Every Ravening Thing - Marsha de la O (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Every Ravening Thing.  Marsha de la O.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2019.

Marsha de la O waltzed in to our office like she owned the place.  Once we read Every Ravening Thing we weren't sure.  It was like a new kind of wind had swept through Today's book of poetry's brain, maybe a new type of sirocco or chimera.  These poems, happy or sad, play out like marvelous candies you can roll around your poetry mouth.  Not trivial penny candy, no Sir, these are not the lint-bound mints of Sunday disappointment, no, these are pure gold.  Toffee so pure and carmel smooth, these poems are almost smoky.

Every Ravening Thing is smart, smart, smart.  Today's book of poetry would suggest that instead of embracing any one narrative style, or structural framework, school, etc, de la O never boxes herself into a process induced corner.  de la O burns with extra sauce and comes out looking like the quintessential everywoman.

de la O isn't afraid of the dark and she's not offering up solutions, but she sure is taking a good look at what is important.  She certainly has things to say, worth listening to things.

In Those Months Gold Leaf Drifted onto His Skin

Late nights, late nights, rain fingered his guitar,

He played bars every weekend, trained dogs

on the side, dreamed an orchard out back,

white peaches, dark plums.

                                            Once he made a barbecue

from a fifty-gallon drum, simmered mussels

in wine.

                                            Late nights, late nights,

talking through winter, his laugh turned to velvet

when the temperature dropped.

Scorpion on his bicep, at his heels an Alsatian.

All through summer his garden spoke in tongues,

stone fruit, dark plums.

                                            The day they told him no,

not a chance for a transplant, he took a whisk

broom to the cemetery, swept his father's grave.

Dark nights, dark nights, rain pierced his eyes.

When the Feather River overtopped its banks

he finally got down

                               to the slow work of drowning.

❢❢❢

2020 is upon us and this past year's hangover feels worse, a little more difficult than others.  Even when President Reagan was standing under the red, white and blue Today's book of poetry didn't feel this particular sense of dread.  Today's book of poetry believes that a regular diet of helpful poetry is called for.  Marsha de la O falls right into this prescription, she is step ahead of the curve, leading, not following.  Take two helpings of Every Ravening Thing and call Today's book of poetry in the morning.

Today's book of poetry has to admit that de la O got under our skin, turned us around once or twice, Every Ravening Thing has weight.  Marsha de la O's landscapes resemble our own, it's when she explains the old terrain and makes it burn new that our eyes widen.

Star Pine

Time can slow to a halt in a hallway

with a view of a star-pine

by the pharmacy, and the roof below

with its carpet of asphalt and small rocks.

I've got a window seat and minor piety,

I've got a chant, thrumming:

               You, my faith, my ark, my bricks and mortar.

We've already said good-bye.

My rule is: keep your mouth shut.

We don't know how it gets in a body.

If I yawned, a tumor could flit inside

about the size of a cream puff or a golf ball

without symmetry - spikes and folds and webs

like a baby dragon.

And when it hatched, the mother

bent her fearsome neck

and moved that nestling

near where your blood bustles.

I've got a thick skull of hope

unwinding a vision, a picture

for afterwards:

you're pink faced and twinkling, rosy-all-over,

maybe shambling a little, but otherwise

the same.

You're looking good.

I'm the life form with a sour smell.

It's fear, but I tell myself that's covered here

by the dead smell of caution, they're non-committal.

They pad by in booties and hairnets, careful

of the I.V., the pole, the whole awkward procession,

a movable bed, a bag of clear liquid

dripping like mercy.

And the patients

with sheets drawn up to their chins

have suffered themselves to be tethered and pressed

like good and sweet animals.

The elevator opens, they're pushed inside,

the door closes behind them.

I watch them leaving, and wait for you.

The star pine leans toward the glass.

I'm mouthing thank you

and whispering please.

That star pine is your lost sister.

That star pine is your brother's soul,

sane and calm and cleansed.

The dragon

bends her fearsome neck;

the tree

is breathing next to the window.

Let it breathe for you.

❢❢❢

"I've got a thick skull of hope."  Today's book of poetry is going to have to contact Marsha de la O and ask if we can use that as a title for a book.

So de la O goes up one side of illness, fear and grief and comes down the other somehow hammering splendid.  And then she pulls out the Upanishads.  Today's book of poetry has a particular fondness of the Upanishads from our last time in a classroom.  We remembered "the essence of all beings is the earth," and more.  de la O has an understanding of the complications every life faces.  Every Ravening Thing takes a look at it all in these robust and lush poems where we learn, like de la O, to:  "let touch teach me."

To the Grandmothers

                Chernobyl, thirty years later

Old women with side gardens and jars

of moonshine alone in empty villages,

tell me, solitary lynx, multitudinous wolf

pack, how do you do it - all my life I've lived

in cities, bought food from grocery stores -

what's it like to return to the abandoned zone

on foot, reclaim your cottage beside the dank

canal, to howl, to hunt in packs, to foal calves,

fell trees, light down in the bodies of swans

and swim in cooling ponds, why would you

fly three thousand miles to build a nest

inside the cracked concrete sarcophagus

over the remains of reactor four?  She grins,

hands over a jelly jar of vodka, the good stuff,

Motherland is motherland, she says.

