BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

ROOTS & TENDRILS:
PROSE AND POETRY OF A BERKELEY WRITERS’ WORKSHOP

Roots & Tendrils: Prose and Poetry of a Berkeley Writers’ Workshop (Berkeley Writers‘ Workshop, Berkeley), 20  poems, 246 pages, $15.95.  Front cover photograph by Mary Alyce Pearson; back cover photo by Mrianne Heller; interior photos and art by Nicholas Mastronarde, Phyllis Smith, and Trudi Frei-Buehler. ISBN 978-0-615-37085-9.

The volume by local writers is mostly devoted to pages of prose, fiction and creative non-fiction, but there are a handful of poems including this “Ode to El Niño” by Susan Austin:

The landscape is littered with their lifeless forms.
Once protectors, willing shields,
They are spent now,
Ribs shattered, innards revealed.
Cast aside,
Destiny beyond reach,
They are sad reminders of better days.
Loose limbed forms,
Tossed on
Fences
Sidewalks
Fields.
An umbrella wasteland.

WINDOWS & SKYLIGHTS
BENICIA FIRST TUESDAY POETS

Windows & Skylights, Anthology Number Three by Benicia First Tuesday Poets (Outskirts Press, Inc., Denver, CO: 2010) $14.95. Foreword by Robert M. Shelby, Benicia Poet Laureate (2008-2010). ISBN 978-1-4327-6343-5. www.outskirtspress.com

Twenty north-east Bay poets are gathered in Windows & Skylights, with photographs contributed by the poets as well. The anthology grows out of the “First Tuesday” group that meets in Benicia every month at the Benicia Public Library (newcomers are welcome), started by former Benicia poet-laureate Joel Fallon, and continued by Robert M. Shelby and now Ronna Leon, whose poem “Harm’s Way” is printed on page 34:

The Great Blue Heron rises out of the marshy
wasteland at the foot of the oil refinery.
The bird, magnificent and unlikely blends
against the smoky sky like a misplaced puzzle piece.
I keep thinking how I’d never let a child
wade in those waters.
The Heron sees the refinery ponds as wetland.
He’s like my son who joined the army.
My son believes the army holds opportunity.
He doesn’t fear the pond’s hidden hazards.
They’re both free creatures in harm’s way.
 

CONTINENT OF LIGHT
DAVID MADGALENE, EDITOR
(WINDSOR/PETALUMA)

Continent of Light, edited by David Madgalene (CreateSpace, 2011), 54 writers, 104 pages, $10.  Cover art by Christopher Luna; 8x10 format. Available from Amazon.
ISBN 978-1456358250. http://continentoflight.blogspot.com

The editor describes Continent of Light as “a cutting-edge collection of post-9/11 poetry unafraid to face current urgent social and cultural issues head on. These poems, truly ripped from today’s headlines, are of intrinsic interest not only to lovers of literature, but to anyone and everyone who has a stake in the world in which they live.”

INTERNATIONAL VIRGIN MARY
by Michelle Baynes

traveling Jalisco in Mexico
to the tattoo artist
each visit filling in the blanks
the stars on her serpentine robe
like paint by number
gold cobalt blue and a halo of filtered light
covering your strong back
protecting you
when you leave Petaluma
following you everywhere

THE BROADSIDER
AN ANNUAL MAGAZINE OF RESCUED POEMS

The Broadsider, An Annual Magazine of Rescued Poems (Poor Souls Press, Scaramouche Books, P.O. Box 236, Millbrae, CA 94030: 2010), Complete set, regular issue, with 40 sealed copies is $20; Individual broadsides are $3 each. www.yunews.com.

These are beautifully produced broadsides bound in a neat mailing: like getting a bunch of posters in the mail for redecorating your office!

FOURTEEN HILLS
THE SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Fourteen Hills, vol. 17.1-2011, Hollie Hardy, editor-in-chief; Leanne Milway, managing editor; Stephen Rosenshein, poetry editor; Lori Savageau, fiction editor. (Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., SF 94132: 2010). $15 for 1-year sub-scription; $28 for  2 years. Single issue: $9. You can order from Small Press www.spdbooks.org or at www. 14hills.net.

