Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Sarah Fox's Invisible Wife (2017)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Sarah Fox's Invisible Wife (2017) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! This is actually the second review of Invisible Wife, after Greg Bem's review over at Yellow Rabbit. You can see Banks' original review here.

A dance with the carousel, Invisible Wife, a symbolist dance that lives on the edge of ecstatic experience, a woman’s scream that bangs in the New Age Renaissance Republic of poetry. Sarah Fox (Poet, writer, teacher, astrologer, worker, placenta encapsulator, artist, grandmother, resister) lives and writes in Minneapolis. She has published two books with Coffee House Press.

The cover of this Chapbook is an excellent introduction, an art nouveau piece, the head of a woman seems to be screaming over enlarged legs, and if you look again, in a trick of the light, it looks like she is a dancer with arms in an arc over her head. Both states are intertwined in this Art Nouveau poetry Chapbook, at once a protest at the state of power conundrums that hurt us and at the same time a dance with darkness, light and the state of serial relationships.

The poetry begins with a poem about Frida Kahlo, as if spinning mythologies and stories, about the Symbolist painter who was in a severe trolley accident and spent a lot of time in a body cast, painting from her bed. A controversial relationship with the painter Diego, Frida Kahlo did not have any children although she had several miscarriages.

“Don’t take the bus. Order burritos.

In Mexico City and Chiapas, women’s

rights. In Frida Kahlo, Diego. In Diego,

Marxism and a few babies.”

Poet Fox is spinning a symbolist poetry confection with edge, a blue rendition of a song.

The title itself, Invisible Wife, touches on the lost woman inside the darkness of her husband’s psyche, his power and his disconnect, someone not fully in her power, at the behest of the patriarchy. He is represented by snake imagery and as someone lost in a forest, suggesting violence. The wife is redemption, “My heart is also invisible, to me. But it sings in tune.”

Symbolist imagery of the goddess, the crone, nature, the body, birth, death and dancing, this poetry sings. Cadence is achieved through repetition, and spins into dialectic, spins into wholeness, spins into magic. A truthtelling, that haunts the nature of intimate relationships, serial marriages, the old school advice from Good Housekeeping magazine in 1955, the reality of power conundrums in intimate relationships and the effects of broken marriages on the body and the psyche. From First Aid Kit

“Radical lying is an unimaginable violence –

a violence now imprinting in psyche everywhere:

I hear the leader speak or see his words and I bleed

through my outerwear. I bleed all the way

back through my wedding day. I wore

blue velvet. Lol.”


“I’m imagining a tail on the wedding dress.

A whip. Something ugly like driftwood.

Something like a deer climbing out

of driftwood. Someone lifting

the driftwood up out of the river

they were crying into. Someone

lifting medicine out of the bride and

lifting the bride out of the ghost.

Someone exorcising the ghost from the truth.”

Enigmatic, as if clothed in mystery, a story is being told in broken thought forms, sometimes in narrative, a one-sided conversation. The story itself lives in symbols and pictures.

In Save Me – for Worldwide Discotheque, it as if the poem is set in a dance hall, people are dancing, the lines of poetry are people dancing and saying “Save Me”. An ingenue poetica of truth and protest,

“We need to think up better endings for our stories.

These tears of mine are justified. To be honest, every Jesus

is terrible. What’s another word for dance? Mother’s milk.

Save me. Endless darkness that is not darkness.”

A brilliant invocation against the violence of the war economy society, the brokenness in ended intimate relationships, the poetry spinning mythologies into dance. A brilliant read. Invisible Wife by Sarah Fox.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Robert Hogg's from Lamentations (2016)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Robert Hogg's from Lamentations (2016) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

from Lamentations, a cinematique look at childhood and death in a Western Canadian town, a “memoir” in poetry that remembers balloons and soft edges, the romance of cowboys, inside difficult times. Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta. He has been on the Canadian literary scene since the 1960’s, studying at the University of British Columbia he was involved with the Black Mountain poets and the Tish poetry movement. He has earned a Phd in literature and taught N.A. poetry and poetics at Carleton University in Ottawa until 2005. Poet Hogg has written 6 books.

from Lamentations, begins with a poetic prose introduction that freefalls into childhood memories of trolley rides and watching Roy Rogers at the cinema, playing “cowboys and Indians” shooting at each other with toy guns, playing dead. And how the Poet laments, as if it was all just fun and games, romance, as if no one ever really died, the fight of good vs. evil, the shooting of horses wasn’t real. A series of poems follow, pared in free verse, experiential, a brush with Imagism, Sitting on Ginger, Ahead (in memoriam, Bob Creeley), The Creative, A Fallen Wall to climax into a mix of poetic prose and free verse in Summer of Sixty three – for Jamie and Carol – on Jamie’s 70th and to end with Synapse Mid-Morning January, as if in epilogue. The short staccato lines in broken thought train are barren and lightening, the nature imagery and Zen of New Age poetry.