❢❢❢

Today's book of poetry is proud to start off 2020 with Marsha de la O's Every Ravening Thing.  We are big believers in the "start as you mean to go on" vibe.  We are all about the poetry burn and de la O is aces.

No promises for the forthcoming year but we are looking forward to reading all the poetry that comes through the door.  Our deepest gratitude to University of Pittsburgh Press and the almost 200 other poetry presses who send work Today's book of poetry's way.

Luckily we already know the line up for the next little while.  It makes Today's book of poetry blush it is so rich.

Stay tuned.

Marsha de la O

ABOUT THE POET 

Marsha de la O is the author of Antidote for Night, winner of the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award, and Black Hope, winner of the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and winner of an Editor’s Choice, Small Press Book Award. Other awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Award and the da Poetry Award. She has published extensively, including recent poems in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review, with work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. De la O lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poet and editor Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and edit the literary journal Spillway. 

BLURBS

Every Ravening Thing presents a matchless intensity and intellectual grit, a fearless investigation into the world amplified by a vision that is both cosmic and detailed in our common suffering. This is a brave book of poetry.

      - Christopher Buckley 

What is ferocious – ravenous – here is the poet’s driven need to tell things as they truly are, which means it’s not always a pretty picture that she so carefully assembles for the reader. And I love the raucous regard she has for diction: reckless and powerfully inventive and fresh the way air can be fresh. All of this is held together by a commitment to the music that drives these poems in a way that soothes the ear. Every Ravening Thing could serve as a warning to all of us about our failures as men and women, and as a celebration of the good we’re capable of doing and in that way is a necessary part of our reading.

    - Bruce Weigl 

This is poetry meant to open hearts and change attitudes in fundamental and necessary ways, poetry of witness and utility. It is also often deeply moving. 

     -South Florida Poetry Review

MARSHA DE LA O at Writers Resist LA 2019 Reading

Video: Poetry L.A.

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DISCLAIMER

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Blood Memory - Colleen J. McElroy (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Blood Memory.  Colleen J. McElroy.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, PA.  2016.

Can a joyous shout still be a protest?  Blood Memory tells us that it can.  Colleen J. McElroy makes it so.  Poems like McElroy's "Lessons in Deportment" will teach you almost everything you need to know.

Today's book of poetry is over seven-hundred blogs/reviews into this project and we are still subject to being totally amazed.  Awed.

Colleen J. McElroy has mastered voice.  These tear-blinding and immaculate poems are damned near perfect.  Voice and place, McElroy, like the very best film directors has mastered mise en scene.  Having set flawless stages her characters simply tell their stories and we believe every word.

Sunday Best

before Aunt Jennie joined Visitation

Catholic Church I walked Mama

to Lane Tabernacle CME and settled her

in a pew next to Aunt Ethel

the two of them demure in small

pancake hats with fragile veils

among the grand feathered hats of the ladies

who hid a week's worth of bad hair earned

in hot kitchens or sweaty laundries

the ladies of Visitation were all but hidden

in stained glass windows incense and stations

of the cross, their dresses as dull as nun's habits

at Lane Methodist Mama and her sister

sat together their heads tilted toward each other

hats pinned to clouds of kinky white hair

around them ladies in gingham and worn coats

fanned away the heat that had kept them all week

in white kitchens or scrubbing office floors

all week they had been no more than

wallpaper seen and never heard

come Sunday when they sang Amen, feathers

and flowers nodded along with them

when I was older I went with Aunt Jennie

to mass at Visitation, rosary beads matching my dress

on my head a white lace handkerchief pinned

into my curls, my missal white to match

around me ladies of various hues cradled

their rosaries and echoed a prayer of redemption

come Sunday we were all of the same cloth

women who sought to be what we dreamed

💫💫💫

Reading Colleen J. McElroy taught Today's book of poetry a new way of looking at his long dead father and allowed us to see him in a kinder light.  That's some trick.  That's a good trick.

Good poetry will do that to you; take you places you've never been, teach you things you didn't know were missing.

Blood Memory is an astonishing collection that will resonate with Today's book of poetry for a long time.  These poems are good enough to take an entitled and aging, old and cranky, sad white man, and for a moment, we got to see the world from the joyous eyes of innocent youth.  There are layers and layers of white privilege weighing down on these poems yet McElroy's world is peopled with strong, strong women helping each other abide.

Today's book of poetry doesn't see many books like Blood Memory, a book dedicated to how intelligent young Black women endure and grow.  In Blood Memory strength is gathered, cultivated and nurtured in the hands of an elaborate matriarchal maze.  Blood Memory affirms our belief that great poetry can come from any source, whether it is the lessons learned while grooming natty hair or the pride/fear confused emotions about the first Black cop in St. Louis.

