Book Reviews

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BOOK REVIEWS

  • This is the Lightness by Rachel Barton, reviewed by Louise Barden

    December 7, 2022
    Book cover for Rachel Barton's "This is the Lightness." White blossoms on a black background, white and yellow lettering.

    The Poetry Box, 2022, 87 pages, $18.00
    ISBN: 978-1-956285-17-8
    Available at The Poetry Box
    https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/lightness and Amazon

    In This is the Lightness,her new collection from The Poetry Box,Rachel Barton takes us on a spiritual and imaginative journey, starting with her narrator’s youthful sense of a universe so small…I wonder it should matter at all  (“Sometimes My Universe”) through times of change and loss into a mature sense of acceptance and joy. 

    From the book’s first section, “Sometimes My Universe”––where Barton describes living in the shadow of an Alaskan glacier or playing ball with her dog––to its end, the poems’ vivid imagery and detailed descriptions introduce us to an interior life that considers even the smallest particulars of the world around her. The first poems reflect a young person’s landscape-view of the world, in which the narrator is primarily an actor who sees such details as part of that environment around her––like blue gills of river trout and sap rising in a rush (“Mobius in a Dream”). 

    Later, Barton uses similes and metaphors to turn such simple descriptions into something more than tangible facts. For example, she describes branches festive with clumps of moss and red leaves like torn ribbons (“Girl in the Woods”), and like a dragon on fir/behind the rugged contour/of our sleeping volcano (“From Knik Arms to Potters March”).

    While the book’s beginning creates a picture of a person who is contented with a somewhat mundane life in the beautiful world around her, the second section of poems, “Owning my Tribe,” moves beyond the minutia of daily living to the narrator’s rising awareness of an imagined interior life that includes more than simple natural beauty.

    In one poem, Barton imagines the world of a woman who becomes a Bear; in another, she gives us the experience of a woman whose animal totem transforms her into an insect. Here she takes us with her to a land where we can stand beneath a waterfall and shiver….[or] lie under an array of crystals (“Abadania”).

    As her narrator’s world becomes increasingly complex, so do her poems.  Punctuation is often spare while Barton also takes imaginative leaps to conjoin images that initially seem unrelated. The results invite readers to share a vision in which imagination [is] the spark that flares brightest (“Guys Take You”). These are poems by a writer who clearly is well-versed in her craft.

    The book’s section called “Slow Crossing,” describes how the aging and deaths of parents, friends, and loved ones inevitably brought Barton’s narrator (as it brings us all) to a realization of her own mortality. Barton succeeds in making us part of this transition through her careful selection of words in poems that are both personal and universal. In the poem aptly named, “Only a Matter of Time,” for example, she admits being too struck with the beginning myself/to anticipate the final chapter.

    Finally in the last chapter, “The Sky is Falling,” Barton shares the experience of gradually coming to an internal understanding of our own body’s frailty and eventual end. She dissects the cause and early-morning advent of a migraine headache in “On Employing Einstein’s Special Relativity” ––a prose poem tightly woven into a block of aligned text. She describes the emptiness of “Recovery”

                            when the world retreats…

                            in the vacuum of a very long outgoing wave

                            its inhale sucking everything from you….

                            ….[until] you have to ask

                            will the world rush to your door again….

    And in “Falling Out,” a sudden loss of confidence in a long-held belief causes her to find myself weeping/my body slightly altered…. And, she has to admit, there is no going back/we cannot unlearn what is true.

    As Barton begins to see she must imagine something new in “Though Darkness Surrounds” and Get over it in “The Sky is Falling,” she takes us with her, learning how to accept the world, with its frailties and our own. And she begins to ask herself what she will do with the years she has.

    She guides us along her path to a mature life where––in spite of pain, loss, and difficulty––she tells us

                            …. not to say I even know what

     the big questions are but I’m anticipating the rush anyway the

                            surprise and then the laughing like champagne bubbles rising from

                            deep within my belly…. (“Slaphappy”)

    And we discover that, in poem after poem, Barton’s vivid and creative imagery, skillfully expressed, has made us ready to laugh with her out of sheer joy.