Paradise Farms
by Karina Borowicz

To the hiss of cicadas I kept picking hand over fist
dropping the big black berries into the white pail
they give you when you wander in trying to look calm
not desperate after driving out there like a  maniac
craving not so much berries as the act of gathering from the branch
plucking gently from the stem rolling one after another
into the palm till you can’t hold any more, then the heavy
kerplunk in the bucket, that simple three-part gesture repeated
till aching, with which I so needed to stain my hands

Spillway
Spillway/Tebot Bach
P.O. box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887

New editor, Susan Terris (San Francisco)

“Crossing Borders” will be the theme of the Winter 2012 issue. Submissions accepted July 1st through August 31st 2011.

     “Over and over as an editor, I say: Surprise me!,” writes the intrepid Susan Terris, who as reincarnated as editor of Spillway Magazine, after a brief hiatus luxuriating as a writer rather than fulfilling the demands of being the co-publisher, co-editor of Runes. For seven years, Terris with her “co,“ CB Follett, poet laureate of Marin, placed that beautiful journal into our hands.
    Terris, along with Follett, deserves to be surprised. She is one of the rarer poetry publishers/editors of literary zines who actually: 1. read every submission themselves (rather than relying on a committee of undergraduates); 2. respond to every poet-submitter with either encouraging words or gentle refusal; 3. follow-up with their readers through the delicate use of the preface or other form of correspondence in a way that combines integrity and old-world “class”; consistently deliver a beautifully produced, interestingly selected sampling of contemporary poetry when they say they are going to do it.
    Spillway is Terris’ latest project, a magazine that has been around since 1996 that features poetry, interviews, book reviews, and art. Now published by Tebot Bach under the stewardship of Mifanwy Kaiser, the semi-annual, perfect-bound journal is edited by Terris, as she says with “complete freedom to shape the journal as I wished.”
    She is creating each issue around a theme. Her inaugural volume selected poems not on the basis of style, but on the topic of “All in the Family.” A unique feature is the appearance in print, side-by-side, of several writers in one family, including Aliki, Tony and Willis Barnstone, and the couple Robin and Keith Ekiss. The next two editions are being planned on the themes “My First Time” (submissions accepted until March 31 for a June publication), and “Crossing Borders” (submissions accepted July 1st through August 31st for a December release). For info, go to http://tebotbach.org/spillway.html or inquire at Spillway2@tebotbach.org. For a one-year subscription, send a check for $16 to the address above.
    Susan Terris' poetry books include CONTRARIWISE, NATURAL DEFENSES, and FIRE IS FAVORABLE TO THE DREAMER. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Iowa Review, Field, The Journal, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. She had a poem from Field published in PUSHCART PRIZE XXXI. Ms. Terris had 2 new chapbooks published in 2009: The Wonder Bread Years and Double-Edged, and two came out in 2010: Bar None and Chapbook on the Marketing of the Chapbook. Her book Homelessness of Self  is available from Arctos Press. Visit her at: http://www.susanterris.com.