Precocious

my mother is angry with me

I am barely four just young enough

to get on the bus for free

but my mother is angry with me

when I read aloud the bright

placards curved high

above the bus windows

I read aloud the placards

asking us to buy nothing

that is free and my mother

grows angry as I read

everything I can barely see

I want to tell her letters

go all mushy melting together

before my very eyes

but my mother is angry

when the bus driver tells her

she must pay for me since

children who are truly young

can not read the ads they see

my mother yanks my collar

tells me sit be still

you'll ruin your eyes

reading everything you see

she threatens to put me

in school a year before

I'm ready and I smile

my mother frowns and asks

what will become of me

if I insist on reading

every little thing I see

💫💫💫

Our morning reading was lovely.  The Today's book of poetry staff doesn't always come to a consensus with our poetry choices but Colleen J. McElroy had us all close ranks, come together, and celebrate as one.  Didn't matter who was doing the reading; these poems bounced around our offices like they were purely electric and everyone got shocked.

Consensus is rare enough, enthusiastic consensus is another.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, and Maggie, our newest intern, found Blood Memory touched them to tears.

They weren't alone.

The Answers to Why

because her daughter, Claudia, had babies while Mama

was still having babies    family lines blurred

mothers and daughters waltzing just out of reach

because her daughter, Jennie, turned Catholic

Mama took me to Lane Methodist each Sunday

because a photographer penciled an outline

around Mama's cottony hair Jennie studied

tinctures and rouges and one-eyed camera could find

because she could not read Mama memorized

all the songs in the hymn book

the communion wine tasted like grape juice

because Mama fed me from a bowl that read: find the bottom

I ate my vegetables sipped pot liquor while she sang old time songs

spoon to mouth: Ol'Dan Tucker too late to git his supper

because Mama's fingers grew thick in winter

I learned to braid her hair

because Mama got too old to do fine work as she called it

I became her eyes to thread needles and pick loose hems

I made sure the white butcher didn't put his thumb on the scale

because my mother, Ruth, worked at Fort Leonard Wood

Mama taught me how to cook

what's a Leonardwood? I asked

because my mother opened mornings like a can of beans

fussing and cussing and quoting Shakespeare

between dammit-I'll-bite-you and scrambled eggs

because Mama said my mother was moody and needed help

I watched my mother paint fake stocking seams down her legs

shapely as Betty Grable   high heels clicking on the linoleum

heading to the door   factory head scarf tied neat as a Sunday hat

because we had afternoons alone Mama taught me

how to knead bread dough the proper way — knuckles down

because Mama singed her eyebrows when the pilot light

went out Papa bought a brand new stove

I missed the old stove and its stand-up oven

because Papa said none of his girls would do day help

I read the papers and dialed the telephone for Mama

because Papa died on the train coming home from California

Mama sat by the window all day and wouldn't talk

because Claudia had become a widow before Papa died

my mother and her sisters fought to get Mama's attention

because Mama said the four poster was too big

after Papa died I slept with her

in the same bed she'd birthed babies who lived

and those who didn't

I counted angels carved in the chifferobe door

because a spider bit me the first night I slept

in the four poster Mama propped me on pillows

so I wouldn't roll onto the blister on my back

because Mama covered the bite in goose grease

there was no trace of the spider come morning

because the chifferobe held Papa's shaving basin

and shoes I spent hours inspecting the little shelves

because Mama put plugs in the locks of Papa's

roll top desk and chifferobe I always had a way out

because Mama said there were two places

she wouldn't want to be: hell and west Texas

we lived in that railroad house on Kennerly for years

because Mama didn't trust white people after the Klan

shot the mules dead in front of the old family house

because after they moved to Missouri Mama said she saw

ghosts walking the long hallway that banked the house

because she said it so much I thought I saw them too

and my mother said don't talk about the old ways Mama

because my mother worked long days I learned Mama's stories

because Mama lived in the past when Papa was alive

and lived every day when he wasn't she couldn't stop

because my mother caught Mama telling me stories

of the time before Lincoln freed us my mother argued

but Mama said she had to tell me what was just because

💫💫💫

It has been a long, long time since Today's book of poetry posted a "list" poem but Colleen J. McElroy's is a cake stealer.  McElroy is now on our radar and will be celebrated by us when Today's book of poetry talks poetry.

Today's book of poetry lives for the pleasure of sharing poetry with you readers, today it is an honour.

Colleen J. McElroy will help inspire a new generation of poets.

Colleen J. McElroy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Colleen J. McElroy is professor emeritus of English and creative writing at the University of Washington. She is the former editor in chief of the literary magazine Seattle Review and has published numerous poetry collections, most recently Here I Throw Down My Heart. Her latest collections of creative nonfiction include A Long Way from St. Louie and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. She has received a PEN/Oakland National Literary Award, the Before Columbus American Book Award, two Fulbright Research Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships (in both fiction and poetry), a DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship.

