A Review of Anna Evans’s “Swimming”*

9 August 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

There is a great variety when it comes to chapbooks. I’m not talking just about the inevitable range of quality between them, but in terms of why they exist. A few of the more common reasons are (not necessarily mutually exclusive):

1. The author is a regular on some poetry scene and puts one out, generally self-published, in order to have something to sell at readings.

2. The author is a good poet but not particularly interested in the military campaign that is getting to the first book. The chapbook stands in lieu of a book in this case.

3. The author “shows promise”, but somehow just isn’t quite ready for a full-lengther. The chapbook offers practice in how to assemble and promote the thing.

4. The author, being fairly well-established, is using the chapbook for a group of poems (or maybe a longer poem and sequence) that doesn’t quite fit in with the previous or next collection.

5. An accomplished author, established or “emerging”, uses a chapbook as a sort of “sneak preview” of a coming book. In the case of the “emerging” writer, it’s a sort of promissory note of what’s to come until the powers that be cop on to how great he or she is.

And Anna Evans falls into this last category. A recipient of an MFA from Bennington, on the editorial board of The Raintown Review, editor of The Barefoot Muse, and a frequent contributor to well-reputed literary journals, Evans is in that strange limbo where you’re by no means unknown, but just haven’t gotten the collection out. And until she wins a major contest or some editor gets wise to her work, we have Swimming (Maverick Duck Press, 2006).

When one is a poet living in a major urban area, is single, drinks a lot, smokes a lot, and has a personal life marked by a degree of instability, one tends to have a certain rant, with individual variations. Namely, that these self-satisfied suburbanites with their fancy gardens and big cars with GPS systems and kids and careers sure do write some boring-ass poetry. And in many cases, this is true. Of course, anyone who has ever been subjected to some restraining order waiting to happen “keeping it real” at a New York City open mic can attest that “living on the edge” in the big city is hardly a guarantee one will be any good, either.

I raise this because Anna Evans’s poems are very much poems of the suburbs, though with, perhaps, a glimpse back to the city and to single life. This is most noticeable in her poem, “The Lal Jomi”, about an Indian restaurant she and her husband used to frequent “…before the children thinned your hair/and thickened me”, in which the narrator recalls headier days of closing down the pub and filling up on tikka and shish kebab. The poem ends on a rueful note:

“Oh love, remember when the meal was done
how we would press the hot towels to our faces,
suck oranges, spit out the pips for fun,
and split, so keen for bed we’d always run?
These days we dine in ritzy four star places
but love, you know I really miss that one.”

Nostalgic? Sure, but a poet should be allowed nostalgic moments, especially when a sense of place is so thoroughly evoked, the taste of “…coriander, pungent spice/burning on our tongues like the advice/ we swapped in drunken voices”. And most of Evans’s poems are not set in her youth, but in her suburban present.

And by and large they work. The opening poem, a free-verse lyric, called “The Lap Swimmer”, probably spends a bit too much time negotiating a fairly straightforward trope, and then there’s “Suburban Housewives In Their Forties”, about women sipping wine, watching their kids, tending their gardens, and realizing that they “are emptying/our minds; all of us have given up/visions of freelance photography…” and let’s hop to the end:

“We meet at the house with the screen
porch, bringing bottles of Pinot
and Chardonnay. Filling glasses
with pale yellow liquid, we see
right through ourselves as we empty them.”

Which is, of course, a boffo final image, but here, as, on occasion, elsewhere, one wonders if the poem is taking a drink or the drink taking the poem. The periodic sense of suburban ennui, through Evans’s very success at evoking it, teeters on becoming a bit overpowering in places.

However, any such tendencies in the chapbook (and they are far from overwhelming) are balanced by a surprising number of erotic poems. And they aren’t the sort of erotic poems one’s afraid of (alternately lineated porn or so elliptical that one has to ask, “That’s about fucking, right?”). Let me quote “Understandings” in full:

“Understandings

“When his fingers sneak
over my skin, tweak a nipple,
I offer no more resistance
than the curve of my back,
the splay of my shoulders.
Then, with the oldest women’s
movement–I turn and let him in.

“Inside me dwells a Parisienne
from the last War–welcoming,
but full of tricks. I concentrate
on that spot in the parking lot
where I first orgasmed, or the front row
of the porn movie I pretended
to watch for the plot.

“Eyes closed in the dark,
I make believe I am getting
what I want, give back
what it takes to satisfy him
that he has a dutiful wife. He pays
the bills, doesn’t ask how I spend
the rest of my life.”