A Fallen Wall

Is this a little like the end of the world?

Is this a small blip on the screen called life?

Listen to the small pounding of the rain.

It make of your forehead

a fallen wall

beyond which there is no longer

a boundary to cross

only a damp ground

oozes like a wet wound

aching to be closed.

The Poet quotes “Porgy and Bess”, Nina Simone and a Black spiritual, the poetry like a reconciliation for the dead and dying, an apologia for the violence of the Western world. This poetry is written at the apex of the life of the Poet, and is reminiscent of Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats:

“That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies . . . “

The Poet is older, looking through the specter of the Spirit world that like a veil has begun to descend and enfold, a cinematic in grey sepia casting into nether worlds.

A fantastical read inside the Canadian landscape, a song of the Canadian West, an idea of celebration after a long journey. from Lamentations from Robert Hogg and above/ground press.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here. This is actually the fourth review of Albanian Suite, after Amanda Earl's review, one by Edric Mesmer, and another by Ryan Pratt over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

This brilliant Chapbook, Albanian Suite is the gift of Hugh Thomas. Poet Thomas lives and works in Fredericton, New Brunswick as a mathematics professor at the University of New Brunswick. He has published Franzlations, “a collection of illustrated Kafka remixes”, chapbooks and been published in various journals 1cent #404, Numero Cinq, BafterC, dig, the Dusie poetry blog amongst others.

In the Acknowledgments, he presents his work as having spun off the poems of Albanian poet Visar Zhiti amongst others, not as a strict translation, because he does not understand Albanian, but this Writer suspects in the true spirit of Albanian.

In the background, down some cobblestone street on a rainy day, Paul Simon sings, “April, Come she will” “When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;/ May, she will stay,/ Resting in my arms again.”

This Writer appreciates and revels in the thick, rich images, as if paintings of a certain noblesse oblige, the lost and present circumstance of decay of the old world Europe, in the new. The metaphors in poetry drip with love and remorse and the passage of time, as if the stone remains despite the rain. From Music I heard with you, “The choir in the clouds hums a Bach cantata/ but someone in the world is coughing/ and Bach is galloping on horseback/ gazing into his crystal of disinterest./ The fierce demons pursuing him/ now just seem wistful.”

As if the last line of defense, the poetry can be heavily laconic as in The Strange Mine of Pork Poetry – “Not enough, those phased lectures of miasma given by a mime – I plugged myelf into the electrical circuit, getting an immediate shock./ The stratagem that sold me the ruins offered drums and furniture, contact with poets leery of bestsellers, literary arms, or –sob!-restaurant meals./ We made examinations down the strange mine of pork poetry, grew wings, became curious about the flowering shrubs among the ruins of ten maps and the vaults of fish.” Also in Sappho II – “cadence address catch dreams/ pays and agree, chlorate of poems,/ empathic, the old epidemic/ things themselves”.

Tucked into the body of the work are two beautiful New Age "translations":

Clear

"After so many

clouds

one

by one

out come the stars


I breathe in

the chill

left me

by the sky’s

colour


Myself

a fugitive

image


Caught

in an eternal

circuit"

(translated from the Italian of Giuseppe Ungaretti)

and,

Stars

"When night comes,

I stand on the steps and listen,

stars are swarming in the garden

and I stand in the dark.

Listen, a star just fell with a clang!

Don’t walk on the grass in bare feet;

my garden is full of shards."

(translated from the Swedish of Edith Sodergran)

As if one long lament on love lost, the corruption of love in post-modern times, the passage of time, the grey and violence of post-modern times, the hard technocracy, the unsatisfactory nature of postmodern poetry, perhaps how everything has grown old. As if the world has existed inside some long ago war for too long.