BLURBS

"There is much to admire in Blood Memory, from the general impulse to preserve a family against the onslaught of time to the details of this particular African-American family in the twentieth-century heartland, to McElroy's style, at once spare and dense with incident and observation."
—The Potomac


“She is the last woman of her line. Her new poems end and begin with A. Phillip Randolph and Pullman Porters, her enjambments are Ma Rainey and Lawdy Miz Clawdy, her leading men are the last Black men on the planet named Isom, her major planets are porches and backroads. She is still the master storyteller to the 60 million of the Passage. When I didn't know how to be a poet, I first read Colleen McElroy to slowly walk the path to how.”
—Nikky Finney

“There is music in her memory—a music of prayer. Moon. Stars. A music of generational flesh. Revered. Remembered. A testimonial to family that startles us with its beauty. And blood. ‘Frozen in time as if with the next breath they will reveal everything under that mask.’ Thank you, my dear sister, for our rescued memory.”
—Sonia Sanchez

An Interview with Colleen J. McElroy, author of Here I Throw Down My Heart

Video:  Bill Kenower

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

In the Volcano's Mouth - Miriam Bird Greenberg (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press

Today's book of poetry:

In The Volcano's Mouth.  Miriam Bird Greenberg.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2017 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters

It's two days in to the new year and Today's book of poetry finds himself outside of a medical clinic shortly after eight in the morning.  I'm in a warm car, the engine running and I have Miles, Trane and the Cannonball keeping me company.  An old friend is in the clinic doing clinic stuff.

Knowing I'd be here a while, it's -25C which is why I'm keeping the car running instead of enjoying the heated waiting room in the clinic, I brought along Miriam Bird Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth.  If I'd known what was about to happen I might not have bothered with turning on the heat.

This is why Today's book of poetry got into this game.  Let the banners fly and the bells ring, call out the trumpets, because Today's book of poetry is opening the year with a stunner.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is a beautiful poetry monster.  How else to describe the delicious havoc these poems leave in their tidy wake, how else to describe these powerhouse narratives that arrive at their harsh conclusions so gently?  Greenberg totally disarms the reader with one sweep of her disarming brush and then knocks them all over with the return pass.

Would You Believe

                     Three blocks from the Cyprus Freeway in Oakland,

                          which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake,

                          with a line by Susan Moon

We climbed from the mouth of a volcano

all year, the year I moved west with my sweetheart

to live three blocks from where the earth had broken

open. Men in the Acorn Projects

remembered pulling strangers

trapped in their cars to safety. Brother,

one told me he'd said, we can be afraid

of each other again tomorrow. Twenty

years past, they'd made good

on their promise. By then I waited weekly in a food line

alongside Chinese immigrant women who fished

plastic bottles from the trash, eyes

roving for a coin, a lost prize, at the curb. Sometimes

I'd lift my hand to the lip--

look out over the volcano's rim, and there,

in a crevice, a scrap of paper, shining:

                                                someone's private prayer

or prophecy. Everybody held out

hope, tended their small hustle. Women knocked

on the door selling broken-heeled shoes, loquats

picked in an abandoned yard, would try the knob

if no one was home. Could I make change

for a twenty, asked someone, unfolding one

she'd manufactured from a dollar bill.

                                               Would you believe

what lengths I went to, to call myself

happy then?                  Star of blood that blooms

beneath a bruised fingernail, star

of silence left high in the heart of a room

after the door's slammed. A couple sits, watching

one another's reflections in a mirror. The two

talk like this as evening falls

around them, and neither has the heart

to get up and turn on the light. "My body's here

but no one's in it." writes a friend; for me

it's different. I'd spent my childhood

in a house made of bees; on hot days honey

dripped through cracks in the ceiling. Me, I hummed,

coiled tight. It hadn't been long since I'd slept

in a creosote field while grainers crashed

in the switchyard nearby. Actual tumbleweeds

turned like prayer wheels crossing the tracks

and the constellations coyotes called to,

streaked across the night, were more miraculous

than freckles on the face of god. Around then,

hitchhiking past Death Valley, a pair of truckers

stopped for me. I used to haul cattle

to LAX, one said. But I couldn't take looking

into their mournful eyes anymore. I guess I wear my heart

on my sleeve, he said. They were climbing

through the Sierras to pick up a load of honey, telling jokes,

they both had wild white beards. I hadn't yet come

in my life to peer over the lip of a volcano,

I wasn't yet made of cicada's coils

and tymbal. Still, I carried a bit of string, a quipu I used

for eavesdropping on the passage of time.

If someone had put a knife in my hands, even then,

I'd have taken it.                                  I can hear

two birds quarreling, tangled in midair. I'm afraid

one day I'll find myself trash picking, tearing

corners from a twenty. I'm afraid I'm no longer

lost as the runaway I met hopping a train

out of Colton that summer

who carried a small jar of her own baby teeth

with her in her pack.

...

Today's book of poetry is tickled to bring such a high-stepping collection up to bat for our first book of the year.  It's too early for any "best book" of the year comparisons but we are certain In the Volcano's Mouth will be part of that discussion.  This is superb poetry.

Greenberg writes poems that are full of new information that feel like old knowledge, these poems feel like a modern folk tale happening in real time, stories we've known all along.  It's not quite haunting but it is close to unnerving as Greenberg unleashes her formative artillery and these poems spill out in front of us like accidents that were meant to happen, prophecies we are only hearing about now.