Child of My Child:
Poems and Stories for Grandparents

Kenneth and Sandi Salzmann have created a unique anthology, begun in 2009. In describing the inspiration behind Child of My Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents, Ken Salzmann says this is “not your grandparents‘ collection of poems and personal essays about grandchildren.”
    Salzmann notes that “the arrival of a new generation brings undeniable evidence of aging and mortality. That may be a particularly tough pill to swallow for the millions of Baby Boomers who have aged into this new role (and sometimes bristle at taking on traditional grandparent names).” Whether they like it or not, many baby-boomers now find themselves caretaking grandchildren as their own children struggle in an unpredictable economy.
    Among its 60 writers, Child of My Child features eight Bay Area writers, including Linda Lancione (Berkeley), John Oliver Simon (Oakland), Naomi Ruth Lowinsky (San Francisco), Meredith Escudier and Elaine Starkman (Walnut Creek), Pearl Karrer (Palo Alto), Lynore Banchoff (Menlo Park), and Arlen Mandell (Santa Rosa).
    Lancione and Simon share a strong connection. Her son is married to his daughter, and Tesla Rose, the subject of several poems in Child of My Child, is their granddaughter.
    Starkman, a popular creative writing teacher was recently featured in My Dreaming Waking Life: Sixty-Six Poems, Six Poets, a collection by Contra Costa County poets. She recalls taking a walk in a nearby apricot orchard with her grandson, Isaac, who was five at the time. She was inspired the child’s “sense of adventure,” which put her in mind of her own, very different childhood. She adds proudly, that Isaac, now 15, is a freshman in high school, and the sixth fastest runner of his age in Northern California.
    Remarking on the different kind of relationships, grandparents have with their children’s children, Starkman says, “We are able to interact with them in new ways,” and are possibly “more appreciative of grandkids than we had been of our own children.”
    Having a grandchild inspired essayist Meredith Escudier to wrote her first poems. She found the experience so profound that it seemed poetry was the “only genre that could even approach the emotions” she was wanting to express.

Baby Picture

I put your photograph
in a picture frame but
how strange
your little soft parts are enclosed
in hand-painted Venetian glass
right angles surround your face
squaring off your features
closely capping your pulsing fontanelle
posing supposing limits when
you are not limited not to this moment
and not to this space your
life is commencing your inner life
dancing unbridled prancing you
are a free-flow a torrent a rush
transforming freeforming roaring
a mountain river.
    --Meredith Escudier (East Bay)

Tesla Rose 14 Months: Redondo Park

Now you’re a big girl and you walk by yourself,
I spot you up the steps of the dark tower.
Up there, on the battlements, in the kitchen,
two witches, five or six, are making dinner
out of sand. Their names are Gretchen and Isis,
they know the secret language of fantasy.
Isis takes our order on an action figure:
Chow mein. Gretchen fills a blue bowl up with sand.
You empty sand on the deck and mouth the bowl.
Gretchen doesn’t understand the word agua.
What little water’s left was carried for miles
in my pocket, as you slept against my chest
in the May sun, past all your grandmothers’ doors.
      --John Oliver Simon (Oakland)

WORKS & DAYS
DEAN RADER (SAN FRANCISCO)

Works & Days by Dean Rader. (New Odyssey Series, Truman State University Press, Kirksville, MO: 2010), 40 poems, 96 pages, $24.95. Winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. With cover art, Desk, by DevonOpdenDries/Getty Images. ISBN: 978-1-935503-08-8. tsup.truman.edu.

Oh, golly, what a bunch of fun Dean Raders Works & Days is. To come upon such a book that makes me think, laugh, feel, and hear language anew! Where to begin?

There is nothing predictable in this book: thats the first thing. The volume opens with Traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmothers Funeral, I Write a Poem About Wallace Stevens, and places us, with the poet/narrator at Stevens grave in Hartford, then shifts to an in-flight scene en route to a funeral, returns to Stevens, back to grandmas funeral, and in the interim, engages in a contemplation--both somber and devilish--about fellow passengers in that soft silver coffin in the sky and their (our) vulnerability as individuals aging toward death and the possibility we all might die sooner than we think, i.e., as in a plane crash:

The elderly woman next to me
In 7D has been peeking at this poem
For several minutes.

I dont mind,
Because the next line is this:
She will die before I do,
As will the man two rows in front
In 5C and his wife in 5D. But then again,
All of us on the plane could get there

In seconds. In the reverse burial that is this sky,
We die forward into the nothing that is not yet revealed.
(from Traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmothers Funeral, I Write a Poem About Wallace Stevens)

Rader does his fair share of contemplating the life and death issues, but mostly his mind strays over being-and- nothingness struggles of identity and degrees of consciousness. The poems have their deadly serious side, but overall the playfulness and experimentation --in terms of ideas as well as the forms the poems take--win us over. As I was reading the book, I kept thinking of Lucretius exhortion to his goddess, that he be able to deliver his facts in honeyed words: poetry doesnt get much better than when narration and music, reality and imagination, seriousness and giddiness all hook up.