Key of Roses, Bruges

for maria erskine

"Demobilized pigeons throng the park

where something happened.

We wait for each other. We cross the pool,

raising barely a ripple.

Some mythological animal

-you said griffin, I said narwhal-

stopped us with an extended claw,

said something in Flemish about life and gardens.

The windows were illuminated even if we weren’t,

and there was dancing among the chimneys.

Overhead, let down on a string out of heaven,

a glockenspiel, as such a total disappointment!"

A celebration of the New Age in poetry, thick with European sensibility and the love diaspora N.A. A fantastical read of Old World Europe, Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Pearl Pirie's vertigoheel for the dilly (2014)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Pearl Pirie's vertigoheel for the dilly (2014) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

vertigoheel for the dilly is a fantastical Chapbook by Pearl Pirie that is a revelation of the Canadian fascist undertoad of the New Age. Poet Pirie has published 2 books of poetry with a third volume coming from BookThug in 2015. She lives in Ottawa and has launched chapbooks, blogs, a micro press and is a radio host, occasionally teaching poetry workshops.

As if howlin’ and howlin’ big at the moon, the enigmatic often dislocated wordscapes present a game, to see behind the curtain, what is being said, not said, what is happening, not happening, a truncated presentation, of the life and times in 21st century N.A. The seemingly disembodied thoughts brought together for a couple of lines, a free flowing Zen of creativity and landscape within very broken places.

The themes presented include ill health/growing old, the state of the ecology/the 21st century, a missing father, sex and conflicted love lives.

“polyps in the colon complement the diverticulosis./ a sort of spilled lego in the digestion.”

“Living La Vida Ibuprofen. Neutral sparrows/ are not imbued with mites.”

and the long poem goes on to mention the ecology of the oceans,

“the seas are emptying, the only choice left/ is the fish in the barrel. breed, fish, breed.”

About ¾ of the way through the long poem there is presentation of a missing father:

“the poem takes the sidewalk chalk “welcome home dad”/ powerwashes off the “wel”, or adds a chalk outline of a child.”

“in the market, rows of bouquets/ father is gone, doesn’t care which colour.”

In the background as if in dialogue with the Reader is the unfolding of a story of conflicted love perhaps the product poetry the manifestation of an underground war. It begins slowly,

"it's as romantic as the attachment of a couple's/ cuddle-bed-sores, growing into one scab."

“for all its 7,200 square kilometers it’s a small country really and time’s a bullet train across it. our time? oh, not ours.”

“look at the lupines, inhale the hummingbird. these are the panacea, the cancellation of everything short of Auschwitz.”

“‘hyperlogalia medical’. Did you mean hyperlocal paralegal? um,/ no. I mean stories overflow any social container or contentment./ only lack of mutual is pathological. otherwise, all glows.”

and like a dirge, the dance, the long poem heats up:

“frost-slapped cheeks applied via Avon, ‘talk to him’ you instructed,/ rub his hands, keep him with us. (we never had touched.)"

“sanguine sans glum, stand-up, wipe sebum, beach bum,/ I’ve been dead to you for 4 changes of addresses.”

As if drawing from the tradition of poetry influenced by war, perhaps T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the introspective and disconnected thoughts in vertigoheel for the dilly are a distinctly Canadian take on a Western world bound by war.

Often poems work on different levels, something about the poem, draws you in, becomes somehow about you or about anyone that reads it, it becomes about us. vertigoheel for the dilly, a very powerful read from The People’s Poet, Pearl Pirie.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Amish Trivedi's The Destructions (2015)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Amish Trivedi's The Destructions (2015) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

Byline: Subterranean Blue Poetry
Title of Book: The Destructions
Author: Amish Trivedi
Publisher: above/ground press
Date of Publication: 2015
Page Count: 17

“pockets full of shells”
- from Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine


The Destructions is the 5th Chapbook by Amish Trivedi, a Poet, Poetry Editor and Professor at Roger Williams University in America. He has earned degrees from the University of Georgia and Brown University. His poetry has been published in many journals, he writes Book Reviews and is a co-editor of the literary journal N/A.

A loud, stereographic offering in staccato rhythms, with the careful choosing and juxtapositions of a few words, like a bomb going off. Rooted in the sensuality of the physical union, the war economy North America, the sex in a box economy, the violence is presented as ended possibilities. Love/sex outside of covenant is war.