A Thousand Wire Humming

My room is hemmed with rain; otherwise its windows

are a scrim of moths pressed

            against the light, tracing feverishly

their dizzy script, and I am made from shadows

they cast,

            passport stamps from Moldova

and Suriname. If you passed me working

at a telephone box on the corner, a thousand wires

            humming, and I

in my mechanic's jumpsuit, phone co.

logo over the breast pocket, you'd never glance back

            twice. One night I sat drinking

on someone else's porch

after a rainstorm. The light was off, it was late, and no one

            came home. The moon cast my dim shape

into the yard, and the clouds racing over it

were skittish

            as rabbits. I am getting ready

to see you--shaving

my legs, painting my fingernails

             and my toes. I put on a black lace bra

you've never seen me wear. I've held the throat

of an animal,

             and broken its neck. I'm climbing

out of my skin. One night

      a woman I knew immersed herself in a bath

             of India ink, came out

darker than the rafters

of a empty house. Her mouth

             burned red, open as instinct

makes a fledgling's mouth open, and her ankles

were more beautiful

             than a sapling bent

by wind. More beautiful than the new body

of a snake emerging

            from its winter skin in the rafters. Somewhere far off

I can hear the sound of a telephone

ringing in an empty house.

             Don't empty houses ring? Listen

how echo inhabits a place it knows

no one's home. Sometimes on the subway

             you catch sight of someone familiar--your eyes meet

but there's nothing to say that won't be swallowed

by the throng.

             Your shadows are tangled

in the legs of the crowd, are talking already, or fighting,

or fucking. Whatever you wish for

             in secret, and each one's ankles

are more beautiful than the other's. Do you remember

the morning when,

             before I'd laid the iron to my work clothes,

you pinned one arm

behind my back? Something trembled

              in the palm of your other hand--

an egg yolk--and you poured it

into my mouth. Breath

              chasing breath's dizzy script,

it was slippery in my throat

as a minnow passing through your fingers

              into shadow, as a paw print

on the loamy creek bank

tires of the rain

               that erodes it, and I became a swarm

of dust-winged moths

then that filled the air where a moment before

               my shape had stood.

...

Our first morning read of the new year had to wait until the afternoon.  More snow and slow minions meant for a later start than normal to our poetry world.  Milo, our head tech, was all Campbell McGrath happy as Santa brought him three early McGrath titles.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, was happy because I told her the David Lee had another book in the offing.  She likes to refer to him as Sir David of Lee, and rightly so.

The rest of the staff seemed to have made it through those damned reindeer and Fat Man in Red.  Miriam Bird Greenberg brought everything into focus real quick.  Milo was the first to say it out loud when he said "if In the Volcano's Mouth is any indication of what is ahead in 2018 we are in for one hell of a year."

Living in the End Times

We sat in the ruins

                       and made tea from the flowers.

Who among us knew

                       anything? The mourning machine

sowed furrows in the distance

                       and a little while later came the mourning machine

to reap what had grown. There

                       at the edge of the field

crouched some children, ready

                       to dash through the field stubble

to pick through the wrecked rabbits' burrows

                       the machine had uncovered, then left behind.

...

Miriam Bird Greenberg writes with such clarity that it breeds instant familiarity, gives instant access to the undercurrents, the swirl darkly at the edges of all these poems, she is almost tender about it.  Today's book of poetry is excited to start 2018 with such an outstanding books of poems.  This is Greenberg's first book but it never shows, before she is done you will want to have every word she has written.

Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth is a book you'll want on your poetry shelf, you'll want Greenberg in your poetry brain.

Today's book of poetry starts the year with a bang.  Miriam Bird Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth will cook your poetry brain from the inside out.

   ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Miriam Bird Greenberg teaches creative writing and English as a second language. She is the author of two chapbooks, All Night in the New Country and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass. Greenberg has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best New Poets 2014 and The Queer South. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area. BLURBS “These poems do what the best poetry sometimes does: reveal and deepen our understanding of the strangeness in the ordinary. And do so in language clear as a bell.”      —Ed Ochester, judge “In the Volcano’s Mouth is rich with mysterious and heartrending images. Miriam Bird Greenberg blends scraps of the harshness of life, of what would be ugly in less skillful hands, with the beautiful, even beatific. These are poems that are acutely aware of the world: The flame/of a match that flares/at the tip of his cigarette/before he draws in his breath/deepens the darkness/that falls just beyond/ his illuminated face. Paul Eluard wrote, ‘There is another world and it is in this one.’ These poems give us a glimpse into that world. They are poems I will come back to for inspiration.”      —Ellen Bass “Although many of the poems in this haunted book are ‘pastoral’ in a Classical sense, the natural world is not a place of peace and serenity. Rather, it’s unstable, a setting not devoid of meaning, but a realm where meaning is always on the move, like the many characters wandering through this book, and the mind of the poet who has carefully made it. These poems are harrowing and wounding, and yet retain a quiet, sustaining reserve of beauty.”       —Maurice Manning                                      Miriam Bird Greenberg @ Quiet Lightning Video: Evan Karp upress.pitt.edu 646 DISCLAIMERS Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission. We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies" and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration

Primer - Aaron Smith (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Primer.  Aaron Smith.  Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

Today's book of poetry is going to start today's blog with a message directly to Aaron Smith.  NO "Blue Exits" please.  There aren't enough excellent poets with your particular mix of bawdy guilt and formidable chutzpah.