A sequence of poems are entitled Self Portraits though Im not sure what is especially self-reflective about them. In Self Portrait: Rejected Inaugural, the predominant voice is a we:

The land was land before we were us.
Our regret, freshly cut, clumps in the front yard.

History, memorys buttonhole, needs a new suit:
Its shoes, scuffed and spit-shined, wait by the door.

We wear ourselves as though it means something,

With the idea of inaugural and the likelihood that these poems may have been written during the last presidential election, there is a sense the I is in fact the we of the American people. The blurring or confusion of an I/you or a I/we or a you/we plays havoc through the book, and becomes a kind of extended leitmotif through poems featuring the characters of Frog and Toad. In the first of this series, Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness,--post-colonial grad-school gibberish if I have ever heard it--there is a gutsy humor in the poems interplay between two amphibian identities. These frog-and-toad pieces serve as comic relief, perhaps a bit of nose-thumbing at linguistic contortions of the post-modern age that leave us commoners cold, and out in the cold, making us think our common-speech is dull-witted while layers of abstractions are profound.


Rader can deliver parodies on poems about writing poetry as well as a cleanly written love poem:

I want to know the word
For your back in the morning,

The noun for the sound you make
When my tongue goes along your breast.

The verb for my mouth
On yours.
(from Love Poem in 5 Couplets + I Line)

He uses most of the poets toolkitthe ancient art of repetition, call and response two-liners, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, dashes, italics, ellipses, and bracketsand when those do not prove to be enough, he invents some new tools for doing what he wants in order to make us see poems afresh. Dont ask me what using three colons at the end of one line accomplishes or why he likes to use a blank underline _______ in several poems, but because he has produced many poems so competently, I bow to his right to challenge my inner English-teacher.

Works & Days may not be the best book for someone relatively new to reading poetry, or unversed in the canon of (in particular) Western literature. After all, the title nods to one of the classics of that canon (and, yes there is a poem written in direct homage to that ancient Greek author who is not Homer). These are not acces-sible poems in the style of a Billy Collins or Mary Oliver and, dont get me wrong, that is not a criticism, for those and other easy-to-read poets have brought poetry a revived audience.

Neither are Raders poems mind-fucks in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet tradition (you know you've got a problem when you have to describe your work by such a visual epithet!). Rader is for the rest of us: those who have read a lot, know our literary history, cherish its best and brightest, but also love pop culture, Dexter, True Blood, Mad Men, and even Criminal Minds and Project Runway, as well as poets as crazily different as Stephen Dobyns, W.S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Coleman Barks, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigel, Brian Turner, Donald Justice, Chana Bloch, May Swenson, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Waniak Nelson and Robert Frost, and refuse to give any of them up because they are overly- or underly- accessible.

Rader is a model of madman freedom that has been persuasively bent to the craftsman's bridle. In the poems in Works & Days, we can travel from this:

No one spreads your butter like Toad.
His heart is jelly, his tongue is jam.
Hell nibble the crust right off of your bread.
Give him your fruitcake, and hell give you his ham.
No one spreads your butter like Toad.
(from Frog and Toad Sing the Birthday Blues: 38)

to this:

Corrido for the Lost Girls of Juarez

Of the men who take them we say:
If not in this world, then the next

Of the men who take them we say:
May the body you needed never be yours

Of the men who take them we say:
May your best moment come when your cock turns to dust/
Of the men who take them we say:
May we find you before the devil knows youre dead

and to this:

And if the mirror asks nothing of the face
fixed in its gaze but a moment of clarity? To see
is to be seen, but to reflect is to enter that space
in which the self doubles down. Someone said let be
be the finale of seem, as though existence and
perception form the wishbone of knowledge.
(from Contingency Triptych: Three Self Portraits,
section II. As Robert Hayden to Michael Jackson)

-- Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

TWO NEW BOOKS BY BAY AREA JEWISH POETS

CHAPTER & VERSE: Poems of Jewish Identity

FROM THE WELL OF LIVING WATERS: Voices of a 21st Century Synagogue

Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity, edited by Sim Warkov with an introduction by Jane Miller (Oakland). 10 poets: Dan Bellm, Rose Black, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Margaret Kaufman, Jacqueline Kudler, Melanie Maier, Murray Silverstein, Susan Terris and Sim Warkov. Cover and book design by Tania Baban-Natal. (Conflux Press, Prescott, AZ: 2011, ISBN 9788-0-9826024-3-0), 92 pages, $16. To order: www.confluxpress.com or simw1@comcast.net

From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of a 21st Century Synagogue, edited by Lenore Weiss, with preface by Rabbi Burt Jacobson of Kehilla Community Synagogue (Piedmont). 25 poets, mostly affiliated with Kehilla. Illustrated by Hannah Sarvasy, with cover by Richard Miles. (Lenore Weiss and Kehilla Community Synagogue, Piedmont, CA: 2011, ISBN 978-0-615-42959-5). $15. To order: www.kehillasynagogue.org.

Both Chapter & Verse and From the Well of Living Waters remind me of those community and regional cookbooks put together as fundraisers for churches and synagogues, sailing clubs and schools. There are a lot of wonderful recipes alongside some rather mundane ones: chicken kiev next to macaroni and cheese. I wish the two editors--Chapter & Verses Sim Warkov of Marin and From the Wells Lenore Weiss of Oakland--had worked together to produce a larger, richer anthology. One wonders if the net had been cast a little further than who knew whom in gathering the poets for these collections, there might have been a wider range of voices. Chapter & Verse is lenient with its 10 poets, allowing each to present several poems; From the Well of Living Waters, represents poets of a specific organization.

In his preface of Well, Kehilla Rabbi Burt Jacobson writes that the poems found in this precious anthology testify to the central Jewish calling of uncovering the sacred hidden in the mundane, while Jane Miller describes Chapter & Verse as an unflinching record of the ordinary. Each books introduction does get something right: the Jewish identities that are presented are offered through the lens of personal relationships, families and family histories, and encounters with a somewhat mute or pantheistic Nature.

There are some wonderful poems of Jewish family history, the requisite selection of poems about the Holocaust, and poems mentioning Eastern European shtetl life. There are poems about life in the Jewish ghettoes of America, and meditations on the dynamics between parents and children, adults and grandparents, and questions about Jewish identity that result from intermarriage. Of the two books, From the Well is more inclined toward exploration of Jewish spirituality; it is intriguing that nearly half of the poems mention breath or bird-life, images that have long resonated with spirit/soul/neshama in literary iconography.

To take these two books at their word of showcasing poems of Jewish identity, lets look at some of what made it in.

Chana Bloch is represented in both books with several poems that have been previously anthologized or printed. I particularly thought the choice to begin Chapter & Verse with her poem Flour and Ash was a good one. It echoes Paul Celans brilliance of being doggedly literal and symbolically cryptic at the same time, and like his Todesfugue (1944), the Holocaust hovers over Blochs image of an artist mixing her materials:

Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy
particulate smoke
thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow.
The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp
with their boxy suitcases,
ashen shoes.

From the Old World to Flatbush, there is a natural arc created in the selection of these first few poems in Chapter & Verse. They are followed by poems by the books editor, Sim Warkov, whose biography mentions a traditional Jewish upbringing but whose poems show a decided turning away from the faith of his ancestors. The poet/narrator has turned his back on the Book of Leviticus. Judaism is baggage, and references to Torah lace his poems on their way to being discarded for an ultimate secularism. In Tetragrammmaton, Gods name causes anger, rebellion, rejection, and defiance, yet the poem ends with a nearly Kabbalistic yearning:

I turn inward, burning with the four Hebrew letters
my forefathers would never have forsaken,
would never have spurned.