    Reviewer’s Bio

    Louise Cary Barden’s poetry has won the Calyx Lois Cranston Prize, Oregon Poetry Association award, the Harperprints chapbook competition, and others. Her poems have appeared in such journals as pan-dem-ik, humana obscura and Cathexis Northwest. She was also Associate Editor of Timberline Review, Volume 11. Barden is a self-avowed tree-hugger whose career indecisiveness has taken her from teaching English at three universities to writing advertising and editorial copy and managing marketing programs. In 2017 she re-settled in Corvallis, Oregon, after forty years in North Carolina.

  • The Great Hunt and Other Poems, by Patty Wixon, reviewed by Paulann Petersen

    September 15, 2022

    The Great Hunt and Other Poems by Patty Wixon
    Cyclone Press, 2021, 50 pages, $12.00
    ISBN: 979-8-515859-73-2
    Available at Amazon or Bloomsbury Books in Ashland
    (For a signed copy and free shipping, please order directly from the author at [email protected])

    Patty Wixon’s collection The Great Hunt and Other Poems begins with a poem in which wildfire smoke dissolves/the sun…leaving the day black.  In the final poem, a bright star flickers before sliding behind a lifting sunrise. Indeed, Wixon’s poems move back and forth freely from darkness to light, from past to present, from joy to sorrow, from catastrophe to blessings.

    Between the first and last poems, readers are invited into the many places the poet lived or traveled, her work emerging from such diverse sites as Greece and Oregon and Alaska and Florida and Taiwan and the Himalayas. Her poems reflect and embrace a life lived fully and richly, one characterized by the keen and unflinching attention she pays to each and every world in which she has found herself. Human violence, wrenching divorce, pandemic sequestering, cultural extinction, beloved classic literature, the balm of the natural world: Wixon embraces them all.

    Personal and family history play a strong role in her work, and nowhere is that strength more evident than in poems about family members, ones such as the following homage titled “Why Grandma Votes.”

           She took advanced math classes in high school,
           the only girl in the room. The counselor said,
           If you want a job, choose nursing or teaching
           Art or Home Ec, not Math.

           After school she worked at Bullock’s Shoe Store,
           memorized the stock, how to measure, stood tall,
           stiff-spine when men backed out the door saying,
           I’ll come back later for a man to help me.

           Summers swimming she beat boys in races,
           but college water teams had no women so she joined
           synchronized swimming, held three-minute breaths
           for spinning water wheels circling three or four times.

           The only woman in fly fishing class, she missed an “A”
           in the final—not knowing Johnson was the leading brand
           of outboard motors—but earned it back casting a dry fly
           half the length of the football field.

    The lone woman among those students, she makes an astonishing one-hundred-and-fifty-foot cast! This A-earning grandma is irresistible, and the poet’s admiration for her courage and tenacity are irresistible too.

    Yes, Wixon gives this grandma her due, paying tribute to her, just as each poem in this collection pays its tribute to the admirable qualities of the woman who wrote it. Curious, insightful, compassionate, open to whimsy and delight, Patty Wixon writes poems that gladly open themselves to each reader lucky enough to encounter them. The last poem of The Great Hunt (that lifting sunrise poem) is a litany of blessings. In it, Wixon calls for a number of blessings, including ones for falling maple leaves, for the warmth of a loved-one’s hand, for pipes filled with hot water when the weather is cold. When she asks that writers whose words lay a path toward hope be blessed, we echo her. As her grateful readers, we ask that she be blessed for her words, for her poems that open—to all of us—their pathways toward hope.