"Fifth Wheel

Light
in a moment
   of regeneration:    thirty-seven    minutes of waiting

in heat. Warnings of
light massacres
    and a manifestation

of detachments."


"Manifold

One set of
words for our
   inside voice:    letters spray-    painted to

appear in
magazines. This
    night is a dream

of violence coming."

Poet Trivedi uses medical images, the disembodied, a love affair as surgery, playing with images of death.

In "Four Destructions

And another
and stationary
    level three coma     and everything     tired of

staying for anyone
other than anything
    beyond neutralities

and."

Also, the Poet plays with language and morphing words that are the titles of the vignette poems: Destructionette, Destructatron, Destructagedon, Destructocution, Destructionista, Destructitarium. I suspect anger at the violence of love life North America, that plays into word constructions and staccato poetry in the Beat tradition. A masculine view with the theme of the “sex as death” oeuvre that is a brilliant excursion in the heat of a Summer evening. The Destructions by Amish Trivedi.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Jennifer Kronovet's Case Study: With (2015)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Jennifer Kronovet's Case Study: With (2015) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

Byline: Subterranean Blue Poetry
Title of Book: Case Study: With
Author: Jennifer Kronovet
Publisher: above/ground press
Date of Publication: 2015
Page Count: 24

“I was hit hard by the light so bright it burned
And all at once I knew she’d understand . . . “
- from Boy Inside the Man by Tom Cochrane

Case Study: With by Jennifer Kronovet is a brilliant turn on narrative discourse poetry. Poet Kronovet is published extensively in journals, including Aufgabe, Bomb, Review, Fence, Boston Review amongst others. She translates poetry and has taught at Washington University, Missouri; Columbia University and Beijing Normal University. She is also the Co-Editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: The Journal of Poetry in Translation and has published a book of poetry, Awayward (BOA Eitions, 2009).

This poetry exists in the realm of magic. The narrative poetry is enigmatic, with a certain Zen of understanding that weaves the esoteric with reality. The poetry is centered around “the boy”, as if the Poet is raising a young male child and this is her experience of her son from her view inside the world of culture.

“With the Boy, with Myself

He has thoughts he doesn’t think about. Birds might wake him, but they don’t. My thoughts feel like speech – how one animal makes nature – until I speak to him. We use words like a tree uses light: there is a process we don’t see but do.

A kid I don’t know hits another I don’t know. I say stop stop to myself. Speech will keep happening against me. The boy will wake to cry.”

“What the Boy Who Wants to See His Heart

He says the moon comes with us when we drive at night. He says in front of the trees behind the trees in front of the trees behind the trees. He says I have eyes. He says goodbye fish. He says the moon comes with us. The heart is a rumor inside your heart. He says a rumor is a man wearing a mask.”

The feminine mystique of wholeness and creationist mythologies are celebrated. At the essence, this poetry captures the grace of a lost world, a world of magic. The child is the catalyst for the magic of new beginnings, a life being introduced to the “machine.” As if all the hopes and dreams of possibility collide with the Poet’s understandings of the world.

“With the Boy, Inside the Museum

A painting of horses charging in a war. The war is subtle but the horses aren’t. Nouns, for the boy, live in the sounds nouns make. We don’t hear the horses, but the boy makes us. Our war is silent as horseflesh armoring distance. The boy’s future war makes a sound. We imitate that sound by accident.”

Case Study: With, is also protest poetry, perhaps a reflection of the violence of the N.A. war economy. “The fence that became incorporated into the bark. It’s resilient as I bash it against the stones. It fits us to the rules that rule what can fit as we rule them.” And, “The why that addresses me makes me live in because, a place where every answer has an equal but opposite error.”

Ms. Kronovet is a gifted Poet, with a new, forthcoming narrative style, a progression from the Postmodernist School. Such a brilliant poetry read for a Summer afternoon, Case Study: With by Jennifer Kronovet.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Stephen Brockwell's Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films (2014)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Stephen Brockwell's Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films (2014) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films: a brilliant read from Stephen Brockwell and above/ground press.

by: Subterranean Blue Poetry
Title: Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films
Author: Stephen Brockwell
Publisher: above/ground press
Date of Publication: 2014 

Page Count: 11

“The sound of silence” by Paul Simon plays quietly in the grey lilt of a winter afternoon. Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films is a brilliant read by Canadian Poet Stephen Brockwell, born in Montreal and living in Ottawa. He has 4 published Chapbooks with above/ground press and has written 5 books of poetry, including Fruitfly Geographic (2004) which won the Archibald Lampman Award. He runs a small information technology company.