As we move through the other eight poets in Chapter & Verse, we are treated to poems that express elements of Jewish cultural and family identity but there are also quite a few poems that seem to have nothing to do with Jewishness, or at least it wasnt clear to me what the connection was. Margaret Kaufmans Tawny Avatar, about the death of her father, is a beautiful lyric poem but its relevance to this volume of Jewish verse is obscure. Rose Blacks anguished poems about her validity as a Jew in light of mixed parentage represent a real issue for many who are born of a Gentile mother and Jewish father, or who feel Jewish but do not feel legitimized. (Hitler would not have had a problem identifying them as Jewish.) Blacks poem resonance with ones written by Hedy Straus in the Kehilla anthology. For comparison:

half of me from pickled herring in New York
half of me from fields of corn in Indiana

all my mothers ancestors from Poland
all my fathers from Alsace-Lorraine

all the Jews who came before my mother
all the Catholics who came before my father
-- from Invitation by Rose Black (Oakland)

I am from the sacred Heart of Jesus
buried deep inside a kreplach
I am from jelly donuts after mass
on the way home from shul
Im from matzoh
and the Irish soda bread of affliction
Im wandering in the desert
looking fro my catechism class
Im from my bubbe in Tereisenstadt
and my zayde in Auschwitz
My first holy communion dress is stained
with bloody magenta borscht
Im Police Chief Callahans great-granddaughter
Im the shiksa at the bar mitzvah
the kike at the communion rail
-- from I Am by Hedy Straus (El Cerrito)

These poems are what I liked best about the two volumes; precise in detail, facile in their language about language itself (balancing English, Yiddish, Hebrew, inherited immigrant tongues), and culling rich memories of recent European and American Jewish history. But, as my friend Ken Blady has taught me through his magnificent research on Jews in distant lands, Jews have looked like, sounded like and reflected whatever far-flung cultures they have landed in and I wish the two books had searched out Jewish poets of African, Chinese, Latin ancestry (perhaps a future volume?). Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican Jewish-American poet, was one exception to the mostly northern European mix in the two volumes.

In books devoted to European-Jewish ancestry, of course, there will be poems of the Holocaust. It is a further tragedy of that disaster that Jewish literary culture has been dominated by poems on the theme of the Holocaust and less concerned with Jewish spiritual renewal. The wounds will remain open for ages especially as the worlds despots recreate the systematic annihilation of human beings.

Stewart Florsheims Statement Recording the Property of Jews (From the Well) and Susan Terris Holocaust Museum: Crematorium II (Chapter & Verse) are two extremes of a type of Holocaust poem where the facts and figures of methodical genocide are chillingly juxtaposed with the physical presence of individuals about to be murdered.

Of the poems in the two volumes, certain ones stand out. Yiskah Rosenfeld's A Lesson in Fractions (From the Well) about a man perpetually dividing a small bit of casserole to stave off memories of starvation has a music in its repetitiveness and a surprising power in its apt use of multisyllabics:

And so he halves and halves, dutifully eating,
seditiously bequeathing a crumb of solidarity
to all other children of children of immigrants,
meticulously sacrificing the minute remains to the god of waste.

Rafaella Del Bourgo bravely tackles the subject of sexual liberation in two distinctive poems in Chapter & Verse. The Jewishness of the poems is organic to the Israeli backdrop of The Queen of Sheba Hotel, Eilat, Israel, 1966 in the first poem, and to the subject matter of a conservative rabbinic student tempted by his Lilith in the second poem.

Melanie Maier's quiet shorter poems (Chapter & Verse) are a refreshing contrast to longer, more expository verses.

There are poems in each volume that seem to have nothing to do with Jewish identity except that they are written by Jewish poets. This is more true of the poems in From the Well, especially those by Teri Gruenwald, Roy Mash, or Leah Koricans meditation on the Ganges (Sight Seen) and Barbara Rhines bland mountain-climbing poems. I suppose because this book represents poets from a congregation, they do not purport to explore the issue of Jewish identity as in Chapter & Verse.