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has seven full-length books of poetry, most recently One Small Sun, from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she received the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. In 2013 she was Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for a choral composition that’s now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge. www.paulann.net

  • Stronger Than the Current, by Mark Thalman, reviewed by M. Ann Reed

    September 1, 2022

    Stronger Than the Current by Mark Thalman
    The Poetry Box, 2021, 46 pages, $12.00
    ISBN: 978-1-948461-75-7
    Available at The Poetry Box

    The title of Mark Thalman’s chapbook, Stronger Than the Current, emerges from the dominant character trait of Helen McCready, a native Oregonian. When the rising Siuslaw River drowns McCready’s prize tulips, she keeps her rowboat tied to the back porch from which she fishes for salmon. Her patience is stronger than the current (“Mapleton”). Not a patience of necessity for survival, not a patience of placid waiting for the fish to bite, hers is rather a steadfast mindful trust in and love of the remaining beauty, which surpasses necessity.

    Patience holds the tensions between opposites in Thalman’s poems which address forestry, deforestation, corporate profiteering, climate crisis, and Oregon’s beauty. In “Logging the Umpqua,” Thalman sinks spurs into bark to climb with history’s Tree Topper, the surgeon who severs fir tree crowns, and we follow as the wind makes long vowel sounds/trying to speak/one word.

    The wind’s breath of awe lingers with the pause, yet seems never to end as the Tree Topper spots the downward movement from the mountain:

    two field hawks
                patient as gods
                glide across a meadow
                to the far ridge.

    Reminded of his risk and the steadying patience of praying, preying hawks, the Tree Topper begins surgical removal and prepares for the leaning fir to spring back forcing him to ride the whipping sway. Even the branches below snap when the crown explodes, and the tree, hundreds of years old, moans. We moan and mourn the loss with the fir, a symbol of patient weathering growth, still offering its sustaining beauty.

    This necessary loss, giving the fir necessary sunlight, decrescendos to deforestations’ greater, unnecessary losses, which Thalman compares with a war zone in “Salmon Berry Mountain, 1911.” After cutting the deadly wedge, consequences are double-edged. Leaping like bucks, the men seek safety lest the fir fall crazy,/pounding them with one blow while a tremendous cracking fractures the air, signifying how the whole trunk and broken limbs explode shrapnel, leaving a hole in the canopy of firs, comparable to looking up from /the bottom of a grave. Unnecessary losses sever relationships with beauty, trying the patience that surpasses understanding.

    “Logging Camp, 1921” refers to days when the crew carried a body on a stretcher, about which no one dares ask,

    As returning from battle,
                hardhats like WW-1 helmets,
                their downcast eyes
                tell the story.

    Patience stretches into humbled silence. Such strenuous work, requiring uncanny nimbleness, clear minds, and the patience that quells carelessness leads to the industry as a whole becoming comparable with war, both being “Widow-Makers.” This poem concerns the kind of risk chosen when The hammer is cocked, when Fate pulls the trigger. This fifty-fifty chance that a logger will survive tree-clubbing is the bet against natural law:  A hard-hat can’t ward off/heavy artillery. Tree Toppers begin to hang up their spurs.

    Yet backed by corporate profiteering, deforestation increases, causing the climate crisis and further trying patience – the context of “Elegy for a Common Field” and Thalman’s echo of Chekov’s 1897 drama, Uncle Vanya.  Each stanza begins with the verb, “gone”:

                Gone are the deer trails . . .
                Gone is the snag the kestrel used for a perch, . . .
                Gone is the topsoil . . .
                Gone are the goats . . .

     as if the land were a complete poem suffering a brutal erasure to become a scant poem measuring increasing displacement.

    In “Celilo Falls,” Thalman invites us to mourn the loss of frothing river cascades/over basalt cliffs where ten thousand generations of men have come to spear Chinook. As floodgates close, the river rises, and petroglyphs, village sites and burial grounds drown under the deep lake created to generate cheap electricity.