As This Writer goes to pick up the Chapbook to read, the title, “Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films” I am reminded of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and all the slapstick paranoia associated with the nuclear weapons age. The series of poems are presented in 3 parts, the first perhaps a series of files from someone’s impressions of old film reels of nuclear tests, the second is titled “Inaudible Dispatches from Radio News” and the third is titled “Wednesday Morning, 3 AM”.

The first poems begin, he is looking at a girl, perhaps a love interest and something is wrong. Then the poems move to an image of a burning tree and perhaps the image of a man before the catastrophe or was it a trick of the light of a photo? Images of desert flowers, the sun, stars and the idea of digging with a heavy water spade. The images unfold in intrigue, mysterious, of the desert, presenting post-apocalypse landscape, someone hovering and observing. As if questioning a presentation of violence that should not be, perhaps a response on a personal level as well as a response to geopolitics and nuclear warfare.

“0800055,
No Date,
“Let’s Face It”,
9:35-10:04

Her hair.
Say that – all the voices
Murmur.

What skin tone
adjustments, I can’t
imagine – who could?
No categories for that
declassification, too much
gamma
to see it.

And of the trees,
what survival?
Match stick does not
survival make
as beautiful as sunsets.

There are no creams
for alpha particles.”

and,

“0800017,
February 18-May 15, 1955,
Operation Teapot

So many objectives:

desert flowers,
mountain sunset,
cup and horizon
at the moment
of creation.

Intimate art
of dust, sand
made glass,
heart lens

of the perishable
mood, desire,
its pitch and yaw,
an orientation

flexible, but its progeny
vivid, immediate,
blood-stopping.

The second presentation of “Inaudible Dispatches from Radio News” is a running presentation of “what if” in the news with counterpoints of dialogue as if a send up of the artefact of culture that is war.

The third presentation of “Wednesday Morning, 3 AM” is a series of sentences, as if playing on the theme of silence after a bomb has been dropped. The idea of silencing, an ending after devastation, the enforcement of a power paradigm, the idea of muzzling, the end of freedom, the idea of death.

“Nothing more silencing than loss of employment in the cathedral ceilings of the boxmall.”

“Nothing more silencing than the derisive laughter of intimate companions you have never met but who have eyes and ears.”

“Intoxication seldom begins with silence, frequently erupts into deafening slurs and always ends with silence.”

“Nothing more silencing than a hand over a mouth.”

The writing immediately draws you in, the style minimalist, blunt and spare in the first presentation morphing into poetic prose with a staccato delivery. As if borrowing from the Beat Poets and the war misery of the legacy of T.S. Eliot (The Wasteland), the disconnected thought forms build a picture of emotional and perhaps actual violence. As if a reminder of the devastation of nuclear warfare and the out of control cursehold, the stranglehold of love lives and geopolitics in North America. Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films is a study in truth and violence, a classic rendering that addresses the issues of the post-modern world as it morphs into the New Age.

Available @ above/ground press.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews rob mclennan's from Hark: a journal (2014) and N.W. Lea's Present! (2014)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to post a review of rob mclennan's from Hark: a journal (2014) and N.W. Lea's Present! (2014) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! This makes the second review of from Hark: a journal, after Jack Goodall's review over at the Flat Singles Press blog, and the second review of Present! after Ryan Pratt's review over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

Byline: Subterranean Blue Poetry
Title of Book: from Hark: a journal
Author: Rob McLennan
Publisher: above/ground press
Date of Publication: 2014
Page Count: 13

from Hark: a journal is a fantastical Chapbook of poetry, some of the poems have been published previously in Canadian Literature (Vancouver, British Columbia) and at www.abovegroundpress.blogspot.com. Rob McLennan is a Canadian Poetry icon, editor, publisher, poet he operates above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, ottawater, The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and posts everything poetry on robmclennan.blogspot.com. He is the celebrated author of more than 20 books of poetry.

