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BOOK REVIEWS

  • Each Leaf Singing, by Caroline Boutard, reviewed by Melody Wilson

    May 1, 2022

    Each Leaf Singing by Caroline Boutard
    reviewed by Melody Wilson

    MoonPath Press, 2021, 97 pages $16
    ISBN 978-1-936657-60-5
    Available at The Book Mine, Cottage Grove, Oregon
    Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, Oregon

    Caroline Boutard’s Each Leaf Singing is a feast for the senses. The cover feels good in your hand, the paper has high rag content, the print is elegant and light. It’s a collection to envy, from the woodcuts on the cover—contributed by the poet’s husband––to her calls back to him from within the poems. This little book is bursting with beauty, love, and first-rate poetry, all without excess. Spare, lean, filled with heartbreak and delight, Boutard’s poems introduce a world we come to know and love.

    Because Each Leaf Singing chronicles the life of Boutard and her husband on their Oregon farm, we learn about the condition of the farm when purchased and what it took to get it going. In the poem “Farm,” we discover the couple found the farm’s ill-used ground…glittering with glass, among other insults; but, by the time the poem reaches the present, the soil is repaired.

    Still the poet laments the many things we couldn’t mend, including the covenant we couldn’t keep—to stay here on this farm for life. This final sadness introduces the reader to the central problem of the collection: the terminal illness of Anthony, Caroline’s Boutard’s husband. But by this time, we cannot imagine another life for her. Even planting, which she describes as the …bend, step, bend along a five-hundred-foot row has become beautiful. We know it’s backbreaking work, but Boutard recasts it as placing each soft, tan soul right-side up. When her friends ask if she and Anthony miss our city life, she muses, I think potatoes/until the memory rings in my chest like a bell  (“A Farming Education”).

    Her hands are dirty, her back and knees ache, but she’s never alone. Plants are everywhere, voles accompany her underground, the trees stand sentinel, and the birds watch from overhead. It’s a multi-dimensional world of such beauty that we cannot look away. And just when we think there can be nothing more wonderful, the quail glide by, ...the deacon guiding the congregation,/His plume nodding as he walks (“California Quail”). Quail also appear in “The Garden on Thanksgiving Morning” among a roll call of farm occupants. The poem describes the farm at rest in what must be the year of Anthony’s diagnosis. She describes Brush dragged into piles now shelter quail/Who butter the gloom with their soft chuffs, reviews other miracles on the farm–– visits from eagles, a pheasant, a coyote–– and reflects on the prior Fall when she and Anthony sat together surveying the view but never saw what was coming.

    Boutard doesn’t belabor her monumental sadness. She gestures toward it, giving it as little space as possible; but in “You, Then I,” she does grant Anthony’s illness a few lines:

                The glutton
                hiding in your bones
                Is growing into something mighty,
                embracing your spine in a feathered spiral,
                curling through your hips,
                those gentle twins I know so well.

    Boutard’s ability to describe is employed here in just the same way it is applied to cabbages and coyotes, to voles and deer, to the disreputable neighbor, and to the cows she calls sisters of perpetual nurture (“Slow Saints”). All of her observations are crisp, original, beautiful.

    Each Leaf Singing contains other poems about family and nature and work—all worth reading––but “Winter Song for Anthony” is among the most poignant poems I’ve ever read. Boutard describes what the couple has suffered:

                Illness is a burden you have shouldered for a while.
                You do this well, mostly alone.
                I help, the way I did
                when we brought our first couch up the stairs
                and I barely carried the weight of my share.

    The analogy is as apt: the poet’s recognition of her own impotence against this foe framed in an anecdote from the past. We see that couch clearly, not because Boutard describes the event (she does not) but because she touches something the reader understands. I won’t take you through the rest of this poem, the really beautiful part, because I want you to see it for yourself. Instead, I refer you to another.

    “January Lonely” is a poem built around things Anthony tells the poet about the owl nesting above the back door, about the names of birds—which the poet forgets—about a voice on the radio she cannot identify. What she does recognize is a feeling we experience as this beautiful book comes to its close, that

    …today is pounding on the door,
                and I am caught
                with our forty years in one hand,
                and a plea for more time in the other.

    Simple, substantial, beautiful. If you’re going to read poetry about rural life in Oregon, or life in general, read this book. You cannot imagine what I’ve had to leave out.

    Reviewer Bio:

    Melody Wilson’s recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, The Shore, Whale Road Review, Timberline Review, SWWIM, and Tar River Poetry. Upcoming work will be in Rat’s Ass Review and Sugar House Review. She received the 2021 Kay Snow Award, Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award, and finalist in the 2021 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.