    Yet there are bright spots.  In “Late July: Harvest,” a giant beast of a combine harvesting wheat could have blindly harvested the doe and her fawns asleep, surrounded by ripe wheat.  But it didn’t. And there are still strongholds of beauty and patient husbandry. “Finley’s Pasture” nurtures four nickering Belgians, ebony titans, and Gravensteins.

    Thalman’s patient stream of consciousness overcomes others’ curses of Oregon’s nine-month monsoon season to unfold the beauty and kindness of “Ten Feet of Rain,” Tillamook Forest’s annual rainfall. He features rain as bounty-bringer and the sun’s blessing of raindrops, primary partner of heat and light to create and sustain life on earth:

    The sun glistens like salmon scales
                on the tip of an eagle’s beak, decorates
                ends of pine needles with ornaments,
                strips maples of their last gold leaves,
                flakes tumbling in a stream.

    Not many view eagles feeding on salmon. Thalman’s keen witness, for us to savor, reveals his very own viewpoint. Rain becomes another muse dancing like a madman across the roof all night. Rain speaks its name through a chant that blesses the forest.  Though this kindness of rain may not faze objectors, it impresses Thalman as freely given noblesse oblige, rewarding nature’s maternity season and the suffering of giving birth to new life.

    In Stronger Than the Current, Thalman offers us both a poetics of place and the patience of grace.         

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    M. Ann Reed offers the Organic Unity/Bio-Poetic Study of Literature in support the Deep Ecology Movement for global and local academic students. Awarded a doctorate in Theater Arts/Performance Studies and a faithful student of C. G. Jung, she served various theater companies as a dramaturge. Her literary essays are cited in the disciplines of medicine, literature, and psychology. Various literary arts journals are homes for her poems: Antithesis, Azure of Lazuli Literary Arts Journal, Burningword, Eastern Iowa Review, Parabola, Paws Poetry, Proverse, Hong Kong Mingled Voices, Psychological Perspectives and The Poeming Pigeon.

  • Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyōto, by Margaret Chula, reviewed by Ce Rosenow

    August 15, 2022

    Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyōto by Margaret Chula
    Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021, 138 pages, 24 full-color images, $24.95
    ISBN: 978-1-951651-98-5 (print; softcover; perfect bound)
    For a signed copy and free shipping, please order directly from the author at [email protected].

    I have known Maggie for almost thirty years, having met shortly after her return from living in Japan. I found several of the stories in Firefly Lanterns to be familiar tales she shared while we visited beneath the copper beech in her back meadow in Portland or shared a meal. Other stories were new to me, and even the ones I had heard before took on new life because of her decision to write them as haibun. This Japanese form began as a type of travel writing, making it particularly appropriate for sharing Chula’s memories of her time abroad. It combines prose paragraphs with haiku, allowing the poet to craft detailed vignettes punctuated with crystalized images in the haiku. Chula is a longtime practitioner of haibun and even invented the form of linked haibun with Rich Youmans in their book Shadow Lines. In Firefly Lanterns, she takes varied approaches, sometimes concluding the haibun with haiku and other times interspersing haiku throughout a longer prose narrative.

    The book is beautifully produced and contains twenty-four full-color original photographs and drawings that enhance the details of the haibun. It also contains many Japanese words that simply don’t translate accurately into English, and there is a glossary at the back for readers unfamiliar with these terms.

    A major strength of this collection is Chula’s ability to select key experiences out of the many options she had to choose from over her twelve-year stay in Kyoto. She shares what is most meaningful to her and also what will give the reader the truest insight into her time in Japan. Rather than acquiescing to nostalgia, she strives for accuracy, providing precise details that create highly evocative renderings of her experiences. For instance, in the title haibun, she describes visiting her friends in Ayabe, which is a roughly two-and-a-half-hour drive from Kyoto. The fireflies are out, and everyone is outside at night catching them:

           Tomoko plucks a bellflower for me and explains that hotaru means firefly and bukuro is
    sack. With our butterfly nets, we scoop the air and capture a net full of fireflies. Carefully
    we transfer them to the
    hotaru bukuro by opening the blossoms and inserting the fireflies
    into their petal-soft cage. Soon the flowers begin to take on the glow of the fireflies’
    light….