It might be hard to imagine that a totally straight sixty-year-old finds common ground with an entirely randy and frequently angry younger gay poet.  But Smith's ribald renunciations of the status quo in Primer come from a deep well of lucid and loquacious lust.  Smith kicks the shit out of Eros.

Notes For A Lecture:  Keith Haring

I like Haring best when he's raw,

so large the image might smear,

so thick on the page I could

tear off my underwear.

When I was a kid, I hated the word

"pleasure." It made me feel like

my parents knew my penis got stiff

in the tub, that the washcloth

felt good on the tip. Imagine our veins:

graffitied tunnels desire moves through,

brakeless, rumbling into thrust.

Just relax, the man said, as he opened

my legs, fingers slick with his own wet.

His tongue in my ass unlocked

a place in my chest I was afraid of.

A friend told me he thought the great revelation

of his life would be a phrase from Keats

or Yeats, not a married man at his throat.

I want to fuck you boy-pussy.

He said he never felt closer to god.

Cartoon hard-ons, dicks with faces, mouths

stuffed with cock. Nameless fucking

self-loathing finally brought me to.

I'm so glad to have a body I hated.

...

Primer is boldly, beautifully frank about the journey to manhood for a young man uncertain of his sexuality, and if not uncertain, terrified.  It doesn't take Smith that long to find certainty but he never quite finds peace.

These poems despair a sexuality some still see as "other" but Today's book of poetry thinks that for all his justified anger and rage Aaron Smith has created a hopeful text in Primer for those about to follow.  And an entirely entertaining book of poetry for the rest of us in the process.

Homosexuality

Dad said someone shot

the albino deer, with

a gun, out of season. Eyes

pink, white fur, a reverse

shadow in dusk against

the hillside. Not in all

the years I've hunted

have I seen an animal

like that. It's cruel, he says,

for nature to make

such a thing, unable

to hide when hiding

is how it survives. He looks

through my eyes, then

away, he wants us to stay

ordinary men.

...

Primer throbs with visceral lust and desire.  Gay men will identify these poems, recognize themselves, their friends, their stories.  But every reader will be able to identify with the human need for love and acceptance, contact.  And it is not just the acceptance of other but the real struggle to accept oneself as we really are.

Aaron Smith's Primer swings carnal but addresses those big questions of who we are and who we see when we look in the mirror.

Jennifer Lawrence

I want to tell the woman

selling self-published christian

fiction at Starbucks, who says,

god has made her a fisher of men

that I didn't think I could come

standing up until a man

I fucked stuck three

fingers in my butt. I want

to tell her that if the asshole

is the crucifixion then

the prostate is the second

coming. Once I thought

it was possible to be an ethical

person until the guy I was dating

said Jennifer Lawrence is our

greatest living actress. He wept

during sex and left his socks on

in bed. I could live with the cold

feet and the crying.

...

Bravo Aaron Smith.  For Today's book of poetry Primer comes across as so damned honest and true that you feel the heat of Smith's fire.  Any poetry lover will recognize the battle with despair and celebrate beating it back into the darkness.

Thank you Mr. Smith.

Aaron Smith

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Smith is the author of Appetite, and Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks, Men in Groups and What's Required. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2013. He is associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BLURBS

“Aaron Smith’s poems have always exuded a blue that’s simultaneously melancholy and bawdy. Primer sharpens his seemingly paradoxical blend of vigor and vulnerability. These marvelous poems are confrontational not simply for readers, but for the poet/self kissing the window between light and darkness, splendor and despair. Smith writes with more provocativeness and compassion than any poet of his generation.”

     —Terrance Hayes

“Shame is the crux, in Smith’s austere poems; an aching, inescapable force that closes the gay boy into his own body, making sex abject, until ‘there’s not enough city//to fill you up.’ The world may have changed, but we can’t help but carry into the new life the ineradicable weight of the past.”

     —Mark Doty

“In Primer, Aaron Smith has not only upped the ante, he’s been penetrated and eviscerated by it. These poems arouse me with their brazen, indecorous explicitness. The collection throbs with sex and the death wish, but also with wit and an exhilarative rage. This book makes me want to live bareback, to write ever-more-recklessly; it makes me not want my ‘stupid, tiny life to end.’”

     —Diane Seuss

Aaron Smith reading at The Poetry Center, Paterson, Nj

Video: Michael Byro

upress.pitt.edu 

600

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Star Journal - Selected Poems - Christopher Buckley (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Star Journal - Selected Poems.  Christopher Buckley.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

Star Journal - Selected Poems  by Christopher Buckley is as straightforward as a yardstick, measuring by star-light, the weight of a butterfly heart.  In fact Star Journal is a book of poet magic, a proverbial pot of gold.  Today's book of poetry defies you to open any page of this book and not be entertained and enlightened.

I don't hear 'em but I certainly feel the ghosts of Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers in the elusive space in the English language where intellect and emotion get to tango it out in an invisible swirl of yin and yang.  Here is a poet with a giant poet clock time machine, metronomes of logic, tiny unseen hammers of reason, all of ticking away in balance inside the Buckley noggin'.