And this poem plays to one of Evans’s strengths–she is very good at conveying coping, making do, not as an act of cowardice, but as an act of necessity. Because her narrators like the man about the house. They like their neighbors and kids. They recognize that life can be boring or disappointing, but they get on with it. And in that sense, the book is rather more optimistic than it might appear.

Now I feel almost churlish making this last point, but I feel it must be said. “Chapbook” need not mean “low production values”. A grainy design on the cover, cheap paper, an ugly font, and a lack of an ISBN number work against the author. Desktop publishing has gotten to a level where one can come out with something that looks quite good even with pretty basic software. For all its smaller size and the saddle-stapled binding, a chapbook is a book–a collection with an author’s name on the front and often an author’s first, and production is a key part of that.

But whatever the problems with presentation, these are poems well worth reading by a poet who will be going places, even if she remains beside the pool in her New Jersey suburb. And I hope the water’s at a good temperature and isn’t overchlorinated.

*A personal disclosure–I’ve been reviewed by Anna, have had poems in both journals with which she is involved editorially, and I know her in person. So sue me.

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Knives out, ladies and gentlemen!

6 August 2008 at 9:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Going by the statistics that I get from this blog’s dashboard, the “On Formalism” post has been, by any measure, the biggest hit. It is Thin Lizzy’s the “Boys Are Back in Town” to the Cullen review’s “Cowboy Song”–even though I think the Cullen review is more important. Where “formalism” is concerned, I’m just one more asshole without a particularly fundamentalist position throwing few comments into a fairly tedious but perhaps necessary debate presently in its third decade. Catherine Ann Cullen, on the other hand, has a first collection out. Likewise, Gail White’s book, from a longtime stalwart of the “New Formalist” scene, strikes me as rather more interesting, too.

But we sure do like a controversy, don’t we–even when the thing is kicked off by a note saying that this reviewer, at least, is sick to death of the metrical verse/free verse thing being played zero-sum. And the Joe Salemis are as responsible for that as the Diane Wakoskis. And I suspect I’m far from the only one who feels this way.

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Rose Kelleher Reviews Gail White’s Easy Marks

3 August 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Okay, I don’t have much book-reviewing experience, or any qualifications other than as an occasional reader of poetry for pleasure. But I thought I’d take a crack at Gail White’s new book, Easy Marks, because, uh, I like it, and why not.

First, a disclosure: Gail White included a poem of mine in one of her light verse anthologies, “Kiss and Part,” a few years ago. Needless to say, having been published by the prestigious Doggerel Daze has been a huge boost to my career. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t be the fabulously wealthy, internationally famous poet I am today. Still, I’ll try to set aside my gratitude and be objective.

Anyway. When the book arrived in the mail, I was all excited. I knew Gail White was known for her light verse, and I figured her book would be the perfect thing to read after a hard day’s work, drinking a glass of wine, bare feet on the coffee table. You know, a mental vacation, like a mystery novel or a comic strip collection. If that sounds like faint praise, well, it’s not. Entertainment is a good thing. Necessary, even.

I was surprised to find that only about half the book (the first half) was devoted to light verse. Surprised, not disappointed. Gail’s (I’ve never met her, and I know it’s more professional to refer to her by her last name, but there’s something about her voice that makes that feel wrong somehow) “light” and “serious” verse are not all that easily sorted into separate folders. Her verse — mostly, but not all, rhymed and metrical — is literate (I had to look up “glaucous”) yet accessible, not too dense to enjoy on a crowded subway. Her best “light” verse has a bitter edge, like Dorothy Parker’s (you know, like Resume and Bric-a-Brac). And her “serious” verse never commits the sin of taking itself too seriously. She can be earnest, she can be erudite, but she’s never pompous.

The problem with a lot of light verse is that, despite its modest goal of being mildly entertaining, it fails to achieve even that: instead it’s corny and old-fashioned, like those comedians who cross their eyes and talk in weird voices. Ba-dump-BUMP. That kind of light verse is always rhymed and metered, relying heavily on cutesy-clumsy rhyme pairs like “loaf’ll/offal,” rather than, say, ideas that are actually original and amusing. ( Ogden Nash often made a point of stretching for rhymes, but in his verse that’s a device, not the whole shtick.) In a couple of her ballades, she maybe leans in that direction, but on the whole Gail’s stuff is a cut above.