    After returning to the house, they release the fireflies into the room:

           lying on tatami / in a room full of fireflies / the evening cool

           In the darkened room, we drink sake and talk softly, speak of gentle things, the
    importance of  friendship, the natural abundance of life….

           When it’s finally time to retire, Murayama-san opens the shoji and releases the fireflies
    into the night. By morning they will have scattered far and wide, specks of darkness
    against the overcast sky.

    An additional accomplishment is Chula’s skill at drawing the reader into the unfamiliar, crafting present-tense descriptions that make the reader feel they are sharing her experiences and feelings in real time rather than in the past.

    Yet another impressive element of this collection is Chula’s decision to construct the book in two parts. The first focuses on her life in Kyoto during the 1980s. The second part describes the return trip she took with her husband in 1997. After immersing the reader in her Japanese life, this second part skillfully conveys Chula’s feelings when encountering the many changes and losses that have occurred after only five years away. Readers, too, will find themselves emotionally impacted by these changes.

    One of the most heartfelt sections of the book is its final series of haibun focusing on Chula’s ikebana sensei (flower arrangement teacher), with whom she studied for the entire twelve years she lived in Japan. On returning to Kyoto, Chula learns that Sensei has Alzheimer’s and visits her in the Alzheimer’s Home only to realize that her teacher has no memory. It is a poignant conclusion to a collection that preserves Chula’s memories of her life in Japan and the changes that occur there once she leaves. Chula’s memories of Sensei and of Kyoto will not be lost as the student returns to Oregon and carries on the tradition of the teacher: clipping camellias /with Sensei’s old scissors /a new year begins.

    In many ways, this collection is like Sensei’s scissors: a haibun master at the height of her ability preserving stories of her time in Japan and modeling the many approaches to the haibun form for others to follow. Don’t miss this master at work. Firefly Lanterns is a wonderful collection I highly recommend.

    Reviewer Bio:

    Ce Rosenow’s books and chapbooks include The Backs of Angels, Even If, North Lake, Pacific, A Year Longer, and Spectral Forms. She is one of the eight authors of Beyond Within: A Collection of Rengay, and co-editor of The Next One Thousand Years, The Selected Poems of Cid Corman with Bob Arnold. She co-authored Care Ethics and Poetry with Maurice Hamington, and her book Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions is forthcoming from Lexington Books. She is also the former President of the Haiku Society of America.

  • making oxygen, remaining inside this pure hollow note, by M. Ann Reed, reviewed by Sakina B. Fakhri

    August 2, 2022

    making oxygen, remaining inside this pure hollow note by M. Ann Reed
    Finishing Line Press, 2020, 34 pages, $14.99
    ISBN: 978-1-64662-236-8
    Available at Finishing Line Press

    The poems in M. Ann Reed’s making oxygen, remaining inside this pure hollow note invite the reader into the hollow growing point we share with plants – the silent note through which, as the author says in the Preface, we breathe soul-life into words, words into musical patterns, musical patterns into images, all literary features into meaning. And so this book unravels, teaching the reader how to read it as it proceeds with a sense of movement without propulsion – a sense of moving-with instead of moving-towards. The words do not merely transform, but transform with the reader.

    The final note of each poem lingers into the beginning of the next one, and thus all contribute to an intricately composed respiration, one that satisfies the journey promised in the Preface: that uncanny, fraught, beautiful, holy act of making oxygen.

    Reed’s musical speech delivers an alliterated conduit to an intimate, perhaps unexpected experience – a brave exercise in relentless compassion. We wait for the critique that does not come, until we find permission to settle into these uninterrupted rhythms and images that connect the very vast – the Whirlpool Galaxy Madonna’s lit candle—to the very small—a phoenix-flame inside drops of rain (“Did you rise or fall from the cloud of unknowing?). Each poem adds a layer and yet somehow contributes to a lightness in the whole.