This was one of a number of Chapbooks sent to me from above/ground press and of all the tomes, this Writer was captivated. In the Chapbook is an introduction that describes the history of the series of poems. The poems were written when Rob’s relationship with Christine was new, they later married. They wrote postcards and letters to each other in their dance of courtship.

“These were small, secret missives, slipped into luggage, pockets or purses before trips, to be deliberately discovered later. On a Greyhound Bus, I reached into my jacket pocket to find three new postcards; halfway between Ottawa and Toronto, little gifts she’d tucked away without my knowledge. Christine’s notes to me were usually composed on postcards she’d picked up years earlier, and written as though from not only the postcard’s point-of-origin, but that time as well, dated months or even years before we’d met . . . I was fascinated by the idea of letters written from foreign geographical and temporal places, sketched out as short postcard pieces.”

The title of the Chapbook is taken from a comic strip by Kate Beaton, “Hark, a vagrant” and at the time he was reading an anthology “Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France” translated and edited by Norma Cole. Four quotes from this book are included in the Chapbook.

The short poetic prose pieces composed by poet Mclennan are titled with a city and a date, reaching various and esoteric global climes and the dates going as far back as 1422, introducing the idea of landscape and history or the temporal. Each poetry vignette includes elements of the essence of the city, perhaps events in the city at that time and weaves in the idea of romance (global and personal) and its antithesis of war, the push and pull of here not here, home not home and violence, the war economy N.A., as someone who has been on a journey and perhaps is traveling:

“London, 1820

In a measure of circling. This is an actual letter. The poem, I should say. Response is so simple. Words point out sediment. Rising moon, the Thames are a-changing. Sooting deep, thick industrial smog. Touch, but more muscular. Victoria, princess. A tower, a namesake. This unknown, hiatus. In what available field. The lives of the past. Leave poets be. Betray to her an abacus.”

The poetry reads like a butterfly entranced by the flame of a candle, as if he is reading the missives from his wife and writing responses weaving, weaving:

“Toronto, 1837

When talks, are we writing it. A roughhousing passage. To summarize: elegy, bonfire, speech. King’s Tavern, old hat. She rinses a teacup, sews stitch to the blade. Call out your anguish, astonishment. The currency inherent in blasphemous buildings. Hairsplitting. I am no further thickness. Forever is quite a long time. The body is present.”

And:

“Tokyo, 1868

Edo, a meaning. Open, her soft voice. Each fold of the city, prefecture. When I claim I am present.. Rails of meaning, undamaged. A blossom, a wonderful scribe. Eaten. This death, microscopic. Sending best wishes. What can you tell me. Illuminate, earth and white powder. The mind meditates, fishing. A castle of wonders. I hold two family portraits. A resident plum.”

In cinematic, the Chapbook could be blown up into a book with coloured postcards of the places in the titles of the poems. As if the Oracle in the time of Spring the poetry is enigmatic and definitive captivating romance in history and within the overconstructed politics of the times. from Hark: a journal, a brilliant read from Rob McLennan.

Byline: Subterranean Blue Poetry
Title of Book: Present!
Author: N.W. Lea
Publisher: above/ground press
Date of Publication: 2014
Page Count: 11

Present! is a fascinating truth-telling of love/life N.A. Written by N.W. Lea who resides in Ottawa, Canada, he has published a book of poetry Everything is Movies, this is his third published Chapbook.

Present! reveals and revels the love diaspora N.A. Written in a post-modern narrative style, the poetry writes as if coming in on the middle of a story/conversation and also ends as if leaving in the middle of a story/conversation. It is a secret dialogue, telling a story without telling a story and secret wordplay, playing with the use of language.

“we were culture-born

then we were enculturated

then we were inculcated

then, indoctrinated

initiated

in’d”

The theme of love is entangled, as if someone lost in the miasma of where is my love affair heart?

“the swans of hurt
burn circles in the snow”

and

“I wonder toward
your darker travails
part your mirth
like legs

what religious tissue!
how

estranging beneath the gawking satellites”

and

“your bunched sun-
dress lays somewhere
between cyberspace
and the mixed orchard”

The theme of parted loves, perhaps serial lovers is mixed with the last throws of the industrial society and coming into the cyberspace of the New Age, using surreal images of technology. Perhaps a reflection of the disembodiement of the “sex as service machine” phenomena feeding the economy, breaking with the love Spiritus and the Holy Spirit.