The weakest pieces, I think, are ones Quincy would call “canon poems”: poems where some classic fictional character speaks in contemporary idiomatic English, and that’s funny, you see, because it’s unexpected (not!). Like “Queen Gertrude’s Soliloquy”:

I wish he wouldn’t sulk. It’s unbecoming,
and first impressions ought to be our best.
Then I do wish he’d stop that beastly humming
and talking to himself. “Give it a rest–
you’re acting out!” I long to say, but no,
a mother can’t, that’s being interfering….

There aren’t many of those, though, obviously, since, as I said, I like the book. Overall my impression is: here’s the voice of a wry, witty female who’s been around the block; is thoughtful and well-read, but not bookish; was raised Catholic, but isn’t religious; likes beer and tacos, and men, too, though they don’t deserve it, damn them; and doesn’t care if Poetry never publishes her.

But don’t take my word for it, read some examples. Here’s the end of “Breaking Down in the South”:

…but still the fame and glamour
of a Nervous Breakdown hung around their necks
like a name-brand diamond. Now, in middle age,
I’m told my dismal state is just depression,
reactive, mild – here, try a little Prozac.
Dammit, I don’t want drugs. I only want
to be eccentric, batty, somewhat daft,
covered by Aunt Leona’s mental mist.
Again, my generation gets the shaft.
I’m due for a breakdown, and they don’t exist.

Here’s a stanza from “The Jump Off Putney Bridge,” about Mary Wollstonecraft’s failed suicide:

Inhaling Thames was cold and painful,
but less humiliating than being fished
up like a turtle, taken to a pub
and queasily revived. Embarrassing
Moments of the Enlightenment–Grand Prize.

Here’s the delightfully goofy first stanza of “Song, In Imitation of Christina Rossetti, and Beginning with a Line by Edmund Wilson”:

My brain is like a piece of cheese
That quivers with a million mites.
My brain is like a fast ballet
Where all the dancers split their tights.
My brain is like a Ferris wheel
Whose rusted gears have ceased to work.
My brain is bleaker than all these
Because my love is such a jerk.

Here’s the end of “The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene”:

Underground, her faith ran like a waterfall. She lived
a hermit’s life. If women sought her out,
their stories thumped like washing on the rocks,
buckets in wells. Theirs was a gospel word
that shunned the daylight – tales Paul never heard.

And here’s a link to a sonnet of hers I find stunning, “Christmas On Rhodes,” published in the December 2007 issue of Lucid Rhythms:

http://www.lucidrhythms.com/December-2007/Gail_White.htm

Then again, I would like a poem like that, being both a fan of the sonnet form, when it’s used well, and a wishy-washy ex-Catholic of the “There is no God, and Mary is His mother” variety. You might dislike it (i.e., you might be Stupid and Soulless and Wrong); if so, you probably won’t like “Easy Marks.” You also won’t like Gail White if you’re one of those men, who seem to be everywhere these days, who have conniption fits whenever an anthology of women poets is published, or a woman makes a humorous generalization about men. These are the same men, ironically, who are always accusing feminists of being whiners. But I digress.

I do have one last petty complaint. There are several typos in the book. One of them is on the title page of the first section: “Dysfuncational Families.” Actually that’s kind of cute, and at first I thought it was deliberate, but it’s not spelled that way in the Table of Contents. Anyway there are several other typos that aren’t cute. Tsk tsk tsk! Editors are supposed to catch those things, and even if they don’t, authors are supposed to proofread the proofs. That’s why they call them proofs. For her punishment, I hereby fine Gail White in the amount of one beer and two tacos, payable to me if and when she’s ever in the Gaithersburg area.

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On “Formalism”

17 July 2008 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

This entry probably delivers less than it promises, as it’s not really my take on New Formalism, New Narrative, Expansivism, and the various closely related movements that seem damn near indistinguishable for those of us who were children in the 1980s. Rather, it’s about this stupid fucking tendency of so many reviewers to make a big goddamn deal out of “formalism” every time that a book that deploys meter and rhyme is under review. (This is especially true in the United States–the Irish are generally saner.) While the decision as to whether or not to use meter, rhyme, and all the rest is, of course, an important one–and prosody should be on the table when reviewing–one too often gets the sense that each book of American metrical poetry that comes out is somehow a barometer on the use of meter in poetry in general. Which is a bit odd, as metered poetry has been in the norm in Indo-European poetry, at least, for almost three millenia, whereas free verse has come into its current prominence within the last century, which would seem to me to indicate that metrical poetry can be successfully pulled off in multiple epochs.