Today's book of poetry couldn't help but think cinematic when reading these expansive certainties. There were moments of complete satisfaction, just like watching a Francis Ford Coppola movie where all the details are exact, all the details make it true.  Buckley does the same thing, makes sure you are hearing the right sound, fills the mirror in the corner with the proper reflection, colours in the edges of the image until you are there breathing it in.

Why I'm in Favor of a Nuclear Freeze

Because we were 18 and still wonderful in our bodies,

because Harry's father owned a ranch and we had

nothing better to do one Saturday, we went hunting

doves among the high oaks and almost wholly quiet air....

Traipsing the hills and deer paths for an hour,

we were ready when the first ones swooped

and we took them down in smoke much like the planes

in the war films of our regimented youth.

                                                                  Some were dead

and some knocked cold, and because he knew how

and I just couldn't, Harry went to each of them and,

with thumb and forefinger, almost tenderly, squeezed

the last air out of their slight necks.

                                                         Our jackets grew

heavy with birds and for a while we sat in the shade

thinking we were someone, talking a bit of girls--

who would "go," who wouldn't, how love would probably

always be beyond our reach...We even talked of the nuns

who terrified us with God and damnation. We both recalled

that first prize in art, the one pinned to the cork board

in front of class, was a sweet blond girl's drawing

of the fires and coals, the tortured souls of Purgatory.

Harry said he feared eternity until he was 17, and,

if he ever had kids, the last place they would go would be a

parochial school.

                            On our way to the car, having forgotten

which way the safety was off or on, I accidentally discharged

my borrowed 12 gauge, twice actually -- one would have been Harry's

head if he were behind me, the other my foot, inches to the right.

We were almost back when something moved in the raw, dry grass,

and without thinking, and on the first twitch of two tall ears,

we together blew the ever-loving-Jesus out of a jack rabbit

until we couldn't tell fur from dust from blood....

                                                                               Harry has

a family, two children as lovely as any will ever be--

he hasn't hunted in years... and that once was enough for me.

Anymore, a good day offers a moment's praise for the lizards

daring the road I run along, or it offers a dusk in which

yellow meadowlarks scrounge fields in the grey autumn light.

Harry and I are friends now almost 30 years, and the last time

we had dinner, I thought about that rabbit, not the doves

which we swore we would cook and eat, but that rabbit--

why the hell had we killed it so cold-heartedly? And I saw

that it was simply because we had the guns, because we could.

...

Christopher Buckley's poems are small stories that spin out so large you can't help but get caught up in the vortex, they becomes proclamations without ever proselytizing.  We can almost believe that Christopher Buckley has our planet sussed out, or at least our meagre scrabbling over its surface.

But in truth Buckley is asking as many questions as your average skeptic.

Range.  Good poets have range and Buckley covers it.  We are subject to musings on Mao Tse-Tung, a beautiful blue evening in Santorini, Bertrand Russell's musings on astronomy, reading/not reading Einstein, dancing "the Stroll," and so on.  These poems swell with the lovely interconnectivity of a man full of ideas, Buckley encompasses a big universe and he does it in big, big poems of staggering beauty and subtle intellect.  When you're reading these poems you are taking in a lot of new information but it is coming through the Buckley filter.

Watchful--Es Castell, Menorca

     But the truth is what we are always

      watchful, lying in wait for ourselves.

                                                 

                                            -Neruda

I remember the idiot in the town square

of Es Castell, trying each day to entice

the resident pigeons to eat the orange peels

he threw blissfully, and with hope,

on to the grass and walks.

                                                         But, after so much time,
they were on to him, and the worthless peels,
and waddled away in a mumbling cloud
of feathers....And each day he'd finally tire
of their truculence and unzip the jacket
of his purple warm-up suit, spread it wide
as a red kite's wings, and run
into their grey midst, scattering them
a few feet beyond the fountains, but never out
above the sky-colored water,
or into the water-colored sky....

Like the old men already sitting there
in the wet shadows on the benches,
we soon tolerated him--like the pigeons
who came back in a minute or two
and who seemed to forget,
as he did, such purposeless and 
momentary confrontations--days
like lost clouds.
                          I soon realized
that I was blessed simply
to walk out each morning
around the square and hear
the clock tower above the post office
strike the hour two times,
a few minutes apart, and not care
which could be correct; blessed
to sit next to the public phones,
which occasionally rang for no one,
and watch the bees dissolve into the sun,
knowing someone else had done the math of light--
the stars never showing any sign
of distress.
                  Yet, if there is some truth
about us, it's not in the stars,
or in the cluster of orange peels
almost as brilliant on the mid-morning walk--
but perhaps in the fact that we can tolerate
one among us to whom they are of equal
consequence.
                      I no longer need to look
to stars, the poorly punctuated dark,
for no matter what I tap out on the Olivetti,
the earth still looks inescapable from here.
But if some innocence remains,
a little of it might be here
on this small island
deserted in winter by tourists,
foreign commerce, and even the attention
of the more fashionable birds.
The green finch and the swifts are
content and have their say.
The boats are in each afternoon,
gulls climbing the air after them,
praising the fruits of the sea.

