, San Francisco, 94114-0752: 2009), 152 pages, $13. Book design and illustra-tions by the author; author photo by Alan Purcell. ISBN 978-0615302515.
http://angelsdestiny2009.blogspot.com

Imani Harrington, editor of Positive/Negative: Women of Color and HIV/AIDS (Aunt Lute Books), writes in her introduction to Angel's Destiny that in this book we find a rare gem of a novel story of poetry that digs deep into the inner core of the soul, manifesting a deep reflection on the nature of violence.

This book is an example of how a creative artist can translate tragedy into meaning by taking the hard-ships of abuse and turning them into inspirational verse to help others also free themselves. It is characteristic of the authors generous soul that she adds a personal note on the inside cover to invite the reader to donate the book to a shelter for victims of domestic violence or abuse.

Angel's Destiny is delivered in sections that chronicle a journey through Illusions, Anger, Awareness, and Love, followed by pages of Tarot-like digital illustrations. The poet is on a mission and rises, Phoenix-like, by way of following her own sound advice:

POPPING
Snap, Crackle, and Popping
as the delayed memories
unfold.

Get it out,
work it out
or
your mind will
explode.

NEXT CENTURY'S CHILD:
COLLECTED POETRY AND A FEW STORIES FROM 1954-2007
JEHANAH WEDGWOOD
(SAN FRANCISCO)

Next Century's Child: Collected Poetry and a Few Stories From 1954-2007 by Jehanah Wedgwood (Meridien Press Works, P.O. Box 640024, San Francisco 94164, 415/928-8904: 2008), 172 pages, $25. ISBN 978-1891132209. meridienwriters@gmail.com

Beloved by the Bay Area poetry community, Jehanah Wedgwood passed away this year. She was the backbone of the long-running poetry series at Sacred Grounds Cafe in the City, and known for her pursuit of Celtic Studies, goddess spirituality, and Shamanism.

Welcome welcome whispered the trees
To the young girl alone in the forest
Welcome welcome sang the flowers
To the young girl alone with her child
Welcome they sang to the young mother
(from Young Mother)

Next Century's Child includes most of Wedgwood's writings, including poems from four chapbooks written over a 50-year career. Combining the mystical, and Druidic worlds that shaped her imagination with a keen observance of San Francisco urban life, Wedgwood offered something unique:

I've worked all day for 35 years with knives.
Brandishing scimitars at parsley and tarragon
Swords to chop the heads of carrots and turnips
Dismembering celery and onions and tomato,
Slicing chunks of gruyere and cheddar,
Spreading Normandy butter and softly bulging Brie.

I cut sandwiches with machetes, tearing lettuce apart
With my bare hands.

Working with swords for 35 years.
It gets to feeling like Im wielding Excalibur.
Im from a family of warriors.

May her memory bless all who knew and were touched by Jehanah Wedgwood.

IN THE BODY OF OUR LIVES
JEANNE WAGNER (KENSINGTON)

In the Body of Our Lives by Jeanne Wagner (Sixteen Rivers Press, P.O. Box 640663, San Francisco, 94164-0063. : 2011) $16. ISBN 978-0-9819816-3-5 . www.sixteenrivers.org

In the Body of Our Lives is Jeanne Wagner's second full-length collection, following The Zen Piano Mover which received the Stevens Manuscript Prize in 2004.

Jeanne Emmons writes that:
She activates the nuances of language itself, its near-lost etymologies and inherent double entendres, to explore the dark complications of home and relationship, grief, emotional deafness, the estranging skin, sin, and redemption. These poems move and amaze and consistently enlighten.
As the title steers us, many poems are studies in the relationship between the mind and body:

Unpredictable stranger, with at least four
humors and as many rumors.

No one can touch the dark fruit
of your interior.

Even my hands, fingered emissaries,
fail me there.

Soft, febrile machine whose hum
I hardly hear . . .
(from A Dialogue with the Body)

Like Stewart Florsheim, Wagner favors the ekphrastic poem. Poems are inspired by Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Georgia OKeefe and others.

Theyre only brushstrokes, his dawn
fishermen, brittle as insomniacs,

the black char of their boats battle-weary
as they sail fresh out of sleep

into a vast sumdge of daybreak, smmall
wakes scattered behind them

like flotsam on the water.
(from Impression: Sunrise,
after the painting of Claude Monet)

THE STRANGER DISSOLVES
CHRISTINA HUTCHINS (ALBANY)

The Stranger Dissolves by Christina Hutchins. ((Sixteen Rivers Press, P.O. Box 640663, San Francisco, 94164-0063. : 2011) $16. ISBN 978-0-9819816-2-8. www.sixteenrivers.org.

David St. John comments on this first collection by Albany's poet laureate, Christina Hutchins. The Stranger Dissolves melds both mind (intelligence and thought) and heart with startling complexity, intricacy, and intimacy. This is a volume to keep at ones bedside.

The poet, a philosophy and poetry professor at Pacific School of Religion, does not shy away from challenging topics:

I am leaving soon,
slipping to where language
will no longer find me,
my days a passage of blue
shadows smudging the linoleum
with wings.

Already I miss my mind at play:
salt flats splayed with meetings
of an incoming tide. I cant point
to the far field and find my way
to where--only a moment ago--
the wild geese rose.
(from The Physicist to His Daughter)

As with Wagners book, Hutchins is carefully attuned to the body and physical sensation:

I had the need of water around my skin.
Of course it was more: more than faucet rush or fist
of rain, I needed myself kicking my might

against a rolled swiftness where the fall enters
its pool below the rock. I swam alone,
opened my eyes to my own pale skin in a whirling

world going dark. Yellow, pink, ripples
of black, the dusking sky rode uneven gathers
pulled by a bodys submerged and quickened thread.
(from Night Swim, Northeast Kingdom, Vermont)