But even still, one finds, in way too many reviews, an apparently almost unstoppable need to waffle on about the efficacy of “traditional” prosody–from whatever perspective. This blog takes the position that making too big a goddamn deal out of prosody qua prosody shortchanges the poets. There are technically brilliant collections that are boring as hell, though I have yet to read a prosodically impoverished collection that was any good. (There’s a lot of prosody in good free verse.) If a collection is filled with sonnets, yes, the reviewer should note the fact, as well as evaluate if the author knows what he/she is doing with the sonnet. But we’ve had enough referendums on the sonnet to be spared another one.

Fair enough?

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Review of Eileen Sheehan’s Down the Sunlit Hall

8 July 2008 at 9:47 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Eileen Sheehan is, at the moment, perhaps one of Ireland’s most underrated poets.* Sure, she’s appeared in all the right journals, has a lovely blurb on the back of her book from Nuala Ni Dhomhnail (a leading Irish-language poet, for those who don’t know), and was recently a reader at some boffo Irish Studies conference or other in the U.S. But unfortunately, hers are not the books that tend to be reviewed in Ireland’s little magazines (those that even do reviews), much less in the Irish Times. This is a shame, because Sheehan’s publisher, the Tralee-based Doghouse, has published a list that, though uneven (a few of the offerings straying into the frankly godawful), includes fine poets such as John W. Sexton and Liam Aungier, as well as newcomers worth watching like Barbara Smith and Catherine Ann Cullen.

Sheehan’s second collection (Down the Sunlit Hall, Doghouse 2008 ) confirms her skill as a poet and her capacity to write seductively. These aren’t poems that give you a hard-on, exactly, but are rather the sort of poems that draw you from the enticements of other books clamoring for your attention. Sheehan can be funny, as in the opening of “upended to someplace”:

“Barefoot by lamplight, by curtained midnight. Slipped
in a puddle of dog piss. Landed straight
into the arse-end of tomorrow. Can happen
like that, revelations, things of that nature.”

Or solemn, as in the close to “Threat of Rain:

“we step back
at the sound of earth on wood
back to notice the living

back into our own
diminished lives.”

Or, in poems like “Needing to Be,” Sheehan is both at once. She is not a poet of a single mood, tempo, or, indeed, song. He poems, at times whimsical, but rooted in particulars of time, place, and personality, have distinct formal characteristics but are always distinctly hers.

One wishes that one could say the the same about more contemporary Irish poetry, which suffers from many of the same weaknesses of much contemporary American poetry–the rather bland anecdote rendered in lineated prose and thankfully generally over rather quickly. Sheehan’s free verse still feels like verse rather than a dullish paragraph hacked up with a berserk “Enter” key. She is a poet of the proper kind.

*Personal disclosure–I know the author and think she’s pretty nifty.

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Review of Catherine Ann Cullen’s A Bone In My Throat

5 July 2008 at 12:44 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Catherine Ann Cullen, A Bone In My Throat (Doghouse, 2007)

It is rare enough nowadays in Ireland to see a first collection centred on metrical work published, but A Bone In My Throat by Catherine Ann Cullen (Doghouse, 2007) is such a collection. The first section of the book, titled “Taboo,” is based on a series of sonnets revolving around a series of mythological tales—Adam and Eve, Bluebeard (which is, properly speaking, a seventeenth-century fairy tale), Fionn mac Cumhaill, Finnegas, and the Salmon of Knowledge, Oisin and Niamh, and Pandora. The sonnets generally take the structure of dramatic monologues, with different characters giving their own versions of the events in the source stories.

Sometimes, these work, as in “Brother-in-Law” (from the Bluebeard poems):

Brother-in-Law

His eyes were mouths that swallowed women whole
Those oyster-cool, those lovely, bone-white girls
Slipped down the dark, embittering his soul
He always tasted fish, expected pearls
Rumours like soot showered from a servant’s flue
Said childbirth wasn’t what had killed his wives
His hands were spotless, hearth and chimneys, too
Were scrubbed within a half-inch of their lives
He ate with relish, gave restraint no quarter
Fattened his pretty white geese for the slaughter
Not what you’d wish your sister or your daughter
We killed him, and our women’s tongues were freed
They dug for the truffle of his darkest need
And wolfed it down, as though they shared his greed

Although there are some metrical infelicities here (most notably, though the sonnet is in somewhat loose iambic pentameter, lines ten and eleven resolutely have four stresses), the vivid imagery and psychological acuity largely make up for this.

However, at other times, the material feels shoehorned into the sonnet form. Take, for example, this strophe from “Salmon”:

Those held no promise for Finnegas
(He thought you gift, but you were magus)
Unless there is a secret place
That’s reached by not achieving grace

The problems here are manifold. The tetrameter, interrupted only by a soft caesura and rhymed in couplets gives a thumpalong effect that’s less Andrew Marvell than schoolyard chant. And then there’s the word “magus”—as in the magi, Zoroastrian priests who famously visited Jesus—throws a whole different set of mythological resonances into a poem with a pagan Irish setting… to no particular purpose.