And if now we are not sure
what is of value--looking out
at the fig trees thin as refugees
along the cliff--we at least understand
what is worthless before our eyes
morning after morning, as the steam
and fog of industry lift off
beyond the port and to the west
without us.
                   I sit above the harbor,
happily on the benches provided
by the ayuntamiento for just this purpose,
beneath the orderly palms,
freighters and cruise ships slipping
in and out, going somewhere...
and make do with the intuition of wind,
the pines with their impromptu rhythms,
my hands and feet free
to defeat the intricate purposes of air,
to do nothing more than claim
the prosperity of light.
                                    Late afternoon,
I like the white tables fronting
the bars in the square, relaxing
with a small Estrella--a beer
named for a star--knowing that,
soon enough, around the corner,
I'll be on my way back
from the market and bakery
with a heart as full as the summer
5:00 sun, with a yellow grocery bag
in each hand as I ascend the steps
to our flat over the cove, where
I'll look out, and see in the reflection
of the glass doors, a happy man
arranging oranges in a bowl.

...

Buckley's Star Journal made for a great morning read in the office today.  His poems read like tidy little novels so the reader has time to sink their teeth in.

Christopher Buckley keeps a narrative line strong enough to climb up the side of a mountain with, or pull shipwrecked survivors from the sea.  He keeps it taut.  Buckley's narrative line is strong enough to be a lifeline, you could hang your hat on it.

Poverty

           for Phil

    la colera de pobre
     tiene dos rios contra muchos mares.

                                          --Cesar Vallejo

Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans.
I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador
so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro
past his door--no cars, computers,
basketball shoes--not a bottle cap
of hope for the life ahead...just enough
to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud
of flies. It's the least I can do,
and so I do it.
                      I have followed the dry length
of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray
for the creosote, the blue saliva, let alone
for pork bellies, soy bean futures.
                                                      Listen.
There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil.
Billions are spent each year on beauty products
world-wide--28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin
conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps,
selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs.
9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone
for foreign aid.
                        I am the prince of small potatoes,
I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching
the crusts I have to give. I have no ground for complaint,
though deep down, where it's anyone's guess,
I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious--
creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard,
a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares
what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something
we share--it devours the beginning and the end.

The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice--
Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On...
not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow.
Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers
of the working class--Pharaoh Oil, Congress,
or The Commissioner of Baseball--all who will eventually
take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap
on the outskirts of Cleveland.
                                                I have an ATM card,
AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed
20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in
disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy's
against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend
its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has--
the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich
with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark,
my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness
or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.

...

Star Journal - Selected Poems is a big book full of big ideas and Today's book of poetry loved it.  The personal and political merge as Buckley storms over the horizon.  Today's book of poetry will be down for anything Christopher Buckley wants to cook from now till the end.  Buckley burns with the best.

Christopher Buckley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Buckley has published twenty books of poetry, several chapbooks and limited editions, and three memoirs. He is the editor of six poetry anthologies as well as critical books on the poets Philip Levine, Larry Levis, and Luis Omar Salinas. Buckley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Fulbright Award, four Pushcart prizes, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America, among other awards. Buckley has taught writing and creative writing at several universities, and is emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

BLURBS

“The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. . . . This is a humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concerns for the events both in and above the world. It rewards countless readings and never betrays itself.”   —Philip Levine on Sky in Ploughshares “Time and the shifts of time are the burden: not simply time as recollection or loss, but also and everywhere the persistent loneliness of star time, mastodon time, so that finally these are poems in which reflection takes on uncommon amplitude and presence. And all this would be nothing, of course, without the language, which is the glory of these poems.”      —Peter Everwine on Dark Matter “Christopher Buckley’s gift for wide-ranging thinking meshes so gracefully with lovingly tender details, he feels like a companion voice for all time—a Hikmet, a Neruda, yes.”       —Naomi Shihab Nye on Back Room at the Philosopher’s Club “There is a deep nostalgia here, but also wisdom and common sense, and beautiful writing. I welcome him at his maturist, poet of stardust.”     —Gerald Stern on And the Sea “The poems are verbally so rich, generous, out-loud (I can't not intone the rhetorical flourishes), inclusive, wry. I like especially the orientation to the large-picture physics/cosmology at the same time that (Buckley) relates his own past. . . . I like the tone—how else to address one's mortality & mixed luck except with irony & affection stirred with gratitude?”      —Dennis Schmitz “Some poets like only celestial music, other the grit of the streets, but Buckley engages winningly with both.”       —David Kirby in San Francisco Chronicle “Prize-winning poet Buckley has a unique poetic voice, a sort of breathless, long-sentenced style that is gripping and captivating . . . . These are poems of immortality and extinction that can still make you smile. He has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending bravado with humility.”      —Judy Clarence in Library Journal "There is a quietness to these poems and breakouts of lyrical intensity that define Buckley as a master of the art."      —North of Oxford upress.pitt.edu 565 DISCLAIMERS Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission. We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies" and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.