I am sure these books will find their readership; with anthologies, an audience grows exponentially through the numbers of poets represented in the book. For me, there wasnt a lot that was new here or that inspired as the best of what poetry can offer: intellectual challenge, emotional spark, and aesthetic pleasure through music and form. For Jews whose identity comes via family and bloodline, there will be familiarity, sympathy and recognition in these pages.

For those interested in Judaism and its dense and fascinating history and passageways, there are only a handful of poems to satisfy, most notably those by Bellm. In one of Chana Blochs poems, The Converts, the poet watches six converts praying intensively during a Yom Kippur service, and worries that if they keep it up well be here all night. The poem ends:

The converts sway in white silk,
their necks bent forward in yearning
like swans,
and I covet
what they think weve got.

In terms of contemporary Jewish-American identity, the magic is in that yearning. What Id love to see is a book by those who are working within Jewish faith tradition, making alive what was nearly destroyed through centuries of pogroms and cultural destruction. Perhaps this has to come from those who have found what the secular Jewish population has lost.
-- Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser, first published at examiner.com

THE BOOK OF GRETEL
ZARA RAAB (SAN FRANCISCO)

The Book of Gretel by Zara Raab (Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40323: 2010), 16 poems and short prose pieces, 36 pages, $14 . Edited by Leah Maines; cover art by Judith Nelson; author photo by Lee Perlman. ISBN 1-59924-566-3. www.finishinglinepress.com.

Michael McFee of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, writes of The Book of Gretel by Zara Raab: This new embodiment of Gretel may transport her tale and its characters to the woods of northern California coast, but it is as wild and weird and haunting as the original. In Zara Raabs strong hands, this becomes a story of identity, of being forsaken and being found, of learning to live as an outcast while not abandoning the possibility of returning home. The Book of Gretel is a stirring poetic series and an impressive first collection.

THE COMING RAIN

Even a vagabond palace
shelters us against the waters
raining down on us in winter

and permeating our beings
in every season. Disaster,
that master of surprise, may touch

down any time, imminent,
And yet he remains these eons
quite seasonal and relenting.

So far, our forms endure even
as we melt into sea or air.
Our forms endure, like small tin cups

set out to catch the coming rain.

Raab expects to produce a full-length collection of her work this year entitled Swimming the Eel.

FAMILY POEMS
LARRY BERESFORD (OAKLAND)

Family Poems by Larry Beresford (Redheaded Press, 5253 Trask Street, Oakland, CA 94601), 11 poems, 42 pages, $8. ISBN 145377808X. Available on Amazon. www.larryberesfordpoet.com.

Larry Beresford has been around the Bay Area poetry scene for many years, delivering delicate insights and honest poems. His previous book of poems, Under a Gibbous Moon: The Adventures of Mister Funky, was published by Broken Shadow Publications. Of the many poems in this new collection, Shes So Great to Come Home To caught the attention of Isadora Alman who claims it is one of the lovliest love poems I have ever read, and Clive Matson suggests that while Beresford's razor wit does cut to the bone swiftly and accurately, it also produces an overflow of warmth.

Here's an excerpt from Where I Come From, the first poem in the chapbook.

It started innocently enough.
First I heard his laugh
issuing from my mouth,
then his humming tuneless melodies
and familiar throat clearing

until now I hear my fathers voice
every time I try to explain
some arcane fact
about the way the world works.

BODY RHYMES
DONNA EMERSON
(SONOMA COUNTY)

Body Rhymes by Donna Emerson (Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40323: 2010), 20 poems, 36 pages, $14 . Edited by Leah Maines; cover photo by the author; author photo by Greg Colvin. ISBN 1-59924-434-9. www.finishinglinepress.com.

Donna Emerson is a licensed clinical social worker and professional photographer, bringing two unique skills to bear on image-rich poems. Susan Terris describes Emerson as a poet who speaks eloquently and elegantly about the body, focusing on sexuality as well as on love and loss.

RED CAR

I sat at the foot of your bed
expecting you might kick me,

while you inspected mme over your
smudged glasses.

You said nothing.
I waited. I asked how youre

feeling today.
You snorted.