And these poems often feel like an exercise, an at times fluent, often pretty exercise, but an exercise nonetheless. (And indeed, as Cullen herself notes, they were the result of a classroom project at Trinity College Dublin.) And while Cullen’s work is unusual in the Irish context, for those of us who have some familiarity with the American New Formalist scene—where the sonnet monologue from the mouth of some canonical figure or other has been done ad nauseam—the first part of A Bone In My Throat has a “been there, done that” feel.

The second part of the book (called simply “Part Two”) feels like the collection Cullen should have published. There are still a lot of sonnets, but the lack of a set requirement to work in the form means that the sonnets feel more organic, like they need to be sonnets. One in particular, “Thaw,” kicks the snot out of anything in the book’s mythological first section. Other poems show Cullen as a capable writer of free verse, and “Meeting at the Chester Beatty” is a genuinely affecting love poem.

The book closes with “The Children of Lir Quintet,” based on the canonical legend. Though the poems here do not repeat the all-sonnet shtick of the opening section, they nonetheless suffer from some of the same problems. The loose villanelle “Aoife” feels rhyme-driven (a common problem with the repetend-heavy form), and with the exception of the lovely final poem, “Winter Solstice,” the poems don’t quite pass the “so what?” test. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that they hew so closely to the source material that they fail to really rise above it, but rather tell the readers a story that they may or may not already know—in verse, true, but without really adding anything.

Though this is an uneven collection, it is nevertheless an intriguing one for contemporary Irish poetry, and we can look forward to seeing Catherine Ann Cullen’s distinctive voice rising, as it does at times in A Bone in My Throat, above the din of the sometimes overwhelming canonical tones that too often overwhelm and distort it. Cullen’s work shows promise, and if she can more organically match form to subject, as well as engage more imaginatively with her subject matter and trust her own voice, she will be a poet of real significance.

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Hey there, folks

30 June 2008 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

So, this is the inaugural post–the real one rather than that generic one WordPress seems to have given me. I should, I suppose, explain what the hell I’m doing with this thing. In the first place, this is intended as a poetry-related blog–in other words, I won’t be discussing my day job, love life, family, routines, etc. And even within the realm of poetry-related blogs, which are legion, this blog attempts to do something rather specific. The idea came to me when my first book (Across the Grid of Streets, Dublin: Seven Towers, 2008 ) came out earlier this year, and I noticed that, among the little magazines, there were surprisingly few outlets to send the thing for review, either in Ireland or among the “formal-friendly” venues in the United States–and that the places that do reviews tend to review works by more established authors.

This is, to a degree, understandable. Small presses–and the authors associated with them–can have a fly-by-night quality. One wants to talk about “important” works, books that people are likely to read, and, for that matter, have a reasonable chance of finding in a bookstore near them. On the other hand, presses–and the authors on them–gain in reputation as more and more people say that this poet you’ve never heard of is good, or at least shows the capacity to get good.

I go to a lot of readings and have gotten into the habit, over the last few years, of reading a great deal of contemporary poetry, Some of it sucks. A lot of it is pretty forgettable… but some of it is really, really good. And it doesn’t necessarily get the attention it should by virtue of its authors, for whatever reasons, simply not having the connections or appearances in quite enough “leading” journals or a master’s degree from the right institution or what have you. I’m not saying that such works are necessarily consigned to oblivion (some do break through), but that breaking through can take a while, and it does not happen unless others lend their support. I hope to lend a bit of that necessary support.
When dealing with first and second collections, by and large, I see no purpose in pulling a demolition job, and if a book deserves one, I shall, in general, simply not review it. And as with everything else in the po-biz, there may be worthy books I just don’t get around to commenting on due to the constraints of everything else in my life. And there will be flawed but promising books discussed here, and I trust that their authors will realise that any criticism is intended to be constructive.

Further, I will talk, from time to time, about readings, both one-off readings and regular series, with or without open mics. Like them or lump them, these are an integral part of poetry today. They are a major source of book sales and both reflect and help shape the attitude that poets take toward that slippery bastard known as one’s “audience”. These have been discussed in public, of course (Galwegian poet Kevin Higgins has a vigorous defense of the poetry slam on the Poetry Ireland web site, for example), but they deserve sustained evaluation.

And I think that covers the basics.

Quincy

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