  • The Color of Goodbye, by Pattie Palmer-Baker, reviewed by Tricia Knoll

    April 15, 2022

    The Color of Goodbye by Pattie Palmer-Baker
    reviewed by Tricia Knoll

    Kelsay Books, 2021, 42 pages, $16.50
    ISBN: 97819554353343
    Available at https://kelsaybooks.com/products/the-color-of-goodbye

    Pattie Palmer-Baker knows how to tell a story. In The Color of Goodbye, the story begins with her parents dancing while her father is home on leave in 1943. Yes, he’s going to war. He’s going to see livid things there ––and during later work in Iraq–– that he cannot forget. He will live them and relive them and will look for escape in a bottle of Jim Beam. And his story will inevitably become the story of his wife and his two daughters.

    Over many years, daughter and poet Palmer-Baker found the voice to tell the most difficult stories in a series of poems. In “Devil Doll,” she and her sister play with Crazy Doll who maims and murders their other dolls. They hear a cork squeak out of a bottle and know Daddy is drinking again. Her mother sees the red lines mapping her husband’s handsome face. In “A Wish Laid Bare,” she drinks champagne while wearing a cocktail dress and considers what she might have become: an archaeologist/in the red-gold deserts searching/for artifact.

    Out of love, Palmer-Baker’s mother becomes complicit in her husband’s addiction. Driving at 120 mph, he asks her for his bottle of Jim Beam. What her young daughter remembers is the “scorched yellow liquid” which her mother hands to him in the poem “The Hand Off.” 

    Soon Palmer-Baker’s poetry builds to “The Color of Goodbye.” A black and white police car. Her father’s shame of being taken to jail wearing his blue terry robe. The poet’s memory of the purple sky on the way to provide bail. The color of pills he finally swallows. The black water that surges around the poet when she knows he is dead and that he called to say goodbye from a motel room as he is about to kill himself. “After My Father’s Suicide” is a poem that takes it shape as a tree, but also a mushroom cloud of woe for the poet who endures the aftermath of her father’s death.  

    When Palmer-Baker’s mother dies, she buries her mother’s remains beside her father. The women have been inextricably linked after her father’s suicide. In “Church of Trees,” the poet states:

                The good don’t go to heaven.
                Their souls glide into oaks and aspens,
                maples, elms, and birches
                where they wind round and round
                until they reach the heart of the tree.

                My mother lives in a huge sheltering maple.

    And in “The Hereafter,” the poet envisions not a sculpted angel with creamy wings, but a dark angel in a place where crows hunker below an ink-stained cloud. This force of love that had endured the trials of a war-torn father will finally lead the poet into rejoining her mother, Beside me my mother in flames.

    The questions that remain are many–– for the poet, her sister, and her mother. Who loved enough and not enough? What does it mean if love is deadlocked? What did the daughter experience as the color of her mother’s eyes, her skin, her mother’s hands?

    Poet John Morrison wrote of Palmer-Baker’s collection, The voice of these poems isn’t asking for sympathy, just a witness. Follow the colors, and you will be that witness. Hard as these stories are, they are told with great love in a voice that took the opportunity to look back with compassion, with scintillas of light both gold, blue, and black and shades in between. 

    Reviewer’s Bio

    Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet, formerly from Portland, Oregon. Her work appears widely in journals, anthologies, and five collections. Let’s Hear It for the Horses won third place in The Poetry Box’s 2021 chapbook contest and How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. Website: triciaknoll.com

  • Any Dumb Animal, by AE Hines, reviewed by Jeanne Yu

    April 1, 2022

    Reviewed by Jeanne Yu

    Any Dumb Animal by AE Hines

    Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2021, 77 pages, $15
    ISBN13: 9781599488882
    Available at https://www.powells.com/book/
    and https://www.aehines.net/

    AE Hines’s first collection, Any Dumb Animal, is a heartful lyrical memoir that centers around three pivotal “Phone Call” poems that open sections entitled “Revival,” “Regret,” and “Rebirth.” Hines revives a myriad of memories: growing up gay with a father who fails him, revisiting his own relationship that ends in divorce, and the wonders of his own adopted son. His unflinching exploration results in self-illuminations that leap off the page touching all that is human.

    Hines beckons us to examine what love is and what it is not. In “My Father’s Son,” no sense is left untouched as he describes “the electric fence on my uncle’s farm, /how my father told me to grab hold of the naked wire, /so that I might remember, he said, so that I could learn.”  In this opening section, Hines invites us to join him in this “Revival”:

           I am thirteen and my grandmother
           is calling me down to the altar
           to stand before them
           in the wide green clearing.

    Here “revival” takes on the meaning of renewed attention to past moments, that of “Idle Worship” in rhythmic, emotive images and form:

                                                             Watch            
           as withered marigolds take flight,
           then fall          like rain.