    Consider how the initial poems move us beyond honoring the dream of a child bringing oxygen, escape, and restoration to victims of a Nazi concentration camp into “Van Cliburn’s page-turner,” celebrating a Rosh Hashanah song praying the music

    to shatter
                   remake us

           alone
               amourtized
                   into time is not.

    The music leads us into the dense poem, “Rain-forest ecstasy”: the climax of the book’s musical pattern beginning with

           tangerine monkeys                  spring              on ancient banana feet                                                                               applaud(dash)ing
                                  ecstatic
                                  starCries.         announcing
                                                            trape(zery)

    Following this entrance,

                                                 Hummingbirdtelegrams twist
           (choose) rush of breath    a blueprint electric            of dots and dash
                                                                                        across apricot tiger flats

    All voices join the hush at the center of the page where Quetzal feathers whisper

       come hug
            the chanting edge of Dolphins
           their erotic brother wears a coat of rain
    knows        

           it takes the swaddling stillness of Penguins    to keep the balance of living beings

    After participating in the ecstasy of rainforest animals, we may contemplate

    the title, “Did you rise or fall from the cloud of unknowing?” Words and letters are disarranged and rearranged by their shifting context throughout the poem, smoothed through delicate alliteration:

           Rain sings tonight.
           Each drop holds a pear-shaped flame.
           Paradrops fall to form fluent silk screens.
           . . .

           Pears fall from the sky.
           . . .

           You are a paradox.

    The poet cares for these threads for us; we can trust that they will gently fall to the bottom of the poem like a light rain, so we are content to follow them—to watch the “pear” drift in all of its forms, to feel the grandness and the ephemerality––the act of making meaningful music through the sounds of words.

    The shaped meaning—the idea that a spiritual flame can survive in water––evokes the question: so where else can what else survive? Much survives––including Rumi’s Guesthouse, Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina” beginning with a horrifying vestige of destruction and loss:

           Ancient stones had received the bullets,
                    ejected hostile guests. Still
           (mason’s lace rudely interrupted, kindly intact)
                    foundation and framework hold true—accept
           the redolent arms they had once restricted­­––accept
                    earth’s green embrace.

    The caesura at the end of the second line is nothing short of striking—and yet we must wait past the parenthetical, we must be still, for what still exists—the contrast to the bullets is followed by another pause: accept. The acceptance of the poem is an opening of arms to the life, the verdancy that time returns to the ruins. The roof ripped away to open sky; moss on the edifice. The halting cadence soon opens a gate to a poetic movement that feels like plucked harp strings—

           wings
                  dithrambic struck strings
                           comings and goings

           of fluttering things,
                ringed chrystograph
                  of tree,
           harp
               piano

    ––short lines that vibrate sweetly—that fall into an unanticipated rhyming pattern as one relaxes into celebrating a new music shaped by syncopated steps. And where do the steps lead us? Through a growing point to realization that we are

           not made of stone
               but fragile flesh
           and bone

           challenged to grow
           more supple,
           more nimble-minded and humane.

    The collection rounds to the closing poem, “Reclaiming Night Persephone’s choice,” a critical and compassionate reflection on the fall of Icarus and the plight of Andromeda.

    As a whole, making oxygen: remaining inside this pure hollow note carries us to a place to breathe differently and to look at ourselves and our universe with a compassionate vulnerability. It does what I feel meaningful art should: In the wise words of Zadie Smith, it rewires [our] inner circuitry.

    Reviewer’s bio:

    Sakina B. Fakhri is the editor of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought and co-founder of Lazuli Literary Group. Committed to language in all of its forms, she believes that—given enough time and creativity—nothing need be expressed in quite the same way twice. Since the publication of her novel The Speech of Flowers and Voiceless Things, she has been crafting a second piece of literary fiction that intertwines themes drawn from ballet, history, and mythology.

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