“there is circuitry
behind the basement wall

this I know …..

so we bash the veneer
with our amped up bodies

and start tearing out
the wires and chips

we’re blurring
but so
so glad”

“and all our appliances
grow real hearts”

with elements of activism and truthtelling

“what an honour
it is to be killed

incrementally

by your government’s
masters!”

A rich post-modern impression of a love/death story in poetry, some dark soma of the night. In the words and music of the Poet Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows”. Present! a great read from N.W. Lea.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Lary Timewell's tones employed as loss (2013)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Lary Timewell's tones employed as loss (2013) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

An exciting Poetry Chapbook, avant-garde poetry bangs in the dance. Lary Timewell finds himself in Vancouver after living for 25 years in Fukushima. He is one of the co-founders and publisher of Tsunami Editions press, currently publishing through the venture obvious epiphanies press.

The Poetry Chapbook begins with a citation by Rosemary [sic] Waldrop, “If we could just go on walking through these woods” sets the stage for high camp and trepidation in a story of love lost. A new treatise on the twisted cultural landscape, North America.

This poetry is blow speak. Bullet line delivery within a poetic prose type style, it is a new post-modern twist on poetic form. Inconsistent capitalization and punctuation in a violent milieu that protests, tones employed as loss weaves the story of love lost/conflicted love with the love of poetry that saves. The two themes are interwoven in the theater of the absurd that includes inane humour mixed with masculine imagery/energy not unlike someone shouting at a wall. “I-vow-my troth recurring dream/hung on for dear laugh, went eventually/belly dancing out of the room, much to the dismay of/poets in their/heated nests”; “waiting in the envelope of the cave/ like chloroformed squirrel, ecstatic”; “the name of your country is not America. Please/ to be stopping sending Coco-Puffs to Rumania”; “the sky swallowing the garage, sap” and “just more earthworms slathered in agnostic marmalade; the chanting”.

Juxtaposed with the theme of poetry/salvation is the theme of love lost and/or conflicted love, “out on the highway, toss milky sandals/ from the salmon-pink bedspread where “I”/ loves “you” and even the far blue/ hills understand it is only a dream” and “I’m just another/ born loser in/ an ordinary act/ of desperation/ the awkward/ decisive punch/ line having/ some fun at/ the expense of/ the expansive/ (homesick or assimilated)/ how/ now”.

Interspersed throughout the long poem the word Poetry appears at the left hand margin with a series of lines begun by a colon.

“Poetry        : throat-red staccato under stucco archway
                      : bickering microbes in the blood
                      : mold-speckled tent pitched in the topography of dream
                      : empathic accidents out to the radius of the real world
                      : gauge of the exchange
                      : the electronic distance between speech & song
                      : the asynchronous knowledge of clues that hold their breath
                      : the mannequin and his young brood
                      : shopping for subliminals in the general store
                      : gleaning the meaning of a depot along the highway
                      : the real landscape of a fictional street
                      : the sound a baby deity makes
                      : the oxygen of music out the open window
                      : the disappearing episode
                      : hands that make wings
                      : an echo losing insistence
                      : exhalation of the unthinkable
                      : baroque repertoire of the mimic in the mirror
                      : obituary vernacular of fastidious trivia“

In a celebration of the written form of poetry, “The path is the poem overgrown, each letter/ an illuminated leaf inscribed, living/ excursion of the swans one notices and stops,/ feeling an urge to be/ similarly taken away, lifted up into/ the sweet capsule of a paragraph/ of unselfconscious cloud. Ragged din, see/ and hear through walls of/ chacun a son gout thunder/ kicking out in knowledge and joy. Alas,“

In the play with language, the dislocated images that lends a punch drawn feel, the imaginative definitions of the word Poetry are an exhaustive constant celebration and not without angst. That poetry could be so evocative is at once spellbinding and full of light.

In the exploration of the defining poetry is the defining Poet. Reading good poetry is a wonderment, that often makes this Writer think in tangents about the relation of the Poet to their writing and the act of writing. How the education of the Poet, intellect and life experience interacts with the Poet’s soul essence, the rhythm of the soul and the Muse to produce fantastical works.

tones employed as loss, a study in absurdist poetry, lightening and light.