    Images also delight the mind’s eye in sad poignant moments as in the description of a sock drawer in “Gay Divorce”:

            It would be this orgy
           of color we’d have such trouble breaking apart.  The sad
           pineapple and banana, the smiley sun-face emoji,
           neon marijuana leaves decorated in confetti

    Hines’s heart presses ever forward in the spirit of revival in “Above and Below” when he writes:

           Downtown towers rise like cairns
           from the city rubble, and I marvel
           at the October geese
           flitting across the steel horizon,
           one dotted line of music
           playing forever westward.

    This collection maintains its intensity into the second section, “Regret.” Each poem is a lament of a different nature. Hines explores a spectrum of poetic forms successfully punching the tension of couplets in “Every Body Lies” and the heavy dance of tercets in “Winter Solstice.”

    His metaphors also resonate in poems such as “Midday Train”: a mid-life reflection.

           the amber fallen leaves
           ablaze on the current
           floating away into our past,
           as we, in our metal,
           speed off into the future.

    The range of Hines subject matter and his courage to experiment across the emotional landscape draw us in. He convinces us that sometimes the simple pleasure “After Reading That Americans Are Having Less Sex” holds its strength in the nakedness of the lived experience, rather than the imagined sexuality.

    The chronology of Hines’ collection can be confusing at first; however, on further examination, we begin to realize that revival, regret, and rebirth are not one’s life trajectory, but a continuous series of arcs in a lifetime. In his final section, “Rebirth,” he demonstrates early and late rebirth.  In “Seventeen,” he writes:

           So we kept my secret
           like an escaped convict
           harbored in our basement
           …
           the convict made his escape

    Later in that life, when he becomes a parent, Hines realizes, This morning, yelling at my son, the sound / of my own father rattles from my throat  (“Mirror”).

    Get ready. Any Dumb Animal talks directly to us and will turn us inside out. This collection lets us see the harsh realities of a world when we do not turn out to be what others wanted us to be. But with determination, Hines also sheds hope that we can turn out to be who we are. As he writes in “From Our Train Window I’m Watching the Hills and Trees”:  

                that’s how the light finally gets in
                and the soul gets out – that, in the end,
                you say, what makes them so beautiful.

    Reviewer Bio:

    Jeanne Yu is a poet, mom, engineer, environmentalist, and coach, who is currently pursuing an MFA at Pacific University. She was a recently selected as a semi-finalist in Rattle’s 2021 poetry contest.  Her engineering work also appears in a number of technical publications.

  • Dear John––, by Laura LeHew, reviewed by Anita Sullivan

    March 15, 2022

    Reviewed by Anita Sullivan

    Dear John–– by Laura LeHew

    The Poetry Box (November 2021) 101 pages, $16.00
    ISBN 978-1-948461-93-1
    Available at: https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/dear-john

    Everybody has a love life of some sort. If you’re a poet, you are in an excellent position to write about your own version in a way that might be helpful or interesting to others going through the joys and agonies love always provides; comparing notes, so to speak.

    Yes, Laura LeHew’s Dear John–– is a collection of love poems. But not in the way the title (and splendid cover art) might well lead you to expect. Instead of several dozen poems about failed or unrequited love filled with sweet apology and regret, these are working poems that have been charged with documenting a complicated set of experiences like a finely-detailed road map. They contain the many twists and turns and forking paths involved in a particular set of adult love relationships, as told by a single, passionate person.

    You could almost read the entire book as a novel. The main character is the poet telling her own story, but immediately the reader is drawn into her vulnerability. I was going to tell you the green herons have come back, says the gorgeously nostalgic opening line of the first poem, “Thermals.” The poem unfolds as if it were a letter to a lover who had died, and the reader can comfortably settle into the sorrowful mindset evoked by repetitions of I was going to tell you. Until at the very end, there is a surprise that kicks open a much larger possibility. It is a brilliant beginning for an intriguing and stimulating journey that the poet is taking right along with you.

    As I read through the poems the first time, I felt them presenting the shadowy outline of a plot. There has been a slow divorce; there is now a second lover who is emotionally damaged, and the poet keeps trying new metaphors to help her adjust to his silences, his seeming disapprovals. She is out of her depth and the emotional stress allows her to call up her poetic skills to help her figure out what to do next.

         In this time of war. This thumbtack. This porch ….

         This very aperture, skeleton key, bullet hole.
         You are tusk and trouble. This house, this life, the
         silence. This uneasy banter. This pinch.
                                                     ¬(“You Have No Punctuation”)

    In the spirit of trying everything, the poet speaks through a variety of poetic forms including several prose poems and a few sestinas. Almost every poem is a new experiment in trying to drive a wedge into a place of deeper understanding.