That good? I asked.
You tilted your head sideways

like an opponent in chess.
(from Red Car)

WHERE A PAINTER MEETS A POET
RONNIE HOLLAND (DUBLIN), POET
LILY XU (LIVERMORE), ARTIST

Where a Painter Meets a Poet, poems by Ronnie Holland and artwork by Lily Xu. (Printed by Custom Sports Cards: www.customsportscards.com: 2010), 19 poems with 19 corresponding full-color illustrations, 44 pages. To order contact one of the creators: ronnie-rr@comcast.net or lily.xu@comcast.net.

A beautiful collaborative effort from Ronnie Holland, former poet laureate for Dublin, California, and Lily Xu, a specialist in Chinese water-color technique. The book is organized into seasonal sections and convey the ephemerality of actions and memory as both move through time.

We saw Franks star shoot across the morning sky
As he sped to his next adventure.
We knew its meaning during that walk
Before the news arrived.
(from Stars)

FOUR CHAPBOOKS FROM SCOTT PERRY (BERKELEY)

* Gathering Stones: Memories of my Experiments with Spirituality, Community, and the Arts in the 1970s
* Saving My Self, Poems 2001-2002
* Music from a Farther Room, Poems February- May 2002
* Chasing Reality, Poems May-August 2002

In his professional life, Scott M. Perry has helped bring words to print for many Bay Area poets and writers. As co-owner of Archetype Typography, one of the oldest typesetting shops in the area, Perry contributed to Hambone, Nate Mackey's avant-garde literary journal, Yardbird, the reader put out by Ishmael Reed and Al Young, materials related to the Before Columbus Foundations book awards, and many others. Through a thirty-year career, Perry has quietly been plying his skills in a number of art forms, as a vocalist in early-music groups, as a visual artist and dancer exploring the relationships between religious ritual and performing art, and as a poet.
At last, Perry has given us several chapbooks that chronicle his productions. Gathering Stones: Memories of my Experiments with Spirituality, Community, and the Arts in the 1970s explores work Perry did at Reba Place Church in Evanston, Illinois, and as a student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. The other three chapbooks present Perry's poetry created during a prodigious two-year period from 2001-2002, and often explore similar spiritual themes of longing and discovery.

Wormhole Freewheeling Elijah, 8-6-2001

I see a light (tunneling photons)
that beams that burns.
Endings come (only after they do)
swifter than beginnings.
Storms fall silent (when is a boat not a book?)
in the presence of. Love
takes its toll (a cat with nine lives)
at the bridge between life and death.
Christ, will I never (your question in a moment)
know what you meant to say?
Space is folded into tow parts.
(Like Gaul, which is in three.
Like God.) To see what is
(the scales fall from my eyes)
is to imagine the world as if it were
capable of sustaining life.
(Lucrezia Borgia out of a job.)
(from Saving My Self, Poems 2001-2002)
***
Visitation, 4-26-2002

The alien came into my shop
again today. (He says he feels safe here
among the books and magazines, signs
of advanced civilization.) I asked him
what he was doing here on this planet.
He said that his people were
exploring the universe, looking
for others like themselves, people
with whom to share the vast spaces
between the pockets of intelligent life.
His skin was waxy and green
as if hed been grown in a cupboard.
His lidless eyes were indigo
and slightly moisst, like a cows.
And he looked at me as if I were
a friend from childhood,
or a character from
his favorite bedtime story.
(from Music from a Farther Room, Poems February-May 2002)
***
Breathing Water, 8-14-2002

We walk in shadow.
Fear of darkness is
fear of imagination.
Troubled sleep.
Dreams that shatter
hope on a hillside
of vague promises and delusions.
We think we can
control the world
by controlling our passions,
but we can control neither.
Altogether vain, yet
in the attempt we sometimes find
pieces of our salvation.
(God will see us
if no one else does.
God will watch us
drown.)
(from Chasing Reality, Poems May-August 2002)

Child hanging from a tree branch at Mt. Tamalpais park. Photo by Jannie M. Dresser