         I want to keep you
         forever a trophy ambered
         or etched in glass or devoured
         & zooming & splitting up
         not
         such a bad idea
         & I never know where
         your sins have been ….
         my love is a curse
         & there is nothing
         you can do about it
                         (“It’s 3 AM & Somewhere in Singapore”)

    Sometimes there is humor, as the tension of uncertainty becomes unbearable. In a poem titled “Eleven Little Love Stories,” there are only nine stories. Here are the final 3½:

         The truth is I don’t think

         he is the one. Whatever
         I want he wants. He says my name

         & cries. I want a man
         who is my compass. Gives me

         roots & wings & the burden
         of my dreams.

    The penultimate poem, “A Full One Hundred & Twenty Count Box of Red Crayons,”
    is a sestina, a tour-de-force that finally brings together both the tension and the fire that has continued between the poet and her beloved:

         you have no words but everyday imply      crush
         make my flesh tremble      crush
         my two kinds of empty      flames
         hidden beneath surface opposition
         lightning when the wind curves taut
         in a sky of tongues
         I have been waiting for you to find me

    This brilliant book closes with seven short, tender poems addressed to the John in the title, a friend whom LeHew actually has corresponded with for many years. In these poem-letters, the reader is reminded that every friendship is a kind of love affair. It pays to keep an open heart so as not to miss a minute of each love experience whenever it comes into your life.

    Reviewer’s Bio:

    Poet Anita Sullivan also writes fiction and nonfiction, including a monthly blog on her
    website www.anitasullivan.org. She has an upcoming poetry collection from Shanti Arts called Carnival of Hinges.

  • Easter Creek, by Gary Lark, reviewed by Tony Greiner

    March 1, 2022

    Reviewed by Tony Greiner

    Easter Creek by Gary Lark

    Main Street Rag, 2021, 80 pages
    ISBN: 978-1-59948-897-4
    Available from: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/easter-creek-gary-lark/

    Gary Lark has long been a favorite poet of mine, starting over 20 years ago when I heard him at a reading. Lark read one of his poems “Fishing” and another by Clemens Starck. I thought it generous of him to spend some of his time celebrating another poet’s work. Lark’s poetry also has this kind and accepting spirit, a heart-softening quality that embraces the humanity of even those who err.

    This is not to say the poetry is sticky-sweet or namby-pamby. Take, for example, “Jacket,” from his latest collection, Easter Creek:

         I was born into a racist family
         in a racist town, in a county
         that took its bigotry for granted.
         I was born into a loving family
         in a community of generous folks
         who gave me all they could.
         These were the same places,
         the same people, mostly.
         The racism lived in mechanisms of thought,
         carried from place to place
         like great-grandma’s quilt.
         Yet, these were the people
         I knew to be kind and willing
         to help. They lived quiet lives
         hoping to have enough in the bank
         to bury them when the time came.
         Racism was woven into the fabric
         like a smoldering thread.
         To dismiss or deny is to hand down
         the garment from generation to generation
         like some immutable heritage.
         It puts a straitjacket on everyone.
         I find it in the closet
         when I’m looking for my boots.
         I swear I’ve burned it
         a dozen times.

    Lark doesn’t shy away from recognizing the racism of his homeplace, but he doesn’t blame, he doesn’t point fingers. He does recognize that these fundamentally good people who have a fundamental flaw, and that he does, too. I find that generous.

    Lark’s poetry is accessible. It doesn’t take multiple readings and a pile of reference books to figure out what he is trying to say; but, on the other hand, it isn’t simple. Look at the closing lines of “Jacket” again. The poet finds his own racism “in the closet”––the place where things are kept safe, but also the place where things are kept hidden; hence, the phrase in another context of “coming out of the closet.”

    It is this combination of accessibility and depth that has led to Lark winning several awards, and being featured on three different occasions on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Easter Creek is in that tradition, but it is a step forward for in his career. The poems in this collection are mostly set in a fictional small town in Oregon, named for a stream in the Coast Range. The collection opens with “Decking,” in which the poet, a carpenter, is building a deck around a swimming pool at an upscale house. Although the carpenter has long been a resident of the community, things are changing––and he doesn’t always fit in. This is conveyed within a couple of lines: It’s a money job, building the deck around a pool/I will never swim in and The gate clanks shut. I know the code today/but I won’t in a week.

    Having established his bona fides as a person with roots in the community, we go on to a series of poems grouped by season, some in third person, some in first. We meet a range of people, and witness some events, including a motorcycle riding bad-boy who interrupts a wedding to call a willing bridesmaid to him. Sometimes these people and events return in later poems giving an effect something like a more upbeat cross of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

    This structure is sound, rewarding, and calls for re-reading. I just checked my copy and I still have five dog-eared pages to study, ponder, and enjoy.

    Reviewer Bio:
    Tony Greiner is a life-long reader of poetry. Aside from Gary Lark, other Oregon poets he likes are Clemens Starck, Kim Stafford, Flamur Vehapi, and Christopher Rose.

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